RECOMMENDED READINGS

1. The Real Roots of American Rage

The Atlantic (50 min)

Summary

The author, Duhigg, examines anger as a force in American life through the country’s history and describes how and why it has become the predominant force in our politics today. And he offers a few thoughts about what we can do about it.

Some highlights:

America has always been an angry nation. We are a country born of revolution. Combat—on battlefields, in newspapers, at the ballot box—has been with us from the start. American history is punctuated by episodes in which aggrieved parties have settled their differences not through conversation, but with guns. And yet our political system was cleverly designed to maximize the beneficial effects of anger. The Bill of Rights guarantees that we can argue with one another in the public square, through a free press, and in open court. The separation of powers forces our representatives in government to arrive at policy through disagreement, negotiation, and accommodation. Even the country’s mythology is rooted in anger: The American dream is, in a sense, an optimistic reframing of the discontent felt by people unwilling to accept the circumstances life has handed them.

Recently, however, the tenor of our anger has shifted. It has become less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives. It is directed less often at people we know and more often at distant groups that are easy to demonize. These far-off targets may or may not have earned our ire; either way, they’re apt to be less invested in resolving our differences. Without the release of catharsis, our anger has built within us, exerting an unwanted pressure that can have a dark consequence: the desire not merely to be heard, but to hurt those we believe have wronged us.

Our predicament predates the current president. In 2001, just 8 percent of Americans told Pew they were angry at the federal government; by 2013, that number had more than tripled. If we diagnose our anger problem as merely a Trump problem, we’ll be sorely disappointed when he eventually departs public life and we remain enraged.

To avoid that fate, we have to appreciate how anger works. Ordinary anger can deepen, under the right circumstances, into moral indignation—a more combustible form of the emotion, though one that can still be a powerful force for good. If moral indignation persists, however—and if the indignant lose faith that their anger is being heard—it can produce a third type of anger: a desire for revenge against our enemies that privileges inflicting punishment over reaching accord.

2. America’s New Religions

New York Magazine  (13 min)

Summary

Sullivan has an unusual perspective. He argues that everyone has a religion. “It is, in fact, impossible” he argues, “not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.”

Atheists will say, that’s ridiculous, I’m not religious. And Sullivan counters, “By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods). Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.”

Sullivan takes the decline of Christianity in the West as a given. But he says religion is a strong as ever – it is just that people have turned their religious impulses to politics. Great analysis. Below I share a part of his critique of progressives. His critique of conservatives is just as poignant.

Selection

For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself.

And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke.

3. C.S. Lewis on Equality and Our Core Misconception About Democracy

Brainpickings (6 min)

Summary

Equality is one of the great political concerns of our moment. Yet this seventy plus-year-old essay on equality by C.S. Lewis is resonant with our concerns today.

Selection

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure… The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

4. How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success 

The New Yorker  (35 min)

Summary

An interesting, but overstated case for how the reality TV producer is the person most responsible for making Donald Trump a viable presidential candidate. Burnett has had a fascinating career – creating TV’s Survivor, The Voice, and of course, The Apprentice. In an era where celebrity makes you a legitimate candidate for any political office, the story of how Burnett produced Trump into a star is worth studying.

Selection

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

5. Robert A. Caro on the Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives

The New Yorker (57 min)

Summary

The historian Robert A. Caro describes his research for an LBJ biography and the experience of combing through the president’s papers.  This is actually fascinating – it makes the work of a historian seem like that of a detective. LBJ is widely recognized as one of the most skillful behind-closed-doors politicians of the 20th Century. In this piece, Caro begins scratching at some of the skills that made him so influential.

Selection

At that time, I was constantly flying back and forth between Austin and Washington. Papers don’t die; people do, and I was giving first priority to interviewing the men and women who, during the nineteen-thirties, had been members of a circle of New Deal insiders to which the young congressman from Texas had been admitted.

One member of this circle was Thomas G. Corcoran, a pixieish, ebullient, accordion-playing Irishman known as Tommy the Cork, who had been an aide to Franklin Roosevelt and had since become a legend in Washington as a political fixer and a fund-raiser nonpareil.

Tommy the Cork had once told me about one of his most effective fund-raising techniques. When the man he was asking for money wrote a check and handed it across the desk to him, Mr. Corcoran, no matter what the amount—no matter if it was more than he had hoped for—would look at it with an expression of disdain, drop it back on the man’s desk, and, without saying a word, walk toward the door. He had never once, he told me—exaggerating, I’m sure, but how much?—he had never once been allowed to reach the door without the man calling him back, tearing up the check, and writing one for a larger amount. And now, when I asked Mr. Corcoran what had changed Lyndon Johnson’s status in October, 1940, he said, “Money, kid, money.” Then he added, “But you’re never going to be able to write about that.” I asked why not. “Because you’re never going to find anything in writing,” he said.

Postscript

1. We live in an over-angry culture. Anger is a natural feeling and part of our history, and studies show that at some level it feels good to get angry. But a) media outlets have found ways to exploit anger for their own profit and viewership and b) we are more isolated from each other and it’s easier to be indignant with someone at a distance than it is when you are in a relationship with them.
2. People want meaning and identity in their lives and increasingly look to politics to fill the gap that religious faith used to fill. If being progressive or conservative is a religious conviction, it’s awfully hard to see the reasonability in your opponent’s opinion or to be willing to work together.
3. I’m chewing on the C.S. Lewis piece, particularly this counterintuitive statement:
   

   I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent… Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

4. We are more susceptible to believing marketing and branding that we’d like to admit. If The New Yorker story about the Apprentice is half-way true, then as our culture becomes increasingly celebrity obsessed, we continue to vote for candidates with names we recognize and brands we believe in.
5. Politics, at the end of the day, is a lot about money. LBJ came to power in Congress because, unlike anyone before him, he was a source of cash. He was able to bundle and deliver donations from Texas oilmen to key congressional races – winning influence for the oilmen and, victories for the candidates he helped, and influence for himself.