I find these days to have little energy for hot takes, blaming or recriminations.
Instead I will offer this list of some of the books I read or listened to over the last year that helped me understand where we are now and how we got here. YMMV.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – I had only planned to listen to the first part of this because I was more interested in how the Nazi’s got into power than I was the War itself, but the story was so good I lasted for the whole 57! hours. Seeing how driven and effective Hitler was at gaining and consolidating power was illuminating and depressing. Demonization of any “other” is really just way more effective than it should be and very hard to fight back against. Even though Hitler made mistakes he just kept at it until finally the system was worn out and basically gave in to him, first in Germany and then for a while in all of Europe. All the appeasement just made him more popular at home.
American Midnight – 1917-1921 was a pretty ugly time in US history. This book gets into the conflicts and in particular the forces that were against America entering into WW1. There’s a lot about the Wobblies and you get the sense of a real change in the culture of America that occurs as the nation begins to realize its power in the world and the power of the business interests that run it. It oddly helped me be less pessimistic about the times we are in now.
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s – This is a pretty good overall explainer about the seeds of our current situation that were planted in the 90s and the progression of grievance politics from David Duke until today. We saw the ugly side of our culture pretty clearly back then and mostly just papered over it and pretended that it went away.
Amusing Ourselves to Death – We love to bash social media for destroying our society but Postman’s book makes it clear that television is the original sin. When we turned news into entertainment and changed discussion of serious things from literate work into a performance we lost the capacity to reason beyond our emotions and fear. It is in this weakened state that social media was able to deal us the death blow. FWIW the book is not really just a polemic against television but more a good critique about what it can and can’t do. You can still watch Ted Lasso and feel ok about yourself.
I am currently making my way through Doppelganger but it goes slowly because frankly Naomi Klein’s work is some of the scariest stuff out there.
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