2022 in reading

Every year around this time, I look forward to Tevi Troy’s review of books he read during the year. His articles are worth reading in themselves, and also inform the reading I do in the coming year.

Tevi’s annual review for 2022 can be found here. Among his selections are: All About Me! by Mel Brooks; Red Carpet by Erich Schwartzel (about Red China’s outsized influence over the American film industry); The Rise of the New Puritans by Noah Rothman; Professor of Apocalypse by Jerry Muller (about the obscure but influential intellectual Jacob Taubes); Admiral Hyman Rickover by Marc Wortman; and The Right by Matthew Continetti (a history of modern American conservativism and the only one of Tevi’s selections I have read).

As always, I read many fewer books in 2022 than Tevi did. However, with three months off from blogging (and even with all those hours spent watching the World Cup), I was able to read more books than usual this year.

The two I’ll recommend are William Barr’s autography One Damn Thing After Another and Tom Cotton’s Only the Strong.

Barr’s book has been out for quite some time. Many of our readers have probably read reviews, and maybe the book itself. Thus, I’ll focus on Sen. Cotton’s book.

The subtitle, “Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power,” states the book’s thesis. Cotton traces what he calls America’s “decline by design” back to the progressive era and, in particular, Woodrow Wilson. The progressives attacked America’s founding and took the view that American power should be deployed not to advance America’s interests, but rather to improve the social, economic, and political conditions of other nations and the world at large.

Then came the “blame America first” Democrats of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Cotton identifies Vietnam as “the moment when liberals turned their backs on America.” The war provided the “perfect opportunity for the New Left to act on its hatred of America.”

Is this an exaggeration? As a member of the New Left during this era, I say it is not.

The next stop in this sad tour is the Obama administration. Symbolized by Obama’s apologize-for-America tour, his foreign policy of decline manifested itself in (among other awful policies) efforts to appease Cuba and Iran — two implacable enemies that Obama believed America had wronged for decades.

On the question of why Obama didn’t at least drive harder bargains with these countries, Cotton answers, "he didn’t want better deals; he wanted to cleanse America’s soul of what he considered its sins against Cuba and Iran. . . .”

Key elements of the left’s sabotage of American power include the surrender of elements of our sovereignty to international organizations, the refusal to enforce our borders, and the neutering of our military.

All of this leads us to the Biden administration. Cotton is merciless, as he should be, in discussing the Afghanistan fiasco. As for Ukraine, he argues that the president’s impotence in Afghanistan encouraged Putin to believe he could get away with invading his neighbor. Biden’s appeasement of Putin, which began his first week at the White House, also played a role. And Cotton reminds us that last January, Biden speculated that a “minor incursion by Russia into Ukraine” might be okay.

The Senator concludes by explaining how America can overcome the sabotage of its power and regain its strength. The key elements are rebuilding the military, securing the border, achieving energy independence, and distinguishing friends from foes (and treating each as such).

My recommendation of Only the Strong also rests on Sen. Cotton’s writing. It as biting as any pundit’s or blogger’s and, of course, better informed. (Tom’s public writing career began, as far as I know, on a blog — Power Line — where he published an angry letter he had written to the New York Times blasting the paper for reporting that undermined U.S. efforts to cut off the flow of funds to al Qaeda. Naturally, the Times refused to publish the letter.)

I’ll leave you with a sample. Here’s part of his discussion of the reaction of leading Democrats to an open letter he sent to Iran’s ayatollahs explaining to them that, because the Senate had not confirmed Obama’s nuclear deal, it could be modified or nullified (as it eventually was) by the next president:

Joe Biden, in a typically long-winded statement, complained that the letter was “beneath the dignity of an institution I revere.” I would’ve thought that evading the Senate to conclude an arms-control treaty with a mortal enemy was more offensive to an institution, but what did I know? I had only been around for a couple of months, not forty-two years like Biden.

Only the Strong would make a great way to kick off 2023 in reading.