Reviews and News:
How did Marine Le Pen’s Front National become largest single party in France? “The two things I often hear from supporters of the Front National are ‘something has to change’ and ‘France was better in the past’. They have a desire for change that is largely driven by a sense of loss, a negative reaction to the state of France today. Shopkeepers list the prices of common items – eggs, milk – observing how much more expensive they are now. Everything, even inflation, is seen as evidence of French decline. Front National supporters’ concern with immigrants (particularly Muslim immigrants) is best understood through the prism of this sense of loss.”
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A “total response” to Dante’s Divine Comedy is one that “demands…the reader engage with the fiction of the poet’s journey through the afterlife with her whole mind, heart, and soul. Montemaggi thus takes up Dante’s call to encounter—with self, with the author and his characters, with fellow human beings, and with God.”
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Stalin and his scientists: “At first, the scientists were surprised to find themselves endowed with new equipment and honor. But the picture darkened once Stalin began demanding astonishing jumps in creativity and production, which in turn made the scientists more important but more dangerous and therefore more policed and persecuted.”
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Adam Kirsch on Ezra Pound: Was he “the most difficult man in the twentieth century”?
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Barack and Michelle Obama signed book deals with Penguin Random House for a reported $60 million.
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Danielle Dutton imagines the inner life of Margaret Cavendish in her new novel, Margaret the First: “Cavendish’s adult life spanned one of the most tumultuous times in English history, from the English Civil War to the Restoration of 1660. Born Margaret Lucas in 1623 in Colchester, Essex, she was the youngest of 10 children, and spent her youth living on her father’s estate. From 1643, when Margaret left her family to serve in Queen Henrietta Maria’s retinue in Oxford, to the court’s exile to France in 1645, she lived in obscurity. Her advantageous 1645 marriage to William, Marquis of Newcastle (elevated to Duke in 1665), cemented her relations with the royalist faction, but the couple experienced poverty living in exile in Paris, Rotterdam, and, finally, Antwerp. During the period of their exile, Royalists fought Parliamentarians in a Second Civil War, which led to the capture, trial, and execution of King Charles I, and, eventually, the establish of a new government under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. After the Restoration, the couple continued to experience challenges as William failed to gain sufficient preferment at court while also struggling to rehabilitate his debt-burdened estates. Yet owing to the encouragement offered by her husband, who was 30 years her senior, the marriage offered Margaret the intellectual freedom and poetic license that was seldom available to young women in the Seventeenth Century.”
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Essay of the Day:
Is populism a threat to democracy? Roger Scruton in The New Criterion:
“Looking back over the events of 2016, liberal-minded commentators are apt to sound a warning against ‘populism,’ a disorder that they observe everywhere on the right of the political spectrum. Populists are politicians who appeal directly to the people when they should be consulting the political process, and who are prepared to set aside procedures and legal niceties when the tide of public opinion flows in their favor. Like Donald Trump, populists can win elections. Like Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, they can disrupt the long-standing consensus of government. Or, like Nigel Farage and the Brexiteers in Britain, they can use the popular vote to overthrow all the expectations and predictions of the political class. But they have one thing in common, which is their preparedness to allow a voice to passions that are neither acknowledged nor mentioned in the course of normal politics. And for this reason, they are not democrats but demagogues—not politicians who guide and govern by appeal to arguments, but agitators who stir the unthinking feelings of the crowd.
“Underlying the attack on populism, therefore, is a belief in two contrasting social motives. On the one hand there are the legitimate and day-to-day political interests that lead people to trust in the democratic process and to cast their vote in full acceptance that the result may not go in their favor. On the other hand there are the dark emotions that the political process is designed to neutralize, but which cynical politicians manipulate at our peril. These dark emotions, summoned in the name of democracy, threaten to bring democracy to an end. For they are at war with the civic attributes on which democracy ultimately depends: fair-minded hesitation, legitimate opposition, and open debate.
“To some extent history supports this diagnosis. Hitler and Mussolini gained power by exciting emotions that have no place in a civilized government, and that the political process exists in order to neutralize. And once in power they quickly abolished all democratic constraints on their behavior and all voice to the opposition. We should not forget, however, that this abolition of the democratic process has ensued equally from revolutionary movements on the left. It is not the specific emotions stirred by Hitler that jeopardized democracy, but the abolition of the constraints that would have put a stop to their exercise. Nor did the danger lie in the fact that the racist passions unleashed by the Nazis were widely shared. A small band of revolutionaries, fired by class resentments, can be just as destructive of the political order, and with similar genocidal consequences, as we know from the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
“The fact remains, however, that the accusation of ‘populism’ is applied now largely to politicians on the right, with the implication that they are mobilizing passions that are both widespread and dangerous. On the whole liberals believe that politicians on the left win elections because they are popular, while politicians on the right win elections because they are populist. Populism is a kind of cheating, deploying weapons that civilized people agree not to use and which, once used, entirely change the nature of the game, so that those of gentle and considerate leanings are at an insuperable disadvantage. The division between the popular and the populist corresponds to the deep division in human nature, between the reasonable interests that are engaged by politics, and the dark passions that threaten to leave negotiation, conciliation, and compromise behind. Like ‘racism,’ ‘xenophobia,’ and ‘Islamophobia,’ ‘populism’ is a crime laid at the door of conservatives. For the desire of conservatives to protect the inherited identity of the nation, and to stand against what they see as the real existential threats posed by mass migration, is seen by their opponents as fear and hatred of the Other, which is seen in turn as the root cause of inter-communal violence.
“The shocks and surprises of 2016 have made it imperative to understand what, if anything, is true in this charge, and just when, if at all, it is legitimate for politicians to appeal directly to the people, in ways that by-pass or marginalize the political process. Democracy depends upon institutions, procedures, and the famous ‘checks and balances’ established by the American Constitution. And if populism means direct rule by plebiscite, it must surely be a threat to that form of government.”
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Image: Green comet
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Poem: Amit Majmudar, “The Bear”
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