"Why I Write" by George Orwell

Why I Write is a small volume of four essays by George Orwell (1903-1950), the author of 1984, Animal Farm, and many other works. The essays include the title one, “Why I Write;” “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” “A Hanging;” and “Politics and the English Language.” 

Orwell’s writing, and his understanding of it, reflected his political beliefs. He had a five-year stint with the Burma Division of the Indian Imperial Police, but eft with a medical certificate because his health was ruined, he dabbled in writing and a somewhat itinerant life and married, but then joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. That experience shaped the rest of his life, his politics, and the books and essays he wrote. He became a democratic socialist, but he was opposed to totalitarianism in all its form, both right and left. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Secession on the Ballot This Week…Almost – Neil Chatelain at Emerging Civil War. 

 

Review: The World Will Never See the Like: The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913 by John Hopkins – Civil War Books and Authors. (You can read my review here.)

 

‘The Changelings,’ poem by Rudyard Kipling – Adam Roberts at Poems Ancient and Modern. 

 

Saturday Good Reads - Dec. 23, 2023

This week, a Missouri state representative from suburban St. Louis was expelled from her political caucus. She’d been running for state attorney general in the primary election. Her problem was being photographed with an alt-right conspiracy theorist and then with a Holocaust denier, and spreading a rumor that her primary opponent, who is Jewish, was an agent for the Israeli government. Lest you think she was a supporter of the man with orange hair, she’s actually a longstanding member of the opposite political party.  

I’ve watched the news coverage of the protests at our elite universities, and it’s like watching Western civilization finally crack. Francesca Block explains how U.S. schools teach antisemitism. Lee Smith at Tablet Magazine underscores that, noting that Palestine is now a global empire. Carl Trueman wonders if Adolf Hitler has now won over the left. 

 

And this story – this story by Bari Weiss – wiped me: “Miracle in Hell: The Baby Twins Who Survived a Massacre.”

 

Speaking of the man with the orange hair, of whom I am not a fan, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled this week that the United States should become the Venezuela of the northern hemisphere, with California hot on Colorado’s heels. In the name of democracy, a state supreme court tries to destroy it, achieving exactly the opposite of what was intended. Reportedly, Republicans are already planning to return the favor and sue to strike President Biden from the ballot in Arizona, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Remember: you no longer have to be charged, tried and convicted of a crime; you just have to be deemed a “threat to democracy.” 

 

More Good Reads

 

Writing and Literature

 

Sigrid Undset: A Study in Christian Realism – A.H. Winsnes at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

British Stuff

 

Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – A London Inheritance. 

 

The Crystal Palace Subway – Helen Barrett at The Critic Magazine.

 

American Stuff

 

The Saddest Christmas – Evan Portman at Emerging Civil War.

 

Faith

 

Grace Grows Best in Winter – Jeffrey Stivason at Gentle Reformation.

 

Turning Grief into Love – Laura Boggess.

 

A season to renounce hate speech – Helen Louise Herndon at American Thinker.

 

When Did Multiple Services Begin? – Caleb Morrell at 9Marks. 

 

Life and Culture

 

Norman Lear: An iconic mass media seeker who evolved past secularism – Terry Mattingly ay Get Religion. 

 

On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Embracing Limits to Find Identity, Community, and Place – Sarah Silflow at Front Porch Republic.

 

Poetry

 

Seeds of Yahweh – Sandra Heska King at On Aging and Other Adventures.

 

10 Funny and Nostalgic Christmas Poems – Society of Classical Poets. 

 

Midwinter – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Solstice – Paul Wittenberger.

 

The Winter of Listening – David Whyte.

 

O Holy Night – Malakai Bayoh and Aled Jones

 Painting: Woman Reading and a Man Seated at a Table, oil on panel (circa 1676) by Frans van Mieris (1635-1681), the Leiden Collection.

