America in an Age of Immaturity
The University of Chicago Press
210 pages; $25
AMERICA, COMPROMISED
The University of Chicago Press
251 pages; $24
Among US President Donald Trump’s major accomplishments is the booming industry in books about him, his administration, the state of democracy in America, the rise of autocracy in America and abroad, the reasons for his rise, the bases of his support, the state of the Republican Party, the state of his mental health or lack thereof, the chaos in his White House and so on. Not all are strictly about Mr Trump — the fact is the conditions and dynamics that brought us Mr Trump long preceded him, and the changes in the fabric of our Republic are paralleled by changes in other longstanding democracies around the globe.
Two of the nation’s top public intellectuals are adding to this expansive genre with short books designed for broad audiences. Neither is fundamentally about Mr Trump; indeed, one barely mentions the president. But both are about the America that Mt Trump’s ascent now typifies. Alan Wolfe, a distinguished professor emeritus at Boston College and prolific scholar of American political thought, gives us “The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity.” “America, Compromised” is by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, the former head of the Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics and an activist on campaign finance.
Mr Wolfe’s is two books in one: First, a polemic, aimed at Mr Trump and his supporters, and at the broader fabric of our age; second, a brief intellectual history of modern America. He sets his frame early on: “It is … not an explanation of one rogue election we need. It is a discussion of what kind of nation we have become.” To get there, Wolfe focuses intensely on the so-called McCarthy era, the period in the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy used deception, lies and demagogy to create an atmosphere of fear and division. Mr Wolfe draws some parallels with today’s Mr Trump era (beyond those of fear, division and deception, there is a direct link: McCarthy’s henchman Roy Cohn became Trump’s Svengali). But his book is less about McCarthy or his tactics and more about the views of a swath of political thinkers and public intellectuals who arose in that era to take on the ideas that made McCarthyism a threat to our democracy.
Wolfe describes and examines a host of postwar political thinkers, many of whom, like Hannah Arendt and Joseph Schumpeter, had come from the horrors of Europe, but he focuses even more on a core group of American-born intellectuals like Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhold Niebuhr, those he calls “mature liberals.” Mr Wolfe is at his best when he is discussing these writers, first-class thinkers who responded powerfully to their era’s challenges. He contrasts their response to what he sees as the lamer reaction of the contemporary intellectual community to Mr Trump — and suggests we no longer have a core of all-star intellectuals but instead a shallower group of “thought leaders.”
Mr Wolfe notes, of course, that McCarthyism lost, which he attributes in large part to the eloquent and sustained pushback from these public intellectuals (although he stresses that it had taken the horrors of a depression and a huge war to remind liberals of their calling and responsibility). He lays out the conditions that led to our current crisis, but implies that these days we have neither the impetus from horrific conditions nor the intellectual heft to transcend Mr Trump and Trumpism and to move beyond our current “immature democracy.”
Certainly, there are reasons this era is different, but blaming a lack of intellectual heft both overemphasises the importance of intellectuals and largely dismisses a pretty impressive collection of present-day thinkers, including many of the Never-Trumpers calling for a reassertion of conservative values from the right, and scholars of political thought, race and authoritarianism showing courage and fortitude from the center and left.
“America, Compromised” is about the country in the Trump era, but not about Mr Trump. Indeed, Mr Lessig would have written much the same book if Hillary Clinton were president and if Democrats had control of both houses of Congress. His focus is not on bad people doing bad things, but on how incentives across a range of institutions have created corruption, with deleterious consequences for the nation.
Anyone who has seen Lessig’s mesmerising TED Talk about Congress and political money knows the basis for this book, now extended to discuss a wider range of institutions, including finance, the media, the medical profession, the academy and the law. All of them, he says, have become corrupted by norms and misplaced incentives that in turn corrupt the behaviour of actors who are themselves operating not out of venality but are caught in institutional webs. The rest of us? We inflict the greatest harm on society because we enable them.
With regard to finance, Lessig examines in different ways the 2008 collapse, from banks to ratings agencies that gave AAA ratings to entities that were absurdly dangerous. These agencies were created in the 19th century, and have had impeccable reputations because of their perceived independence and objectivity. But, Lessig says, the big three ratings agencies, designated as official by the Securities and Exchange Commission, compete to get the lucrative business of analysing securities. Good ratings mean more business. Bad ratings, not so much. With financial institutions playing one agency off against the others, the results were predictable.
What to do? Lessig examines a range of ways to de-corrupt institutions. As with so many efforts, it is hard to find remedies that are realistic and practical. Still, some of Lessig’s ideas are not just pie in the sky. He recommends public financing for campaigns; delinking rating agencies and experts offering testimony from those paying for it; and using in-depth polls to gauge public opinion on key issues as a kind of shadow government.
That two impressive public intellectuals like Alan Wolfe and Lawrence Lessig are weighing in on the challenges of our times, joining so many others, is reassuring. “The Politics of Petulance” and “America, Compromised” join an impressive array of books and essays that may, someday, have a future intellectual historian using them as examples to lament the fact that his or her contemporaries are not as eloquent or important as the group that arose in the Mr Trump era to combat the threats to our way of life.
©2018The New York Times News Service