The Three Summers
I sometimes forget that I am not a liberal. Or at least I think of myself as some sort of Right-of-Center Eisenhower Republican who believes in a traditional bouquet of values and principles as associated with classic conservative thought, with an evidence-based edge. So a lot of the modern conservative project bewilders me. Most of all the sort of space occupied by the author here.
When I struggle with a review, it is usually because the scales weigh heavily in both directions, where the book has enough good material to get a strong recommendation but enough bad material to require impressing the need for readers to sup with a long spoon. Sometimes I struggle for other reasons.
The struggle here is more a product of my contrarian nature being contrarian to its own self. Well, mostly. I am interested in the project of the book as spelled out in the introduction. I think that the process of reappraisal of events is necessary due to the shoot from the hip version of our media landscape. I wonder about how we got to now.
But to quote Clueless, like, we’re expected to swoon?
Mike Masnick wrote an excellent argument about how you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Whether you are interested in politics, politics is interested in you. Every point in time has its own unique threats to civilization writ large, and those will always influence what is going on. It is the other reason history is always new. We don’t need the same things from it.
So, I wrote a review after reading The Summer of our Discontent. Then current events caused me to write another review. But I equally felt bad about that review as too bound in current events, and wrote yet a third review. The reviews bounce between one and three stars for a rating on the book.
If there is a consistent theme, I think it is why the initial paragraphs here are not a non sequitur to the remainder of this post. I want to live in a world where this is a four star book, a barbed corrective to conventional wisdom being what it is. What we get is akin to sanewashing, thinking that you are punching up by virtue of doing a handstand first.
At any rate, there are three reviews of this book that I have done. I cannot say that any truly get at what I need to get at. But I am providing them in sequence here:
3 Stars
There is a saying, and I do not know who coined it but it is not novel, that starts that Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man and goes on from there to express the seeming contradictions in his actions. This book is the uneducated man’s idea of God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, making, one must suppose, the author the MAGA idea of William F. Buckley, Jr..
Like Buckley, this is moral panic built within heterodox intellectualism.
Unlike Buckley, the moral panic has no temerity and only a Churchillian martini of an ethos; the contrarianism is at the level of the New York Times Pitchbot, and the intellectual quality is curtailed to the language.
It is the last that is the most offensive. Buckley was a complex writer, writing about complex things, in a complex way. His was poetry, and (despite the actual fiction) he could have been a writer who would have been today in the literary canon, even if there was some three-card monte going on. This book is only the con; is all fig leaf and no cock.
The book is written by a U.S. Black1 centrist intellectual and author, who lives in France2. The thesis is…well, that is the problem. The thesis is that humanism, specifically around race, overreached itself in a way that provoked a backlash. Shorthand this as wokeness run amok.
I am sympathetic to this as a claim. I don’t know about you, but I still feel like a center-right Republican, now looking at drywall where the Overton Window used to be. I feel like this argument is right, and I feel like I can point to instances where this argument is right. So I want it to be proven.
The author goes about the proof by recapitulating the years from Obama’s election to the attack on the Capitol. This is not an argument; it is a description. From the beginning chapters, strangely fixated on Ta-Nehisi Coates in what feels like an attempt to shame him, to the closing chapters, where the author gives the aborted coup an “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”, there is no reasoning. It is someone telling you a series of major news events from then to now.
The idea, I think, is that if you explain the major ways in which the consensus view at the time was incorrect, it provides a justification for people’s anger. And this is interesting. But I think here that the conclusion is get your news from slow media. The author’s own point is not proved or disproved. Cultural trends, and culture includes politics, affect what is being reported, but how do I know that this is not post hoc, propter hoc? And the point, for instance, of the marketplace of ideas and a free media in a democratic society is meant to be self-correcting. I assume the counter-argument is that the woke are uniquely censorious, yet we are having this conversation, so surely that cannot be the end.
Let us assume that the facts as described here, which suggest that the media and the public made a sow’s ear of the various events. I am not going to try to engage in that, as this is a highly detailed sort of analysis unfit for a review by a non-expert.3 How does any level of looting that arose out of what happened with George Floyd make it okay to kill law enforcement due to a lie specifically propagated to stop a free election? That whataboutism was codified in the U.S.S.R. as “and yet you are lynching Negros” has never been as apropos.
And let us close this circle with the contemporary hour. A principled version of this book is conceivable. It would take looking at both of the failed media ecosystems. It would take skewering what is going on now with media companies. It would be less interested in some celebrities Xitter and more interested that the U.S. government does not need to jawbone in order to jawbone, because the degree to which companies and institutions comply in advance in the interest of self-gain is not tragic but pathetic.
And yet, and yet, I do not think that the book is bad.
It is polemic, and much of what I thrilled about here is the function of the polemic. I envy the author’s mastery of the sneering aside, and the non-argument is unassailable, making it perfect: since there is no argument, only the implication of one, all that is there to argue with is the facts. It looks strong, since facts are facts, but facts are not evidence. They are what evidence is made of. And neither is a result.
Again, the sort of potential in a coherent version of this book is huge. One of the repeated tricks in the book is to point to similar events to one that got major traction, then let the implication that the Illuminati is cherry-picking, but that question is pretty interesting. Different events pick up different frames of meaning, that include some facts and exclude others. It is interesting to think about why that is. It is equally interesting to think about whether the tail is wagging the dog: does the frame create the story or does the story create the frame.
