(you might want to read them before they’re banned…)
The political catastrophe presently engulfing the US federal government and destabilising the post-WWII international order has been such a compelling ten-days’ car crash that it’s hard to look away. It takes an effort of will to stop compulsively doomscrolling and… I’m not sure rageposting is the word. Maybe wtafposting? Seems like my social media life now consists of variations on “holycow did you just see what I just saw?” — as we reality-check each other’s perceptions of events that seem unbelievable, surreal, sometimes terrifying.
It’s even hard to go to sleep, because of a vague uneasy fear of what the heck may happen before morning (West Coast time) — what fresh vandalism of governance will be reported, what fresh brash stupidity will assail reason and memory. Going to sleep feels like turning one’s back on a brush fire burning very near the house, or on a drunken gang of yobs working its way up the street towards us.
The avalanche of cray-cray and cruelty is overwhelming, disorienting — and that’s just the point. That’s the strategy: what Steve Bannon memorably called “flooding the zone with shit.” It’s “shock and awe,” a blitzkrieg of batshit authoritarian whimsicality, posturing, theatre and threat: staggering lies, flagrant constitutional violations, intentionally outrageous provocations, spectacular and blatant corruption. The firehose effect is intended to dismay and numb and overwhelm opposition, to keep the “reality based community” off-balance and flailing… like tourists in a cave full of disturbed and manic bats.
I suggest therefore, refusing to flail: slowing down, stepping back, and trying to get some kind of analytical understanding of what is happening here and why. Perhaps it’s better to take some hours away from the endless news cycle of fascist theatrics and political hooliganism, to consider the underlying structures and trends, the historical moment in which we find ourselves. It feels unprecedented. And yet it isn’t. It’s a perfect storm of very familiar human failings and pre-existing conditions. It can be understood. There is context.
And if we know what we’re dealing with, then we can get past the incredulity, our normalcy bias and unwillingness to believe this is really happening — and get on with the essential business of resistance.
To that end I recommend a short list of books — readable, not too dry and scholarly, but substantive — which might help us to get a grasp on the overall situation. If you read only five books this troubled year, these might be good choices.
Monbiot and Hutchison, The Invisible Doctrine
In this elegant little volume, in just 25 very readable chapters, the authors explain the origins and curious history of the economic and political doctrine known as “neoliberalism.” They trace its evolution, from a fringe/crackpot theory in the 1930s to absolute hegemony by the 1990s. They explain how it was promoted and sold, who funded that sales campaign, who benefited, who lost out, and what the long term effects have been on all our lives.
If you want to understand why there are so many billionaires these days, why “austerity” and “shrinking government” have become unquestioned political goals; how we ended up with enough misery and anxiety among enough people to kickstart new authoritarian populist movements; why we suddenly have a crop of theatrical authoritarian buffoons trying to demolish liberal democracies worldwide… this book will answer many such questions. The authors bring receipts: names, dates, amounts of money.
They also explain that the most powerful ideology in the world is one that has no name, that presents itself as merely the natural order of things. This creates the illusion that there is, as Margaret Thatcher memorably said, “no alternative.” Their engaging and challenging text begins with this thought experiment: what if the citizens of the Soviet Union had never heard of Communism? if you have never heard of neoliberalism — or have only a vague idea of what it means — or are young enough to have no memory of what life was like before we started trying to run entire countries as if they were for-profit businesses — then this book will be an eye-opening read.
Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest
If you have been wondering who the heck these tech billionaires are, those men who became so suddenly visible in the front row seats at Donald Trump’s second inauguration — who this Musk fellow is and why he’s so very, very weird — then Rushkoff’s fascinating, quirky insiders’ tale of “The Mindset” of Silicon Valley will be enlightening on many counts. Rushkoff chronicles the spectacular story arc of Silicon Valley and its tech startups, from its chaotic, anarchistic, idealistic and creative beginnings to inexorable monetisation, financialisation, and the rise of the techbro billionaires.
But this is not just a story about money and how it accumulated in certain hands. It’s also the tale of an ideology or philosophy (or cult mentality) that rooted and grew over the same period — an ideology of technosolutionism, of elitism, of accelerationism — an individual and collective grandiose fantasy of tech billionaires as the saviours of humanity. If you seek to understand the staggering hubris and recklessness of men like Musk and Thiel, and the culture in which they are embedded, this is a riveting read… and one which will probably leave you more frightened of them, not less.
Because they are mad. And Rushkoff describes and analyses that madness — the nakedness of our self-appointed emperors, their childish refusal to bow to reality — in detail. He also reminds us how, inevitably, the elitist and technocratic shenanigans of the uber-wealthy and their “Mindset” contribute to the energisation of movements like MAGA.
[bonus book: Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All — this author also gives us an insider’s view, of the condescending, misguided, and often purely selfish forms of “charity” practised by the CEO and billionaire class today. An excellent companion volume to Rushkoff.]
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom
Leaving tech billionaires aside for now and returning to those populist authoritarian buffoons: many of us struggle daily with an inability to comprehend how any person as dishonest and dysfunctional as Donald Trump could ever have been elected to the presidency of the United States even once, let alone twice. Timothy Snyder’s meticulously researched book helps us to understand how that happened.
