Category: book reviews

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thick is an excellent collection of Black feminist essays. We are lucky to have Tressie McMillan Cottom’s brain and pen. As an academic trained in sociology, I particularly appreciate Cottom’s approach of blending candid personal narrative, social theory, social scientific facts, and clear as day opinion. These essays are highly readable for a non-academic audience, yet she doesn’t dumb down the ideas or pull any punches. She is asking us to do the work.

The book revisits other pieces she has written. Some of the essays are revisions, others are new responses to conversations sparked by old essays. She writes to clarify her own thinking and make clear the social world surrounding us from the perspectives we usually don’t hear or ignore. Thus, her essays include narratives and metanarratives. Cottom helps us understand why and how she writes. And she explains her specific goals and vision for a society that listens to Black women, that takes their experience and wisdom seriously. There aren’t any hidden agendas here; they are out in the open. She wants us to discuss them. That’s the point.

I love her voice (she is also great in her interviews on television and radio), and I look forward to future collections of her writing.

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Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the companion book to Astra Taylor’s excellent documentary What is Democracy? Many of the interviews, historical references, and scenes are fleshed out here and organized around a more pointed argument than the documentary offers. Where the film pursues curiosity about the true meaning of democracy and how it is meant to function through the lenses of historical definitions and contemporary history, Taylor’s book explores many of the tensions inherent to democracy to help us understand its fragility as a concept and practice and warn us that we are at risk of losing the bits of democracy we have established in modern times.

Democracy’s contradictions and tensions, especially its modern coevolution with capitalism, allow it to be exploited easily in ways that undermine its own ideals. Its strength and weakness is its fluidity. Most importantly, it is dependent on a shared belief of its citizens that this is how we want to govern ourselves, and a commitment to collaborate together to preserve it. This all makes democracy rare and precious and, as I said, fragile.

Taylor marshals a wide range of philosophy, literature, history, and contemporary commentary to present her case. The book is erudite and insightful in the juxtapositions in provides, like the movies Taylor makes as a skilled documentarian. At times, though, it feels a bit thrown together and winding. Being organized around themes, means it often lacks the compelling, cohesive narrative that makes you want to keep reading past the parts that don’t grab you as strongly. The book seems little confused about what it wants to be—straddling the line between an academic volume and a popular press book—but not quite succeeding as either. The book would have benefited from an edit developing stronger storytelling at the book and chapter levels to structure its narrative.

I still think Taylor’s contribution here as an amateur democratic theorist and observer of contemporary society is impressive. Right now, we are all looking for some guidance on how to make sense of democracy, and I think Taylor’s book will be instructive for many, especially in helping make sense of why democracy is not “the end of history,” but is rather an unlikely dance we have found ourselves in. And if we don’t pay attention and work together, “we’ll miss it when it’s gone.”

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Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Richard M. Rorty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What did the “Old Left,” what Rorty calls the “reformist Left,” ever achieve? A lot, according to Richard Rorty in this set of lectures and notes.

The New Left, which Rorty calls the “cultural Left” is now the dominant form of Leftist politics in the United States, ascendant since the 1960s. Rorty, argues that they have largely forgotten their history, rather ironically, as they complain that every system is broken and that we don’t deserve the patriotic hopefulness that the U.S. traditionally inspires. With the decline of the Soviet Union and Marxism as a useful theory of history, this leaves the Left without a hopeful, unifying narrative—a vision. Multiculturalism, the dominant Leftist social theory and goal in the 1990s, is inherently divisive.

Rorty concedes that there has been value in the cultural Left, pointing a finger at the US’s history of (and ongoing) oppression against different groups. He can enumerate the cultural Left victories through identity politics that have produced dramatic increases in social acceptance of marginalized people and an unearthing of their histories and experiences for the public. However, writing in 1997, he sees all of these victories as evanescent without a willingness to work on reform: enacting laws and policies (that often require compromise) to secure good outcomes for people.

Rorty has little time for Marxist theories here. There is not a coming revolution by the working class (what is the working class now anyway?) because the relationships between capitalists and corporations and communities and people have been thoroughly transformed by globalization. We need the government more than ever to step in regulate the economy. We need reform and we need the recreate the alliance between the cultural Left and reformist Left to achieve it.

