A Power Line Christmas, part 1
We have solicited messages to Power Line readers from a number of authors of books published this year. The authors are friends or occasional readers of Power Line. It seems like a fitting time to remind our readers of these books, which include some of the best and most important books published this year. Below are links to the books together with the authors' messages or comments in lieu of them:
World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, by Norman Podhoretz:
There have been dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of books about the many issues aroused by 9/11 and George W. Bush’s response to it. But World War IV differs from them all in two major respects. For one thing, it is -- at least so far as I know -- the first serious attempt to set 9/11 itself, the campaigns that have followed it in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the war of ideas it has provoked at home, into the context of the role the United States has played in the world since 1941. Seen in this light, the struggle against the forces of Islamofascism into which 9/11 plunged us reveals itself as the direct successor to the wars against the totalitarian challenges to our civilization posed by Nazism in World War II and Communism in World War III (as the cold war becomes in this scheme of things). Secondly, against critics both on the Left and the Right, World War IV offers what is probably the most full-throated statement yet published of the case for the Bush Doctrine, whose effort to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy represents the only viable strategy for fighting and winning World War IV.The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots' Quest for Destruction, by Michael Ledeen. Bill Katz commented here:
One of the most important books I've read in years. Ledeen knows more about the Iranian challenge than almost anyone, and he writes about it with economy and precision, basing his arguments on a buildup of documented facts about the Iranian-American relationship, the beliefs of the regime, and conditions inside Iran. This is a book we'll look back on in ten years either with thanks, if Ledeen's advice is followed, or with sadness, if it is not. If you think the Iranian threat is a mirage, or something cooked up by the infidel neo-cons and their Israeli girl friends, The Iranian Time Bomb will set you right.Land of Lincoln: Travels in Lincoln's America, by Andrew Ferguson:
I was a Lincoln buff as a kid, and I always retained a residual interest in him. But over the last several years I sensed that the Lincoln I’d read about when I was younger -– the large, iconic Lincoln, the inspirational Lincoln –- had started to fade. He’d shrunk, been subdivided almost, cut to fit people’s individual needs and preconceptions. It’s as though this great national possession, this indispensable part of our patrimony, had been privatized. Just in the last few years there were books trying to prove he was gay (written by a gay activist), a manic depressive (written by a recovered manic depressive), a fundamentalist Christian (written by a fundamentalist Christian). There was even a book trying to prove that if Lincoln were alive today his political opinions would be identical to Mario Cuomo’s. Guess who wrote that one.The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes:I thought one new way to try to get at Lincoln, and try to understand what he’s meant to the country, would be through the people who have made him a part of their lives: buffs, scholars, collectors, enthusiasts of all kinds. The book is about them almost as much as it’s about Lincoln. I went to a convention of Lincoln haters in Richmond, Virginia, and to a convention of Lincoln impersonators in Santa Claus, Indiana. I followed a pair of motivational business gurus during their Lincoln Leadership Seminar, where Lincoln was held out as, of all things, a business sage. I spent time with the greatest Lincoln collectors, and got to hold in my own two hands Lincoln’s handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address.
By the end of it – thanks in part to a concentration camp survivor from Czechoslovakia I discovered when I was almost done with the book -- I thought I’d found something close to the original Lincoln that had inspired me as a kid, me and most of the country. He’s still there, still available, still ready to educate and inspire.
Candidates from John Edwards to Mitt Romney are reluctant to address the central problem of domestic policy – the reform of entitlements. Our inaction guarantees that our children and grandchildren will confront extra taxes. Part of the reason for this reluctance is affection for the New Deal, which gave rise to the modern entitlement system. The general view of the New Deal is a blurry, affectionate one. Franklin Roosevelt, we learned, may have made a few mistakes, but was protecting us from something worse. The “bold persistent experimentation” that FDR practiced was more or less excusable in the emergency context of the Depression. There was always the impression that the New Dealers were morally superior to their opponents in the private sector. This was the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s view – he and I discussed it. If you opposed this view, you were considered inhumane.To be continued...But looking into it all to write The Forgotten Man, I found several things. One was that Roosevelt truly was an inspiring figure -- this book doesn't hate him. The other is that both Hoover and he did terrible damage to the economy, and in fact made the Depression worse. The argument that Roosevelt protected the country from extremism – Father Coughlin, Huey Long – is exaggerated. Americans in the 1930s, even homeless or hungry, were fairly conservative. The damage of uncertainty caused by FDR’s back-and-forth experimentation is what most of us had overlooked in our studies. The 1930s were not a period in which godly government men, more virtuous than their counterparts in business, tried valiantly to right a sinking ship. The Thirties were the period of a power struggle between the public sector and the private sector in which the public sector won a decisive victory.
The reason going back to this period is important is that our nostalgia is stopping us from, say, rewriting Social Security. The nostalgia is getting in the way of giving our children the chances we had. The great Forgotten Man of today is the younger generation.
