AMERICAN BREAKDOWN

The former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal adds to the why-American-society-is-in-such-a-mess genre.

Baker, now a WSJ editor at large and a regular commentator on Fox News, maintains that he is nonpartisan and that “there is plenty of blame to go around,” but readers will quickly discover that he is an old-school conservative. Like many traditional conservatives, the author deplores Donald Trump and his followers. However, if forced to choose between a die-hard, right-wing conspiracy theorist and a conventional liberal, he would throw up his hands in despair. Baker blames much of our current crisis on “the rapid advance in progressive ideologies in American institutions in the last thirty years or so.” Perhaps his greatest anger is directed at his own profession, journalism, which—with the exception of his WSJ—has dropped all pretense of objectivity. “Taking their cue from Karl Marx,” news organizations refuse to merely report the world but work actively to change it. Baker also excoriates American universities, a conservative bugbear long dominated by liberals who shout down guest speakers and harass nonconformist professors. Least effective is the author’s chapter on the medical profession, an uncomfortably Trumpian attack on pandemic-era public health measures. He mostly denounces quarantines as hysterical fearmongering, and he maintains that vaccines, although modestly effective, have been oversold and should be voluntary. Since he blames America’s “cultural revolution” on a powerful, isolated cabal and opposes violence, his conclusion is short on specifics. He places his trust in the blameless, salt-of-the-earth American citizenry who “believe in traditional American values and ideals, put American…interests ahead of global concerns, and favor tough immigration restrictions and the reassertion of American sovereignty.” Although Baker believes in climate change, he also argues that the matter is overblown and that “climate extremism” is the new global religion, “a temporal canon, with its own moral and doctrinal heft.”

A polemic that will arouse conservatives and irritate liberals.