Category: Book Reviews

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks. Penguin Press, 2017. ISBN: 9781594206139. 339 pgs.

Tom Ricks begins his latest book, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, with anecdotes about moments in the 1930s when each of his protaganists came very close to a premature death–much closer in Orwell’s case than Churchill. The future prime minister looked the wrong way stepping into a New York street, on which the cars drove on the wrong (right) side, and was nearly mowed down by a taxi. The future bard of totalitarianism stuck his head up from a parapet in Spain while backlit by the rising sun and took a 7mm bullet through the neck. Ricks begins his book this way so that he can spend the next several hundred pages demonstrating that the survival of both men mattered. Ricks is arguing here for the great man theory of history–long out of vogue–and he makes a compelling case. Oddly, his case for Orwell may be even more compelling than his case for Churchill.

In Ricks’s telling, Churchill and Orwell were distinguished and linked by their determination to see the world as it is (Orwell more than Churchill) rather than fit the “facts” to their predetermined theories or conform to the conventional wisdom of their “sets.” When the British ruling class was, at best, committed to appeasement and in many cases enamored of Fascism, Churchill doggedly insisted that Fascism was both evil and a looming threat. Orwell, though a committed man of the left, came to see Stalinism as just one more form of totalitarianism, no better than Nazism. Churchill too sounded, or rather re-sounded, the alarm about the threat of Soviet Communism after the Second World War–the main reason for his canonization by the American right.

To make the case for Churchill as the essential man, Ricks relies on two sequential but separate periods of his life. In the first, Churchill is nearly alone in his persistent condemnation of Nazism and his advocacy for greater preparedness. To understand the courage of Churchill’s position, it is necessary to understand his environment, and it is not a pretty picture. Much of the British ruling class, particularly the titled aristocracy, was at best defeatist and at worst sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis. Anti-semitism was rampant, and faith in democracy was at a low ebb. Lord Londonderry and the Mitford sisters probably enjoyed more support than Churchill, who was obnoxiously strident about a problem that most people just wished would go away and be forgotten.

Appeasement has taken on a universally negative connotation in the decades since Munich, but it was quite popular at the time. Considered in context rather than with the advantage of hindsight, it is not hard to see why. Britain was barely a generation removed from the Somme, and the veterans, war widows, and orphans could hardly be expected to enthusiastically go to war on behalf of Czechoslovakia. The more inexcusable tragedy happened after Munich. Neville Chamberlain’s government was orderly and efficient, but it did not really do anything. Even after the Germans took the rest of Czechoslovakia and overran Poland, Chamberlain seemed supine. Belying the defense that Munich bought time for the British to prepare, unemployment actually rose from 1.2M in September 1939 to 1.5M in February 1940, when Britain should have been running factories 24 hours per day.

It was here, in the critical first months of the Second World War, that Winston Churchill again earned his place in history as the essential man. The collapse of France had not convinced the British appeasers and fellow travelers that resistance was necessary–quite the opposite. Churchill almost single-handedly energized the war effort, strengthened the spines of the British people through grim but stirring oratory, and imagined the strategy that would eventually lead to victory. The Prime Minister drove his generals and many of his fellow politicians mad with his meddling in various war matters, but Churchill understood better than anyone else what would be needed to win the war (as opposed to battles) and how to get it. Furthermore, Churchill’s direct intervention in many facets of war preparation was not amateurish meddling but based on his many years of careful study of the issues–as if John McCain suddenly found himself a wartime president. Ricks points out early in the book that Churchill was shockingly uneducated in numerous areas, but in history he was broadly and deeply read. It gave him an instinctive feel for grand strategy.

