Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

Liked this a lot, but I've got some problems AND NOW YOU'RE GONNA HEAR ABOUT EM. First, the book is supposed to be about the supposedly timeless wisdom of the classical era that the Founders tapped into but the entire book is framed as the authors personal existential crisis about Donald Trump winning in 2016. Along these lines the final chapter is about what we can do to stop Trump which is even worse than that part. (Even more so by the fact that the book came out after Trump lost in 2020.) The author spent 300 pages on how brilliant the Founders were and then says they were so stupid they would shocked and appalled at modern politicians and society for its self-serving focus on personal or factional benefit. Buddy, did you even read any of the shit you wrote let alone the sources you used? 

He makes a list of ten things we can do against Trump but two of them contradict, #2 says the state needs to suppress freedom of speech, press and assembly to the point that any organization of individuals needs to be outlawed and the corporate form to be abolished entirely since the Founders wouldn't have recognized it even though it was a central component of common law for centuries and two of the four in the book were actual trained lawyers and a third simply did not pass the bar. As if this was not bad enough then #8 says that in the time of Trump's evil ways we need to defend freedom of speech and press more than ever before. Pal, buddy, friend, you just said the state needs to suppress it and borderline totally. 

Lastly, he uses "First Peoples" for Native Americans, cites a source that does not at all remotely speak for all of them to justify this as he claims, is ahistorical and erases their tribal individualities, which I bring up mostly because he erases actual tribe names to insert First Peoples. The founding generation understood the tribes were separate and distinct rather than a homogenous "Indigenous" and this was important to basically all their dealings with them. (Something the author comes close to accidentally stumbling upon when he mentions the different ways the French and British treated them and how it determined what side they fought on in the numerous wars.) Tribes today absolutely do not consider themselves to be one large demographic group outside of the shared (yet still distinct, look at how the different tribes in different locations were treated) experience, they even less did back then.



Amusingly, in the preface of this book, the author muses about the insatiable modern need for historians to engage in presentism to show they're on the right side of history and that he won't be doing it so suck it up. It's also a lie as he drops in a number of them, but nobody's perfect. That's not one of my serious complaints about this book, of which I basically have none, though there are a few errors related to these. My only real complaint is that the endnotes are one after another on the same line which makes it really hard to look at them. This was a necessity since even doing this left like 100 pages of them.



Pretty meh, especially after the first few as they increasingly become less friends and more like staff aides or something. The author worked for Bill Clinton and was able to talk to Bill, Hillary and Vernon Jordan and the extent of the "friendship" we learn about Bill and Jordan is that they liked to play golf and Vernon gave him advice a few times. Amazing stuff! They're just like me except for the golf thing! It's pretty trite in general but the chapter about Woodrow Wilson doesn't dance around how much of a weirdo asshole he was and I don't want to be too critical now that people are finally catching up to me on that.



This was okay but it feels like he abridged a longer book or two. But too much because it starts repeating itself and skipping over events as it goes on after spending way too much time on earlier ones. I didn't necessarily set out to learn an extended description of the Battle of New York but that's what I did since it's a central part of this. I thought there'd be more about the conflict with Loyalists based on the subtitle but he spends like two pages on it. Funniest part is he opens a chapter by talking about the importance of looking at maps and how one of the British war planners didn't do this, then later on in the chapters wonder why a British general didn't take a route through Delaware. If you look at a map you'd see that he could have been locked on a peninsula if he went that way and Washington had merely moved south. The British may have had sea superiority but it still would not have been a great idea since the goal was to get back up to NYC.



Since I obviously believe that "social justice" is a conservative and regressive reactionary ideology to justify oppression I intended to savage this book on principle alone. But he tricked me and legitimately looked at the literature on the original Puritans. While he gives too much of a pass to many Republicans in the conclusion, in a form of "less worse", the bulk of the book was limited in this regard and the conclusion avoided (though maybe not enough) endorsing them as the alternative so I unfortunately cannot rage about it. Another trick on me. If I have a major complaint it's that he didn't put enough of the big picture together on the original Progressive Era, he hits on a number of examples including the Temperance movement but he didn't delve into it like he did the Puritans so he missed the connecting tissues you can trace from the New England colonies through that period and on. I guess I can't entirely complain since he didn't promise to do this.

Since it's a "modern" politik book I looked at the negative reviews on Goodreads and laughed about all the people who missed the point and got very angry because it hit too close to home. Almost all of them completely bent out of shape about a single specific thing he mentioned to the exclusion of the overall thesis. Lots of opportunities to drink at the "it's called being a decent person" justifications for oppressing others. Best one attacked him for being "porn sick" and obsessed with "degrading pornography" because he mentioned on two pages feminist efforts to ban pornography. And one of those pages was merely contrasting those feminists with other social justice people who uphold sex work and everything related to it as revolutionary and important. I bet the sick freak was masturbating while he wrote it! The pervert!