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A review by jabarkas
Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man by Garry Wills
5.0
This was the most stunningly intelligent books I have ever read. Over forty years old at this point, I found it as salient today as the day it was written, and devastatingly incisive. The terrifying question that this begs is: how have we changed so little in the last half a century?
The first 3/5 of the book consists of a series of anecdotes which roughly Sketch our the 1968 Republican primary, as well as its background, and the surrounding environment at the time. He uses this setup to begin to infect the readers mind with a series of questions about the surreal implausibility of the situation. Then in the last 2/5, he goes in for the kill fundamentally shattering the philosophical scaffolding that has been (barely) propping up classical liberalism since the great depression (for the uninitiated, liberalism and Liberalism have only slightly more in common than catholic and Catholic.) Though I will not, with my halting words, do his arguments the disservice of a summary, I will say that an education on this book and its contents should be required for anyone participating in American democracy.
The first 3/5 of the book consists of a series of anecdotes which roughly Sketch our the 1968 Republican primary, as well as its background, and the surrounding environment at the time. He uses this setup to begin to infect the readers mind with a series of questions about the surreal implausibility of the situation. Then in the last 2/5, he goes in for the kill fundamentally shattering the philosophical scaffolding that has been (barely) propping up classical liberalism since the great depression (for the uninitiated, liberalism and Liberalism have only slightly more in common than catholic and Catholic.) Though I will not, with my halting words, do his arguments the disservice of a summary, I will say that an education on this book and its contents should be required for anyone participating in American democracy.