Recommended Reading

Nostalgia for a Tragic Past

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Eric

Steven Hahn is Professor of History at New York University. His previous books, The Roots of Southern Populism, A Nation Under Our Feet, and A Nation Without Borders, have won many prestigious awards. In his latest, Hahn shows how American politics have been shaped by antagonism between group identities and communities, rather than individuals in pursuit of liberty.

Following Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, commentators, pundits, and scholars around the nation set to work on lectures, articles, and books decrying the rise of an illiberal democracy in the United States. Founded upon an extant literature about comparable governments abroad, these writers expressed a concerted concern that the United States had broken with its past and turned instead in a new and dangerous direction. Now that Trump has been elected again, in 2024, these alarms are certain to resume their ring. But even as we listen, we should place Trump’s profile in proper perspective by acknowledging that at least two things can be true at the same time. The first is that, yes, Trump is a different and more aggressively illiberal leader than those we’ve had in the past. The second is that, no, the United States has not been, until now, a paragon of liberal democracy.

This point is cleanly made and thoroughly documented by Steven Hahn in his 2024 book, Illiberal America: A History. The argument is textured, but the gist is that the political culture of the United States has been shaped by a variety of currents, at least one of which was liberal but was washed always among swiftly illiberal others. Though we commonly think of the US as a land in which individual rights and liberties form the political bedrock, this too-easy characterization obscures a few centuries of political-social life defined by group dynamics, when a stratified pyramid of demographics facilitated the subjugation and/or expulsion of those on each successive margin. This is the history that has given us the sinister profile of the white male, the narrowly defined and highly privileged figure who ruled over the rest, especially when wealthy. From that pinnacle, though, the racial, religious, national, gendered, propertied, and related category exclusions have proceeded steadily downward and out, pushing in turn against the American Indians, the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the women, the Jews, the Catholics, the Irish, the beer-drinking non-English-speaking eastern and southern European immigrants in general, the poor, the workers, the communists and alleged communists, the Muslims, the gays and lesbians and transgenders, etc.

Throughout American history, in other words, your identification with a particular status group has mattered much more than your political integrity as an individual with rights.

The misconception that the United States was, is, and may yet be the manifest ideal of liberalism is owed primarily to the dedicated work of the post-New-Deal, mid-twentieth-century historians who established the idea in the minds of their influential readers. Important writers like Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, Lionel Trilling, and the rest of their cohort emphasized American liberality in their work, effectively recasting the nation in a not-exactly-wrong but still-aspirational light. This effort was widely successful, buttressed and expanded especially by those prominent liberals who saw America always in a state of becoming the land they had always hoped it would be. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, they had come to believe it all so completely that Trump’s election felt like a fracture in the timeline, a narrative infidelity. And yet most of these also knew their history well enough to concede, on second pass, that it wasn’t so unusual after all.

Hahn’s book is comprehensive, moving longitudinally and supporting his thesis with candid evidence at all points between the colonies and the present. In his careful telling, the land that became America was defined all along by sequential waves of vilification and exclusion, shaped by a shifting matrix of identity politics that targeted each ascendant group the very moment its ascent was recognized. The natives were to be conquered, converted, enslaved, or expelled, and replaced, then, by endless shiploads of shackled migrants. These indentured servants and slaves provided the labor force to realize a new feudal dream, usually losing their health and their lives long before anything like freedom arose on the other end. The nation they built with their backs and their hands grew and complex-ified and stratified, acquiring new land and building new institutions while swelling with new arrivals and pushing ever westward toward the Pacific. At one point, it split in two and the citizens fought each other in an exceedingly bloody war over whether or the not its peculiar institutions could persist. Afterward, this chaotic, contentious, and very often violent exercise in nation-building rolled on in patchwork, tribal fashion, through segregation and discrimination and Jim Crow and ethnic neighborhoods and all the rest, driven by suspicion, recrimination, and division, and culminating here and now in what Hahn calls, ominously, an “era of illiberal darkness.”

But in acknowledging the danger, he disavows the surprise. Illiberalism has never been peripheral to American life. On the contrary, he writes, “It is usually nourished by the ‘community’ and expressed by the community’s ‘will,’ however the ‘community’ may be understood.” In that sense, America can’t be great again. It can only hold itself to a higher, as yet unmet standard.

Isabel Wilkerson is the author, previously, of The Warmth of Other Suns, an award-winning account of the Great Migration between World War I and 1970. In Caste, she examines social distinctions in several different caste societies, arguing ultimately that, in many ways, the United States, Nazi Germany, and contemporary India were shaped by comparable beliefs, assumptions, and systemic social forces.

Or, in other words, the stratified, group orientation informing American history amounts to a caste system. In her 2020 book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson makes this case in language consistent with Hahn, and starts from precisely the same place, looking incredulously back on those disillusioned Americans who greeted Trump’s first election with shock and disbelief. “‘This is not America,’ or ‘I don’t recognize my country,’ or ‘This is not who we are,’” they said. Actually, Wilkerson replies, “This was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not.”

From there, her book relays a discomfiting history that roundly exposes the liberties taken by Hartz and Hofstadter and the rest in their focus on American individuality, a privilege reserved, she writes, for select members of the dominant caste. If you were Black in the nineteenth century—or, in many venues, if you are Black today—the particular texture of your individuality is likely to be concealed behind the simple fact of your blackness in the judgments and assumptions of those who pass through your orbit. You are, to them, first and foremost a type, and beholden to the traits and constraints with which the type is associated. The same is true if your people come from some East or South Asian nation, or from Latin America, or if you’re Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, or if you’re part of the white working class, or otherwise likely to be lumped quickly into a category.

“A caste system,” she writes, “is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.” The system “uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart,” and it “endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through generations.”

This is an accurate description of the Black experience in America, certainly the Native-American experience, and has applied in different ways to different others along the way, depending on when and where they made their entrance into the ranks.

Though the arrangements she describes are familiar, some readers may recoil when Wilkerson characterizes them as castes, a primitive and dehumanizing concept unbecoming in the land of the free. Certainly the recent enthusiasm for “patriotic” histories of the United States would not be comfortable with this. But one of the great virtues of the book is that Wilkerson brings so many receipts, noting that many others have made this association before.

Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner characterized racial segregation as a caste system in the nineteenth century, noting that “Caste makes distinctions where God has made none.” In 1916, eugenicist Madison Grant wrote approvingly of the caste system in India, identifying it as the means by which the upper classes “preserve the purity of their blood,” and adding that “In our Southern states, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose.” In 1942, anthropologist Ashley Montagu wrote that, “When we speak of the race problem in America, what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.” In 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, in his An American Dilemma, that the effort “to maintain the color line has, to the ordinary white man, the function of upholding that caste system itself, of keeping the ‘Negro in his place.’” And on and on.

To suggest that the United States of America has been built upon and stratified around an elaborate system of castes is to invite comparisons to Nazi Germany and contemporary India, neither of which is bound to flatter the American self-concept. And yet Wilkerson explores these analogues very deliberately and finds them compelling.

In the first case, she provides the contemporary documentation that, not only did the Nazis look to the US for examples of how to codify their racial hierarchy in law, they puzzled over how the US had managed to implement such strict racial boundaries—more rigid, even, than Australia or South Africa—and yet still “to retain such a sterling reputation on the world stage.” Some Nazi intellectuals, like the writer Herbert Kier, “thought American law went overboard,” and tried initially to settle on a more moderate approach.

To Indians, the parallels are obvious. In 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited India, hoping to learn more about the tradition of resistance to colonialism and caste. When his host introduced him to a group of dalit high school students as “a fellow untouchable from America,” King felt “a bit shocked and peeved” that he would be characterized in this way. Upon some reflection, though, he had to concede the similarities. “Yes,” he told the group, “I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.”

Caste is a very focused and thorough book that weaves history, sociology, psychology, and the author’s personal experiences together in defense of a very exacting thesis. It pairs well with Illiberal America to challenge the misty national nostalgia embraced by so many on the political right and some still on the center-left.

Charles King is Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University. The author of eight books, King is here concerned with the circle of anthropologists around Columbia University Professor Franz Boas in the 1920s, who challenged the popular belief that categories like race, sex, and nationality were determinitive of intelligence, ability, and potential.

The pervasiveness of that nostalgia should demonstrate that, to a considerable extent, the misremembering of history is less a partisan project than a general human tendency. We all make our contributions, and one of the unsung benefits of living in a time of such prolific historical scholarship, networked libraries, and affordable paperback editions is that we have an unprecedented opportunity to get the story right or, at minimum, less wrong in our own minds. And yet, as Mark Twain said, the man who does not read books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them, and between you and me sometimes the state of our discourse and the trend in our politics makes me wonder how far and in which directions the benefit of nearly universal literacy is being pressed today.

It’s a bit of a digression except that, as Charles King explains in his Gods of the Upper Air, the more accurate take on the human condition is generally a minority view and often radically at odds with the prevailing consensus. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Franz Boas was emerging as one of the world’s most provocative thinkers and building a circle of admirers at Columbia University, the “standard view of human society was that differences of belief and practice were matters of development and deviance.” A “more or less straight line ran from primitive societies to advanced ones,” and you could rank those societies from most advanced (white, western European and America) all the way down through the most primitive (Black, African, Native American, outlying Pacific Islanders) as though viewing human evolution and development from the side, like a hominid chart. This thinking was instrumental in guiding our social institutions and political economy as recently as the second World War, a cataclysmic event that was itself largely produced by such thinking.

A German immigrant to the United States, Boas published and lectured widely on the concept of culture, arguing persistently that cultural ideas shape our thinking, action, and lifestyles far more than mere genetics or any natural tendency toward racial progress. “The social categories into which we typically divide ourselves, including labels such as race and gender, are at base artificial,” he argued, “the products of human artifice, residing in the mental frameworks and unconscious habits of a given society.” Though widely resisted in academia and beyond, these claims were appealing to some precocious—eventually famous—young researchers, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, who became his protégés.

They called their work “cultural anthropology,” and set off into the world to study human cultures in their own settings, on their own terms, without imposing any of the top-down assumptions standard to the hierarchical thinking of the day. Boas had made his name among the Inuit, Mead went famously to the South Pacific, Hurston to the southern states. Benedict stayed mostly in New York, but wrote brilliantly while holding them all together in her correspondence. They wrote each other, competed with each other, sometimes fell in love with each other and had affairs with others along the way, each eventually garnering biographers and so turning the study of human life into a human life worthy of study.

Their great insight, King writes, was that “no society, including our own, is the endpoint of human social evolution. We aren’t even a distinct stage in human development. History moves in loops and circles, not in straight lines, and toward no particular end. Our own vices and blind spots are as readily apparent as those of any society anywhere.” They were “dismissed from jobs, monitored by the FBI, and hounded in the press, all for making the simple suggestion that the only scientific way to study human societies was to treat them all as parts of one undivided humanity.”

King’s book offers a fitting capstone to a read through Hahn and Wilkerson because of his comparatively narrow focus. After reading through those large and sweeping histories, Gods of the Upper Air focuses us specifically at one important moment, if stretched across decades and traveling ‘round the world. In that moment, between the wars, we witness a new and compelling worldview being born and immediately challenged by a cranky status quo. This was the era of eugenics, remember, in which these old ideas about racial stratification and genetic inferiority were operationalized in state-sponsored sterilization programs and used to justify a host of toxic laws and Supreme Court rulings. They perpetuated colonialism and Jim Crow and the successive lives of the Ku Klux. Like Wilkerson, King dwells at length on the various ways that American racism served as inspiration and policy model for Nazi-brand anti-Semitism. And so any concern that these writers paint with a brush too broad evaporates here amid the many fascinating and granular details. It’s an awesome book.

Reading these three titles in this order is liable to reorient and certain to clarify your thinking about some of the (still!) most provocative matters around race, gender, and history dividing the American people today. To me, they make our moment very intelligible, and for that reason all the more disappointing. But to be clear these are not downer books, and they are not anti-American in the sense so often alleged. They demonstrate that, as James Baldwin once put it, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” And after nearly four centuries on these shores, we really should be learning from all of this. Going forward, in our lives, our work, and our politics, we might aspire to make America great for everyone, for the first time.

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Politics | Tagged Caste, Donald Trump, Illiberalism | Comments Off

The Sexual Revelation

Posted on August 25, 2024 by Eric

Benjamin E. Park is Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. His books, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier and American Zion, provide a comprehensive view of Mormonism from the first revelations of Joseph Smith through the presidential ambitions of Mitt Romney. Together, they provide an introductory course in an American original.