Saturday Good Reads - Oct. 28, 2023

Louisa May Alcott is known for her works of fiction like Little Women, but she was also an essayist. Liz Rosenberg at Literary Hub writes about Alcott’s forgotten essays, including one long one about her work at a Civil War Hospital for wounded soldiers.  

Our legacy news media seem bent on reaching a state of irrelevance. It took a week, but The New York Times finally addressed the story that it likely hoped was true but was nothing but Hamas propaganda – the supposed bombing of the Gaza hospital that never happened. Had it been true, it would have fit the media narrative perfectly and turned Israel into the equivalent of Hamas. However, I suppose we should be grateful that the Times owned up to it, finally. Many others didn't. And the new media keeps wringing its hand over the plummeting in trust by the American public.

 

We all believed anti-Semitism was the crime of the 20^th century, but we had gotten beyond that. As it turns out, it’s alive and well in our elite universities, the news media (The New York Times hires a fan of Hitler as its freelance writer in Gaza), and Congress, including one of the representatives from St. Louis. Julia Duin at Get Religion writes about what Jews worldwide are experiencing right now, like it’s the 1930s all over again. Michael Oren at The Free Press says this isn't about Israel anti-Zionism; it's a war against the Jews. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Faith

 

The Question Your Kids Shouldn’t Be Asking – Melisa Edgington at Your Mom Has a Blog.

 

Why Are People So Fascinated with ‘Lost” Books of the Bible? – Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder. 

 

What Did You Plan to Be Hated For? – Rhys Laverty at The New Albion.

 

British Stuff

 

The curious priorities of the police – Sarah Phillimore and Twelve things more arrestable than calling for jihad – Ben Sixsmith – at The Spectator.

 

Why I joined the October Declaration – Toby Guise at The Critic Magazine.

 

Poetry

 

The Word – Jeffrey Essmann at Society of Classical Poets. 

 

A poet converted by her own writing – Lynn Domina at The Christian Century.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Bookish Believers – Katelyn Ho at Story Warren.

 

Y’all Want to see a Death of the Author Body? – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

 

Politics

 

What liberals still don’t get about Trump supporters – John MacArthur at The Spectator.

 

Culture

 

The Mortal Danger of ‘Yes-Buttery’ – Rod Dreher. 

 

Qatar’s War for Young American Minds – Eli Lake at The Free Press.

 

Dear Eddy – Phil Craig at The Critic Magazine.

 

American Stuff

 

From Pony Express Hero to Civil War Casualty: Remembering Johnny Fry – Tonya McQuade at Emerging Civil War. 

 

9 Civil War Movies with Glaring Historical Inaccuracies – Liamba Ngenda at Screen Rant. 

 

Civil War Art: Veterans in the Fields – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

 

I Worship You – James KE

 Painting: Woman Reading in an Interior, oil on canvas by Carl Vilhelm Holsoe (1863-1935). 

"The Myth of Voter Suppression" by Fred Lucas

Like everything else in contemporary America, the subject of elections has divided along red and blue lines. By significantly changing rules on ballots, how they’re collected, how they’re secured, how voting does or doesn’t require a photo ID, and similar areas, the divide opens between conservatives concerned about election fraud and progressives cry “voter suppression.”  

Fred Lucas, manager of the Investigative Reporting Project at The Daily Signal (a conservative news outlet), took a close look at what evidence there is for both voter fraud and voter suppression. In The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections, he makes a convincing case that voter suppression is indeed a myth, while election fraud has a long and dishonorable history in American elections.

 

The two sides of election concern have a long and interwoven history, Lucas says. Voter suppression, in fact, was almost standard operating procedure in Southern states during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods – and it was a procedure perfected by state Democratic parties to keep as few Black Americans from voting as possible. And it played a significant role in how the Democratic Party kept a hammerlock on cities like New York and the Southern states in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. (I can personally testify to that control; I grew up in Louisiana, where for decades your only political choices were Democrats.)