Churchill the strategist understood that strategic victories are not necessarily built from tactical victories. In 1940 the British were quite reasonably afraid and needed to regain their belief that they could win, so that, “military moves that did not make sense on a tactical basis sometimes were nonetheless advantageous for strategic or political reasons.” It was better to do something and seize the initiative than to sit placidly accepting attack and allowing the British people to perceive weakness and lethargy. Furthermore, Churchill understood the importance of organization and leadership and helped translate it into strategic advantage. “Military historians have long recognized that technological innovation is close to useless without carefully constructed organizational support.” Britain won the Battle of Britain because home field advantage preserved its pilots, fuel, and air time and because the British organized a very successful layered detection and defense that leveraged their strengths. It helped that the Luftwaffe, led by Goering, was virtually incompetent. While their planes and pilots were very good, they had no underlying theory of victory. They dropped as many bombs as they could, largely at random, in hopes the British would simply give up under the pounding. Churchill’s maddening obstinance was contagious, and Goering’s largely indiscriminate bombing caused massive damage and casualties but probably stiffened British resolve.

In the end, Churchill was right to be confident and not just because the U.S. and the Soviet Union eventually entered the war against Germany. Ricks quotes Bungay’s history of the Battle of Britain: “the margin of victory was not narrow…the Luftwaffe never came close.” Churchill could see beyond the early losses and the seeming invincibility of the German war machine to understand that invading and conquering England would be very hard indeed and probably beyond Germany’s capability–even before they invaded the Soviet Union. More importantly, he could transmit that confidence to his people so they could brace themselves for the trials to come and resolve to do what they must.

Where Winston Churchill was a larger than life figure before World War II–difficult to ignore even in the political wilderness–George Orwell was a decidedly more modest presence. He had published a number of rather bad novels and one very good book about his time in Spain. That book, Homage to Catalonia, plus his membership in one of the Trotskyite factions in Spain, had marked him among his fellow leftists. Ricks, ever the journalist, admires both Churchill and Orwell because they did not try to twist what they saw before them into their pre-conceived notions of how they wanted the world to be. Orwell was a standard British socialist when he went to Spain, but when he got there he saw Soviet agents manipulating the situation for the benefit of the Soviet Union, infighting between the groups with a willingness on the part of the Communists to ruthlessly suppress the others rather than cede any control, and he described it as he saw it. Consequently, he spent the war in a rather awkward position. His Spanish wound and his general ill health completely unfitted him for active service or even overseas reporting. He was no longer trusted by the socialist establishment, and he was genuinely eager to aid the war effort because he saw Nazism as the threat that it was. So he went to work for the BBC as a half-hearted and ineffective commentator.

As the United States entered the war in full in 1943, George Orwell began to rise above his middling life just as Winston Churchill descended into irrelevance. In Ricks’s telling, the Tehran conference marked a watershed for both. Churchill was relegated to second-class as the U.S. and the Soviet Union made plans for the post-war world with little concern for the wishes of their junior partners. Orwell saw the two emerging superpowers dividing the world between them and began thinking in the terms that would inform both Animal Farm and 1984. Churchill had been the essential man in 1940 when Stalin was still allied with Hitler and Roosevelt was unable to budge the United States off its isolationism. Stalin, the ultimate realist, knew that British wishes were of small concern to him, and Roosevelt was determined to end colonialism, even at the extent of his wartime allies.

The most important aspects of Orwell’s life were packed into six short years. His first wife died, leaving him with a young son in the midst of the war. He wrote Animal Farm and finally alienated the entire British left who saw it as a direct assault on Stalin and the Soviet Union, which they still supported. His longtime publisher, Victor Gollancz, refused to publish it. Tellingly, he had also declined to publish Homage to Catalonia, which marked Orwell’s initial break from the socialist herd. In their sheeplike devotion to Soviet Communism, the British socialists were as craven and complicit as the British aristocrats had been in the 1930s regarding Nazism. It is probably some measure of the true popularity of hardcore socialism in Britain that Animal Farm sold out almost immediately, achieving a level of popularity that Orwell’s earlier works had never approached.

By the end of the war, Orwell was a very sick man, staving off tuberculosis. As his health declined, he worked frantically on two projects–finding a new wife and step-mother for his son and completing his dystopian novel of a future under totalitarian rule. He acted somewhat paranoid, believing Communist agents might be trying to kill him. The Soviet archives opened up decades later revealed that he was, in fact, on a kill list in Spain, but it is unlikely the Soviets would have killed a British subject in Britain at that time. Though visibly dying, Orwell managed to complete both his masterpiece, 1984, and his essay on “Politics and the English Language,” cementing his reputation as a writer and his influence on the post-war world.