Of all the novel American social-sexual arrangements in the antebellum years, from the strenuous celibacy of the Shakers to the untethered free love of Berlin Heights, perhaps no experiment has proven so durable to fame as Joseph Smith’s venture into plural marriage. A radical innovation that came to define the Latter-Day Saints and to delay Utah statehood for a period of decades, Mormon polygamy began as yet another accord between Smith and God, a secret covenant that granted the prophet rights to do things that he had wanted to do anyway, and at the very moment it first seemed plausible to do them without consequence. In both his Kingdom of Nauvoo and his more recent American Zion, Benjamin Park does an admirable job of recounting these events with candor, somehow threading a narrative needle between credulity and cynicism.

Though American Zion is the obvious choice for readers in need of a sweeping Mormon history, Kingdom of Nauvoo is the more granular and—in my view—more captivating take. Probably most readers don’t know that much about the saga of Nauvoo, so practically every page is a revelation. And yet I keep returning to one detail in particular, a representative anecdote that captures Smith’s psychology, his brazenness, and the remarkable influence he must have wielded over those in his orbit. It explains how he was able to generalize plural marriage, moving it beyond the confines of his own private practice and making the case for its adoption by others in the community.

That story centers upon Sarah Ann Whitney, one of more than two dozen women Smith married in secret before his first wife, Emma, found out. Whitney was 17-years-old in July of 1842; Smith was 36. By accounts an exceptionally attractive girl, she was also the daughter of prominent Mormon parents. When Smith approached Newel Whitney to ask for his daughter’s hand, he came with a written proclamation—written, that is, in the voice of God—promising an eternity of honor and immortality to the entire Whitney household once the couple was sealed. Whatever reservations they may have felt about gifting their daughter to an already—in fact, many times over—married man, the offer was too good to refuse.

But though the marriage itself raises a host of questions and red flags, the situation became much more interesting the following spring, when Smith was confronted by a seemingly foreseeable problem. Sarah Ann Whitney was, in the eyes of Nauvoo’s young gentlemen, a very eligible bachelorette. No one knew that she was married to Smith, so she had both many callers to reject and no obvious reason to reject them all. Smith realized quickly that he needed a way to remove her from the dating pool without drawing any unwelcome attention to himself. He found that way in the sympathetic figure of a grieving widower, Sarah Ann’s uncle-by-marriage, Joseph Kingsbury.

Caroline Whitney Kingsbury had died the previous October, leaving her husband alone to raise their infant child. He was still very much in mourning when Smith came to him with a novel proposal. If Kingsbury would agree to be joined to Whitney in a “civil union”—not actually a marriage but something that looked to the residents of Nauvoo exactly like one—then Smith would seal him to his beloved Caroline for all eternity. When Kingsbury agreed to the scheme, he helped inaugurate a theological advance. If men and women could be united in civil bonds til death do they part, they might also be united spiritually in ways that death could not break, and this process might be formalized whether the spouse was living or dead.

Before long, a growing number of Mormon men were pursuing eternal seals with their lost wives, even in cases where they had already remarried and established such seals with their new brides as well. Though one wife was living and one (or more) dead, the man who secured these seals could already consider himself to have multiple wives, in a spiritual if not a physical sense. Looking ahead to the endless span of eternity, when all would be joined together forevermore, the matter of whether one or two or none of these wives were dead on earth seemed to matter less and less. Introduced and expanded gradually, starting with those—like the prophet’s moralistic brother Hyrum—who had loved and lost, it helped make polygamy palatable to many who might otherwise have rejected it out of hand. And it took off from there.

Polygamy was still noxious to just about everyone else, though, and the already swirling rumors help explain why the Mormons were run out of New York and then Ohio and then Missouri before Joseph and Hyrum Smith were lynched in Illinois, and why Brigham Young then bade America adieu entirely and started his people on the long western march to the Great Salt Lake, where polygamy persisted for most—but not all—of the rest of the century. From one vantage, the doctrine of plural marriage appears little more than a patriarchal swindle that permitted prominent men to have sex with several—even dozens—of women without violating social-religious standards of propriety or compromising their status as pillars of the community. Considered more generously, it was a complex social arrangement that empowered the prophet to bind his people tightly together in a cohesive matrix of interlocking and overlapping relations that would persist into infinity. My own judgment leans decidedly closer to the first of these interpretations. But the intricacy of the thing makes you wonder.

Ellen Wayland-Smith is Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California. Her book, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table, documents the strange evolution of John Humphrey Noyes’ religious sect, from a collection of avowed Christian communists practicing “complex marriage” in the nineteenth century to a straight-laced, middle-class silverware company in the twentieth.

If Joseph Smith was perhaps the most audacious of the 19^th century’s religious-political-sexual innovators, he did not run unopposed. The perfectionist minister and self-proclaimed prophet John Humphrey Noyes also warrants consideration, and his contemporaneous Oneida Community rivals Nauvoo in a number of significant ways. Ellen Wayland-Smith’s Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table offers the most recent—and most comprehensive—account. Though the Latter-Day Saints appear here only in passing, the parallels between the Mormons and Wayland-Smith’s Oneidans are uncanny.

Like Smith, for example, Noyes declared a direct connection to God that justified both his critique of the prevalent social norms and his exploration of alternative arrangements. Also like Smith, Noyes’ revelations authorized him to have sex with lots and lots of women without forfeiting his claim to decency. And here again, Noyes founded his enterprise upon an apparatus of high-toned theological concepts that persuaded a bunch of perfectly respectable people to join in. If you end up thinking that Noyes did all this mostly just for the sex—as I mostly do—you still have to grapple with the complex theological reasoning that he used to validate his behavior.

Here’s the background: Starting in the 1830s, when upstate New York and New England were still much in the throes of the Second Great Awakening and its attendant millennialism, the young minister Noyes came to believe himself a special representative of God on Earth. (In this, he was not so dissimilar to Charles Grandison Finney, William Miller, or Lyman Beecher, to say nothing of Joseph Smith. If not in the water, special election seems to have been in the air.) Like many of the reformer class, Noyes condemned a pronounced selfishness in American society and sought means to correct it. He did so at the level of the family, through which individuals claimed ownership of their partners and children, and from which they laid claim to other people, properties, and assets. If this impulse were to be overcome, Noyes argued, Christians needed to become communists.