 

Fred Lucas

Lucas looks at electoral reforms, undertaken by almost half of the states, to see if any of them have discouraged voting. They haven’t. The reforms include cleaning the voting rolls of dead people and people who’ve left the state (something the Michigan secretary of state recently fought to keep from happening, for some unknown reason). He discusses the business of vote trafficking (in a capitalist society, everything gets capitalized). And he also considers how race is used in the arguments over election reform.

 

He examines the various bills introduced and occasionally passed by one house of the current Congress that would essentially federalize control of elections (Lucas sees that as a dangerous mistake). And he presents an in-depth study of all of the various groups behind the claims of “voter suppression” and who’s funding them – including some of the biggest charitable foundations in America.

 

Lucas is also the author of Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Elections, The Right Frequency: The Story of the Talk Radio Giants Who Shook Up the Political and Media Establishment, Abuse of Power: Inside the Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump, and other works. An award-winning journalist and veteran White House correspondent, he’s written and reported for Fox News, Newsweek, National Review, History Magazine Quarterly, The Washington Examiner, Newsmax, The Blaze, Townhall, The Federalist, The National Interest, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, and other news outlets. He received a B.A. degree from Western Kentucky University and an M.S. degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. He lives in Virginia. 

 

The Myth of Voter Suppression is both a timely and vital book. Well-research and well-documented, it tells a story of great concern and great peril for the future of American elections. 

 

Related: 

 

Tainted by Suspicion by Fred Lucas.

“Who is an Evangelical?” by Thomas Kidd

In the early summer of 2016, we bumped into some good friends we hadn’t seen in a while. At one time we’d attended the same church, but we had both gone on to different congregations. We were at a restaurant when we saw them. All four of us would qualify as “evangelicals.”

We chatted, and then we asked, “What are we going to do about the election? How can we vote for either Trump or Clinton?” Their response pretty well summed it up: “It’s a choice between the devil you know and the devil you don’t know.” It was a handwringing moment, and an ongoing struggle, for us all.

I mention that story because of the news media’s fixation with “81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016.” No one cared when 79 percent of white evangelicals voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, because Romney lost. (I should point out that the “81 percent” number has been examined and dissected by a number of people, and it may only be what the news media cartoonishly presented it to be. It’s as if the election was Donald Trump in a vacuum, that it was Trump or no one – when it clearly was anything but that.) But the news media rarely looks any further than its own narrative, and it missed the quandary so many of us evangelicals faced in the 2016 election.

In Who is an Evangelical: A History of a Movement in Crisis, Thomas S. Kidd, the James Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, concisely looks at the history of evangelicalism, its American historical context, its increasing involvement in American politics in the post-World War II period, and what he believes is the crisis it faces today. He sees the crisis as the identification of evangelicals with politics as opposed to its mission of spreading the gospel.

In an interview with Samuel James at The Gospel Coalition, Kidd noted that it’s the news media who consistently identify evangelicals with politics. In his introduction to the book, Kidd notes that he is a “#NeverTrumper,” and an evangelical. He is someone always worth paying attention to. He’s written numerous books on American history, American religious and cultural history, and related topics. His subjects have included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, the Great Awakening, Baptists in America, the religious history of the American Revolution, Patrick Henry, and a recent two-volume history of America entitled, appropriately enough, American History.

Who is an Evangelical? is, in part, a history lesson. It covers how evangelicals came to be, the role they played in the coming the of the Civil War, the controversy between evangelicals and “fundamentalists,” the importance of Billy Graham, the New Christian Right, and evangelicals from Reagan to Obama. (Evangelical support for Donald Trump can’t be understood without understanding evangelical reaction and response to the Obama era.) Kidd also tackles the “81 percent number,” noting that self-identification as evangelical included many Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, and that there were oddities in the polling process. And he notes the credibility crisis polling itself has been experiencing. 

Thomas S. Kidd

He also points out that, cynics and critics (and the news media) aside, politics isn’t the only defining factor as to what makes an evangelical. In fact, it may be relatively small. What is more important to evangelicals Likely remains what it has always been – the gospel, worship, charitable activity, missions, and teaching. 