It would have shocked people of the time to hear it, but Orwell is probably a more significant figure than Churchill in terms of his influence on the modern world. Churchill’s dogged resolve, inspirational rhetoric, and ultimately successful organization of Britain’s defense in the early days of the war made it possible for there to be a post-war world, but once the U.S. and the Soviet Union entered the war, Britain was primarily important as an unsinkable staging base off the coast of Festung Europa. Ricks notes that Churchill’s oratory became less stirring and more confusing as the war carried on. The Combined Chiefs paid less and less attention to his suggestions and desires. Age, fatigue, and drink all took their toll. When he finally faced election for the first time in 1945, he lost and faced the indignity of turning over Downing Street to Clement Atlee while the war was still going on. Churchill enjoyed a brief renaissance as an early prophet of conflict with the Soviets and crafted another of the many felicitous phrases that have embedded him in the English language–the Iron Curtain–but his second turn as prime minister was embarrassing. He was built for the moment of crisis and fulfilled his role beautifully. The world he made possible did not really need his gifts or have room for them.

Furthermore, it is somewhat misleading to laud Churchill as the champion of “freedom” without a very large asterisk. As Williamson Murray points out in his own review in War on the Rocks, millions of Asians and Africans (not to mention Irish) in former British colonies might find the idea very odd indeed. Churchill was the champion of British independence and the freedom of the English, Scottish, and Northern Irish to live under a particular form of self-government. He did not share Orwell’s much greater commitment to universal freedom of conscience and self-governance.

Orwell, by creating a fictional portrait of totalitarianism that was both vivid and accessible, became the poet laureate of the Cold War. Just as Churchill understood early that the Soviet Union was both monstrous and a threat to the West, Orwell too saw the erstwhile allies for what they were. While Animal Farm attacked the Soviet Union as it was and had been, 1984 presented the picture of what all societies could become if they gave in to the forces of totalitarianism. The most terrifying aspect of 1984 is not the surveillance or the suspense or the torture but rather the final sentence. Orwell understood that the deepest threat of totalitarianism was not its coercion but the tendency of ordinary people to embrace it.

Orwell’s vision of a dystopian future embedded itself into western culture. Even in the Soviet Union smuggled copies proved a powerful driver of resistance. His essay on the misuse of language in politics became a seminal tool for teaching the abuse and misuse of English to mislead and obfuscate. On this subject Ricks makes one of his rare misstatements, claiming that, “Less noted about the essay is that it isn’t simply against bad writing, it is suspicious of what motivates such prose.” That aspect has not gone unnoticed at all. It is what distinguishes Orwell from Strunk and White or any other guide to good writing. Indeed, there are serious problems with the essay as a guide to style, but as an expose of the techniques of political misdirection it is unmatched.

Tom Ricks has made a powerful argument for the very real impact of two individuals on the course of history. While large, impersonal forces ultimately made possible the Allied victory in World War II, its outcome would have been very different if the British had reached a separate peace in 1940. Had Churchill been run down by that New York taxi, it is difficult to see who would have fulfilled his role in the 1930s–certainly nobody of his talents or determination comes to mind. It is equally difficult to see how the British would have withstood the pressure to surrender without Churchill’s inspiration. Likewise, Orwell was unique among committed leftists in combining a clear-sighted understanding of the evils of Stalinism with the literary acumen to help others see it. Orwell was not a necessary factor in the West’s Cold War victory, but he was a useful implement for galvanizing the determination of western peoples to persevere and to resist Soviet propaganda.

Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army 1917-1945 by David E. Johnson. Cornell University Press 1998. ISBN: 0-8014-8847-8. 288 pgs.

Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers is a stolid, workmanlike review of the winding road for weapons development from World War I to World War II with an examination of the forces within the War Department that affected each. I read the book for a specific project at work, so I skipped the bomber development parts that were irrelevant to the project.

Institutional considerations were paramount in tank development. The infantry branch insisted on developing tanks as adjuncts to infantry and therefore taking total control of tank development. The senior officers who came out of WWI viewed their experience in that war as dispositive and utterly failed to see that the U.S. Army’s late arrival and the primitive nature of tanks made their experience almost wholly irrelevant.

Senior officers consistently made decisions based on an unexamined, indeed an unspoken, assumption that tank technology would remain where it was at the given moment. Rather than undertaking a serious study of what was likely to be possible by the time the U.S. Army would have to fight, they generally acted as if they would have to “fight tonight” even though there was little prospect of imminent ground combat. Consequently they made doctrinal and organizational decisions based on the weaknesses of early developmental tanks and then reinforced their prejudices by failing to upgrade their technology.

The July-August 1939 edition of the Cavalry Journal included two articles on the Polish horse cavalry claiming that it was well prepared to deal with a mechanized enemy. After the German panzers rolled over the Poles in September, the U.S. chief of cavalry, MG John K. Herr, felt a need to redouble his efforts to defend the primacy of horse cavalry while conceding to efforts at greater mechanization. Not surprisingly, MG Herr proved to be the last U.S. Chief of Cavalry.

It is important when developing new military technology to consider three questions:

• How mature is this technology?
• When to I expect to need it?
• How mature do I expect it to be when I need it?

These questions become ever more important as the cost of new technology sky-rockets. The U.S. paid a price for its belated preparations for World War II, but it also derived unexpected benefits. The Germans, French, British, and Japanese all conducted extensive field testing under the most realistic conditions from 1939 to 1941. While German and Japanese aircraft were superior in the early days of the war, they were a sunk cost. U.S., British and Soviet designs that benefitted from the lessons learned in the earliest day [confirm this] came online later and in greater numbers while the Germans were able to design superior aircraft but not to field them.

In tanks, however, the U.S. never caught up. General Eisenhower was outraged to learn near the end of the war that American tank crews believed their equipment to be inferior to the Germans’. He had either not paid attention or had been fed happy nonsense up to that point, when it was too late to fix the problem. [Patton anecdote is telling but may not fit here]. But even this failure presents an important lesson about modernization. U.S. tanks were never able to match German tanks one for one or even by swarming in greater numbers. U.S. forces, nevertheless, defeated German forces on the ground. While the tanks were inferior, U.S. artillery and close air support were far superior. With greater numbers, superior logistical support, better organization, and superior ground attack aircraft, the U.S. combined arms team was more than a match for the Germans panzers that had pioneered mechanized combined arms warfare.

Sometimes intellectuals get lucky. A long-simmering idea turns into a project and comes to fruition just as external events come together to elevate the project’s relevance beyond its authors wildest dreams. Anyone who was finishing up an obscure article or book on terrorism or the Middle East in the summer of 2001 knows what I mean. Nichols and Drezner, both #NeverTrump Republicans, were nearing completion of these books when Trump surprised the world by winning the U.S. presidency. Nichols was a pessimist through much of the election and saw Trump’s victory as a possibility, while Drezner believed, along with nearly every other political scientist in America, that Hillary Clinton’s advantages and Trump’s alarming missteps would keep him from the White House. So while Trump and his acolytes are a presence in each of these books, neither was written specifically as a screed against Trumpism. Rather, Nichols and Drezner both identified political and intellectual dynamics that alarmed them and chose to address them. Of the two, The Ideas Industry is the better, deeper, and more serious book, while The Death of Expertise is more fun thanks to its author’s high degree of snark.

July 4th is a particularly appropriate day to reflect on Nichols’s work since it bears directly on the fundamental American question: what is a good citizen? In a nation based on divine favor, a good citizen is devout, but the state does not depend on his devotion. In an ethnic nation, the good citizen is pure of blood and culture, but if he is not, then he provides a useful target for the government and the masses. In a republic as conceived by the American founders, however, the legitimacy and effectiveness of the state rest on the extent to which citizens are both able and willing to make wise, informed decisions about their own governance.

