In an 1852 letter, Gustave Flaubert announced his ambition to write “a book about nothing, a book with no external attachments.” He added: “The most beautiful books are those with the least matter.”
Flaubert managed to assault bourgeois sensibilities with such scandalous, if exquisitely wrought, works as Madame Bovary. But he never quite succeeded in writing a book about nothing. That achievement had to wait until the 21st century for fulfillment. The judges are still out, but I suspect that the palm for that award might well go to Michael J. Knowles, a recent graduate in history from Yale, for the incisive political analysis in Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
There is a reason that this brief, but comprehensive, inquiry shot to the number-one spot on Amazon. First, it covers all the bases: There are chapters on Economics, Foreign Policy, Civil Rights, Education, Homeland Security, Energy, Jobs, Crime, Immigration, and (perhaps the weightiest section) Values. Knowles has covered the waterfront. Second, as his extensive bibliography suggests, Knowles has done his homework: He has drawn on a wide and bipartisan range of works, from Saul Alinsky’s classic handbook for community organizers, Rules for Radicals, to Peter Schweizer’s critical investigation into the Clintons’ finances in Clinton Cash—and many other books.
The conservative pundit Ben Shapiro summed up Knowles’s achievement in this pithy endorsement: “Thorough.” And the Amazon entry calls Reasons “the most exhaustively researched and coherently argued Democrat Party apologia to date.” I think that is about right, and one of the 2,000 or so Amazon reviews, expands on this assessment:
I can’t improve upon that—although I do think that the reviewer who observed that “there are NO WORDS to describe how informative this book is” also caught an important part of its charm.
Even works of political philosophy have an aesthetic, or stylistic, dimension, and Knowles is also to be commended on his achievement in strictly literary terms. “Brevity,” as Polonius remarked to Gertrude and Claudius, “is the soul of wit.” Knowles has matched matter and message with rare economy in Reasons. Gertrude would not be able to retort to him as she did to Polonius: “More matter, with less art.”
But it is for the substance of his analysis that Knowles’s study will be remembered. The fact is that in the aftermath of the most divisive presidential election in modern memory, much commentary, on the right as well the left, has been hampered by an obtuse verbosity and trammeled by a tired allegiance to shopworn categories of political analysis. Michael Knowles has definitively transcended the usual narratives that proved almost comically wrongheaded in attempting to explain the metabolism of the 2016 election. He is especially convincing in laying out the various rationales marshaled by Democrats to sell their programs to the country. He digs deeply into both Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s platforms, showing, despite the stark differences in their rhetoric, the deep continuities that made them all but indistinguishable to American voters.
As Donald Trump contemplates a palatable replacement for Obamacare, revamps the country’s immigration laws, and sparks a renaissance in job growth and economic vitality, Knowles’s detailed exegesis of the Democratic alternatives on these and other issues will help ordinary citizens put the differences between the parties into useful perspective. No party has all the answers to the exigent issues that face America in the 21st century, but Knowles’s careful unpacking of the Democrats’ real agenda enables us to see clearly what is at stake in the partisan debates that have mesmerized the country. No candidate is above criticism, but Knowles shows, with inarguable thoroughness, that there really were important differences between what the parties had to offer.
In fact, I suspect that Reasons to Vote for Democrats will prove to be even more valuable for Democrats and progressives than for Republicans. To quote Hamlet once more, the book manages to “hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Conservatives, having lived through the Obama years, and a brutal election season, may not find all that much that is new here; for them, I suspect, it will serve mostly as a useful handbook or reference work, a sort of political Baedeker.
But for Democrats, it is sure to come as a revelation. Citing chapter and verse, going behind the usual pieties of the pundits, it lays bare with forthright (if sparing) candor the real motor of contemporary Democratic ambitions for the country. No one having read this book will be in any doubt about what the Democratic alternative really looks like.
Some Amazon commenters have wondered whether an audio version will soon be available. Since Reasons to Vote for Democrats, apart from its front matter, chapter headings, and bibliography, is entirely blank, I doubt that Audible, or any of the other major audio book outlets, will offer a commercial version. But who knows? John Cage’s 4’33” is widely available on YouTube, so there may yet be hope for an audio version.
Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, is the author, most recently, of The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.
