Two new books look at the project to overturn the 2020 presidential election and whether Jan. 6 — the attack on Congress — was a blip or an omen: “The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It” by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague, and “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them” by Barbara F. Walter.
Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at Yale, assessed them in The Washington Post. They agree, he wrote: “2020 was a lucky break. The guardrails held, but only barely. Without fundamental reforms, they may not hold longer. And the very forces that weakened those guardrails make repairing them extremely hard.”
“The Steal” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 304 pp.): “A marvel of reporting,” with insight into motivations; “a kaleidoscope of stories about how officials and activists in pivotal states like Arizona and Georgia responded to Trump’s false claims of election fraud” — people who work the polls, count ballots, certify results, consider legal challenges and oversee that work for the political parties. “In 2020 on the Republican side, that oversight veered more and more into interference.”
“How Civil Wars Start” (Crown, 320 pp.): This analytical book sold Hacker, a skeptic, on the likelihood of another such war. Walter, “a leading scholar of civil wars,” updates their dominant image: They “rarely involve armed forces on both sides” and are far more likely in weak democracies (not, say, in weak dictatorships). “They’re also highly contingent on the role of social media and the quality of political leadership.” So, think right-wing paramilitaries and a war “decentralized, drawn-out and defined by terrorism.”
On why civil wars start, three factors: “eroding political institutions; extreme racial and ethnic factionalization, especially when previously privileged groups are losing power; and the capacity of prominent leaders to foment violence, with social media their current (and highly effective) weapon of choice.” Civil war will or won’t happen “based on what we do now,” Hacker wrote. “This is a book that everyone in power should read immediately.”
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Back to cash again: We’re eager to spot a Maya Angelou quarter — the first in the American Women Quarters Program. Seekers should ask their bank in late January or early February when the quarters will circulate locally, the U.S. Mint says. (Smithsonian)
In the pipeline: Memoirs from Bill Barr, attorney general under George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, due March 8; Mark Esper, on his time as Trump’s defense secretary, May; Kathleen Buhle, ex-wife of Hunter Biden, June; Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks whistleblower and transgender advocate, October.
Obituary notes: Terry Teachout — a dauntingly well-read cultural critic whose wide-ranging writing included biographies of H.L. Mencken, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington — was 65.
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New and recent
Joseph J. Ellis, “The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783.? (Liveright, 400 pp.) The last in the trilogy that began with “Founding Brothers.” Ellis explores prominent and lesser known figures of the time (white, Black, American, British); the military and political action; and the ideologies that clashed under the necessarily accommodating umbrella of “the cause.” A “carefully wrought, highly engaging reality check on the elusive character of the American Revolution,” historian Andrew Burstein wrote in The Washington Post.
Also: Jonathan Evison, “Small World,” stories from today and the mid-1800s of an amalgam of people, together on a train. … Laura Lippman, stories: “Seasonal Work” … Kathryn Schulz, a memoir of grief, “Lost & Found.”
— Erica Smith, erica.smith@pilotonline.com