Tom Nichols examines the evolution of discourse into a shouting match between partisans who all think their opinions are equally valid regardless of qualifications, experience, or intelligence. He provides a trenchant critique of the area he knows best–academia–and concludes that we are doing our children no favors by treating a university education as a commoditized service. Finally he covers the damage done by vast but unmediated sources of online information and the corrosion of journalistic norms.

Nichols comes as close as any serious author could to saying that many Americans are just too stupid, uninformed, or willfully ignorant to be good citizens. Perhaps it’s his blue collar background that makes him comfortable saying in print what would make an east coast upper class liberal squirm in self consciousness, but Nichols is not shy about his disdain for those who choose to remain ignorant but believe themselves entitled to respect on any number of complex issues. As he has frequently pointed out on Twitter, he doesn’t care if people cannot find Ukraine on a map; he just does not think they should voice an opinion on whether to go to war there. Or more accurately, he does not believe that those with actual decision-making power should pay any heed to the uninformed opinions shouted by the ignorati. Unfortunately, in a democratic republic, it is impossible to ignore the ignorant, prejudiced, or just plain stupid rantings of the masses, particularly when power actors are willing to weaponize that ignorance for political and commercial gain.

Nichols acknowledges but never really addresses the great dilemma: the how of correcting the current disaster. Winding himself up in a breathless conclusion, he writes, “the most daunting barrier, however, is the public’s own laziness. None of these efforts to track and grade experts will matter very much if ordinary citizens do not care enough to develop even a basic interest in such matters.” If a decisive number of American citizens are stupid or ignorant and unwilling to change, how do those who are not stupid or ignorant change them? It is unlikely that those who have consumed the fire water of populist demagoguery will choose to disbelieve that they are absolutely correct, that their opponents are evil and stupid, and that they need to replace the populist fire water with the kale smoothy of reasoned discourse, respect for experts, and ambiguity. The innate strength of experts is that they will be right more often than they are wrong. The innate weakness is that honest experts will always have to admit what they don’t know, own their mistakes, and resist the temptation to make rosy predictions. They will always be vulnerable then to charlatans and opportunists who are willing to make certain and rosy predictions. After British voters elected to leave the European Union, Leave advocates were forced to acknowledge that they had simply invented some of the economic figures they had employed. Those who led the movement suddenly dropped out after the vote, unwilling to lead a government that would have to deal with the disaster they had wrought. A clearer case of cynicism would be hard to find, but will it cause the British voting public to turn back to the experts and reverse course? Not likely. As Nichols himself points out almost daily on Twitter, people don’t like to admit they’ve been had.

The fundamental problem he identifies is the resentment of the uneducated against those who know more than they do. Being wrong does not foster contrition and humility–it causes greater resentment and doubling down. The man who has been conned has a strong incentive to deny the con because his self-respect is more valuable than whatever he lost. Con men rely on shame and embarrassment. The true experts will be hard pressed to fight back without sinking to the level of the charlatans. Nichols laments the reality, but he does not pretend that some 3-point program will fix it. He candidly admits that, “we can only hope that before this [collapse of the American system] happens, citizens, experts, and policymakers will engage in a hard (and so far unwelcome) debate about the role of experts and educated elites in American democracy.” It may be vain to hope that the same American public that cannot resist junk food and soda will choose the hard road of intellectual engagement and self-education when there are networks and websites and politicians ready to spoon feed them garbage for free.

Here we segue neatly to Daniel Drezner’s book, The Ideas Industry. Drezner, a full professor of political science at Tufts, a prolific blogger, and a frequent presence on cable new shows, examines the ways that journalism, the academy, and think tanks have evolved over the past century to the current cacophony of mutually exclusive partisanship, internet trolling, high-level plagiarism, and intellectual superstardom that feeds the disconnect Nichols finds so disheartening. Where Nichols’s book is largely an informed by impassioned polemic, Drezner’s is a more academic examination of the way the modern public receives its information and the incentives that drive the Ideas Industry.

