Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics

Journalist Barkan (The Prince) provides a searing chronicle of the political contortions that culminated in Donald Trump’s reelection. Barkan opens with the June 2024 New York congressional primary race between democratic-socialist incumbent Jamaal Bowman and moderate challenger George Latimer. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee—an organization “funded by right-wing Republican donors”—“unleashed nearly $15 million” to “obliterate” Bowman for describing events in Gaza as a genocide. For Barkan, the fate of Bowman is emblematic of its political moment, which he describes as a revanchist reaction to the progressive wave that was itself a reaction to the first Trump presidency. Barkan posits that the “social justice politics” of the left were effectively co-opted into a nastier form of “grievance politics” by the right, noting that Republicans had become “identity and language obsessed... whining about... female sports” and Israel’s “oppressed” status. Of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, Barkan lays fault with the media for failing to report the truth. Indeed it’s the media that is subject to his harshest critique; he knocks the poll-driven “weathervane” politics that he says fueled the centrist backlash to progressivism, and skewers “the many ponderous New Yorker writers” and others whom he sees as legitimizing the overly polished style epitomized by Kamala Harris. More than the anti-progressive backlash, Barkan argues, it was Americans’ disgust with such disingenuous slickness that led to the “raw, crude, hilarious” Donald Trump’s reelection. Narrated with verve, wit, and spine, this is an essential view of the present moment. (July)