Kidd’s book is an important one, whether you consider Trump an angel, a devil, or something in between. He’s telling us that evangelicals have a long history, predating the American Revolution and the Constitution, and will continue to have a history after this current “era of ill feeling” has passed. He’s warning that evangelicals are facing a crisis from too closely identifying with Republican politics. And politics is not what makes an evangelical an evangelical.

Related: 

A Conversation with Thomas Kidd on Evangelicalism – The Gospel Coalition.

Top photograph by Robert Metz via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The Global and American Spirit" by Evan Lanning

It’s rare to find a collection of essays that range intelligently over a broad array of subjects, are easily readable and engaging, and fully hold your interest for 238 pages. That’s what author Evan Lanning has managed to achieve with The Global and American Spirit.

Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine. The Constitution and the Anti-Federalists objections to it. Alexis de Toqueville. The controversy over Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. A fascinating survey of the American novel. How about philosophical perspectives in The Grapes of Wrath? Book reviews. An examination of Tolkien’s ideas. 

Lanning seems comfortable and eminently knowledgeable in the worlds of American history, literature, politics, philosophy, and current events. Here are a few of the standout essays.

“Aristotle and Politics” discusses the Greek philosopher’s ideas on the three associations which serve as the basis of community – the household., the village, and the polis – and how they conflict with socialism (proving there’s nothing new under the sun; ancient Greece had its socialism proponents, too). 

In “Cicero and De Oratore,” Lanning considers that convincing oratory doesn’t necessarily happen because of “rational argument, logical dialog, or elegant and adorned prose.” Convincing oratory happens through appeals to the passions and the emotions.

“Integrity and the Constitution” examines the argument between constitutionalist originalists and those who believe the Constitution should be a “living document.”

“The Jefferson Controversy: When Politics Meet History” views the Jefferson / Sally Hemmings issue through the lens of politics and delves into the actual evidence for Jefferson fathering children by his slave.

“The Continuity and Progress of the American Novel” studies how American literature has been shaped by culture, politics, religion, or some combination of the three. Lanning looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, My Antonia by Willa Cather, The Sun Also Risesby Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. 

“Taking Sides in American History” asks, and answers, questions like, did the Great Society fail? Did rock and roll upend American family and social customs? Was the Americanization of the war in Vietnam inevitable? And should America remain a nation of immigrants?

And there’s much more.

Lanning is a field representative of the Leadership Institute, which provides training for conservatives in campaigns, fundraising, grassroots organizing, youth politics, and communications. He lives in Indiana.

The Global and American Spirit is a collection of insightful, well-written essays that directly and indirectly inform many of our contemporary social, economic, and political issues.

Top photograph by Tom Coe via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Mystery Story That Ripped Me Off

Each Thursday, I usually have a review of a mystery or crime novel. I’ve read mysteries since I was six years old, stating with Trixie Belden, graduating to the Hardy Boys, then Agatha Christie, and on from there. Today, some of the best writers our there can be found penning mystery novels – Anne Perry, Ian Rankin, Louise Penny, William Brodrick, and more.

It was with some eagerness that I started reading the book I planned to review this week. It was set in the town where I grew up, it was in a series of which I’d read the first (a big award winner) many years ago, and it had an interesting premise.

I do not have a review of this book, this week or any week. I will not mention the title or the author, to protect the guilty. But what a profound disappointment.

When I buy a mystery novel, I want to read a mystery novel. I don’t want to read what begins as a good story and then is marred by the author’s political prejudices. I’m not interested in the author virtue signaling as to how “woke” she or he is. I don’t want characters stereotyped into cardboard cartoons, and whole classes of people dismissed as ignorant, so the author can let his or her friends know how cool they are. 

And it didn’t have to be this way. The novel has an interesting premise, several original supporting characters, and a knowledge of the geography and how people talk. But where it went awry was with the main character, the investigating police detective, who comes from a wealthy family but is hip, woke, aware, perceptive about privilege, and lives with a lover in the politically cool part of town. All of the politics flowed through this character, and it became tiresome.

