PanThe New RepublicIt’s a straightforward story. But it only hangs together if you don’t press too hard ... Not incorrect so much as incomplete ... The larger problem for Mounk’s narrative is that many of the ideas that swept onto the scene in 2020 have ebbed just as quickly in the months and years since ... It is my opinion that he is, ultimately, arguing against a straw man ... If we are worried about free speech, equal opportunity, and human dignity, we should be far more concerned about Republicans who have spent the last years banning books, restricting health care, and censoring education.
Katja Hoyer
RaveThe New RepublicContradictions are beautifully captured ... Crafting an expansive and generous history of East Germany, Hoyer brings long-standing academic scholarship to a broader audience ... Apt.
James Kirchick
MixedThe New RepublicIt is, broadly, a familiar story of the closet. But by focusing on gay men and lesbians who worked in and around the federal government, partook of Washington high society, and largely remained closeted, Kirchick offers a very different take on American LGBTQ history. Whereas many books emphasize the work of pathbreaking activists who came out of the closet and took aim at society’s homophobic norms, Secret City emphasizes those who worked inside the system—many of them Republicans who were forced to balance their hidden sexuality and their public conservatism. It is thus a history of slow assimilation, a fundamentally conservative account that endeavors to write gay men and lesbians into a triumphant story of American democracy ... really a history of the gay American conservative—a history of how gay men kept turning up in national politics and the federal government where they were least expected ... The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, which had such success pressuring the federal government to take the epidemic seriously, is mentioned nowhere...Assimilation rather than revolution is the telos toward which Secret City strives ... emphasizes not how persecution of and discrimination against gay and lesbian people have undermined American claims to equality and justice but rather how the country’s eventual embrace of LGBTQ rights is proof of the success of American liberalism...What Kirchick—along with other gay conservative writers, such as Andrew Sullivan—seems to suggest is that because it’s now possible for some queer people to assimilate successfully, it’s time for the movement to, well, move on ... highlights the extent to which gay conservatives have always occupied positions of influence, even if in decades past they were far more circumspect about their sexuality. But the experiences of these elites, who are able to navigate the halls of power—some more successfully than others—are perhaps not the best indicator of the state of gay rights or of the health of our democracy more generally. After all, the Republican Party in which Thiel and Grenell have found a home is one that not only calls for the abolition of hard-won LGBTQ rights but also increasingly questions the value of democracy itself.