The Christian communism Noyes envisioned was realized finally in the 1840s and founded upon an institution that he called “complex marriage,” an arrangement by which all exclusivity was dissolved and every man in the community was in a sense married to every woman, and might therefore enjoy the conjugal benefits of each and all. No individual person could stake a claim on the life of any other, nor entertain feelings of jealousy in any justifiable way. To prevent rampant pregnancies, the men in the community practiced “male continence,” stopping somewhat short of full consummation. When babies were born, they were raised by the community in communal settings, denying parents any exclusive claim to their children. If any particular couple wished to have a child together, they had to apply to the community leadership for approval, which was granted or not based on the spiritual quality of the child that the couple seemed likely to produce. Sometimes those applications were approved. Otherwise, pairings were assigned. In either case, Noyes pioneered a form of spiritual eugenics not entirely dissimilar to the physical variety that would arise in the early 20^th century.

By 1845, when the new reforms were up and running and his Oneida community first beginning to flourish, Noyes had developed a theory of sexuality that drew on the early science of electricity, culminating in a theory of “electric sex.” The gist is that human beings are endowed with a life force traceable to Christ himself, and that this force can be transferred from person to person, growing in intensity with each transmission. A community of Christians bound by diverse connections would thus function as a spiritual battery, generating and containing enough electric potential to nurture health, ward off disease, and raise its members ever closer to true immortality. This sort of spiritual-physical growth took priority at Oneida, set against the compulsive, selfish, money-making obsession of the outside world. That was the appeal.

Unsurprisingly, though, Noyes’ sexual theory and practice found their way eventually into some extremely creepy places. Most disturbingly, Noyes took it upon himself to initiate all of the community’s girls into sexual experience immediately upon completion of puberty, around the average age of thirteen. There is also evidence that Noyes hoped to begin approving brother-sister sexual unions, and eventually to father a child with his own daughter. “Avuncular unions,” between uncles and nieces were already commonplace at Oneida. Eventually, the in-bred condition of the community would inspire Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

By the end of the 1870s, the Oneida Community had collapsed under the weight of Mormon-inspired anti-bigamy legislation and Noyes had expatriated to Canada. Thus began the second life of the community, in which a group of avowed communist non-conformists began a transition to perfectly normal, bourgeois respectability by dropping the weird sexuality and leaning instead into the production of fine and affordable silverware.

Ultimately, both the Mormons and Oneidans buckled under political pressure and abandoned key elements of their belief systems. In hindsight, though, those key elements look a lot like the lecherous predilections of their all-too-human god-complex founders. That’s not to say that their social critiques were entirely wrong, or that middle class normalcy is necessarily right. But these parallel trajectories remain engrossing in themselves. They disclose a foundational libido at the base of very high-minded systems.

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Christianity, Politics | Tagged Mormonism, Oneida, Polygamy | Comments Off

A Recession of Charisma

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Eric

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University. His book, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, documents the political influence of military leaders on both sides of the Atlantic during the 18th- and early 19th centuries, and defines them as a type.

The “Age of Revolutions,” a fifty-year stretch roughly spanning 1775-1825, was an era defined by the charismatic leadership of great men. More than that, as David Bell frames the period, it was a time when ordinary people could participate in the historic dismantling of old institutions, the fresh construction of new ones, and the broad expansion of human freedom on the way, all beneath the oversight of a few exceptional figures. Bell’s exemplars, including George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Loverture, and Simón Bolívar, hold several important qualities in common. Each was a military leader renowned for his talent, strength, and courage; each was hailed as a savior or redeemer of his country; and each was subsequently recognized as a founder of something new, a father to his people, who ultimately made the transition from military to political leadership. Bell travels with each figure as his reputation is built, identifying the pivotal events and helpful embellishments that lent themselves to an immortal reputation in every case.

Consider Washington, for example, who was the first of the era proper, and his revolution its inaugural. The glorious year of 1776 was anything but for the American general, whose frequent defeats and retreats were eventually formalized into a “war of posts” intended to annoy the redcoats without subjecting the Continental Army to any one final and decisive collapse. Observing this regress in October, John Adams complained to his wife that “in general, our generals were out-generaled.” There was bitterness and intrigue within the chain of command as well, as some of these generals—like Joseph Reed and Charles Lee—questioned and conspired against their chief. Later, when great victories were finally won, it would be others—like Horatio Gates at Saratoga and Nathanael Greene in the South—on the field. But none of this mattered to the American people, who consistently celebrated Washington via parades marched, songs composed, and towns named in his honor. He was a new type of leader for a new era and a new form of government—not a divine monarch, but an ordinary man, elevated by extraordinary virtues and crowned by acclamation.

For the American people, Washington’s bravery, honor, and commitment made him the perfect avatar of a republican admiration that they were already enthusiastic to confer. In such a context, the hero’s heroism is largely a product of his audience’s fawning attention, radiated by them upon him rather than the opposite, and so susceptible to abuse. As early as 1777, with the cult of Washington already at fever pitch, Adams expressed concern and probably more than a little jealousy. “I have been distressed to see some of our members disposed to idolize an image which their own hands have molten,” he said to his colleagues in Congress. “I speak here of the superstitious veneration which is paid to General Washington.” When the war was won—very largely thanks to the French—Washington declined the opportunity to rule as dictator, an astonishing relinquishment of power that he would reprise with flourish later, after his second term as president. (Garry Wills has thus referred to Washington as “a virtuoso of resignations.”) Though his countrymen would immediately cite his humility and grace as yet further reasons to adore him, their adoration might just as easily have conceded him the presidency for life if he had claimed it.

In broad outline, then, Washington is representative of Bell’s men on horseback. Compelling in themselves, they are all the more so for the cults of personality that their leadership inspired. Each affected a sort of manly charisma, each commanded men in battle, and each was rewarded in turn with expansive political power—in the newly united states, in France, in Haiti, and from Gran Colombia to Upper Peru. In many ways, these careers were products of a particular time, formed by Enlightenment values and republican ambitions, captured in portraiture and popularized by an emergent press. Each man was made by his admirers to be larger than life, and each has since been re-humanized under the careful examination of history. But importantly, all of them earned their accolades in the thrill and danger of action. We remember them now less for who they were or for how they spoke than for what they did in the world.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. Her book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present documents the political influence (primarily) of non-military leaders who have claimed power around the world during the 20th and early 21st centuries. These, too, offer us a particular genre of leader, but of a weaker vintage.

