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For the politics/current events book club, we decided to read Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conways’ The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. It tells the very interesting story of the decades-long propaganda campaign that is market fundamentalism, which somehow made it “common sense” in America that any government action (except killing brown people) is tyrannical and too Big, while companies can never be too Big and the invisible hand of the free market can solve all our problems as long as we give it completely free rein to do whatever it wants and do not anger it by attempting to put any checks on the behavior of Big Business (which does not exist), lest it smite us, this is definitely science and not religion.
You might think that if I said I had trouble getting into this book it would be because the content about far-right libertarian bullshit was too upsetting to focus on for long periods of time. This would be incorrect! I had a hard time getting into this book initially for a few reasons, but honestly, once I got past then and well into the far-right libertarian bullshit, I got much more engaged.
The first stumbling block for me was just that this book is 500 fucking pages long, and I have way too much assigned reading this year. This is entirely my own fault, as I am doing my yearly longread, Whale Weekly, the Monday history class, one Vorkosigan Saga book each month, and the Year of Erics, in addition to whatever book we pick each month for this book club. As a result I have discovered the limits of my tolerance for assigned reading projects and am starting to get resentful that I have no fucking time to just browse my own bookshelves and make impulsive decisions about what to read next. This is not actually a problem with the book itself. For the past eight years of this book club I have usually been the one getting excited about reading big 500-page-plus chonkers about upsetting things; it is unusual that I have put myself in a spot where the idea of reading anything for this book club that’s more than 200 pages long has me glaring balefully at my TBR shelves that I cannot squeeze in the time for.
The second stumbling block is that this book is very carefully aimed at a specific audience, which is moderate American liberals who may or may not consider themselves progressive but are at least open to the idea that “progressive” is a normal and legitimate political position for an American to hold, but anything further left that than would self-evidently be Too Far. So a lot of the book, especially right in the beginning, is devoted to covering its flank from right criticism by assuring the reader repeatedly that they’re not socialists, none of what they’re advocating is socialism, the right wing made them up, the socialists probably aren’t real and can’t hurt you. A fair amount of this is factually correct in that there is indeed a lot of room between far-right anarcho-capitalism and total central planning, and that for at least the last 30 years nearly the entirety of human politics has existed in that vast middle ground. But the constant assurances of Not Being Socialist and the obvious veneration for finding Reasonable Middle Grounds is just really fucking annoying as a reader who actually is a socialist.
Anyway, once we get past all the fucking framing, the content is very interesting. The book is very long because there is quite a lot of information there, some of which I was sort of familiar with, and some of which was not. I found the most interesting stuff to be the development of basically the right-wing version of “vulgar Marxism,” where American goons took the at least somewhat nuanced writings of folks like Hayek and Adam Smith and wrote “condensed” or “study” versions that conveniently left out all the bits where these writers acknowledged that market failure were ever real or that there was ever a role for government in doing anything about it. The chapter about Rose Wilder Lane and her hand in editing the Little House on the Prairie books–plus her own writing, which was much less successful because it was mostly just psychotically hard-right polemic–was also fascinating as someone who read the Little House on the Prairie books and reasonably enjoyed them but never got super into them the way I got into, say, American Girl or Dear America.
Anyway, this book could probably have gotten down to 400 pages if it was just the content and not all the framing and argumentation so much, and I personally would have enjoyed it better that way, but that is also not how books are structured, especially not ones where you are specifically attempting to advance an argument for political purposes and not just dump info on people. I would have preferred the infodump because I am slightly out of range of the audience for this book, but there are probably more people within the intended audience for this book than there are people like me, so fair play to the authors, I guess, but this is my review and I get to complain about the bits I didn’t like. Socialism is a scare word used in deeply dishonest ways by the right wing but it is also a real political project and people should be more normal about actual socialists existing and even being correct about stuff, thanks so much.
You might think that if I said I had trouble getting into this book it would be because the content about far-right libertarian bullshit was too upsetting to focus on for long periods of time. This would be incorrect! I had a hard time getting into this book initially for a few reasons, but honestly, once I got past then and well into the far-right libertarian bullshit, I got much more engaged.
The first stumbling block for me was just that this book is 500 fucking pages long, and I have way too much assigned reading this year. This is entirely my own fault, as I am doing my yearly longread, Whale Weekly, the Monday history class, one Vorkosigan Saga book each month, and the Year of Erics, in addition to whatever book we pick each month for this book club. As a result I have discovered the limits of my tolerance for assigned reading projects and am starting to get resentful that I have no fucking time to just browse my own bookshelves and make impulsive decisions about what to read next. This is not actually a problem with the book itself. For the past eight years of this book club I have usually been the one getting excited about reading big 500-page-plus chonkers about upsetting things; it is unusual that I have put myself in a spot where the idea of reading anything for this book club that’s more than 200 pages long has me glaring balefully at my TBR shelves that I cannot squeeze in the time for.
The second stumbling block is that this book is very carefully aimed at a specific audience, which is moderate American liberals who may or may not consider themselves progressive but are at least open to the idea that “progressive” is a normal and legitimate political position for an American to hold, but anything further left that than would self-evidently be Too Far. So a lot of the book, especially right in the beginning, is devoted to covering its flank from right criticism by assuring the reader repeatedly that they’re not socialists, none of what they’re advocating is socialism, the right wing made them up, the socialists probably aren’t real and can’t hurt you. A fair amount of this is factually correct in that there is indeed a lot of room between far-right anarcho-capitalism and total central planning, and that for at least the last 30 years nearly the entirety of human politics has existed in that vast middle ground. But the constant assurances of Not Being Socialist and the obvious veneration for finding Reasonable Middle Grounds is just really fucking annoying as a reader who actually is a socialist.
Anyway, once we get past all the fucking framing, the content is very interesting. The book is very long because there is quite a lot of information there, some of which I was sort of familiar with, and some of which was not. I found the most interesting stuff to be the development of basically the right-wing version of “vulgar Marxism,” where American goons took the at least somewhat nuanced writings of folks like Hayek and Adam Smith and wrote “condensed” or “study” versions that conveniently left out all the bits where these writers acknowledged that market failure were ever real or that there was ever a role for government in doing anything about it. The chapter about Rose Wilder Lane and her hand in editing the Little House on the Prairie books–plus her own writing, which was much less successful because it was mostly just psychotically hard-right polemic–was also fascinating as someone who read the Little House on the Prairie books and reasonably enjoyed them but never got super into them the way I got into, say, American Girl or Dear America.
Anyway, this book could probably have gotten down to 400 pages if it was just the content and not all the framing and argumentation so much, and I personally would have enjoyed it better that way, but that is also not how books are structured, especially not ones where you are specifically attempting to advance an argument for political purposes and not just dump info on people. I would have preferred the infodump because I am slightly out of range of the audience for this book, but there are probably more people within the intended audience for this book than there are people like me, so fair play to the authors, I guess, but this is my review and I get to complain about the bits I didn’t like. Socialism is a scare word used in deeply dishonest ways by the right wing but it is also a real political project and people should be more normal about actual socialists existing and even being correct about stuff, thanks so much.