Snyder, a distinguished historian, tells the story of how Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia: what kind of political rhetoric and tactics he employed, which ideologues invented and polished that rhetoric for him, what methods he used to achieve near-absolute power and an indefinite term of office. Snyder emphasises the inability of dictatorships to provide an orderly mechanism for succession — orderly succession being one of the great strengths of a democracy — and the resulting need to replace a narrative of movement into a manageable future with a grandiose narrative of timeless conflict against an eternal Enemy. He also explains — by quoting Putin’s own words and those of his high-level apparatchiks — what the long-term strategy is.
Putin’s playbook — his revanchism, nationalist mythopoeia and homophobia — will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has been watching the United States (or Hungary for that matter) for the last couple of decades. Even more eerie will be Snyder’s documentation of the many connections between Russian oligarchs and the Trump family, from the 1980’s forward. In Snyder’s analysis, fundamental flaws in the US political and economic system (racism, inequity, a dysfunctional electoral mechanism) offered points of weakness that Russian intelligence could — and did — exploit to destabilise the US and weaken NATO. With Donald Trump as a useful tool in that endeavour.
Snyder offers us several nuanced and well-researched answers to the haunting question: “How the heck did a man like Trump get into the White House… again?”
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Eric Hoffer, autodidact and public intellectual, tried very hard after WWII to understand how the heck Nazism managed to take over a cultured and civilised nation like Germany. He wrote this book — unfootnoted and informal — as a series of musings on the psychology of people who join an extremist mass movement like Nazism. What do they have in common, if anything? How do such “ultra” political movements get started? Why are people drawn to them, and what kind of people?
While a few holes have been poked in Hoffer’s work by later scholars, many of his fundamental insights remain as relevant as they were at the time. For those of us trying to understand the rise of the MAGA movement and the “reboot” of Nazism in the present day, this book has a lot to offer.
[bonus title, Humanity by J Glover; a book that compares famous historical cases of mass evil. The Holocaust and Stalinism, Hiroshima and Rwanda, all feature in his careful exploration of how ordinary people come to do dreadful things to our fellow human beings. If you are wondering how badly things can go wrong if not corrected, this will not be a reassuring book; which is exactly why it should be on your reading list.]
Rose Shapiro, Suckers (how alternative medicine makes fools of us all)
A book about medical fraud and charlatanry might seem out of place here, but bear with me. Much of the groundswell that put Donald Trump in the White House twice came from what sociologists call “the cultic milieu,” the subcultural stratum of society where crackpot theories, superstitions, religious extremism, urban legends and contrarian conspiracy narratives flourish. From Birtherism to QAnon to election denial to the lunatic theories of RFK Jr (proposed by Donald Trump as overseer of national health!), “alternative facts” prevail in the MAGA movement.
This alternative universe was never more starkly visible to the rest of the nation than on Jan 6 2021, when an armed and violent mob stormed the US Capitol in a concerted attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. One of Donald Trump’s first actions in office in 2025 was to blanket-pardon all the insurrectionists who were serving jail terms for their actions that day — referring to them as “patriots.”
For the reality based community (the 70 percent or so of the population who are not deeply enmeshed in the cultic milieu) it came as a profound shock to witness all the above — plus the tragic and ludicrous spectacle of Covid denialists continuing to spew their conspiracy theories while dying of Covid … and the incomprehensible folly of parents more terrified of vaccination than of dangerous childhood diseases. Even as I write these words, measles outbreaks are starting to occur in the US and there is a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas — things which would have been inconceivable only 30 years ago.
There are longstanding connections between the cultic milieu, the far-right MAGA and neo-fascist movement, and the “alt wellness” and MLM industry. While Shapiro’s book doesn’t delve deeply into the links between “Q-a-Moms”, Trump cultists, white supremacy and vaccine paranoia, she does do a very good job of documenting the history and current status of various non-evidentiary, anti-scientific health fads.
Her insights into why people fall for these “snake oil” scams — and her warnings about their potential costs in public health and well-being — now sound spookily prescient. Long before anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers became a core Trumpist demographic, Rose Shapiro catalogued the medical frauds and conspiracy theories whose popularity eventually culminated in our current pandemic of anti-science and anti-intellectual conspiracism weaponised by authoritarians to destroy public health systems.
The undermining of public confidence in evidence, in factuality itself, is a key element in the durability of authoritarian governance — as Snyder points out in The Road to Unfreedom. Wittingly or not, those who profit by peddling quack remedies and kneejerk distrust of medicine contribute to the undermining of democracy and civic engagement and the polarisation of society into “separate realities.”
[bonus title: The Unpersuadables by Will Storr, a brisk and sprightly “gonzo journalism” tour of die-hard conspiracy theorists and their astonishingly durable “disconfirmation immunity.” Storr tells a good story about colourful characters rather than presenting academic quantitative or longitudinal studies; he presents us with vivid, compelling portraits of a variety of people whose “alternative facts” are proof against any amount of real facts. If we are trying to understand how so many people can believe so much counterfactual nonsense — enough to put a man like Donald Trump in office twice — these case studies offer perspective and parallels. They suggest that we are dealing with a universal human phenomenon, not an incomprehensible anomaly. Here are Hoffer’s “true believers,” in person and up close. This is why you can’t have a meaningful argument with your MAGA uncle.]
What are you reading these days in an attempt to make sense of what is happening?
[This article was written by a human with no AI assistance. The illustration, however, was generated by Midjourney, prompt by the author. The author has no financial incentive to recommend or disrecommend any book and no connection with any book selling business.]