Two Books That Explain This Political Moment
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If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac or drop a crispy fry between the car seats or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive. Happy holidays, Matter of Opinion listeners. It's Carlos here. I wanted to share a special year-end conversation that I just had with my fellow opinion columnist, Pamela Paul.

Now, you all know my fondness for books. And since Pamela is a former editor of The Times Book Review, we thought we'd get together and each share a book that best helps us understand this cultural and political moment. I hope you enjoy. And thanks, as always, for listening. I'm Pamela Paul, an opinion columnist for The New York Times. And I'm Carlos Lozada, also an opinion columnist at The Times.

So both of us have had long roles in the book world. I was the editor of the New York Times Book Review for almost a decade. And you, of course, were the longtime nonfiction critic for The Washington Post. So the two of us tend to see things through the lens of books.

And I thought this would be a good time for us to look at our current moment, whether that's political, economic, historical, and think about a book that in some way captures or crystallizes or helps us understand this moment. The book. The book. The book. The book of all time. That's a little, that's a high bar. Yes, but you have a book. What did you pick? I do. I have a book called

So I should mention, you know, in my prior incarnation as a book critic at The Washington Post and now as a columnist at The Times, I spent a lot of my time reading political books and thinking about this question, books that help explain the moment. So I read my fill of, you know, books that explain the Trump era. Right. You've written a whole book about books that explain the Trump era. Yes. Yes. Yeah. To get to get meta.

And, you know, a lot of these are books that have come out in recent years. But the book that I keep turning to that helps me think about what is going on now is a much older book. It was published when I was in elementary school in 1981. I did not read it then, but it's called American Politics, the Promise of Disharmony by the late political scientist James.

Samuel Huntington. I have a very tattered, falling apart copy here in front of me. Yes, with many post-its to show that you've actually read it and reread it. Exactly, which I have. I keep coming back to it. So if you know Huntington, you probably know him for his Clash of Civilizations thesis from the 90s. If you're like a military buff, you may know him for this book, The Soldier and the State, which he wrote in the 50s. He had a very long career.

This book is less well-known, and it looks at what happens in America when we fail to live up to our professed values, to who we say we are. So he writes that there's always a gap between our values of liberty and equality and individualism and constitutionalism and the ability of our government and our institutions and our nation to live up to those values, to deliver on those values. But he says that in moments when that gap is greatest—

You get what he calls a moment, creedal passion. We get mad because we can't live up to the creed, right? And he says that in those moments, the promise of American politics becomes its central agony. So he looks at the Jacksonian era, he looks at 1960s, looks at various moments in American life. And he says, in these moments, here's what happens. Authority and expertise are questioned. Polarization is high. Protest is high.

Intense hostility towards power and wealth. You get new social movements surrounding criminal justice, surrounding women's rights, and you see new media emerging devoted to advocacy and adversarial journalism. And he wrote this in 1981. In 81. And when I first read it, it was in 2017.

It was early in the Trump presidency and it amazed me how well it anticipated so many of those debates. What's crazy is that he even wrote then in '81, he tried to anticipate when the next such creedal passion moment would happen.

And he said, if the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the 21st century. I thought you were going to say something scary like in the fall of 2024. No, but we're basically right on schedule, right? And so what I find fascinating about this book is that in his telling,

The American Dream sort of matters most because it is never quite fulfilled. The reconciliation of liberty with inequality and the rest is never complete. But it's not really a pessimistic book, even if it sounds like it. He has this line at the end that I just always think about. Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie. It is a disappointment.

but it can only be a disappointment because it is also a hope, right? And that is something that I think about and kind of rely on all the time as I'm thinking about

not just what I write about or what I do as a journalist, but just as a citizen. You know, this kind of gets me by. So thinking about what we can expect in the next four years, what would you say, like, in what way does this book, American Politics, The Promise of Disharmony, not a very positive title? Kind of gives it away, right? I mean, like, what does this tell us about where we are now in terms of

what we think it means to be an American. Yeah, the one of the things I find fascinating about the book is how it highlights not just what Americans fight over, but how Americans fight over those things, right? Whether you're debating health care or taxes or immigration or war,

Americans invariably invoke the founding values, right? The founding creed of America to challenge whatever, you know, policy or injustice they perceive, right? So it's not that a reform is just necessary or sensible. It has to be articulated and defended in terms of the creed, right? That's not who we are.

is sort of a very common attack line, right? Yes. It's not just it's bad, it's un-American. That's why you see a lot of Trump's opponents have often attacked his policies, not just by saying they're wrong, but by saying, you know, they're un-American, they're not who we are. And Huntington really speaks to that. He says, Americans divide most sharply...

over what brings them together, right? And so it's those definitional questions that we overlay on kind of like all our debates. And I think you've seen that not just in the last election, but throughout the Trump era. Right. I mean, that was the response of many to the election, which was actually, this is exactly who we are and we have to deal with this. Yeah. And I think that's hard to deal with, right? Because

Sometimes the way we make these arguments is not just about policy preferences, but these kind of foundational beliefs about what the country is or should be. And the rise of Trump has challenged that for a lot of folks who would instinctively rely on, you know, this is not normal, this is not who we are, when in fact it very much may be.

