Books of the Year for The Art of Association
At the start of 2021, I found myself exhausted and full of doubts. The tumultuous events of 2020 had left me drained and feeling like my grasp of what was happening in our democracy and how we might fix it was slipping away. Then January 6th occurred, which only underscored my sense of being at a profound loss. I concluded it was time for me to invest in and rebuild some intellectual capital. I have done this in part by revisiting a few classic books and texts – consulting old teachers, as it were – and reading them with fresh eyes. But 2021 has also been a stellar year for new books on the discontents of our democracy and how we could ease them. Here is my list of the ten best of these recent publications.
A big question I have been mulling over this year is whether and how we might rekindle a sense of shared patriotism to counteract the centrifugal forces pulling us apart. Steven B. Smith’s Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes illuminates a clear path forward. He defines and upholds an enlightened form of patriotism as “the most fundamental political virtue,” contrasting it with the nationalism, cosmopolitan globalism, and multi-culturalism others are pushing to supplant it. Smith acknowledges his reclamation project is a never-ending one: “To be an American,” he observes, “means to participate in a great centuries-long debate of what it means to be an American.” He has written a timely and essential book. And I am always here for a Yale political philosopher who opens with an epigraph from Saul Bellow’s Augie March – “I am an American, Chicago-born” – and closes with lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams.”
With Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, George Packer makes a punchy contribution to the debate over what it means to be an American. He notes we are divided, first into red and blue tribes, and then again by divergent perspectives on our country’s growing diversity and whether we think it is on the right track or not. In his even-handed treatment, each of the resulting quadrants – Packer labels them Free, Real, Smart, and Just (or Unjust) America – has a point. And they each have something they need to accommodate if we are ever going to resolve our differences. While Packer’s ethnography of the “Four Americas,” published separately in The Atlantic, has enjoyed broad take-up, his subsequent chapters on realizing a new and encompassing Equal America pack the book’s wallop. Ultimately, Packer emphasizes, “we have to create the conditions of equality and acquire the art of self-government. The two are inseparable, and doing each one makes the other possible.”
My exploration of the prospects for a renewal of patriotism have been suitably chastened by Samuel Goldman’s After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division. Goldman presents an alternative and more limited account of the potential substance and scope of American patriotism. In his analysis, attempting to define what it means to be an American by turning to notions of a covenant, creed, or melting pot misconstrues rather than clarifies. None of these traditional framings reflects who we have been, are, and can be as a people. Rather than seeking to impose a false and unattainable unity, he contends we need to acknowledge and respect the pluralism and disagreement built into the extended sphere of Madison’s republic. Duly grounded, we can turn to the necessary work of appreciating and shoring up the institutions through which we contest and must work out our differences.
In High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, Amanda Ripley brings solutions-oriented investigative journalism to bear on destructive disagreements that take on lives of their own. She considers such stalemated “high conflict” – as opposed to potentially fruitful and often necessary good conflict – to be the invisible hand now shaping our contentious times. Ripley draws on social science research and several well-told vignettes helpfully removed from the fray of our national politics to demonstrate these counter-productive patterns. Her appendices on how to recognize high conflict in the world and in oneself—and prevent it from accelerating—convey news we all can use.
Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t is a great book to pair with High Conflict. Galef is focused more on how individuals see the world. We are powerfully and psychologically inclined to see it as we wish it to be rather than how it actually is. This predisposition, which she calls the soldier mindset, works to polarize us. We hold to the worldviews of “our side” without questioning them while assuming the worst of those with whom we disagree. In a previous blog post, I suggested that the soldier mindset predominates in the social sector, especially among those of us who fund or advocate for policy and systems change. We would do better to spend more time operating with Galef’s scout mindset, being open to and seeking out what is in fact true, then revising our mental maps accordingly. Galef provides plenty of self-assessments and practical tips to help us make this shift.
Our individual and collective quests to understand the world are threatened by incendiary disinformation, conspiracy theories, trolling, and cancel culture, on the right and left alike. As these malign forces have taken hold in our public sphere, we have increasingly heard the lament that democracy depends on shared facts. In The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch shows that liberal democracy actually depends on institutions that challenge, vet, and verify – for now, anyway– said facts. These institutions, comprised of scientists, academic researchers, journalists, lawyers, and civil servants, serve as the guardians of what Rauch calls the reality-based community. Freedom of expression is another vital ingredient in this community. By highlighting how knowledge is constituted, the threats to this crucial system, and what we can do to help shore it up, Rauch has done us all an excellent service. He has also written what will likely be one of the most important books of the decade, let alone the year.
Two authors made powerful impressions on me this year by weaving gripping personal narratives together with innovative assessments of fundamental challenges facing our democracy. In an earlier post, I shared an interview with Theodore Johnson, author of When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America. Since reading Ted’s book, whenever I have considered the twinned imperatives of his sub-title, I have seen them from his painfully honest, personally experienced, and academically grounded vantage point.
For her part, Russia expert Fiona Hill was thrust on the national stage through her electrifying testimony in the congressional hearings that led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Roughly a third of her memoir, There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, covers her public service in the Trump Administration, for which we all are in her debt. But Hill’s primary focus is on the thorny problem of deindustrialization, the social and economic problems arising from it, and how to respond so no people or places are forgotten.
Joshua Cherniss’s Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century is perhaps the book I wrestled with most this year, judging by the volume of marginalia I scribbled into it. How should liberals (broadly defined) ward off ruthless opponents on the right and left, at home and abroad, seeking to overthrow the values and ethical underpinnings of liberal democracy? Can we do so without sullying and sundering those values and ethical stances ourselves? To help us with these daunting questions, Cherniss revisits answers developed in the darkest days of the twentieth century by Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin. They espoused what Cherniss calls a “tempered liberalism,” one conveyed via an ethos that blended realism, candor, probity, moderation, self-awareness, humanity, and – not least – hope for the future. They were exemplars in their times, and Cherniss argues, persuasively in my view, that we would do well to emulate them in ours. (I wrote a full review of Liberalism in Dark Times in American Purpose, which you can read here).
My final selection also sheds light on our current quandaries by invoking classic historical perspectives. It goes back even further, to the reflections of four French thinkers: Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville. As Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey point out in their introduction to Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment, “Each of these authors possesses the uncanny capacity for spelling out one of the few basic modern alternatives for thinking about happiness….[they] give voice to thoughts that occur to every modern mind from time to time but with a power few of us can hope to match.” You may wonder why a volume fathoming the insights of luminary moralistes on happiness and human nature appears in my list of the top ten books of the year on American democracy. The Storeys were prompted to write the book by the unease and striving for contentment they discern in their talented students at Furman University. They suggest this restive spirit has long been part and parcel of our democracy. Indeed, their title derives from a chapter in Tocqueville’s Democracy In America on the same sense of restlessness amid relative prosperity he witnessed while journeying here in the 1830s. The authors point out that Americans are, more and more, looking to politics to fulfill our elusive quest for contentment. If left unchecked, this impulse will overwhelm the political institutions of our limited democracy. Perhaps the Storeys, and the thinkers they invite us into a beguiling and open-ended conversation with, have something to teach us after all.
No doubt I have left many worthy titles off my list. Please let me and other readers know of additional books published this year that you have found especially edifying in the comments below. That will give us all a good start in our reading for 2022.
In the meantime, all the best for the holidays!
