Book of the Month July 2024

The Total State

I am a teacher, and a bookworm, and a nerd (possibly in that order) and so when I want someone to understand something, I will usually hand them a book. You want to understand the Crusades? Book. You can't figure out how to reconcile the one and the many? Book. How should you raise kids? Here's a book. The Bible is one of them, of course, but God has been kind enough to let us copy his method of communication about innumerable things. 

But this leads to a problem: how do you decide which books to read? There are probably now more books about, say, WWII than any one person could literally read in a lifetime! With all this information wandering about, how do you select and shape your reading?

There are books for that, of course, but one way is to listen to people you trust. That's part of why I run this "Book of the Month" feature; I want to introduce people to books I've found worthwhile or helpful. And the book for this month is one that I've found helpful enough to promote to a category I call "A Book for the Moment." These books are for someone who is looking around at our current moment and is lost and confused. Five minutes ago it was the Nineties, and things seemed pretty good. Now things seem to be the opposite, and the standard stories he's been told about why seem to be wearing thin. "What happened?" he asks helplessly. "How do we fix it?"

"Aha," I reply, "I'm glad you asked. Here's a book."

(Actually, three books. Sorry. They multiply when you're not looking.)

Three Books for the Political Moment

The book of the month is The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies by Auron Macintyre. (No, that's not a typo--apparently he doesn't capitalize the "I." And yes, it bothers me.) Like many good books, it begins with a question: Given all the vaunted freedoms and checks and balances we learned about in school, why could something like the massive COVID tyranny still happen?

"I was absolutely blown away by what had unfolded before me. The U.S. Constitution was the bedrock of my American identity. I had been told all my life that the carefully crafted checks and balances built into the system limited the government's ability to seize power in exactly this manner. Even if all the branches of government were to work in unison to encroach on people's freedom, the Bill of Rights stood as a final bulwark against the destruction of our liberties. I had been told the Second Amendment existed primarily to make sure nothing like this could ever happen. Yet freedom of assembly and worship had been summarily abolished and very few people seemed to care...When tyranny came, nothing happened. The Constitution I believed in my whole life did nothing. Those who had parroted the myth of limited government seemed to go on as if nothing important had been lost." (16)

So he studied and read, and studied and read some more. And he discovered that what most folks get taught in school about our founding narrative is actually an up-to-date version of Plato's Noble Lie from the Republic. People won't believe that they sprang out of the bronze or silver or gold of the earth any more--so we updated the story for a modern audience. This isn't necessarily nefarious; all mass audiences have to simply history into a story they can understand, and ours is no different. Macintyre sketches our own version like this:

"For most of history, men toiled under all powerful kings, tyrants who wielded total control. Their every word was law. Religion, tradition, and obligation combined to create a system that crippled science, innovation, and progress. Then, in the 1600s, philosophers took up the tools of skepticism and reason from the burgeoning discipline of science and began applying them to politics. Discarding the stifling assumptions of the past, these thinkers developed more rational foundations for the state, revivifying an ancient form of government, the democratic republic, that would come to dominate the Western world. Democracy would give the people, not some parasitic aristocracy, power. Through voting, citizens would elect the government of their choosing, granting its sovereignty only if it agreed to protect the rights of the people.

Separation of powers and a carefully crafted system of checks and balances would combine with elections to safeguard against the expansion of government. Limited government would guarantee the individual unprecedented levels of liberty, which would unleash the creative energies and productivity and kind. This new form of social organization would require a few revolutions to get started, first in America, then in France, but as the massive advantages of liberal democracy became clear, countries would begin to make more peaceful transitions. The age of reason and science was yielding unprecedented unprecedented progress and abundance, and anyone who wanted to compete in the new world would be wise to follow the democratic trend. (17) 

The problem with this wonderful story is that, of course, it's simply not what happened. (Any history teacher with a basic knowledge of the medieval period should be able to tell you that, which says something about the history programs of most American schools.) Most kings of the ancient world were not all-powerful, checks and balances are a Biblical/feudal ideal, not an Enlightenment one, and people did not magically give up grasping for power simply because someone decided to name it "limited government." Our story is not giving us the results we've been told to expect.

