Recommended Reading
One way to spend discretionary reading time – which you have, during vacations – is with our specialties. Or we can just seek entertainment. But I like to read slightly outside of my usual focus. Knowing what our intellectual neighbors have written is a healthy corrective to preoccupation with our intellectual families. May I suggest that students, in the social sciences and history especially, consider the following books?
The Righteous Mind by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is brilliant and often fun. Although fairly long, it could have gone even deeper and still held readers’ interest. Its subtitle, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, has a non-academic tone but makes a measurable claim. Does the author succeed in showing us “why”? Largely, yes. In conversational yet careful prose, he makes a seemingly major addition to our understanding of the Red-Blue divide. Haidt—an active defender of intellectual diversity who has since co-founded worthy projects called Heterodox Academy and OpenMind Platform—made his widespread reputation in political psychology with this 2012 book, which draws partly upon his own research on the differing “moral foundations” people have.
Haidt says our political convictions are rooted in emotion far more than reason, but that emotion results from natural evolution and is ultimately functional, not dysfunctional. And that we can, realistically, commit ourselves somewhat more to reason than we normally do. The convictions associated with the Left and the Right are based to a great extent on differing moral foundations in our minds. Liberals, i.e. “progressives,” focus very largely on Care or preventing Harm (in the term’s basic humanitarian meaning) and on maintaining or establishing Fairness or Equality. Libertarians, Haidt shows, are quite another breed than Conservatives because they have their own moral foundation, obviously Liberty, that greatly overshadows all other foundations despite some concern among them for Fairness/Equality. Conservatives have by far the broadest range of seriously felt moral foundations. To concerns about harm and fairness, they add strong attachments to Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity (which need not be religious in the usual sense). Far from dismissing these distinctive features of conservative public morality, Haidt is quite respectful of them from his own slightly left-of-center perspective.
Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon could, perhaps, be read with special profit in conjunction with The Righteous Mind. Published a full generation ago in 1991, it shows, from what might be called a compassionate-conservative perspective, that the concept of absolute or nearly absolute rights can be a cold and sickly thing. Glendon argues effectively, with a good range of examples, that its long-growing dominance tends to impoverish our communication with others, including empathy for their inconvenient concerns—thus, too, inhibiting and flattening deliberation in government about the public good.
Sadly, the excessive “rights talk” and the closely-associated aggrandizement of legalism—relying on the law for everything—have resulted, she says, in a “law-saturated society.” They have become simplistic, selfish substitutes for moral reasoning in our public life. Truer words were never spoken, and they’re even truer today.
The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office (2017) can be read as a counterpart to an even more recent book, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency. The latter’s author, Stephen Knott, a professor of national security affairs, tries to show that the office has sunk into demagoguery during our republic’s odyssey and how it might be healthily renewed. The problem, he preaches, is “not … the ‘imperial presidency’ but the populist presidency.” Historian Jeremi Suri is troubled by popular pressures on the presidency too, and he can’t stand Donald Trump either. But The Impossible Presidency follows in the non-philosophical tradition of political scientist Richard Neustadt, who argued plausibly in 1960 that the presidency is a fundamentally “weak” office—strong only, or sometimes strong, when a president assiduously exercises the complicated skills needed to make it so.
Suri differs most significantly from Neustadt in stressing not the limits our system puts on our chief executive, and the virtually limitless modern demands on the office, but what he considers our presidents’ runaway agendas and their unproductive compulsion to deal with crises as extensively as they do. The Impossible Presidency can, among other things, help explain to people who vehemently oppose Trump why they needn’t have been so fearful of him—and, to his staunch supporters, why they shouldn’t have expected so much.
The ten presidents whom Suri discusses, concisely but not superficially in this notably well-written book, are given chapter titles with varying degrees of creativity. One of the better ones is Poet at War, for Lincoln. The book also analyzes the National Healer (Franklin Roosevelt), the Frustrated Frontiersmen (Kennedy and Johnson), the Leading Actor (Reagan), and the Magicians of Possibility (Clinton and Obama).
Finally, I recommend a tome published in 2013 by political scientist and historian Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time is commendable, first of all, for its theme: the New Deal plus World War II plus the early Cold War – periods that Katznelson plausibly insists should be viewed as a single era, defined by a series of radically new, disorienting challenges and thus by fear.
Katznelson is thought-provokingly critical of the New Deal enactments and America’s rise to superpower status. But he views them as a success story, and indeed a democratic success story, while stressing their moral complications and compromises – including, prominently, certain New Deal compromises with racism. Although it’s heavy reading, Fear Itself is very intelligent, excellently researched by a truly independent mind, and a good investment of time.
David Frisk is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement (ISI Books, 2012). A longer version of this piece was published at the Law & Liberty website last year.