Both traditions agree that the work of the country is unfinished, that the United States and democracy is an ongoing project which we must continue to make progress on to realize better quality of life for all. Conservatives fought against all of the social democratic work achieved by the reformist Left under presidents like FDR and LBJ. These policies weren’t perfect and racism undermined the access to key resources and services, but the core vision was a decent one and deserving our efforts politically to expand them.

My favorite part of this book is Rorty’s deep love of the writing of Walt Whitman and John Dewey and their hopeful narratives of America. Rorty laments the abandonment of these narratives of “social hope” on the Left since the 1960s. The Left needs to be a politics of hope and needs to return to its pragmatic roots of labor organizing and power-building at all levels of society. The Left cannot simply focus on the abstract virtues of a progressive culture, retiring into academic enclaves and only turning out to the street to protest. The Left must commit to building electoral power and propose hopeful policies on every socioeconomic issue. Only then can we achieve our country.

I would imagine that Rorty (the Rorty I infer from this book) would be energized after Biden’s election. The rhetorical work of the Obama campaign emphasizing hope and building a broad coalition would have been exactly what he would have wanted. But then the campaign withered away rather than creating the kind of ongoing organizing effort it could have achieved at local, state, and national levels. Trump, which Rorty seems to have been predicted in these lectures, was allowed to become president because of the lack of the narrative of hope and an effort among the political class of the Left (Democrats) to move to the center further dividing the Leftist coalition and imploding the narrative of progress. Biden might represent a good bridge between the reformist Left and cultural Left if they can meet there through the work of figures like AOC and Stacy Abrams and willingness of leaders like Pelosi and Schumer and organizers like Color of Change to prevent another populist demagogue from selling false hope from the Right.

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Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The West has forgotten its hard-won wisdom from the first half of the 20th Century. The political Left lost its way in the heady days of neoliberal economic dogma and assumptions about believing the inexorability of both peace post-Cold War and of globalization in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Meanwhile, the political Right, searching for identity after the Left took over centrist politics, adopted the mantle of nationalism and authoritarianism in response to inequality producing insecurity and political division.

In this brilliant analysis, Tony Judt reminds us why we created social democracies across Europe and North America following the world wars, foregrounding the wisdom of Keynes as a keen observer and architect of early 20th century history, politics, and economics. There are certain things only governments can do: ensure that economic gains do not unfairly accrue to the few (as capitalism is designed to do) and construct and maintain infrastructure and utilities that markets can never get right because they will always be natural monopolies and inefficient when provided equally (e.g. public transportation, the postal service). Social welfare programs ensure a basic human quality of life, which is all the more important when there are major disruptions in the economy (e.g. depressions/recessions, shifts between major industries and employment needs, automation).

When people lose jobs and perceive unequal economic outcomes among their fellow citizens, they get pissed. They feel insecure. They are susceptible to demagogues and authoritarians who promise stability and deflect the blame toward people that don’t look like them. This is how we ended up with fascism, with virulent nationalism that precipitates wars between groups and nation-states.

We were sold lies by neoliberal economists in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, who misread history and mistook the postwar stability as inevitable as opposed to carefully constructed to ensure those terrible wars and the social inequality that preceded them would not return. We attacked “socialism” because it was politically convenient during the Cold War era, especially in the United States. It turns out everyone loves the stability of social security and Medicare, but they fail to realize that they are the product of a hard-won negotiation between capitalism (that is always captured by special interests without regulation) and socialism (that tries to blow up everything to create an elusive utopia). The product was social democracy.

Judt argues that the Left needs to be a bit more conservative in defending the value of social democracy and not give in to neoliberal dogmas about economics and the role of government. And we all need to remember that inequality within democracies are the causes of so much social turmoil. Democracy is delicately maintained because we observe a shared responsibility for our collective well-being. When inequality produces insecurity, democracy is easily lost as people pine for authoritarian programs of “law and order” and nationalist calls to fight against “others.”

Identity politics can help us understand the ways inequality plays out and have achieved limited wins for different groups, which feels like the only thing worth fighting for when the political landscape as a whole seems otherwise unresponsive. But it also distracts us from the core questions of what our governments should be doing.

If I could hand out copies of one book to elected officials, it might be this one. Tony Judt writing in 2010 explains how we get to Donald Trump and is prescient about the problems we are facing and what it will take to address them by reclaiming the value of social democracy.

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