The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic uses the
books of the Trump era to argue that our response to this presidency
reflects the same failures of imagination that made it possible.
As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read some
150 volumes claiming to diagnose why Trump was elected and what his
presidency reveals about our nation. Many of these, he's found, are more
defensive than incisive, more righteous than right.
In What Were We Thinking, Lozada uses these books to tell the story of
how we understand ourselves in the Trump era, using as his main
characters the political ideas and debates at play in America today. He
dissects works on the white working class like Hillbilly Elegy;
manifestos from the anti-Trump resistance like On Tyranny and No Is
Not Enough; books on race, gender, and identity like How to Be an
Antiracist and Good and Mad; polemics on the future of the
conservative movement like The Corrosion of Conservatism; and of
course plenty of books about Trump himself.
Lozada's argument is provocative: that many of these books--whether
written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, Trump's
true believers or his harshest critics--are vulnerable to the same blind
spots, resentments, and failures that gave us his presidency. But Lozada
also highlights the books that succeed in illuminating how America is
changing in the 21st century. What Were We Thinking is an intellectual
history of the Trump era in real time, helping us transcend the battles
of the moment and see ourselves for who we really are.
