Reviews for The discerning reader

The average rating for The discerning reader based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-19 00:00:00 Thomas Boegebjerg From a second reading: Vermont Royster was a gracious commentator. I miss him for that as much as for the classically educated grounding with which he “thought things over.” His job as editor and column writer for The Wall Street Journal required him to assess the events of his time as they were on the day of his writing, without knowing how “things would turn out.” But he could readily reach for historical examples of similar conundrums from decades and even centuries past. That allowed him perspective and often wisdom less exemplified by some of his contemporaries, never mind commentators of our present day. He also practiced a dignified form of forgiveness that is often skipped by other would-be journalists. My favorite chapter in this book is “Persons in Their Places,” comments about several prominent people of the world, including the US presidents of his own lifetime (Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan). He interprets their flaws in the context of human imperfection, and makes sure to give each man credit for whatever deeds were done well. It is unfortunate that Mr. Royster could not live to witness President Reagan’s speech at the Berlin Wall—or to see its ultimate results during the successor administration of President G. H. W. Bush—for here we see that as early as 1981 he wrote, “. . . the suspicion grows that there is more to Ronald Reagan than has met anyone’s eye. I will no longer be surprised if he proves to be both a strong and successful president. . . .” We know now that Mr. Royster’s optimism has been less born out on other topics. In the early 1980s he warned of a decline in academic standards in public schools, including at the university level. In 1983 he saw some hope that a “pendulum was swinging” when a National Commission on Excellence in Education “charged that there was a ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in our public schools and made a plea for higher standards.” Alas, for less hope in 2021.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-14 00:00:00 Kirsten Le Guerneuve This book is a fascinating historical artifact from one of the first writers to fully grasp the implications of the major party realignment happening in the period of the 1930s to 1960s. Kevin Phillips was a republican political operative and involved in the Nixon presidential campaign of 1968. He viewed the emerging republican majority that he describes with enthusiasm. But you don't have to agree with his politics (I very much do not) to recognize that his grasp on voting patterns at a granular, county-by-county level is accurate and his analysis has a great deal of truth to it. The book has no moral dimension; it's purpose is to lay out a winning strategy for the republican party is based on racial voting patterns in the south, combined with traditional republican strength in non-Great Lakes midwest and plains, as well as the southwest and California, which at the time had just voted for Nixon and elected Reagan as Governor. Phillips describes the old voting patterns that were largely a result of the Civil War breaking down under the new political dynamic created by the New Deal/Great Society programs. He is very interested in tracing migration patterns of various ethnicities and correlating them to voting patterns, demonstrating that Yankee and Scandinavian settlement generally results in (present day) Democratic voting, and Scotch-Irish and German settlement in the mid-Atlantic and south are fertile ground for Republicans. There are lots of exceptions to these patterns, and Phillips goes to lengths to explore them, discussing the impacts of immigrant arrivals in cities, Tammany Hall style machines, Catholicism and anti-Catholicism, and the movement of previously enslaved populations out of the south. What we see is the now-well-known "Southern Strategy" of the GOP in its early form, as the previously "solid South" turned from Democratic to GOP stronghold, and the same happened in reverse in the New England states. Phillips is good at understanding how third party candidacies helped to obscure this transition, including the Strom Thurmond "Dixiecrat" ticket of 1948 and the George Wallace candidacies. Voters opting for these third party options tended to be traditional Democrats who voted third party as a weigh-station out of the Democratic party and into the GOP. Later in life, Phillips came to greatly regret what he had written, and the blueprint it gave conservatives to become an anti-civil rights party and ultimately the monstrosity it has become. It is certainly strange the way that anyone conversant at all in US political history understands the parties' realignment to some degree, but it remains extraordinarily difficult to grasp how this could have actually taken place in reality. Even a figure like Trump, as heterodox as he is in some ways, was completely unable to alter Congressional Republicans' traditional policy positions. It took incredible economic upheaval, novel political innovations (again, New Deal and Great Society), and the enduring racism of the American people to achieve realignment over the course of decades. This book is a view from someone who was seeing it pretty clearly in real time. A lot of Phillips predictions of what to come where very close to correct, and we did in fact enter a period of conservative dominance of our political life, which we may or may not still be living in. The only big mistake he makes is his contention that California and the Pacific coast generally will continue to be battlegrounds. The conservative southern California he imagined overtaking liberal San Francisco was never to come into reality. There was a a book in 2002 entitled "The Emerging Democratic Majority" that purported to make a similar case a coming period of Democratic dominance. I haven't read it, but heard good things about it, though I must say that it does not feel like a period of emerging Democratic majorities to me. It does feel like a moment of unusual pressures, fractures, and possibility though - so one never knows.