In that regard, Bell’s men on horseback offer a strange and perplexing contrast to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s strongmen, the latter of whom rose to power within the past hundred years or so. Individually, each of these books analyzes charismatic leadership of a sort. Read together, they document a stark depreciation in the quality of political charisma worldwide. Founded and formed by revolutionary heroes, much of the globe would be inherited later by small and hackish functionaries, few with any military experience and fewer still with any real achievement in that theater. Having witnessed the glorious conquests of Napoleon and Bolívar, the world would soon have to settle for the blustering demagoguery of Mussolini and Hitler, the indolent brutality of Franco, the absurdist violence of Pinochet and Gaddafi, the sleazy corruption of Berlusconi, the frowning kleptocracy of Putin, and the cartoonish incompetence of Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Trump. A focused consideration of this cohort necessarily asks us to think a bit about how and why we have managed to maintain our fervor for strong leaders while so dramatically lowering our standard for what qualifies as strength.

Here again, let’s consider the example from the United States, former (and maybe future) President Donald Trump. Unlike Washington, Trump did not build his reputation on bravery and selflessness in service to his country. He has never stood on principle or virtue or the cultivation and defense of his sacred honor. He certainly has never relinquished power gracefully, even when the nation’s established electoral processes dictated that he must.

Instead, Trump is—and always has been—known for his extravagant greed, lust, selfishness, and shamelessness. He was an icon of the 1980s precisely because his flamboyant excesses epitomized that era. Later, when his public profile began to flag, he regained attention as host of a reality television show on which he insulted a cast of made-for-reality-TV characters. When he took his political turn, he did so as a conspiracy theorist. And as president, he transformed the Oval Office into a daily circus, defined by bombastic press conferences, unhinged Tweets, bizarre speeches, and the signature of exactly one major bill—a generous tax cut for the wealthy. All along, he was developing a cult of personality that would cast his rallies in an explicitly authoritarian light. When he lost the 2020 election, by wide margins in both the popular and Electoral College votes, his hordes stormed the Capitol at his direction.

And yet, unlike Washington in so many ways, Trump has likewise claimed the fawning adoration of very many Americans, despite (in part because of) a much more assertive chorus of critics. He has secured, again, his party’s nomination to the presidency, and the contest was never close. The Republican base, who pride themselves on unshakeable patriotism and on their veneration of the Founding Fathers, do not hesitate to deify Trump on signs, banners, and ubiquitous flags, depicting him sometimes as the musclebound, gun-toting action hero that he has never approximated in real life. This is perhaps the one and only notable similarity—John Adams could grouse about Washington’s defeats, and today’s liberals can rant and rave about Trump’s indiscretions, lies, and crimes, but a great many of the people in either case simply do not care. The image has been molten by their own hands, and they are defensive of their creation.

Like the rest of Ben-Ghiat’s strongmen, then, Trump’s success is traceable to a charisma that has been granted by his admirers rather than produced by his initiative. As president, he seduced the people with a tale of lost greatness, effectively wielded propaganda, demonized the free press, claimed a special brand of masculine virility, used his office to enrich himself and his family, threatened his critics with retribution and violence, and sought to retain power to the detriment of democratic institutions, a playbook that Ben-Ghiat documents with care and disconcerting uniformity across all of her subjects.

They’re all basically the same. Different in degree, perhaps, but not substantially in kind—each self-styled strongman another brash and mediocre leader who will be remembered for who he was and how he spoke rather than for any good he did in the world.

Posted in Books, Philosophy, Politics | Tagged Charisma, Leadership, Revolutions | Comments Off

Current

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Eric

Posted in Books | Tagged Latter-Day Saints, Mormonism | Comments Off

Current

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Eric

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

Posted in Books | Tagged Thoreau, Walden | Comments Off

Conservatives or Radicals or Something Else Entirely

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Eric

Nicole Hemmer is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She and I discussed her first book back in 2016. Her second book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, resituates the Republican Party’s sharp rightward turn in reaction to the Reagan presidency, rather than at its beginning.

In the autumn of 2023, shortly after becoming the first Speaker of the House to be stripped of his gavel, Congressman Kevin McCarthy was asked to comment on the far-right cadre who had engineered his ouster. “They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and they’re chaotic,” he said. “That’s not the party I belong to. The party of Reagan was if you believed in your principles, that you could govern in a conservative way. They are not conservative and they do not have the right to have the title.” Perhaps McCarthy had not read Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. Otherwise, he might have had a clearer grasp of exactly when and how the party he belongs to—the party of Reagan—became defined by anger and chaos.

If the Reagan Revolution achieved the great triumph of American conservatism in 1980, it also marked the culmination and passing of the triumphant conservative style—that sunny, smiling optimism of its Californian namesake. Indeed, though Ronald Reagan remains emblematic of 80s-era Republicanism, the balance of his political allies and admirers were even then transitioning into darker and more aggressive forms, ever more fiercely committed to the unpopular stands their popular leader was ever unwilling to take. Though they fawned on the Great Communicator in his day and invoked his name regularly for at least a decade after his death, the post-Reagan conservatives had come to view Reaganism as an opportunity missed. For all his virtues, it seems, the Gipper had one near fatal flaw in their eyes—he paid attention to public opinion.

The story of American politics in the 1990s is thus largely concerned with right-wing reaction to Reagan’s perceived moderation. The protagonists are rising right-wing politicians and media figures with radical ideas about government, who viewed election as license to enact these categorically. In temperament, these individuals—Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Roger Ailes, to name a few—were doctrinaire and inflexible. Stylistically, they were angry. Apparently convinced that morning in America had passed to afternoon, they radiated an irascible and sneering sort of frustration, rejecting conciliation and compromise as synonyms for weakness, and practicing politics as warfare by only slightly milder means. If Reagan proposed a political vision to the people and waited for their assent, his successors would make demands and force them through, or else.

