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What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era
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Scholars' Citation Index
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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.
Reviews
"[An] incisive survey of the 150 nonfiction books he's read 'on the Trump era' ..."
"What Were We Thinking is, instead, not much more than the sum of its many quotations."
"If we cannot tear our gaze away, Lozada shows us how best to look."
"More often, though, Lozada finds subtleties in areas we've assumed clear-cut ..."
"A book that solemnly analyses 150 often trashy books about someone who is not known to have read a single book and hired stooges to write the 20 self-puffing volumes published in his name?"
"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."
"Lozada offers a brilliant, wrenching analysis of immigration ..."
"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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