No change. Prince Andrew. Milei and Meloni, stars of anti-woke gang
Britain’s Prince Andrew has been chummy with someone unsuitable…again. This time, it’s a Chinese businessman and alleged spy whom Britain’s national-security court banned from the country. Argentina’s president and Italy’s prime minister – both stars of the international anti-woke scene – have met…again. Javier Milei’s Dec 14 visit to Rome to see Giorgia Meloni is his third to Italy this year. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on how the more things change, they stay the same. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story.
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The Big Story:
Many predict that when the Trump era formally begins on Jan 20, it will mark the beginning of the end of political, cultural and economic liberalism in America and the wider world.
That may be too sweeping a judgement but this sentence in our first book pick is worth noting:
“Attempts to salvage the good name of liberal democracy by contrasting it favourably with non-Western autocracy have been undercut by the feckless violation of liberal norms…The very ideal of ‘an open society’, too, has lost its once-fêted lustre”.
This Week, Those Books:
This week’s books are unusual in that both have the same title.
One is non-fiction, the other fiction.
The Backstory:
Though published nearly 120 years apart, both books reveal the same genetic trace – systemic resistance to change.
This Week’s Books:
The Light That Failed : Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy
By: Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Year: 2020
This brilliant read, originally subtitled ‘A Reckoning’ , dissects the West’s failed efforts to export its model of liberal politics to central and eastern Europe. In essence, the authors (both respected political scientists) ask the key question that arises as Donald Trump prepares to take power in the United States and populism, nationalism and faux democracy gain ground elsewhere. Why is western liberalism losing ground even on home turf, having already failed to root itself in new territory after the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War?…The authors also contextualise Trump’s ascendance among American voters as the triumph of “provincial resentment against a cosmopolitan world”. They write that Americans themselves accept their country’s declining influence and no longer believe they must improve the value systems and freedoms of their competitors (primarily China).
Choice quote:
“Populists are rebelling not only against a specific (liberal) type of politics but also as against the replacement of communist orthodoxy by liberal orthodoxy”…
The Light that Failed
By: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
Year: 1891
Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize for literature but this, his first novel, remains arguably his least well known and least well received. Yet, it has stayed in print for more than a century, perhaps because it points to a deep truth about inherent resistance to social change.
Kipling wrote this novel when he was just 26, reprising events from his own life to create the melancholic manly man world of Dick Heldar…Though this novel has been criticised for its misogynist attitude, it could be said to convey the confusion that ensues when there is a shift in the tectonic plates of culture…
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