Drezner devotes an early chapter to the difference between “thought leaders” and “public intellectuals.” Viewing himself (proudly) as the latter, he gives the thought leaders their due and acknowledges the value in driving ideas. The power of the thought leader is simplicity–in Isaiah Berlin’s dichotomy he is the hedgehog who know one thing. Consequently, the thought leader is attractive both to policy makers and to uninformed or semi-informed citizens. Thought leaders push clear policy options with definite outcomes and none of the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand waffling of public intellectuals. The problem, of course, is that thought leaders are quite often wrong. At best they gloss over the complexity and ambiguity that bedevil human affairs. At worst they push nonsense (see anti-vaccination or any health advice peddled by Gwyneth Paltrow) to the uneducated and credulous masses lamented by Nichols. Public intellectuals will point to uncertainty and contingency. They will explain that presidential actions are only one tiny force on the economy. They will point out that military conflicts are inherently unpredictable and influenced by myriad external forces. They are Berlin’s fox, knowledgeable of many things and therefore unwilling to provide the certainty that people outside the academy crave.

One of Drezner’s more interesting examinations relates to the disparate fortunes of economics and political science both as academic disciplines and as policy influencers. As he puts it, “policymakers view economists as experts, but political scientists as charlatans.” While political science has been attacked for studying every more esoteric subjects with ever more elaborate mathematical models, economics has thrived as it has been taken over by quants and elaborate math. Economics has made itself less accessible to the general public and elevated itself, in the public consciousness, to a science, while political science has been more accessible (or perhaps less inaccessible) and become in the public mind an effete, irrelevant argument about unimportant minutiae. Why? Drezner argues that economists present as thought leaders while political scientists present as public intellectuals. Because economists share a consensus on many of the basic tenets of their field–even as they debate viciously on issues of tactics and implementation–they can present a positive front without fear of contradiction. Drezner cited Pareto optimization as a fundamental principle on which all economists can agree. In contrast, political scientists do not agree at all on the value of basing foreign policy on improving human rights. To laymen, a debate between political scientists seems like a battle between a Christian and an atheist, while economists can confidently present recommendations without fear that their fundamental values will be questioned by their peers. As Drezner points out, economists therefore gain the ear of the public and policymakers despite a dismal predictive track record.

Drezner’s most important observations, however, relate to the incentives and constraints on both think tanks and celebrity intellectuals. Looking closely at Fareed Zakaria, Niall Ferguson, Tom Friedman, and others, Drezner demonstrates how the rewards for what he calls “superstars” have ballooned and distorted the market for intellectual commentary. Where intellectuals could once hope for a teaching or journalism position that would keep them in the middle class, the most elite now draw five figure speaking fees and seven figure book deals. Perhaps even more enticing–they can reach the ears of presidents, cabinet secretaries, and legislators and see their ideas enacted as policy. Drezner is admirably open-minded toward people like Friedman, who often draw the ire of academics. He evinces enormous respect for Zakaria while demonstrating how the incentives of superstardom led him into serial plagiarism. The modern ideas industry has created a wide field for intellectuals who can market themselves through television and social media, but it has also created traps that steer those superstars toward ideas congenial to the plutocrats who fund conferences and the politicians who can implement their ideas.

Like the individual intellectuals, think tanks have undergone a transformation as their numbers have boomed and their influence has grown. In a more crowded intellectual marketplace, think tanks have found it necessary, or at least expedient, to market themselves more aggressively. The shift in fortunes from industrial barons to information age entrepreneurs has tilted the field toward think tanks that can generate immediate policy impact rather than those that seek to influence ideas over time. The shift is most obvious at Heritage, and Drezner delivers a brutal history of their fall from a dogmatic but intellectually respected institution to shameless flacks for a particular brand of politics and policy–more devastating because he published before the ouster of Jim DeMint. In the Heritage story, though, there is a ray of hope. Over the course of DeMint’s tenure Heritage shifted from conservative but rigorous scholarship to slanted propaganda. Drezner highlights instances in which Heritage leadership quashed reports with inconvenient conclusions or researchers achieved the desired results through the use of preposterous assumptions and distortions. Intellectual quality gave way to partisan advocacy. Drezner quotes a Heritage staffer on the leaders of Heritage Action, “they felt absolutely no intellectual modesty. They felt totally on par with people who had spent thirty years in the field and had Ph.D.s.”

