The Ten Best Books I Read in 2019

Well, here we go. As usual, in alphabetical order, by author:

Loka Ashwood, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government is Losing the Trust of Rural America. A wonderful synthesis of survey research, oral history, and political critique, grounded in a specific time and place, and adding up to an excellent analysis of the overlapping effects which poverty, government land-grabs, local corruption, and capitalist exploitation have had on so many rural communities in America. The overall frame of "for-profit democracy" needs more theoretical work to be entirely persuasive, I think, but Ashwood's work adds greatly to our ability to properly assess the anti-government vs. libertarian vs. anarchist sensibilities which exist among the rural poor. More thoughts here.

Michael Austin, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition. Michael (who is an old friend) has written here the sort of book that I usually admire but don't especially approve of; his civic-mindedness rarely engages in any kind of structural consideration of the causes of America's democratic dysfunctions, instead staying on the level of human psychology, political history, literary expectations, and more. But I can't deny the profound decency of this book, however moderate his tone itself may be. This is a wonderful call to a renewed political ethos in the United States, one premised upon respecting limitations, showing empathy for others, and developing a more mature perspective on what human beings, in the midst of disagreement, can nonetheless achieve. More thoughts here.

Timothy Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.This is the sort of book that really hits my sweet spot: a thoughtful, detailed, perceptive argument, one that makes use of solid electoral and economic data, about a social problem (really, a whole nest of interrelated social problems), written from an unambiguously conservative, traditionalist perspective, but which is honest enough to recognize that it is the structures of capitalist globalism and individualism that are most fundamentally at the root of that problem. Carney isn't about to become a socialist, but his reportage and observations are enough to make any honest person--including the author himself--admit that, in a different world, he could and probably should be someone on the left. More thoughts here.


Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Yes, I am fully aware that there are many solid critiques of the social evolutionary theory of morality and belief which Haidt made extremely popular in this book, and in particular of the political implications that Haidt draws (even I think much too casually) from his theory. Still, the fact remains--as someone who is not terribly familiar with cognitive psychology and the evolutionary claims which ground, I found Haidt's book wonderfully informative: well-written, with lots of clear and compelling examples and data that, far from be obscure, was inviting and engaging. There is obviously a lot of good reasons why this book become such a hit; I used it in a honors seminar this year, and it sparked some truly wonderful conversations. I wish I'd read it years ago.

Eitan Hersh, Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. I just finished this book, and while I think organizationally it needed one more one-through, in general I was surprisingly impressed by it. "Surprisingly" because I generally dislike books with long, explanatory, "how-to" subtitles. But at its heart, this is a great, bracing read. He shows, with data that strikes me as mostly pretty solid, that political hobbyism--particularly the political pontificating all over social media--is a real, structural problem for the people Hersh's own class, and the class of most who would read a book like this: white, college-educated, left-learning citizens. It really is a wonderful complement to Austin's book above; while Michael made a moral case for taking on the emotionally difficult work of reaching out to those you disagree with, Hersh shows us exactly who needs to hear that case (namely, people like you and me), how we are excusing ourselves from it, and how to stop. Politically speaking, this a fine, practical book.

Margaret Kohn, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth. This is the best work of political theory I've read in years. Kohn uses the framing device of Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities to develop her notion of "solidarism," a kind of localist/urbanist populism or socialism, that advances a wide range of theoretical claims about property, equality, democracy, and more, in the context of city life. In the pages of this book she makes smart, provocative readings of Locke, Marx, Kant, and more, using them all to create an intellectual perspective on how we should address classical problems in political theory in a world which is overwhelming urban, and where traditional notions of sovereignty are being replaced, however inconsistently, with the belief that our "commoweal" would be better served by thinking more in terms of municipality rather than nationality. A great book.

Charles Marohn, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. I've been a fan of the Strong Towns movement for years,so it was wonderful to get a copy of Chuck's book and see all these ideas about city planning, city financing, and city life put together into a single argument. The book isn't a brilliant, scholarly treat of urban history or economic, but is a delightful mix of practical observations, intellectual speculations, and hard-nosed accounting. Marohn makes it pretty clear that the American municipality is committed to a profoundly unsustainable financial model; recognizing that truth opens one up to seeing questions of political and environmental sustainability in different lights as well. More thoughts here.

Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism. This book made me want to argue so much--which benefits such a short monograph.I don't know Mouffe's work on democratic theory and social democracy terribly well, but I know enough to understand that she sees herself, in this book, on insisting upon the accuracy of some of her earlier writings, here in this moment of Trump and Brexit. The populism she is calling for is, again, one that in many ways I am highly sympathetic to: that is, recognition that democratic politics have to be organized not around liberal universalism (though she defends the liberal constitutionalist state as a necessity, nonetheless--another thing I'd like to argue with her about), but rather around real social empowerment. What she sees as the fake, xenophobic populism of those mentioned above has appropriated the participatory feel which the particularism of democratic societies inevitably generate; the left needs to reclaim that. A good, impassioned read.

Benjamin Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. It's been a long time since I read a single, book-length study of Mormon history, and I'm very glad that Park's book is the one which broke my fast from this topic. This is the first truly serious study of the Council of Fifty, a mysterious group that cast a long shadow over a short but vital moment in my faith's history; the minutes of those meetings were locked away in church archives for nearly 200 years, only recently being made available. Park's study of them, and his weaving of the story they tell of Joseph Smith's sometimes revolutionary, sometimes reactionary, mostly deeply illiberal ideas, into everything else that Smith was involved in and was happening to his city of Nauvoo in the early 1840s, makes for a tour-de-force. I'm not sure I fully agree with Park's theoretical analysis of what it all adds up to, but before theory you need to have the facts, and Park here provides them in great detail.

Noah Toly, The Gardener's Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics. Another one of those books that I didn't think I would care for that much, as Toly's background is equal parts of evangelical Protestantism and public administration, both of which are fields and perspectives I have little attachment to. But as the book progressed, Toly's thesis is laid out carefully and powerfully: that climate change, to say nothing of multiple other environmental concerns, are best understood in light of the tragic character of our fallen world. That's not a call to give up and embrace our sinfulness; rather, it is a call to re-orient how we think about our stewardship towards God's creation by way of some Niebuhrian thinking about our "dirty" responsibility for it all. It's a thoughtful assessment of how believers should talk about the world, and I'm grateful for it. More thoughts here.