Clearly, George Scialabba has caught post-liberal realignment fever, that fusionism from the Left that asks if it is “possible that economically vulnerable blacks would prefer to have more black and white allies in their desperately unequal struggle for economic fairness than more Broadway theaters named for blacks and more black actors, directors, and book reviewers,” and comes to the conclusion that “J.K. Rowling’s views on transgender rights … can hardly produce as much suffering as an obstetric fistula.” The master stylist and critic’s new essay collection, Only a Voice, may be the post-liberal Left’s most thorough and measured articulation. Never mind that the collection comes in the middle of a Democratic presidency, when sympathetic ears are far fewer in number, or that he rubs salt in the wound by insisting that Ralph Nader did nothing wrong, or that his nods to “cancel culture” read like editorial pellets. The style is the gold standard for anyone who wants to write or think about ideas. Greater misgivings abound anyway, mainly the implication that America in 2023 is a vast intellectual wasteland.

In this latest dystopian rendering of our present condition, one of countless by this point, Scialabba has homed in on aversion to intelligence as its greatest crisis, as it aids and abets all the others. We neglect economic justice and sacrifice our very planetary stability to engage in vain gestures of identity politics and culture warring. Argument alone may not have “moved the world,” but when carried out honestly, it maintained a healthy democratic life. Alas, “the raw greed and colossal financial power of the energy companies are impervious to argument.” Yet in a moment when it seems all but useless, Scialabba finds argument, and by extension, the intellectual, all the more necessary. “All we have is a voice,” he writes. “But if there were ever a time to lift it in defense of our lovely, perishing planet and our sometimes lovely, endangered, self-destructive species, this is it.”