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Nonfiction

Two Leading Intellectuals Analyze What Ails America

Credit...Gabriel Alcala

THE POLITICS OF PETULANCE
America in an Age of Immaturity
By Alan Wolfe
210 pp. The University of Chicago Press. $25.

AMERICA, COMPROMISED
By Lawrence Lessig
251 pp. The University of Chicago Press. $24.

Among President Trump’s major accomplishments is the booming industry in books about him, his administration, the state of democracy in America, the rise of autocracy in America and abroad, the reasons for his rise, the bases of his support, the state of the Republican Party, the state of his mental health or lack thereof, the chaos in his White House and so on. Not all are strictly about Trump — the fact is the conditions and dynamics that brought us Trump long preceded him, and the changes in the fabric of our Republic are paralleled by changes in other longstanding democracies around the globe.

Two of the nation’s top public intellectuals are adding to this expansive genre with short books designed for broad audiences. Neither is fundamentally about Trump; indeed, one barely mentions the president. But both are about the America that Trump’s ascent now typifies. Alan Wolfe, a distinguished professor emeritus at Boston College and prolific scholar of American political thought, gives us “The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity.” “America, Compromised” is by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, the former head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and an activist on campaign finance.

Wolfe’s is two books in one: first, a polemic, aimed at Trump and his supporters, and at the broader fabric of our age; second, a brief intellectual history of modern America. He sets his frame early on: “It is … not an explanation of one rogue election we need. It is a discussion of what kind of nation we have become.” To get there, Wolfe focuses intensely on the so-called McCarthy era, the period in the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy used deception, lies and demagogy to create an atmosphere of fear and division. Wolfe draws some parallels with today’s Trump era (beyond those of fear, division and deception, there is a direct link: McCarthy’s henchman Roy Cohn became Trump’s Svengali). But his book is less about McCarthy or his tactics and more about the views of a swath of political thinkers and public intellectuals who arose in that era to take on the ideas that made McCarthyism a threat to our democracy.

Wolfe describes and examines a host of postwar political thinkers, many of whom, like Hannah Arendt and Joseph Schumpeter, had come from the horrors of Europe, but he focuses even more on a core group of American-born intellectuals like Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhold Niebuhr, those he calls “mature liberals.” They set out the values and behaviors that embody what Wolfe views as political maturity, taking on both the world-government left and the populist, demagogic right.

Wolfe is at his best when he is discussing these writers, first-class thinkers who responded powerfully to their era’s challenges. He contrasts their response to what he sees as the lamer reaction of the contemporary intellectual community to Trump — and suggests we no longer have a core of all-star intellectuals but instead a shallower group of “thought leaders.” And he tries to draw lessons from the writing of the old school of mature liberals to apply to the present day, a time, he says, when our political immaturity has led to the politics of petulance.

The intellectuals Wolfe admires made a case for the appreciation of subtlety, ambiguity, intellectual curiosity and tolerance of divergent views — all qualities that are abundant in the world of thought but have never been cherished by the broader electorate. As he points out, James Bryce wrote 130 years ago, “The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity.”

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Wolfe notes, of course, that McCarthyism lost, which he attributes in large part to the eloquent and sustained pushback from these public intellectuals (although he stresses that it had taken the horrors of a depression and a huge war to remind liberals of their calling and responsibility). He lays out the conditions that led to our current crisis, but implies that these days we have neither the impetus from horrific conditions nor the intellectual heft to transcend Trump and Trumpism and to move beyond our current “immature democracy.”

Certainly, there are reasons this era is different, but blaming a lack of intellectual heft both overemphasizes the importance of intellectuals and largely dismisses a pretty impressive collection of present-day thinkers, including many of the Never-Trumpers calling for a reassertion of conservative values from the right, and scholars of political thought, race and authoritarianism showing courage and fortitude from the center and left. He also does not give enough emphasis to other conditions: the rise of partisanship extending even to the courts, the importance of tribal media in a new communications age, the obliteration of campaign finance rules that had put some limits on the power of the oligarchic class.

Focused as he is on ideas, Wolfe does not end with a series of reforms to reverse our decline. Instead, he offers advice to his readers: Don’t be petulant, appreciate the nobility of politics, trust experts, avoid conspiracy theorizing, don’t believe candidates who promise only good news, pay attention to political debates, be sensitive to norms and not just laws. All good ideas, but Wolfe has no road map or magic wand to get most Americans to buy into them.

