“Rounding Up” is a newsletter rounding up various links, newsletters, and podcasts from the perspective of political reform. If you’d like to join this experiment, please subscribe.
Because of the holidays, this issue is going to be a little different from the usual fare. Rather than doing a link round-up, this issue is instead going to round up political reform books (broadly considered) from 2020. In fact—20 books from 2020! (Don’t worry; I’ll be back to the regular round-ups in January 2021.)
I’ve broken them into three rough categories: “politics and policy,” “cultural analysis,” and “principles and persons.” These works have a variety of perspectives, but they’re all looking at big-picture questions, important shifts, and all that jazz. Within each category, they’re in alphabetical order. Maybe some ideas here for a New Year’s read or—I don’t know—an early Valentine’s Day gift? (“What do you get for a person who already has the complete works of Christopher Lasch?”)
If you have any newsletters you think I should be following or any tips, feel free to drop me a line (through Twitter, email, etc.). Check out @fredbauerblog or fredbauerblog via gmail.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
Politics and Policy
Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, The Populist’s Guide to 2020: Hosts of Rising (one of the media epicenters for political-reform analysis), Ball and Enjeti offer a compilation of their monologues and op-eds. They discuss 2020 politics, media culture, manufacturing policy, and more.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism: Case and Deaton extend their earlier research into the opioid epidemic to look at some of the challenges facing working-class Americans and how to address them.
Ryan Girdusky and Harlan Hill, They’re Not Listening: Girdusky and Hill survey nationalist and populist movements across the globe.
John B. Judis, The Socialist Awakening: Having analyzed populism and nationalism in earlier books, Judis now looks at the way socialism has gained new currency (particularly among the young).
Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis, Trade Wars Are Class Wars: Klein and Pettis argue that trade policies reward some interests while harming others—and that the economic disruption caused by the neoliberal trade regime could threaten global stability.
Yuval Levin, A Time To Build: In some ways a sequel to 2016’s The Fractured Republic, A Time to Build looks at institutional renewal and rebuilding. In contrast to a politics of atomism, Levin argues that institutions play a central role in ordering politics and our personal lives.
Michael Lind, The New Class War: The post-2016 era could in some ways be subtitled “Michael Lind Strikes Back.” The themes of national politics outlined in his 1990s book The Next American Nation have garnered renewed interest. In his latest book, Lind examines some of the class dynamics of the neoliberal age.
Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: In recent years, the demographer Joel Kotkin has been outlining the conditions of what he terms “neo-feudalism,” characterized by the hardening of class lines and the concentration of resources. According to Kotkin, the “neo-feudal” model threatens many elements of democratic life.
Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: One of the most famous chroniclers of social capital returns to examine how the United States can repair its social bonds.
Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: Combining philosophical analysis and cultural commentary, Sandel argues that the the meritocracy as currently practiced is in tension with a politics of the common good.
Nick Timothy, Remaking One Nation: A former top advisor to Theresa May, Timothy hopes to bring Disraeli’s “one-nation conservatism”—a politics of solidarity and state action—into the 21st century.
Cultural Analysis
Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: In this revisionary history, Caldwell claims that tensions between alternative political paradigms have characterized the past 50 years and that those tensions have escalated into sharper conflict.
Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: The Decadent Society fears that Western life is stuck in a rut of reboots, stagnation, and long-term malaise.
Joshua Mitchell, American Awakening: Mitchell argues that a certain politics of identity has combined with mass atomization to threaten the stability of the American republic.
Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Technically, this isn’t from 2020. But the Library of America did publish a handsome 50th-anniversary edition of Murray’s classic in 2020 (with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). In contrast to some contemporary accounts of identity, Murray finds that mixedness is at the core of the American experience: the “American is a composite that is part Yankee, park backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro.”
Principles and Persons
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: Lasch-Quinn turns to ancient philosophy to offer an enriched model of the person (with a place for inwardness and introspection).
Charles Larmore, What Is Political Philosophy?: This slim book covers a range of topics. Like Martha Nussbaum (see her 2019 The Cosmopolitan Tradition), Larmore is among the defenders of “political liberalism” who also believe that the social compact plays an important role in sustaining liberalism. The closing pages of this book fear that the current iteration of globalization poses a threat to the liberal tradition.
Pierre Manent, Natural Law and Human Rights: This isn’t exactly from 2020, either, though 2020 was the first year this was published in English translation. One of the foremost contemporary theorists of liberalism and the nation, Manent here offers a model of natural law and duty as an alternative to a politics of atomism.
Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: Ricks looks at the debts of the American Founders to classical political philosophy.
O. Carter Snead, What It Means to Be Human: Snead also develops this theme of enriching personhood by reflecting on the importance of embodiment (and vulnerability) for our senses of ourselves.
Rosa and Bertha Gugger painted by Albert Anker (who did a number of paintings about reading—this one’s from around 1883):
Happy New Year!