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What Are You Reading Right Now?

I just finished reading The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead. Arc is a tour d' force of greatness, no question. Mead seeks to take the course of U.S. history as it relates to Jews and then Israel from just after the Civil War through 2022. Without serving as a spoiler, Mead effectively makes the argument that Israel's importance to the U.S. stems more from its military and economic success and power than it does to the impact of the "Jewish" or "Israel" lobby. Indeed, he very effectively belittles the impact of the lobbies asa being the equivalent of Star Trek's "vulcans;" an imaginary force thought to be creating a wobble in Mercury's or Venus's orbit. He states: "Not only does Israel occupy a "continent" in the American mind; Jews, at 1.9 % of the population...." in arguing that the focus on Israel is out of proportion to Jewish numbers. The contrast is even starker when compared to an estimated worldwide population at 15.7 million, 0.2% of the 8 billion worldwide population. What the author leaves out is that the Jews, historically, have had a disproportionate pull on the world psycho.

I do have my quibbles with the book: 1) there are lots of run-on and awkwardly constructed sentences; 2) the book illustrates the dictum in intro to Practicing History: Selected Essays by Barbara W. Tuchman, that it is hard to write good history close to the occurrence of events. It certainly was, and is; and 3) part of point II, the last two chapters, on the history of the relationship under Obama, Trump and Biden are not yet history given how recent they are.

While I do not accept 100% of the author's opinions, the book is an indispensable starting point of any serious analysis and understanding.
 
Next up on my classics audible list:

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From the book under review, by Canada's former PM, Stephen J. Harper,Right Here, Right Now: Politics and Leadership in the Age or Disruption, an excerpt:
Stephen Harper said:
One can call this "populist conservatism" or "applied conservatism," but, to my mind, it is really just conservatism. Conservatism, dating back to Edmund Burke, was never about ideological rigidity.

In fact, Burke was rejecting the philosophical dogmatism that marked other thinkers and thinking in his era-including, by the way, those who reflexively defended the status quo. Conservatism is about seeing the world as it is and applying the lessons of experience to new challenges. It is inherently populist in the sense that it is necessarily concerned with people rather than theories.
Quite the tour d' force, the book amply reviews and summarizes American and, to a lesser extent Canadian sociology, philosophy and political history from approximately 1980 through a portion of the Trump era. He clearly styles himself as a latter-day Edmund Burke, an eminent political philosopher from shortly before the American Revolution through the late 1790's. Harper sees conservatism as pragmatic and flexible as opposed to atavistic.

This book is a short but highly accurate guide to the modern political era, and aptly explains how we wind up with Trump, for better or worse. I reluctantly give "five stars" and this is one such occasion.
 
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