I am particularly irritated here in that there is a sort of grand architecture offered in the opening chapter arguing for a return to an idea of Americanism. Cynically though it seems present only to afford something to point at as a thesis, or at least is a one-off comment, and only returned to through implication. You can read where the argument might have been made at some point, though it is not. Instead the argument is that Matt Bors cartoon, except in the third person.
So the book is not outright harmful, though it will be used for harm. It is well written if argumentation as a science interests you. But, like, read the Harper’s letter and save your $30 plus tax.
- I, generally, make a point to follow the use of language of the author. The politics of naming groups is complex and non-obvious, but I feel like I am in their house so I abide by their rules. Here I do not. This is not because I disagree with the author over the capitalization of black, but to make a point in this footnote about the author’s use of footnotes. In the body of the text the author will make a guarded but inoffensive statement, so you think you have read a measured and center-right argument, then use the footnotes for mean-spirited attacks. It is burlesque: you see what you think you saw. ↩︎
- Again, I would not feel compelled to mention this, except for how often the author reminds you that he lives in France. Usually without relevance, though there is one chapter that is about contemporary French intellectual discourse and how it has been poisoned by the U.S. discourse. Which the author raises in the inverse of the way the story is usually told what with the dogwhistle that is Cultural Marxism, but, like the rest of the book, having mentioned the fact, the author feels no need to prove that his assertion is correct.
Of course, there is a major point of relevance to the fact that the author lives in France, which is that he is not in the U.S.. So, like a tech magnate with a climate-proof enclave in New Zealand, he got his. He has no skin in the game. He and his will be better off if the rest of us are fucked, and he then gets to go on whatever future European talking circuit as a phony Cassandra. ↩︎ - Which, one might argue, is the point. ↩︎
One Star
The work that the book sets out to do is to rectify history. Any goodwill it garners in the process of the work of doing that is squandered in its own abuses.
I originally wrote a 3 star review. There is something good here, but this book is more of a research archive from which a different book could be written, one that has a hypothesis, as opposed to an implication.
But in the process between drafts and posting, and looking back over the book to make sure that I did not miss anything, I caught the Manhattan Statement*, and it made me think back to the afterword here, and subsequently made me reappraise my review. Because that is the book’s thesis. In summary:
Step One: Obama
Step Two: George Floyd Protests
Step Three: ???
Step Four: The conflict in Gaza.
You could call it a conspiracy theory, where there are talking points being distributed out, but it does not need to be. There are enough institutional overlaps and Telegram chat threads for it to be unnecessary in the light of groupthink and talking about what is playing in Peoria.
It all leads to Hamas. You don’t like Hamas, do you? I don’t like Hamas. Conveniently, by the standard that the author has set about MAGA, that is all I need to say in order to establish my bona-fides, and I could now take as pro-Hamas a position as I care to. You can argue there is a distinction here being drawn between Hamas and support for Hamas. Except that is even worse. Oh, so you’re only complaining about speech, then? Well, that’s a lot better, you’re not an idiot, you’re a hypocrite.
There is a principled way to make the arguments here. This is not that. You can – you should – agree with the book’s internal conclusions and find its logical arc insulting to anyone with a casual interest in history.
* – The author, unlike with the Harper’s Letter, that he claims some pride of ownership in the book, is not a signatory to it, presumably because he understands that the other signatories on that one would just as rather the pearls he clutches so desperately be a lynch mob’s noose. But this is the turnabout is fair play for the style of footnoting in the text itself.
Two Stars
The letter from the editor at the preface of the book disproves the contents of the book better than any line-by-line refutation could.
The book is about how the kids aren’t alright, so much so that Israel had to invade Gaza.
The method that the author uses to prove it is a retelling of the history of the United States from the election of Obama to the MAGA coup attempt. In doing so, he rectifies many of the errors of conventional wisdom about many of the events, then also goes on to be extraordinarily petty.
It does raise interesting questions, specifically about the media ecology and why one story forms the way that it does, what makes one popular and one ignored. But this is a topic for media studies, which, one assumes, is too leftist a concept for the author, so instead we get some classic pearl-clutching.
This is traditional anti-free speech behavior, as much as it wants to name its opponents as such. What is described in the book is the marketplace of ideas, the process of a society finding its way through facts and beliefs. Saying it operates with bias is axiomatic: that is what opinion is.
This is a heckler’s veto at book length. Periodically, the author will drop a thesis that I wish the book was about, then never come back to it. The closest it seems to come to one is a New York Times Pitchbot esque defense of the MAGA coup as justified. You know, because the lynch mob though that the left had killed cops, they could do the same with impunity, and that poor mislead MAGA was merely doing what they saw the Left do.
Which is a weird argument in the context of the book about the media lying to everyone – how would they then know? It is almost as if there is more media than is focused on here! And this is where whatever might be useful in the book dies.
The fullest disproof of the book is the actions of the media and business interests in the current administration. Basically, if this book were insufferably cynical, pointing out the constant calculations of people and powers to harvest political gain off of human suffering, it would be banal but entertaining. As it is, a lot of people showed willingness to get jawboned in any direction, right or left.
I mean, if the letter that the editor included in the ARC is included in the published version, it shows the publisher doing this, the nerd doing the bully’s homework in the hope that he will get beat up less.
It is well written if argumentation as a science interests you. But, like, read the Harper’s letter and save your $30 plus tax.
CITATION HEEDED 