So what did happen? Macintyre works through two major ideas: first, the tendency of modern "limited" governments to erode other social spheres in the name of freedom, and second, the rise of the modern "managerial class" to compensate and keep society in order without all those other spheres. Parents should be free to chase their business dreams--so the bureaucrats will raise the kids in public schools. Other bureaucrats will care for your aging parents. Still others will disestablish any sort of social superiority for Christian churches (after all, you must be free to choose any faith, or no faith at all). Since people lose freedom when certain businesses can't compete, they'll regulate those too. And on and on and on. The two tendencies of freedom and managers work together until at last you wind up with a total state that has a right to tell you to do literally anything, and all in the name of Freedom.

"There is a reason why every organ of power in the United states seems obsessed with introducing sexual and gender identity to children at an increasingly young age. Normalizing the idea of transsexual children is an incredibly useful tool for the regime because it can serve as a reliable wedge between kids and parents. If children can choose their own gender, if the ability to choose their gender is a human right, then it becomes the duty of the government to protect that right. Protect that right from whom you might ask? The parents, of course." (39)

If you're wondering how the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave can take pre-teenage kids from otherwise great  parents and allow them to irrevocably harm themselves, then this is a book for your moment. It's readable, punchy, and fairly short (~150 pages) Plus, unlike some other authors, Macintyre is also brave enough to sketch an actual path forward to better things at the end of the work. I won't spoil it for you, though.

As a bit of a bonus, here are my other two political "Books for the Moment" as well.

 The Age of Entitlement

Christopher Caldwell is an editor and opinion writer for a few small publications like the Claremont Review of Books and the New York Times. His first book was the cleverly-titled Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (2009) about how Europe is becoming Muslim but has no idea how or why to stop it. (Also worth your time, particularly given how immigration has become our own national issue since then.) But his second was about American politics, and it's a hummer. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020) makes the case that when we  passed the Civil Rights Act to deal with segregation we unwittingly supplanted the old system of legislative government with a brand-new one of lawsuits, affirmative action, bureaucrats, and judicial-decision government. He then further claims that most of the conflict between Right and Left is actually conflict based in which of these two systems each side thinks should be supreme. If you see based folk on Twitter/X griping about repealing the Civil Rights Act, odds are they're not actually racist--they probably just read this book. If The Total State gives you a theoretical overview of how we got here, Age of Entitlement gives you a particular historical instance.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

I should note at the outset that this book is a monster--over 400 pages of dense academic work in what we might call historical psychology. It that terrifies you, then you should know that there is a pared-down version called Strange New World that's less than half as long. Buy that instead.

But if you can stomach the long haul, Carl Trueman gives an excellent and fascinating treatment of a very simple question:

 "The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: "I am a woman trapped in a man's body." My grandfather died in 1994, less than 30 years ago, and yet, had he ever heard that sentence uttered in his presence, I have little doubt that he would have burst out laughing and considered it a piece of incoherent gibberish. And yet today it is a sentence that many in our society regard as not only meaningful but so significant that to deny it or question it in some way is to reveal oneself as stupid, immoral, or subject to yet another irrational phobia." (19)

Trueman works through the history of the West, giving particular attention to men like Rousseau, the Romantic poets, and Freud, to show how such a view could develop. Like all intellectual histories, there is room for disagreement about how influential or representative certain figures or movements were, but taken overall this is a great way to get some insight into how we got here. If Macintyre gives the framework and Caldwell gives the political history, Trueman provides the motivation behind the average academic or college grad who sincerely wants to help people--and becomes the well-meaning dupe of the first two authors' subjects.

So there you have it: my three books to understand the modern political moment. Of course, if I've missed your favorite, feel free to add to my list by commenting below!