The Bookshelf

The political columnist David Harsanyi, now a senior writer at the Washington Examiner, requires no introduction to National Review readers. In his new book, The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists (Broadside Books, 320 pp., $32), Harsanyi makes the case that, while conspiracist thinking is found across the political spectrum, the past few decades have seen the rise of a particular kind of hysteria on the left. The online term for it, “BlueAnon,” plays off “QAnon,” a conspiracy theory on the fringe right. It’s a “useful juxtaposition,” writes Harsanyi: Followers of “Q,” who believed a powerful cabal was operating a global child-sex-trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizza place, are notably without influence. The delusions of BlueAnon, on the other hand, are spread by respected media outlets, prominent Democratic politicians, and highly credentialed academics -- and are correspondingly taken seriously on the left. Harsanyi’s catalogue of conspiracies includes a variety of hoaxes, myths, moral panics, smears, and paranoid beliefs -- from the Russia-collusion narrative to the idea that America is hovering on the brink of fascism. It’s no wonder, then, that a growing number of Democrats believe that the typical Republican is a white-supremacist Christian nationalist intent on destroying democracy. Conservatives, Harsanyi advises, should respond by guarding their own sanity.

Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, devotes his latest of many books to defending a vital front in the culture wars. In The War against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History (Polity, 272 pp., $29.95), Furedi mounts a forceful case that the goal of the aggressors in this war is “cancelling Western civilization” by “delegitimizing its ideals and achievement.” Headline-making skirmishes -- the toppling of statues, the calls to “decolonize” everything, the policing of language, and the defenestration of canonical figures -- are all assertions of a noxious form of “presentism,” which takes for granted that the past is morally inferior. Furedi notes that the obsession with putting our ancestors on trial -- what he calls “grievance archaeology” -- coincides paradoxically with a desire to break free from history and begin from scratch (“Year Zero” ideology). Both outlooks disastrously cut people off from their cultural inheritance, unmooring their identity. Indeed, the explicit goal of current educational trends is to teach children that their history is largely shameful. Ultimately, Furedi writes, the result of this anti-humanist project is to infuse the present with a sense of futility and hopelessness: If the past contains little worth preserving or honoring, why should we think we can chart a meaningful course for the future?

Victoria Coates, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation who served as a deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration, didn’t venture to predict the result of the 2024 presidential election in her forthcoming book, The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel -- and America -- Can Win (Encounter, 184 pp., $29.99). There is little chance, though, that the policies she advocates in the book (unambiguous support for Israel, a U.S.-led regional alliance including Saudi Arabia to deter Iran and counter China) would have been adopted by a President Kamala Harris. Coates is a believer in “two fundamental truths” articulated by the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall.” The first is that until Palestinians accept the existence of Israel as a permanent fact, their primary objective will be the eradication of the Jews. The second, which follows, is that Israel must have impenetrable defenses. Coates argues that it is in U.S. interests to buttress those defenses by forming an airtight security and economic alliance with Israel. And, she writes, it is ultimately in the best interest of the Palestinians that they be treated not as an equal negotiating partner but as losers in a war who must accept the terms of defeat. Israel’s military victory over Hamas in Gaza is the necessary first step.