What's yours? What's your book that helps you figure out this time? So, you know, when you and I talked about this, when we conceived of having this conversation, like, is it the book of all time? Is it the book that we read this year? And you went wide, you know, horizon and, and,

I suffer from the tyranny of choice when I think about it in those terms. And I also have the residual way of thinking for my years at the book review, which is often like, what are the books this year? And even more often, like, what's the book this week? And

And I'm actually going to go even further to talk about the book that I read most recently. It is called The Sing Sing Files, One Journalist, Six Innocent Men and a 20-Year Fight for Justice by Dan Slepian, who is a producer at Dateline.

And this book came out this year and it looks at a subject that has of long been of interest to me, which is basically all of the problems with our criminal justice system. I tend to look at every book sort of that I'm reading at a given moment as the most important book.

I tend to view it through the lens of what's going on now. And when I was thinking about which book I wanted to choose, I didn't want to think about it simply in terms of Washington or the presidential election, partly because I think we often focus so much on that to the exclusion of the rest of the huge country and everything that's going on.

So this book is an account of the work that Slapian has been doing for Dateline, but also to a large extent on his own time, looking at cases of wrongful conviction in Sing Sing, an infamous prison that is in Austin, New York, just outside of

the city, and all of the people whom he writes about were imprisoned in Sing Sing. And all of them were convicted for crimes they did not commit. And all of them spent years in prison. Even after, it was quite clear there was overwhelming evidence that their convictions were wrong. Of course, we've

had a number of these very high-profile situations. And the Central Park Five is probably the most notorious case in New York, and that comes up in this book. And what is terrifying and depressing is that even after these very high-profile situations where convictions have proven to have been incorrect,

and people are in prison, it can take years to get them out. So what this book brought up for me are a number of things, both specific to the criminal justice system, but also tell a story about this country and the way it thinks about good and evil and crime and punishment and innocence and guilt.

And the specific things that it brings up that I think continue

are the resistance to truth, the resistance to fact, often out of self-preservation. So it's really disheartening to read that even now, after cases like the Central Park Five, there is such strong systemic resistance within the criminal courts in New York, which we tend to think of as a pretty liberal city and state, to admitting that they've made a mistake.

and to taking steps to address that, you realize that it is a dysfunctional, sclerotic thing

slow-moving system in which everyone is sort of covering their ass and looking out for their political future. So it's not ideological in the sense, you think it's just, it's really just people not wanting to go to the trouble that it would take to admit and undo mistakes. Yes. It's not ideological. It's systemic. It's practical. It's petty.

But where I do think ideology plays into in this larger story around incarceration, and when I think about this country today, I think that we are such a vindictive, vengeful kind of culture. I think especially right now, there's a tendency to think in terms of good and evil, of bad guys, of good guys. We're so polarized. We're so incapable of reexamining our

own biases and assumptions. And it's that kind of ideological intransigence that makes this kind of like petty, practical intransigence even worse, you know. And the other reason I wanted to talk about this book is just to talk about the fact that the criminal justice system at every step in the process is

is so troubled. I don't want to use the word problematic because you and I both have a problem. Everything is problematic. Everything is problematic. Yes, but when you go through it step by step from, you know, arrest to prosecution to appeals to sentencing to the ways that prisons operate, that we profit off of people's imprisonment, that we continue to staff prisons with people who are not necessarily qualified or trained in

And that the guiding principles around our prison system is retribution, punishment. It's not rehabilitation, redemption. And therefore, we focus very little once people are in prison on programs like retraining and education and mental health care and substance abuse treatment.

I mean, one of the things that I still find really appalling is the disenfranchisement of not only people while they're in prison, but of former convicts.

they, you know, sometimes never get to vote again. And so you're basically depriving people from having hope and a stake in the society that has punished them. You continue to punish them after they have served their sentence. And that, to me, is like the ugliest side of America, but it's very real. You know, I picked a book that

was very much about American politics, you know, these big picture questions of American identity and values. You picked something very specific, you know, very contained, the lives of six people caught up in the criminal justice system. How do you see that book as

you know, connecting in sort of a tight way with the moment we're living through politically. Yeah. You know, crime, which obviously is what this book focuses on, was one of the most common concerns articulated by voters. And in that sense,

Maybe there's room for a little bit of optimism because criminal justice reform is one of the few issues that does have a certain degree of bipartisan support. And I don't know how much we can judge Trump to based on Trump one. But, you know, during the first Trump administration, he had the First Step Act.

He was interested, it seems, and open to ideas around reforming the criminal justice system. So this might be one of those places where not only might we see movement on a state-by-state basis, but perhaps could see some positive change from the federal government.

I think I should probably dip into the Sing Sing files. You want to trade books? You know, if you don't mind this old, tattered, pathetic copy, we can go ahead and do that. All right. On that note, on that holiday giving note, thank you, Carlos. Thanks, Pamela. To find more audio essays and conversations like this one, search for The Opinions wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe and leave a review while you're at it.

If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac, or drop a crispy fry between the car seats, or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip. It was just a really long drive. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. At Participating McDonald's.