Then a funny thing happened. Republican politicians got frustrated with Heritage’s blatant attempts to strong-arm them and began cutting off their access. Congressional aides reported that they relied less on Heritage products. Respected academics described their products as, “useless.” By 2016 Drezner’s own survey found that 74% of self-identified conservative opinion leaders expressed little confidence in Heritage reports. Drezner’s examples of mixed effects on influence are distressing by contain a kernel of hope. Heritage still executes effective advocacy campaigns and strong-arms top-line politicians to show up at their events, but decreasing respect from the congressional and executive staffers who actually write policy may mean decreasing influence on that policy. Heritage’s fall from grace has taken a long time and it might still not be apparent to a casual observer, but it indicates that quality matters. There will always be a market for partisan quackery, but it need not dominate the entire ideas industry. Extending beyond think tanks, universities can cater to the whims of undergraduates and their helicopter parents, but at some point employers will devalue education if the educated are no longer useful employees. If we believe in our own principles, that critical reasoning and deep knowledge provide real value, then institutions that provide them will find a way to thrive, even if they seem temporarily overshadowed by those who provide intellectual candy wrapped in perks. Recent reporting indicates that red state Republicans have begun turning away from tax cuts even as Arthur Laffer continues to push his snake oil in Kansas. The heavily Republican Kansas legislature recently rolled back tax cuts in a victory for reality over ideology.

Nichols and Drezner paint a dire picture of an America that could easily consume itself through intellectual sloth. As Nichols points out, citizens have a right to be wrong, and technocracy will not save us from an ill-informed, selfish, and lazy electorate. The ultimate consumers of the ideas industry are those same ill-informed and lazy voters, and the industry has plenty of incentives to produce the intellectual equivalent of cigarettes and soda. That said, the ideas industry is not governed purely by profit motives. Fareed Zakaria may have fallen prey to the incentives to overextend himself and take shortcuts; Tom Friedman may worry that publishers have no desire to constrain his work, but neither Zakaria nor Friedman is in it purely for the money. Both of them care deeply about their ideas and their policy influence. Paul Krugman regularly publishes a column detailing all of the mistakes he has made in the previous year. Most university presidents would not be happy with a reputation for a large endowment, a winning football team, and worthless academics. Certainly few professors wish for such a reputation regardless of their salaries. Drezner is far more accepting of the current state of affairs–arguing that some of it is an improvement and some of it is not, but it is irreversible. Nichols is less sanguine but also offers few practical ideas for improvement.

The unfortunate truth is that major cultural trends do not change easily. We will not soon convince Trump voters to embrace climate science or academic ideas on international relations. We can, however, alter the focus of the academy. Schools can move away from both political purity and undergraduate coddling to focus on academic rigor. They can resist attacks on free speech and teach their students to defend themselves rather than seek intellectual shelter. Conservatives like Nichols and Drezner can actively call out and provide alternatives to the culturally loaded language of the political right, and liberal politicians can shift their emphasis away from identity politics to concrete problem-solving. Shouting matches in which we call each other “fascists” and “libtards” will further warp the incentives for polarization, segregation, and red meat propaganda disguised as policy discussion. If expertise is to regain the respect of the public, and the ideas industry is to focus on educating and informing that public rather than herding them, then leadership will have to come from the intellectuals and politicians who currently reside in the public opinion basement. It will not be easy or fast, and it will require people of good will to prioritize core values of democracy over transient policy differences, but it is the only hope.

*This review refers to the Kindle edition of each book. Each of these books is loanable on Kindle.