Things I need to catch up on

One of the challenges that come with trying to consistently deliver posts is that it becomes difficult to do the amount of reading required to stay up-to-date on the latest in intelligent long-form pieces and books, and you become a slave to the latest news cycle. In a way, it feels like a strange inversion of one of the problems I confronted in grad school; where your focus is often on the mountain of reading that you’ve been assigned for the week, and very little of current events outside of the most sensational bits of news items manages to break through. After two months of writing and posting, I’ll admit I’ve perhaps been a bit too hard on some of the columnists that in the past I have almost gleefully raked over the coals. That isn’t to say that I don’t find the analysis of the David Brooks and Ross Douthats of the world to be almost amazingly consistent in their wrongheadedness, it’s just that I now have to concede that this is a lot harder than it looks.

With that being said, I want to highlight two works that I just placed on hold at the library, and look forward to tackling the moment they’re available. The first book is one that I’m almost embarrassed not to have tackled yet. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics of Extremism is a book that’s been on my radar since it was released. I have managed to read a few excerpted passages as well as listen to some interviews that the authors have given on the work, and those small tastes really suggested that this should be an informative (if at times exasperating) look at what has seemingly gone wrong with American politics. Of even greater interest to me is that it promises to offer some suggestions on steps that could be taken to improve the situation. The fact that it was co-written by authors hailing from The Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute should dispel any fears that it is a partisan screed.

The second book that I’m looking forward to tackling is Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay. Fukuyama, famously predicted “the end of history” and the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” While events that transpired after the publishing of his best-selling 1992 book suggest that he may have been overly optimistic, or at the very least a bit premature in his analysis, I have always found his insights to be quite interesting. If you ever have a spare moment, his discussions on Robert Wright’s Bloggingheads are worth your time. The thing that I find most thought-provoking (at least from reviews of the work) is that while Fukuyama is generally typecast as a tradition conservative thinker, his analysis includes the insight that the issue with American government is not that its central government is too powerful, but that it is too weak. The opportunity to read a thinker of Fukuyama’s stature, bucking the conventional wisdom of his tribe, is exciting. 

I’ll make sure to provide updates with my thoughts on these books once I’ve managed to work my way through them. I might take a bit of time (life consistently throws up roadblocks to my reading for pleasure) but my inner poli-sci geek is anxious to get to work on them. If you’ve already read either book, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have a good weekend, and I’ll hopefully see you all back here next week.