I read the story to the end, even as the narrative started to collapse in on itself. The ending was contrived; the killer turned out to be a minor character who has a brief mention in the story. I think what happened is that the author got so caught up in politics that he (or she) lost control of the story and had to figure out a way to end it. 

The reader, or at least this reader, got shortchanged. Which is a nice way to say I was ripped off.

This past weekend, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I read a review of a local production of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams in which the reviewer made the claim that all men in the 1950s wanted to be Stanley Kowalski, the sexy and abusive character played by Marlon Brando in the movie. On the same page, in a story about the new Gauguin exhibition opening at the St. Louis Art Museum. the writer included a sentence about how the legal age for women to marry at the time of Gauguin was 13, “a law written by men, likely, to benefit themselves.” No source was cited for either statement; they were included as bald statements of fact when they were nothing more than political statements castigating a particular group of people, in both cases, white males.

Our culture has allowed politics to saturate everything. Everything we do has become a political act fraught with implications. Everything we say is judged through a political prism. And everything I read in the newspaper has to be deconstructed to understand the writer’s (and the editor’s) political bias.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

My worry is that this is just beginning.

Photograph by Brian Wertheim via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The Great Revolt” by Salena Zito and Brad Todd

Donny Deutsch. former CNBC program host and regular guest on MSNBC, says people who voted for President Trump are “like Nazis.” Actor Peter Fonda tweets that the President’s young son should be kidnapped and turned over to pedophiles (he apologized after a huge uproar). Comedian Kathy Griffin displays the President’s head and eventually apologizes (sort of). The President himself regularly tweets any number of true, untrue, half-true, and who-the-heck-knows-what’s-true things every day.

Welcome to what passes for public and political discourse in 2018 America. There’s no question that the 2016 presidential election is still creating a major upheaval in American politics and society. 

Salena Zito and Brad Todd considered what happened and took a deep look at the five states where the election was won for Donald Trump – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. All five voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2016. And they went deeper that statewide results – they went into the counties that flipped from Obama to Trump, and many by large margins. And unlike most mainstream media reporters, they didn’t parachute in from New York or Los Angeles the day after the election, interviewed a few people, and then left. They stayed around, and they talked with people, often I their own homes. They talked with their families and friends, too.

The result of their work and research is The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.

They didn’t find Nazis, unless a lot of Nazis voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2016. In fact, they didn’t find a “typical” Trump voter at all. What they did find was that people who voted for Donald Trump in the counties in those five states could be broadly classified into seven groups, and, because one of the authors is with an opinion research firm, they gave the groups catchy titles.

The seven are “Red-Blooded and Blue Collared,” “Perot-istas,” “Rough Rebounders,” “Girl Gun Power,” “Rotary Reliables,” “King Cyrus Christians,” and “Silent Suburban Moms.” The chapter on each includes interviews with representative people. 

Salena Zito

I don’t live in one of those five states, but I recognized every single person they talked with. I know people just like them; I have family members just like them; I go to church with people like them. 

And while these groups and the people are markedly different, certain common themes clearly emerged. They don’t trust big corporations. They don’t trust the national and even the local news media. They believe Barack Obama, even though they voted for him, led the country in the wrong direction, and especially when it came to national defense and security and the economy. Many of them own small businesses, and they watched their medical insurance costs skyrocket with Obama care while big corporations were exempted. They saw a playing field tilted against them and the communities they live in and love. They believed they were disdained by the economic and cultural power centers on the coasts. And they saw Hilary Clinton offering more of the same.

Their concerns ran so deep that they could look at Trump’s vulgarity, antics, crazy statements, and tweets and say, yeah, they’re bad, but maybe he’s the one who will blow up what needs to be blown up.

Brad Todd

The authors consider these groups, and then they look at the broader implications of what happened in 2016, and what that means for the future. 

