AN INCOMPLETE UNDERSTANDING. We have works such as Ideas Have Consequences and The Burden of Bad Ideas to make the argument that bad things are not completely accidental. Now comes Rolling Stone correspondent Matt Taibbi, whose The Great Derangement is a visit to the halls of Congress, the churches of Revelations, and the imaginations of the September 11 was an inside job conspiracy buffs. This Book Review N^o. 8 suggests that Mr Taibbi has insufficient grounding in the ideas he claims to be exploring to be able to properly criticize them. (Put another way, his Rolling Stone colleague P. J. O'Rourke, who would have different reason to criticize each of these collectivities, would be both funnier and more philosophically consistent.)

Mr Taibbi grew up in Russia, something he reveals toward the end of the book. Russia is the kind of place where a person can intuit the tragic vision (cornices fall off of buildings, drunken doctors pass out and patients die on the operating table). He therefore had a useful dodge when his church trainers beseeched him to speak in tongues: your Texas ten-step fundamentalist preacher isn't likely to recognize Russian poetry. There are other funny moments in the book.

It's the logic, the basis for a sustained intellectual argument, that's missing. When he gets into Christian logic-chopping (these behaviors invite demons, these behaviors are contrary to the commandments) he misses the parallel to the same sort of "anxious procedural discussions" (see page 122) that make up Congressional hearings or 9/11 Truth manifestos or faculty meetings. In all such cases, the reason the logic-chopping is frequently content-free is the absence of any meaningful standard of argumentation. The fundamentalists are too sure of salvation, the truthers too muddled by relativism, the members of Congress too corrupt to bother.

It's also a sense of history that's missing. The author has worked with members of Congress, including the recently-reviewed David Sirota on Bernie Sanders's staff. He may be right about Our President (just another establishment pretty face), and he's not fond of Rahm Emanuel, who, I learned, is brother to a Hollywood figure he's also not fond of. But I digress. The derangement of the antiwar left he contemplates is one he characterizes as a struggle for a "liberalism" whose roots are in the Vietnam-era war protests. Talk about playing into Rush Limbaugh's hands: the culture-war themes he has such fun with (feminazis, long-haired-maggot-infested-dope-smoking-FM types, environmentalist wackos) are precisely the same extreme left forces that are at odds with standard-issue liberalism, which is really technocracy styled as "progressive" by other means. That technocracy includes confidence in countercyclical fiscal policy, targeted tax cuts and credits, selective service, and rents for the court intellectuals. P. J. O'Rourke would not be fooled. But his writings show evidence of having taken time to understand the ideas first.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)