2024 books in review

Thoughts and quotes from this year’s reading

The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti

This is a nuanced historical account of the ideas, events and players that constituted the conservative movement and each of its evolutions and milestones since the 1920s. It’s very much ‘likely reads as ‘inside baseball’ and was exciting to read the names of people I’ve known, met or read who played a role in the story. It was also therapeutic to better understand that the populist wing that currently dominates the party via MAGA has always existed in some capacity. Factions within the party expand and contract over time. There’s nothing new under the sun, but the times do call for re-litigating first principles and the virtues of conservatism against the fringier views of populism, nationalism et al.

Select quotes:

“My focus is on the writers who set in motion the interplay of ideas and institutions, of ideology and politics…How had matters long thought settled – the importance of markets, the benefits of free trade, the blessings of immigration, the necessity of war-become so hotly contested?”

“Conservative writers and thinkers disagree more than they agree. They comprise a movement defined by a lively debate over first principles.”

“[Ronald Reagan’s] unique political talent led almost every faction of American conservatism to think that he was on its side. To this day every conservative wants to claim him. The truth is messier.”

“Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement resembled the conservatism of the 1920s – but with a significant difference. In the 1920s, the Right was in charge. It was self-confident and prosperous. It saw itself as defending core American institutions. One century later, in the early 2020s, the Right…no longer viewed core American institutions as worth defending. It was apocalyptic in attitude and expression…these tribunes of discontent have succumbed to conspiracy theories, racism, and anti-Semitism. They have flirted with violence. They have played footsie with autocracy.”

“Such temptation toward extremism is present on both sides of the political spectrum…What matters is the willingness of intellectuals and politicians to confront and suppress the extremes.

A Torch Kept Lit – Great Lives of the 20th Century by William F. Buckley, Jr and edited by James Rosen

This compilation of eulogies by William Buckley, mostly published in his regular newspaper column in National Review or as Op-Eds, makes one grieve the era when columns and op-ed pieces, as a medium to exercise public debate, drove political idea formation. I can’t help but contrast those days with modern platforms where crass video monologues and angry impulse tweeting eclipse thoughtful and sober rhetoric in the public domain. What a lost art it is that robs our attention from a simpler yet richer way to engage in political discourse.

WFB’s eulogies were not necessarily to honor personal friends – though sometimes they were- but to acknowledge a life of significance in one way or the other. This book is best read alongside The Right, which chronicles the role many of WFB’s eulogy subjects had in the tumult and evolution of the conservative moment beginning in the 1950s. These are WFB’s personal thoughts about the men and women, friends and foes alike, whose input into how political philosophy should influence government made lasting impacts, providing rich contextual insight into the pivotal era in history.

Adding to its appeal is references and stories WFB includes in his eulogies that portray his charmed life, full of larger than life adventure and bravado, which was his intrigue, matched only by his vast, and often vexing, vocabulary. He’s not without fault but certainly a visionary.

His writing (and some of his views) seems antiquated. You can get lost in the meandering prose that’s sometimes sharp and other times whimsical. “Buckley’s grammatical piety fluctuated; his use of the serial comma, for example, was inconsistent. In part this reflected contemporaneous standards and style guides.” (p. 15 footnote)

Select quotes:

Dwight Eisenhower (Presidents)

“Disappointed by his dismal unconcern with the philosophy of conservatism (of which he was a purely intuitive disciple” at a point in the evolution of America when a few conservative philosophers at his side might have accomplished more for the ends he sought to serve…”

Lyndon B Johnson (Presidents)

“A man of his most recent word.”

“The rhetoric of LBJ was in the disastrous tradition of JFK – encouraging the popular superstition that the state could change the quality, no less, of American life.”

“He was…unsparing of himself, and who acquired at least a certain public dignity which lifted him from buffoonery, into tragedy.”

Whittaker Chambers (Friends)

“…swooping in to take a quick point, withdrawing, relaxing, laughing, listening – he listened superbly, though even as a listener he was a potent force.”

Ayn Rand (Nemeses)

“Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. It’s dogmatism is without appeal…She risked, in fact, giving to capitalism that bad name that its enemies have done so well in giving it.”

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Nemeses)

“It is an awful pity, as one reflects on it, that nature is given to endowing the wrong men with extraordinary productivity.”