In these years, Buchanan’s frowning growl and Gingrich’s bookish scorn came to define their own peculiar mode of persuasion. Confident that they were ideologically correct, they had no patience for caveats and no tolerance for dissent. When Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush in the ’92 primary, he wielded his conservative purity like a cudgel, battering his more moderate rival over a heretical willingness to tax. When Gingrich launched his own revolution in ’94, he assigned an entirely new lexicon to see it secured, recasting his Democratic colleagues as sick, selfish, radical, treasonous, and worse. In step with Limbaugh’s radio bombast, alongside the rise of Fox News, sanctified by association with the Christian Right, and contemporaneous with reactionary militia movements, this ascendent political ethos drew support from across the rightward reaches, bolstered by certainties and inflected with menace. Animated by their blinding hatred of William Jefferson Clinton, conservatives struggled desperately to retake the White House and to see their agenda finally imposed without restraint.

The impeachment proceedings launched against Clinton in December of 1998 thus provide a representative anecdote for the shift underway in the Republican Party for at least a decade to that point—the moment at which Reaganite conservatism formally surrendered to the Gingrich caucus. Because Kenneth Starr’s charges were so humiliating and salacious, the case was perfectly calibrated for the right-wing media and publishing sphere, and tailor-made for the chain emails everyone’s uncle was forwarding dutifully along. And yet, for those same reasons, the impeachment was extraordinarily unpopular with the public-at-large, creating the sort of political calculus that would likely have prompted a Reagan to balk. Asked why he pressed on despite the risks, Gingrich responded curtly, “Because we can,” a quip that Hemmer flags as “an apt summation of the right’s emerging attitude toward power” (247). Once in office, the Republicans of the 1990s would do everything in their ability to satisfy all of their desires. If the effort cost them majorities, they would thrive in opposition until winning their seats again.

Perhaps somewhat chastened by Clinton’s acquittal and their own midterm losses in ‘98, Republicans nominated George W. Bush in 2000, entrusting their prospects once again to an optimistic candidate pitching a “compassionate” conservatism. But though Bush would win the election (sort of) and serve two terms in the White House, his party was not really reverting to a softer political style. By 2008, with the nation embroiled in Iraq, devastated by a “Great Recession,” and on the verge of electing its first Black president, conservatives were angrier than ever and amplified by a media empire with nearly ubiquitous reach. That sprawling and vicious media ecosystem is central to the story Hemmer tells, cross-pollinating with the GOP and moving steadily from backdrop to center stage with the rise and coronation of the abrasive, conspiratorial, and truly singular reality television star President Donald J. Trump.

Like so many other political volumes published in the past eight years, Partisans is ultimately an account of how the Trump administration became possible, and it is more compelling than most. Though we commonly attribute Trumpism to the dynamics and fractures of our “polarized”nation, Hemmer is thorough and careful to explain that the term is not quite correct. Indeed, she writes, though the 1990s are “so often described as an era of polarization,” this was “actually an era of right-wing radicalization” (14). Here she may be understating the extremity of movement conservatism in the 1960s and 70s, while overstating Reagan’s moderation in the 80s. But whenever it began in earnest, the era of conservative radicalism was clearly underway by 1990. It continues today.

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Politics | Tagged GOP, Nicole Hemmer, Partisans | Comments Off

Church, Commerce, Creation – A Conversation with Mark Stoll

Posted on January 19, 2024 by Eric

Mark Stoll is Professor of History at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America; Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism; and Profit: An Environmental History. Each book explores the relationship between three formative influences in American life.

ECM: Your books focus on the interplay between Protestantism, capitalism, and environmentalism. Did an interest in any one of these prompt your interest in the others?

MS: I grew up in a religious household in the pre-evangelical days. I was interested in environmentalism as a kid in the 1960s, and later, when I began to take an interest in that history, I noticed that a lot of the nation’s great environmentalist figures were lapsed Presbyterians, as I was by then as well. I spent most of the 70s living in San Francisco and going hiking in the Sierras. This was a decade when the nation made great strides in environmental protection. But then, of course, Ronald Reagan became president and appointed the notorious James Watt to the Department of the Interior, and we began rolling back so much of that progress in favor of mining and ranching and timber interests and an otherwise “pro-business” agenda. I was attentive to all this, so when I went back to graduate school in the late 80s, I had these issues on my mind.

At that time, I had been reading about John Muir—who was religious—and also thinking about the Lynn White thesis, that Christianity is to blame for much of the world’s environmental degradation. You know, the idea that God has granted humans dominion over the world with a mandate to subdue it and that this has justified deforestation and extinction and pollution and all the rest. A lot of people accepted that argument at the time, but to me Muir seemed to challenge it. It was his experience, and my own, that growing up in a religious environment influences you deeply, and you retain that imprint throughout your life, even if you leave the faith. You can’t just abandon it. You may change your beliefs, but that inner Baptist or Catholic or whatever it may be lives on in your perspective. I was looking for a research paper topic at the time, and started to work in this direction.

ECM: Can your work be read as an extended response to Lynn White?

MS: Well it’s worth noting that Lynn White was religious as well—he was a Presbyterian, and the son of a prominent Presbyterian minister. But I guess I have been calling for a degree of respect for these religions, and observing that “secular” things are often not as secular as they seem.

ECM: Your second book is a history of American environmentalism by way of Christianity and capitalism and detailed discussions of landscape painting. How did you decide to write history through art criticism?

MS: I’m interested in a lot of things! I take a sort of polymath approach to the world. It’s American history, but it exists in this cultural constellation. Environmentalism can be political and activist, of course, but it is also expressed in poetry, literature, art, and so on. In my first book, I just wanted to write about the stuff that I like to read and then show how it’s all related. In the second, I was thinking about how to show, in a creative fashion, the variety of ways that these attitudes find expression. It was a joy to consider all of these beautiful paintings and learn a bit about the artists who created them and to identify their connections to each other and to their subject matter and to my subject matter as a historian.

ECM: Presbyterianism comes up frequently in your books, and you note that it has been particularly important to American environmentalism. Why?

MS: When writing the first book, I tried to focus on Protestantism as a whole. But as I was revising it, I realized that you could identify particular attitudes and trace them to figures aligned with particular denominations. I began to think about that, and pursued it much more directly in the second book. I had a very hard time coming up with a way to present my argument. At first I was just going to say here are some environmentalists who were Methodists, then here are some Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Catholics and so on. And also some Jews, who have been extremely important to American environmentalism. But that seemed like a very dry way to present the information, so I tried to organize it chronologically. This allowed me to see that there was a sequence, and they actually segue one into each other.