Zito, a native of Pittsburgh, worked for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for 11 years. She joined the New York Post in 2016 and is a political analyst for CNN and a reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. Todd is the founding partner of OnMessage, Inc., a national Republican advertising and opinion research firm. 

The Great Revolt tells the story of 2016. It suggests that none of the people the authors talked with have changed their minds since the election, and that national mainstream media coverage of Trump – contrary to what journalists and editors might think – is only reinforcing their beliefs. 

As a nation, we have moved into uncertain and uncharted waters.

Top illustration: the U.S. electoral map after the 2016 presidential election. 

“The Ferryman” by Jez Butterworth

The story opens rather ominously. A body has been found in a bog; the man had been missing for 10 years. It’s clear that he had been executed – his hands had been bound behind his back and he was shot in the back of the head. Two men attempt to convince, and then successfully threaten, a Catholic priest, to convince the man’s older brother to let the death be. 

Switch scenes to a farmhouse early on the day of harvest in 1981. The Carney family is waking up, and it is a large and extended family. Quinn Carney is the family head; he and his wife Mary have seven children, stretching from the teens to a baby. Living with them is Quinn’s sister-in-law Caitlyn and her son Oisin; Caitlyn’s husband disappeared 10 years before, although periodic rumors report sightings of him in Ireland and England.  

The family includes three aging relatives – Aunt Maggie, afflicted with dementia; Uncle Patrick, who likes his liquor; and Aunt Patricia, who is rather sardonically funny and lives to hate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. 

This is Northern Ireland. It is the Time of Troubles, the Irish Republican Army, and random and not-so-random violence. And what looks to be a happy, loud, and somewhat raucous family will discover the violence of politics and the politics of violence rearing their heads. 

This is the story of The Ferryman by British playwright Jez Butterworth. It’s a moving story, and a disturbing story. It is also a story that, while it may be about Northern Ireland and the IRA in 1981, it is also a story very much with us today, in this age of extremist politics, protest, division, and anger. And this is true for both reading the play and seeing it performed. 

As such, the play can be considered a warning against what happens to the family when politics and violence fuse together. 

Jez Butterworth

Butterworth is one of Britain’s leading playwrights, and the author of several previous plays, including Jerusalem, Mojo, The River, The Night Heron, Parlour Song, and The Winterling. The Ferryman debuted in April in London and is currently playing at the Gielgud Theatre. 

The minor character of Aunt Pat is a critical one to the story. She not only directly introduces the edge of politics into the play; she also represents the longstanding bitterness and anger against the English that fueled so much of the IRA’s activities. 

But it is the character of Quinn Carney that is the critical one. He’s a man in love with his sister-in-law and not his invalid wife; he restrains himself politically and focuses on his managing his farm. But he also has a past as a former IRA soldier. And as the growing shadows gather around Quinn and his family, the question becomes what he will do. 

The Ferryman is a hard story, but a story that needs to be told. And read. 

Top photograph of harvest in Northern Ireland via WallpaperStock.net.

“Shattered” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

I started reading Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign and quickly found myself paying close attention to the numerous accounts of the presidential candidate’s interactions with her speechwriter, Dan Schwerin. Perhaps it was because corporate (and a little political) speechwriting has been such a large part of my career. Perhaps it was because the accounts, as chronicled by authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, rang so true to my own experience.

Perhaps it was because I worked for a wide array of executives, a few of whom shared character traits in common with Clinton.

After reading the book, here’s my understanding of Clinton and her speechwriter. She liked him; he was a fine speechwriter. She worked him tirelessly; he believed in the candidate and was willing to work long, thankless, hours. But she was never really satisfied with his work, because he seemed unable to articulate why she was running for President of the United States.’

There was a good reason for that, one that went right to the heart of why Clinton ultimately lost the election. The candidate herself could never articulate why she was running for President. “I’m the most experienced and competent candidate ever” was not a compelling campaign narrative. “It’s time we broke the glass ceiling for women” was also not a reason.

