Up@dawn 2.0 (blogger)

Delight Springs

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Speaking Truth to Both the Right and the Left

George Packer’s “Last Best Hope” and Jonathan Rauch’s “The Constitution of Knowledge” argue that Trump die-hards and the woke both threaten democracy.

Like many public intellectuals who are worth reading, George Packer and Jonathan Rauch don’t toe a predictable line in American political and intellectual debate. They despise Donald Trump and the disinformation-heavy discord he has spawned. But they don’t share all the views of progressives, either, as they’ve come to be defined in many left-leaning spaces. Packer and Rauch are here to defend the liberalism of the Enlightenment — equality and scientific rationality in an unapologetically Western-tradition sense. They see this belief system as the country’s great and unifying strength, and they’re worried about its future...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/books/review/george-packer-last-best-hope-jonathan-rauch-the-constitution-of-knowledge.html?smid=em-share

No comments:

Post a Comment