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

“We are accustomed to viewing the founding era as endowed with an inexhaustible supply of superlatively able men available for public service. But once the most gifted public servants – Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, and Jay – were already accounted for, Washington, like many later presidents, had a fiendishly hard time finding replacements for his sterling first-term cabinet and turned by default to comparative mediocrities.” (p. 713)

“An essential difference between the American and French revolutions was that the America version allowed a search for many truths, while French zealots tried to impose a single sacred truth that allowed no deviation.” p 714 (context: pp. 687-689)

“That Washington now identified with northern finance, commerce, and even abolitionism would have major consequences for American history. Had he sided with Jefferson and Madison, it might have deepened irrevocably the cleavage between North and South and opened up unbridgeable chasm seventy years before the Civil War.” (p. 676)

“A central component of the Whig orthodoxy that had spurred the American Revolution was the supremacy of the legislative branch, viewed as a curb to the executive.” (p. 590)

“Competent powers to Congress for general purposes.” (Washington’s toast at a celebratory dinner following the final treaty signatures in 1783. p. 455)

“The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.” (Farewell address, September 1796)

“Washington’s catalog of accomplishments was simply breathtaking…Most of all he had shown a disbelieving world that republican government could prosper without being spineless or disorderly or reverting to authoritarian rule…His most flagrant failings remained those of the country as a whole – the inability to deal forthrightly with the injustice of slavery or to figure out an equitable solution in the ongoing clashes with Native Americans.” (pp. 770-771)

The Good Country – A History of the American Midwest 1800 – 1900 by Jon Lauck

This book examines the Midwest from roughly the era following the Revolutionary War up until World War I. Fair warning: It reads like a textbook but meticulously follows the threads of pragmatism, pluralism, religious commitment, open education and broad civic participation that caused the Midwest region to flourish during this era. Its thesis is that this region embodied the original intent of America in the fullest way with democratic vigor, constituting the most advanced democratic society to date in the nineteenth century.

Select quotes:

“Enjoying the fruits of a long and hard-won struggle for democratic progress should not be casually dismissed as dull. It should be seen as a sweet victory against centuries of tyranny and abuse.”

“Older codes of deference eroded in the region, an egalitarianism prevailed, and the republican ideology that fueled the American Revolution found its most fertile ground.”

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

This book is provocative in a positive way. It challenged many of my presuppositions about poverty through compelling logic and empirical data. His examples of the ‘piling on’ of poverty are most important. The idea that bad circumstances compound, and poverty begets more poverty.

Key to reading this book is to not let the ideas you disagree with harden you against his broader points but rather to let the stories he tells and the realities of poverty soften us to a solution – his or otherwise – and be willing to bend our approach to understanding about poverty and the poor. Conservatives readily recognize markets aren’t perfect. So it follows that we should be willing to accept realities that might contradict assumptions about poverty

Select quotes:

“Capitalism isn’t broken, it’s bifurcated.”

“Americans who rely on the most invisible [government] programs (namely tax breaks) are the least likely to believe that the government had given them a leg up.”

The Practice of the Presence of God – Brother Lawrence

This short book is a series of letters from and conversations with Brother Lawrence about faith and the Christian life. It points to Scripture, such as Psalm 119:73, that reminds us we need God to open our eyes and increase our faith. And yet it is not the strength of our faith but the object of our faith that endures.

Select quotes:

“Brother Lawrence confided to me that the foundation of his spiritual life was the faith that revealed to him the exalted position of God.”

“…we must continuously walk in God’s Spirit, since in the spirit-life not to advance is to fall back.”

“It isn’t necessary to be too verbose in prayer, because lengthy prayers encourage wandering thoughts.”

“It is not possible to become spiritually mature all at once.”

“The more we know [God], the more we will desire to know Him”

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

This book is a compilation of remarks Lewis gave on radio during World War II. In them, he walks through his logic of the existence of God and how that defines morality. The latter half of the book is about the Christian life.

“…all that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery – the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

“A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works.” This quote reminds me of Tim Keller who, in relation to technical questions around the creation story, caveated his remarks by saying the “why” questions of faith are more important than the “how” questions.

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.”

“Most of us find it very difficult to want ‘Heaven’ at all…when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it.”

“It is impossible for [God] to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.”

When I Don’t Desire God by John Piper

[I’ve misplaced my copy of this one and, with it, my notes!]