What My Book Is About

An Attempt at an Explanation

People sometimes ask me, “What’s your book about?” I’m not very good at answering this question; I usually reply, “American politics in the early 1990s,” which is true enough, but not the whole story. (That answer also usually results in the asker quickly changing the subject or looking around for someone else to talk to.) But I don’t feel comfortable giving answers like, “It’s about how we got here” or “It’s how everything fell apart” or “It’s about American Fascism!” Those might be more arresting but also seem terribly pretentious. Nor do I think calling it a “pre-history of Trumpism” does it full justice either.

Lately, I’ve had some very fruitful conversations with close and careful readers. One of those was with Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman of the Know Your Enemy podcast, who’ve been talking with me since the inception of the project. I think these conversations have really helped me to touch on the underlying theme of the book.

The book is based on an intuition, one that I’ve struggled to articulate fully, but recently I’ve felt like I’m getting close to naming. The intuition is that the seemingly disparate phenomena I tried to catalogue and chronicle were actually reflections of a single underlying phenomenon. The critic Jennifer Szalai recently used Raymond Williams’s term “structure of feeling” to describe what I was identifying in the book. I definitely was trying to identify a certain affect, a public mood, which I called “the politics of national despair.” Williams provides a helpful concept insofar as it attempts to combine vibes with a structure: a bounded shape, an identifiable set of qualities. Sometimes I think of each discrete part as “moments” in the unfolding of a bigger picture, or as elements with elective affinities that crystallized into a larger whole.