We ask interesting people what book they think President Trump should read. In the past, we’ve talked with Garry Kasparov and Chris Matthews, among others. This week we ask Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys. She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist. You can follow her on Twitter @Chsommers.
Christina Hoff Sommers skips right past the “obvious choices” of what President Trump should read, like Miss Manners and How to Win Friends and Influence People. Whatever ails the president’s character, the AEI scholar and author says economist Deirdre McCloskey knows what “ails modern America,” and Trump ought to read about it in McCloskey’s three-volume The Bourgeois Era.
“McCloskey’s trilogy offers one of the most powerful (and witty) defenses of human liberty ever written,” Hoff Sommers tells me. “The president would enjoy the case it makes for the free market and deregulation. He may also relish her impatience with economically-challenged academics who promote socialism. McCloskey says she would be a socialist if she thought it helped the poor. But it doesn’t. It’s classical liberalism and the free enterprise system that lift people from poverty.”
This is a standard worldview for a Republican. But McCloskey’s perspective is complemented by personal, human traits; “McCloskey’s ‘humane libertarianism’ (her term) is perfectly suited to what ails modern America,” Hoff Sommers tells me.
“While the president might enjoy McCloskey’s economics—save for the part about free trade—the lesson he really needs from McCloskey is one about the importance of bourgeois virtues such as prudence, restraint, and love,” she says.
McCloskey, who taught English, history, and communications in addition to her economics work at the University of Illinois Chicago for 15 years, doesn’t put herself inside a box. “I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian libertarian,” she says in her university biography. Trump himself is no stranger to defying traditional labels.
But because of The Bourgeois Era’s length—around 2,000 pages—Hoff Sommers reminds us that in addition to McCloskey’s books, she “has dozens of shorter articles that [summarize] her arguments, as well as videos. Perhaps Fox News can start airing them.”
