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What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era
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About This Book
The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic uses the books of the Trump era to argue that our response to this presidency reflects the same failures of imagination that made it possible. As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read some 150 volumes claiming to diagnose why Trump was elected and what his presidency reveals about our nation. Many of these, he's found, are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. In Reading Trump's America, Lozada uses these books to tell the story of how we understand ourselves in the Trump era, using as his main characters the political ideas and debates at play in America today. He dissects works on the white working class like Hillbilly Elegy; manifestos from the anti-Trump resistance like On Tyranny and No Is Not Enough; books on race, gender, and identity like How to Be an Antiracist and Good and Mad; polemics on the future of the conservative movement like The Corrosion of Conservatism; and of course plenty of books about Trump himself. Lozada's argument is provocative: that many of these books—whether written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, Trump's true believers or his harshest critics—are vulnerable to the same blind spots, resentments, and failures that gave us his presidency. But Lozada also highlights the books that succeed in illuminating how America is changing in the 21st century. Reading Trump's America is an intellectual history of the Trump era in real time, helping us transcend the battles of the moment and see ourselves for who we really are.
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Reviews
"In doing so, he rightly considers a host of books which are very much not Chaos Chronicles – which, on the face of it, are not actually about Trump at all."
"An intellectual history devoted to a dimwit who once struggled to read aloud an extract from the American constitution ..."
"It was an act of transcendent masochism, but we should be grateful he did it because What Were We Thinking looks past the obvious and perverse — that is, past Trump himself — to the troublesome questions raised by the elevation of a soulless carnival barker to the nation's highest office ..."
"He argues persuasively that the most valuable recent books on American public life move beyond outrage to probe the reasons Trump was elected and the reasons his supporters have stuck by him ..."
"If you haven't read these 150 books, What Were We Thinking will give you a fascinating overview and analysis of the books that explain where we are now, how we got here, and where we might be headed."
"A nimble overview of the library of Trumpiana, which is likely to grow no matter what the outcome of the 2020 election."
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