Books that enable and ennoble a national reexamination
Books that enable and ennoble a national reexamination
washingtonpost.com Review | By Carlos LozadacloseCarlos LozadaBook criticEmailEmailBioBioFollowFollowBook critic
In his eternally best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy,” published in 2016 and written before Trump’s political ascent, J.D. Vance blames the struggles of his communities in Kentucky and Ohio largely on a poor work ethic and an ingrained sense of helplessness.
By contrast, in her affecting memoir of Kansas farm life, “Heartland,” Sarah Smarsh says her family’s efforts rarely earned enough to purchase respect. “Being as we got up before dawn to do chores and didn’t quit until after dark,” she notes, “it was plain that the problem with our outcomes wasn’t lack of hard work.” The gap between Vance and Smarsh is more than personal, more than the difference between mountains and plains. It is an ideological divide.
In the early days after the 2016 election, George Orwell’s “1984” displaced Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” atop Amazon’s bestseller list, meaning Americans were suddenly less concerned with how we got here than with where we were going. Dystopian classics boomed, with Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Margaret Atwood scaling bestseller rankings. Fears of homegrown authoritarianism brought Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” back into circulation, while Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel, “American War,” imagines a second U.S. civil war in a red vs. blue nation remade by climate change, militias and radicalized youth - a work made all the more unnerving by its flashes of plausibility.
“Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination - the logical end point - of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time,” Naomi Klein writes in “No Is Not Enough.” Those are stories she has long been exploring in works such as “No Logo,” on the rise of corporate super-brands, or “The Shock Doctrine,” on how governments and industries exploit crises to impose pro-corporate policies.
But the books that matter most right now are not necessarily those revealing White House intrigue, scandal or policy battles, no matter how crucial those subjects. They are, instead, the books that enable and ennoble a national reexamination, the books that show how our current conflicts fit into the nation’s story, the books that hold fast to the American tradition of making ourselves anew.
They are the books on the rural working class, such as Jennifer Silva’s “We’re Still Here,” that rarely oversimplify its motives, that recognize the diversity of the heartland, and that realize that the true challenge for working-class Americans is the belief that no candidate or party or institution is responsive to their needs.
They are the resistance volumes like “Rules for Resistance,” edited by David Cole and Melanie Wachtell Stinnett, which understands that the greatest danger is less a particular change of policies than the erosion of the system that makes all resistance possible. They are the studies on presidential lying that remind how truth is not a righteous declaration but a painstaking process of discovery, a process that, as Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum contend in “A Lot of People Are Saying,” demands less certainty and more doubt.
They are the studies on immigration, such as Erika Lee’s “America for Americans,” that show how the nation’s tradition of openness has always coexisted with a powerful xenophobic strain. They are the works on race and identity, such as “The Lies That Bind” by Kwame Anthony Appiah and “When They Call You a Terrorist” by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, that see the quest for individual dignity behind every group struggle. They are the examinations of White House mayhem, such as Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes’s “Unmaking the Presidency,” that explain the origins of our governmental norms and the long-term risks of a leader who conflates himself with his office. And they are the volumes on democracy, such as Jill Lepore’s “These Truths,” that identify today’s battles as part of an endless fight to live up to America’s professed principles, and that show how striving - and often failing - to do so is not just a feature of our system but its definition.
Such books are not beholden to this moment, which is why they reveal so much about it.