Almost History
Some not-so-recent books that remain timely
I’m a two-track reader—I typically have something as background research for what I’m writing about, and another book that’s strictly for pleasure. The former is something I give designated time on one of my weeknight or weekend work slots, while the latter gets done in the interstices of the day (once in a while, like on vacation, I’ll devote a larger block of time to it; I’m hoping the next such opportunity will be Christmas Eve). Ever since finishing college, when I landed a job at Simon & Schuster, my fun reading has been focused on new releases. But every once in a while, I’ll circle back and read older stuff.
Of which I’ve been doing a little more lately. There have been a number of books I’ve been hearing about for years that keep getting cited by writers I admire. So I recently decided to check them out for myself.
One of these is Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of America is Tearing Us Apart. These days, “polarization” seems to have become the omnipresent term of our time, but this breezily written 2008 study by a Texas journalist, produced in the aftermath of the 2004 election, seemed to capture the phenomenon in motion and document it in a truly prescient way. Early on in The Big Sort—not to be confused with The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s classic account of the financial crisis of 2008—Bishop describes the steady acceleration of “landslide counties”: residential units where party identity for one side have gotten ever more intense in the past half-century (some maps in the front of the book depicting this are truly stunning). But the strength of the book is how widely it documents the self-sorting of the American people by education, urbanization, religion, marketing, and more. There are some contemporary wrinkles that make it seem a bit dated; the sorting of people into left and right churches now seems to be a matter of the right being churched and the left going totally secular, for example, and racial minorities, once concentrated in the Democratic Party, have begun to disperse across party lines according to Bishop’s other criteria. Bishop has a historical perspective that notes varies forms of segregation that have governed national life before the mid-twentieth century, but he’s clear that what we’re seeing is new—and problematic. It’s rare to encounter a book that has held up so well not simply as a document of its moment, but as a text that continues to hold explanatory power.
A more recent book that I picked up recently was Tim Alberta’s 2019 chronicle American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. I noticed this sizeable tome when it was first published, but never had much interest in reading it. In part, this was because I’m generally not a fan of long-form journalism of a moment that’s just passed (this is the specialty of Bob Woodward, who I’m more interested in hearing interviewed than reading his books, though there have been exceptions), and in part because reliving the advent of Donald Trump was, shall we say, not entirely a pleasant experience. But American Carnage just keeps getting mentioned, and now I know why: Alberta explains, with exceptional clarity, how the GOP got hollowed out years before Trump ever arrived, and how its desiccated husk was filled by a figure who seemed to come out of nowhere to harness the populist rage that the libertarian country-club right had always been able to control. But Alberta also makes clear that Trump was not simply some freakish phenomenon—he was a canny politician who played his cards with consummate skill. This is particularly clear when Alberta explains how Trump demolished primary opponents such as Marco Rubio and (especially) Ted Cruz in the 2016 primary, and how he foiled what were some very determined and quite openly manipulative efforts by the GOP machinery to defeat him. (The running chronicle of figures who expressed contempt for Trump then and are professing fealty to him now is quite eye-opening.) I’ll confess I lost interest in the book as it moved into the first half of Trump’s first term in notorious chapters such as Charlottesville and the botched attempt to repeal Obamacare. But this is a useful book to read and have on your shelf as a reference, particularly as we head into a second Trump term.
Though I didn’t actually re-read it (I’ve done so twice) I did have another look at Robert Putnam’s 2000 study Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community when a colleague asked to borrow my copy. In one sense, Bowling Alone is quite dated, because Putnam—whose 2010 book on religion, American Grace, and autobiographically-inflected study of the American Dream, Our Kids, are well worth reading—lays the blame for our national fragmentation on television, which, as he documents, corroded our communitarian spirit. But if you mentally substitute “social media” every time he mentions “television,” you find yourself thinking that we’ve now got Bowling Alone on steroids (Putnam updated the book to incorporate the rise of the Internet in 2020). It is deeply ironic that media that were once heralded as vehicles of bringing people together have managed to become so divisive and isolating.
Anyway, next time you’re at the bookstore—remember those?—pay attention to those perennials that look vaguely familiar on the shelf or even on display on a table (publishers pay for that space, so those books must be doing something right). There may be gold in those hills of type.