“America, Compromised” is about the country in the Trump era, but not about Trump. Indeed, Lessig would have written much the same book if Hillary Clinton were president and if Democrats had control of both houses of Congress. His focus is not on bad people doing bad things, but on how incentives across a range of institutions have created corruption, with deleterious consequences for the nation.

Anyone who has seen Lessig’s mesmerizing TED Talk about Congress and political money knows the basis for this book, now extended to discuss a wider range of institutions, including finance, the media, the medical profession, the academy and the law. All of them, he says, have become corrupted by norms and misplaced incentives that in turn corrupt the behavior of actors who are themselves operating not out of venality but are caught in institutional webs. The rest of us? We inflict the greatest harm on society because we enable them.

For Congress, Lessig notes that the framers were deeply concerned about corruption, but rarely focused on the evils of individual quid pro quos. They worried about institutions, the danger of politicians becoming dependent on forces beyond the voters who elected them — or, as Madison wrote, “the people alone.” Congress, Lessig believes, is corrupt even though the overwhelming majority of congresspeople are not.

The institutional corruption here comes from political money. It corrupts the agenda, the issues that get the focus and attention, and moves Congress away from the needs and concerns of the voters. While our political institutions were not all or mainly linked to voters, at least not directly, the House of Representatives is and was meant to be a channel for the voices of the people. It has become something else entirely. Similarly, Lessig’s chapter on the media, in which he examines technology meeting market forces, reinforces the sense of dysfunction that flows from distorted incentives. One need only look at Facebook for a current example.

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With regard to finance, Lessig examines in different ways the 2008 collapse, from banks to ratings agencies that gave AAA ratings to entities that were absurdly dangerous. These agencies were created in the 19th century, and have had impeccable reputations because of their perceived independence and objectivity. But, Lessig says, the big three ratings agencies, designated as official by the Securities and Exchange Commission, compete to get the lucrative business of analyzing securities. Good ratings mean more business. Bad ratings, not so much. With financial institutions playing one agency off against the others, the results were predictable. Lessig quotes Roger Lowenstein, the author of a book on Wall Street: “Imagine the big rating agencies as three competitive saloons standing side by side, with each free to set its own drinking age. Before long, 9-year-olds would be downing bourbon.” The ratings failures were key contributors to the financial collapse. Individuals in the agencies did not take bribes — it was the perverse incentives that corrupted the institutions.

In his essay on the academy, Lessig first writes scathingly of the psychiatric profession. In the era of miracle medications promising relief or cures, psychiatry has become captive to the pharmaceutical industry, altering the ways diseases have been classified and drugs prescribed.

Other parts of the academic world have been corrupted as well, Lessig writes, with experts as hired guns who are now paid to testify. What’s more, legislation sponsored by the Democrat Birch Bayh and the Republican Bob Dole and passed in 1980 was intended to encourage academics to bring their research to the marketplace. But giving financial incentives to the academics for their work meant both more commercialism at public expense and more reasons for scientists to keep their findings secret, hindering the free exchange of research findings.

Some of Lessig’s toughest words are for his own profession, the law. Lawyers used to prosecute white-collar crime, without partisanship or other biases. But somehow, in the aftermath of the catastrophic financial crisis in 2008, not a single individual miscreant was brought to the bar of justice. Why? Start with the fact that the gap between the incomes of prosecutors and lawyers in firms has ballooned; a prosecutor now struggles for a good life relative to his or her law school colleagues in the private sector. That has led to a revolving door between prosecutors’ offices and white-collar defense firms. Being “hirable” means public officials can’t be too hard on firms they might eventually join. It is not a matter of greed, but of distorted incentives leading to unsettling behavior.

What to do? Lessig examines a range of ways to de-corrupt institutions. As with so many efforts, it is hard to find remedies that are realistic and practical. Still, some of Lessig’s ideas are not just pie in the sky. He recommends public financing for campaigns; delinking rating agencies and experts offering testimony from those paying for it; and using in-depth polls to gauge public opinion on key issues as a kind of shadow government.

That two impressive public intellectuals like Alan Wolfe and Lawrence Lessig are weighing in on the challenges of our times, joining so many others, is reassuring. “The Politics of Petulance” and “America, Compromised” join an impressive array of books and essays that may, someday, have a future intellectual historian using them as examples to lament the fact that his or her contemporaries are not as eloquent or important as the group that arose in the Trump era to combat the threats to our way of life.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the Not-Yet-Deported.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: What Ails America?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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