Ultimately I began to look at the religious upbringing of various figures in the environmental movement, and one after another turned out to be Presbyterian, which is striking because it’s not that large of a denomination. It’s mainly an immigrant church, so it’s not like it started out at the top, like the Episcopalians, or that it was blessed with a lot of natural leaders. Rather, they tended to come from hardscrabble circumstances, with an imbued commitment to hard work, a deep respect for education, and a close connection to the land. For these reasons and others, it’s hard to overstate just how important Presbyterianism has been to American environmentalism.

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Climate Change, Convo, Politics | Tagged Environmentalism, Mark Stoll | Comments Off

Mentor / Mentees

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Eric

On the occasion of a well-deserved retirement. With Stephen H. Browne, Professor Emeritus.

Posted in Scholarship | Tagged NCA2023 | Comments Off

The Year in Reading, 2023 – Abolitionism & Transcendentalism

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Eric

In 2023 I read a bunch of books on slavery, Abolitionism, Transcendentalism, the major figures and currents of each, and the ties that bound them to one another. The reading list is included here, along with some reflections on the effort. In the coming year I plan to conclude a pair of other projects-in-progress, focusing on American literature through 1900 and American history through 1917.

The year 1776 regularly serves as a synecdoche for American history–as a small part of the thing that stands in for the whole. For many or most Americans, the association of the Declaration of Independence with July of 1776 has forever established that year as a repository for all American myths, themes, and values, such that it has come to encompass all other years within its red, white, and blue mystique. That is, 1776 is the primary–often the only–historical point of reference that Americans carry close at hand, absorbing so much daylight in their eyes that all subsequent decades are cast in deep, impenetrable shadow. Especially on the American Right, 1776 radically simplifies and clarifies what American history means, quickly converting a textured and perplexing collective memory project into what Van Wyck Brooks once termed “a usable past.” This is why Hillsdale’s foray into public historiography had to be called “The 1776 Project,” and why Tea Party activists so frequently wore tricorne hats. It’s why they called themselves “the Tea Party” in the first place.

To observe that 1776 functions synecdochally is also to engage with every stern and overall-ed gentlemen who has ever stood up at a public meeting to admonish someone for mistakenly calling America a democracy, when it is actually a republic. Though true so far as it goes, this is the sort of claim you can make unequivocally only if your historical awareness extends no further than 1800, or if you simply ignore every new state law passed, every Amendment ratified, every reform movement mustered, and every civil war fought in America between the Constitutional Convention and the present. It has been the obvious tendency of the Amendments, for example, to expand the franchise to ever wider categories of citizen, each redistributing political power more evenly among the population and inviting all to use it well. Though the extensions of voting rights first to Black men, next to all women, and finally to everyone over the age of eighteen receive the marquee treatment, we should also note that non-wealthy white men like those now so fond of this quip were largely denied a seat at the political table in America’s most self-consciously republican decades. Up til and during the gradual, state-by-state repeal of property qualifications for voting starting in the 1790s, the Early Republic was administered explicitly by the elites. It’s hard to imagine that this is the sepia past imagined by the “forgotten men and women” of this latest “silent majority.” It would not explain why Donald Trump hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the White House.

But anyway these matters are on my mind now because I recently completed a second pass through American history from the Revolution to the Civil War, focusing this time on Abolitionism and Transcendentalism, specifically. There are fifty very good books on this list, and reading them together has given me a lot to process. One obvious take-away is that some of the nineteenth century’s best and brightest devoted the balance of their time and energy to expanding American freedom in various ways, pushing stubbornly against the horizons of acceptable belief, thought, and practice in religion, politics, and family, all prior to and during the monumental struggle against slavery. That’s a fascinating story containing fascinating stories, so it’s all the more unfortunate that these have been unjustly eclipsed by some fan fiction about Patrick Henry and Paul Revere. Which is not to say that their generation was unimportant, of course. But their generation was not the only one!

Though the Transcendentalists are personal favorites–and though this reading accompanied my first real essays on Emerson and Thoreau as well as my first visit to their homes in Concord–I found the most illuminating parts of the project in other places. Herbert Aptheker’s work on slave uprisings, though old to historians, was new to me, and the May and Burge books on Manifest Destiny and filibustering were really great. (It remains unclear to me, still, how filibuster went from “pirate” to “mercenary” to “very long speech” in American usage.) Someday I’ll read all the way through American history by way of overlapping biographies, a segment of which will take me again through Henry Mayer’s Garrison, David Blight’s Douglass, Megan Marshall’s Fuller, Robert Richardson’s Emerson, Laura Dassow Walls on Thoreau, and David S. Reynolds on Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Taken together, they’re like squares in a colorful quilt.

This fall my reading on the American past has been balanced by a separate project on degrowth economics that leans present and future. I’m wrapping that one up now, and in January will start a new list from Reconstruction through the Progressive Era. On the side I’ll be catching up on great American novels, now up through Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. I also have a bunch of once-read volumes on Latin American history that I want to organize and revisit, but that may have to wait another year. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the month to learn all there is to learn or to understand it adequately. Trying is always, to some extent, a rewarding failure. But the books linked above offer a good start on an important era, and you may consider them recommended reading.

Posted in Books | Tagged Abolition, Recommended Reading, Slavery, Transcendentalism | Comments Off

Current

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Eric

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From Color Line to Colorblind

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Eric

J. Russell Hawkins is Professor of History at Indiana Wesleyan University. Jesse Curtis is Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University. Each is the author of a newish book about white evangelicals and colorblind rhetoric in the second half of the twentieth century. This essay considers both in light of the ongoing reappraisal of Christian history and race in America.

In August of 2019, the New York Times Magazine published “The 1619 Project,” a full-issue effort to approach American history through the interpretive lens of slavery and anti-Black racism. Though previous histories had employed a variety of other lenses—politics, religion, economics, military campaigns, and so on—this project would center race as the definitive variable in the past four centuries of life on these shores. Widely lauded and much-discussed, the issue drew criticism from historians Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood, who affirmed the intent of the project while regretting certain factual inaccuracies. In her determination to emphasize and indict American racism, they argued, reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones had crafted a coherent big picture at the expense of important particularities. An expanded and bound edition appeared in 2021, quickly claiming bestseller status and continuing to stir debate nationwide, informed by the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and a correspondent panic over “critical race theory” in the public schools. The past, present, and nuances of American racism were hashed out everywhere.

