Kim Raff for The New York Times

Books for the Trump Era

Ross Douthat

New York Times | 21 Dec. 2016

[excerpts]

So my reading list starts with two of liberalism’s sharpest internal critics, both deceased — a reactionary of the left, Christopher Lasch, and a conservative liberal, Samuel P. Huntington. Their most-cited works, Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism” and Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” have obvious applications for our culture and politics today. But the books I would recommend are a little different.

For Lasch, it’s “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” (1995), a polemic against the professional upper class’s withdrawal from the society it rules and a critique of the ways in which multiculturalism and meritocracy erode patriotism and democracy. For Huntington, it’s “Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity” (2004), a book widely denounced as racist for arguing that the recent wave of Latin-American immigration might not be easily assimilable and might instead balkanize the country into identitarian redoubts.

Both books are imperfect: Lasch’s is too angry, Huntington’s too pessimistic (I think). But in different ways they both offer, in Lasch’s words, a “revisionist interpretation of American history, one that stresses the degree to which liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism.” And they illustrate how the Western elite has burned the candle of solidarity at both ends — welcoming migration that transforms society from below even as the upper class floats up into a post-national utopia, which remains an undiscovered country for the people left behind.