That wasn’t the speechwriter’s fault.

Allen and Parnes take the reader on a highly detailed, in-depth tour of the Clinton campaign, from the time before the announcement that she was a candidate all the way to the post-election remorse and recriminations. I didn’t for a minute doubt that they themselves were Clinton supporters, but this book is not a flattering kiss-up to the candidate. Instead, it is a clear-eyed view of what happened and why. And other factors built on her inability to articulate her reason for being in the race in the first place.

Clinton was determined to avoid the mistakes she believed her team had made running against Barack Obama in 2008. She was so consumed with this that she ended up making many of the same ones, because she missed the essential nature of those mistakes in 2008.

The campaign relied heavily on data analytics – perfected by the Obama campaign teams in 2008 and 2012 – and less on traditional polling. They likely should have relied on both. Data analytics misled them in Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan, until it was too late to do anything about it.

The candidate and the campaign team first missed and then misunderstood the huge wave of populism that rose like a monster from the political deep. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both rode that wave. Both Sanders and Trump were able to articulate clearly why they were running for the country’s highest office. And both Clinton and her team saw but seemed unable to deal with the revolt of the American working class, especially in the Rust Belt.

The campaign team and the candidate assumed the “narrative of the blue wall” – and believed that states that had gone Democratic in recent elections would continue to do so. The Sunday before the election, warning lights were flashing full tilt in the Rust Belt, and the response was too little and way too late.

The ruthless power struggles within the campaign team, by the paid consultants, and by the DNC were all factors.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

The perceptions of the Clinton political empire played a role – the Clinton Foundation and its acceptance of money from all comers; the speeches she made to groups like Goldman Sachs; the hovering presence of Bill Clinton, who always believed he knew better than the campaign team. Sometimes he was right. Sometimes he was wrong, like when he met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix airport.

Clinton went into the campaign hobbled by the ongoing media coverage of her private email server used for State Department business. And once Wikileaks started the release of the hacked John Podesta and Democratic National Committee emails, most people conflated those emails with Clinton’s server problems.

FBI director James Comey playing popup-head with “We’re ending the criminal investigation of Clinton, no indictment but she did a bunch of illegal things,” “We’re reopening the investigation,” and “We didn’t find anything after all” was also a significant factor.

All of this, and the details of the primary campaigns and the general election, form the narrative of Shattered. Donald Trump plays a small role in this story. Clinton’s campaign team had never run into a candidate like him before, not to mention some of his wild statements and antics (like inviting four alleged women victims of Bill Clinton to one of the presidential debates). But the authors clearly see the reasons for Clinton’s defeat not so much explained by Trump as by the significant failings of the candidate and her campaign team.

Allen is an award-winning journalist with a long political reporting pedigree, including Politico, Bloomberg News, and Roll Call. He’s currently the head of community and content at Sidewire and an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. Parnes is senior White House correspondent for The Hill and has also written for Politico. She has previously reported on the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. Allen and Parnes are also the co-authors of HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Rodham Clinton (2014).  

Dan Schwerin, the speechwriter

The authors rely a lot on unnamed sources (like “a senior campaign official”), but they explain why and how they managed that. The account of the Clinton campaign in Shattered has the ring of truth. And while the authors don’t cover much beyond the two days following the election, there is much here that points to what happened in the months afterward – the shock of the defeat, the rage it engendered, and the “Russia interfered with our election” narrative. Among others.

And I keep thinking about Schwerin, the speechwriter, struggling to write his candidate’s speeches in the context of a vicious campaign, constant crises upending finished speeches, sniping from the campaign team, Obama’s people, the consultants, the DNC, and the candidate herself. Of all the people covered by this book, he’s the one – the only one – that garners my sympathy.

Shattered is an absorbing book, but if you’re not a political junkie, it does require some stamina to get through the detail. But there’s a reason for that – the explanation is in the details.

Top photograph: a Hillary for President campaign poster.