At the same time, somewhere within this broad, national reckoning, Christian historians were examining American churches through a comparable racial lens. Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: the Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism appeared in April of 2019, withAnthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism: the Politics of Morality in America and Randall Balmer’s Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right going to press in 2021. These are history books that culminate in the present, mapping the route from then to now in order to situate current events, especially as they pertain to white evangelical faith, Republican politics, and the coalescence of the two in Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency. They are also small books with big arguments, painting in broad strokes and so perhaps vulnerable to the same sort of concern that has followed Hannah-Jones. Academic readers who consider these popular histories may want to pair them with some more traditionally academic fare—narrower in focus, more attentive to detail, and rigorously documented via archival research. They will find these in the two books considered here. Each focuses on white evangelicalism in the second half of the twentieth century, attending specifically to the ways that white evangelicals talked about race—or declined to do so. Both chart a progression from the stern enforcement of the color line in the 1950s and 60s to the strategic adoption of colorblind rhetoric in later years.

Read the whole thing in the Journal of Communication and Religion.

Posted in Book Reviews, Christianity, Culture War, Politics | Tagged Christianity, Evangelicalism, Racism | Comments Off

Communicating Climate Change

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Eric

David Wallace-Wells is editor-at-large for New York Magazine, as well as a contributor at the New York Times. His 2017 article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” later expanded into a 2019 book of the same title, sparked a heated discussion within the climate science community over the rhetorical utility of appeals to fear and to hope. This essay considers the arguments in light of the communication scholarship.

If we were to identify and list important turning points in the national conversation on climate change over the past two decades, one of these would likely fall on July 9, 2017, with the online publication of David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York magazine. Widely shared on the internet and soon to be reprised as a bestselling 2019 book, this essay examined an array of worst-case scenarios, asking just how bad the climate crisis could get if global carbon emission continues apace. Though much climate discourse tends to focus on a range of 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming by the end of this century, Wallace-Wells observed that these figures represent the floor of projected change, and that there is no ceiling. Global warming is likely to pass two degrees over preindustrial levels well before 2100, and will not stop there simply because the calendar flips. To take the climate threat seriously is therefore to examine what may happen if the temperature continues to climb, as it surely will, if global governments fail to act. Wallace-Wells imagined three degrees of warming, then four, five, six, and upward, watching as human beings become unsafe out of doors and millions of equatorial refugees migrate toward the poles, as agricultural systems break down and food becomes scarce, as air becomes unbreathable and plagues arise and spread, as economies collapse, as wars are waged, as oceans die, and, ultimately, as the earth is left uninhabitable.

Though Wallace-Wells’ essay contained plenty of fodder for those who charge the climate movement with alarmism and hysteria, the most interesting dissent came from within the community itself. Writing at Vox, David Roberts (2017) cataloged critical responses from climate scientists and writers who charged Wallace-Wells with sowing the seeds of despair. Perhaps the most prominent of these came from Penn State professor Michael Mann, who took to Facebook to critique what he called the essay’s “doomist framing.” In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer (2017) echoed Mann, writing that, “Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism. They cite research suggesting that people respond better to hopeful messages, not fatalistic ones; and they meticulously fact-check public descriptions of global warming, as watchful for unsupported exaggeration as they are for climate-change denial.” At the New Republic, Emily Atkin (2017) summarized the criticism with the assertion that, “doom-and-gloom is unpersuasive and discouraging.” She then quoted Rutgers professor Jennifer Francis to that effect. “My own experience in speaking to public audiences is that doomsday stories such as this article are so depressing that people shut down and stop listening,” she wrote. “If there is no hope, there will be no action, and goodness knows we need a lot more action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions right now.”

On Twitter, climate scientist and Project Drawdown director Jonathan Foley called the essay “deeply irresponsible,” charging that Wallace-Wells had been “cherry-picking doomsday scenarios.” Zach Labe, of the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California-Irvine, wrote that, “we can reach a much broader audience by talking about impacts and solutions rather than hyperboles.” Climate activist Alec Steffen wrote that, “Despair is never helpful,” and that the piece was “essentially one long council of despair.” Intercept climate writer Kate Aronoff concurred that the essay was not “helpful,” instead exemplifying a troubling proneness to “nihilism” on the activist left. And finally, technologist Ramez Naam critiqued the essay as being “incredibly bleak,” concluding that, “through a combination of exaggeration and hopelessness, it turns away those in the middle that we need to persuade.” Indeed, “it makes action harder” (Roberts, 2017).

In response to these objections, Wallace-Wells suggested that his approach offers an important counterweight to what he considered the too-rosy tenor of mainstream climate discourse. Asked by an interviewer from the Gothamist whether there was any hope, Wallace-Wells responded:

Oh, I would say there’s quite a lot of hope. The conceit of the piece was to survey worst case scenarios in order to ultimately motivate people to action. But one of the things that I worried about as I put it together was that readers would have a fatalistic response to it and I don’t really think that that’s appropriate. At some point in the piece, I talk about almost all of the damage that we’ve done to the planet, in the sense that global warming has occurred over the course of the lifespan of the Greatest Generation. So ultimately, I think, this could be as short a story as a story of two generations. But at the very least we have another lifespan to figure it out, and to take the necessary actions to forestall at least the gruesome worst-case scenarios that I sketched out in the piece (Fishbein, 2017).

For his part, Roberts (2017) agreed, observing that Wallace-Wells’ emphasis on worst case scenarios functions as a glass of cold water thrown in the face of those focused too narrowly on positive outcomes. He wrote that the popular belief that “Things [will] stay roughly as they are” is every bit as improbable as Wallace-Wells’ worst-case scenario, yet it is believed by vastly more people. “Part of that is because envisioning the best-case scenario is easy,” Roberts wrote, “it looks just like now! — while envisioning the worst-case scenario is very difficult. It’s especially difficult because the worst-case scenario is treated by the very few people who understand it as a kind of forbidden occult knowledge to which ordinary people cannot survive exposure. Nobody can talk about it without getting scolded by the hope police.”

In other words, if it is in fact a problem that too many people are taking climate change too seriously, it remains an exponentially greater problem that too few people are taking climate change half as seriously as they should.

Read the whole thing in the Pennsylvania Communication Annual.

Posted in Books, Climate Change, Politics | Tagged Climate Change, Katharine Hayhoe, Wallace-Wells | Comments Off

Recommended Reading

Nostalgia for a Tragic Past

The Sexual Revelation