Exit Right is a flawed book, but it is flawed in the particular way that only great books can be. It fails to fully answer the impossibly ambitious questions it lays out, but its insights are so absorbing that it doesn’t matter. Its stories only partially fit Oppenheimer’s underlying argument, but the prose is so perfect you barely realize it. And just when you think you understand what propels and paralyzes one of his characters, the author moves to another. This book proves so satisfying precisely because it leaves you wanting much more.
This is Oppenheimer’s first book, but he writes with the assurance and historical command of someone who has been thinking about his topic for a long time. The colors of his own flag are hard to discern, which makes him a reliable guide.
A tale of brave, lonely men facing a hostile world is the message Oppenheimer wishes to leave with his readers. This simply does not ring true, since none of these men made the turn by themselves ... In spite of these criticisms, Exit Right grabbed me as few books have done in recent years. This is political history at a very high level, especially when American politics seems to reach new lows every day. What a pleasure it is to be reminded that ideas do matter, and that those who devote their lives to them are doing something worthwhile.
The book’s modest problem is that it doesn’t quite connect its six dots. Exit Right stops short of proving that these six men, or the many other apostates of which they’re examples, are responsible for today’s near-catastrophic political climate. Nor does he postulate a unifying theory of radical political reconstruction, instead copping to the very different circumstances and motivations that turned the six men rightward.
Exit Right is a collection of penetrating yet discrete character studies linked by an overall theme – leftists who turned to the right – as opposed to a single large-scale excavation of American political culture.
To Oppenheimer’s credit, his own politics, which seem somewhere on the left, don’t intrude on the absorbing stories he tells ... While in principle his subjects offer a model of political engagement, the character of the apostates changes over the course of his narrative, which spans nearly a century. Put most simply, they become less serious, reflecting a broader decline in America’s ideological life.
