In the course of a review of The Plot against America, Philip Roth’s dystopian novel that has the United States adopting a form of Nazi rule after the election of America-Firster Charles Lindbergh, the Australian writer Clive James confessed to never quite suspending his disbelief in this lurid alternative history. The United States, wrote James, “will never be free of racial prejudice for the same reason that it will never enshrine racial prejudice in anything like the Nuremberg Laws: it’s a free country.” He pithily concluded that “the insuperable problem with The Plot against America is that America is against the plot.”

Bari Weiss, a staff writer and editor for the opinion section of the New York Times, used to hold the same iron conviction that the United States would never succumb to the plague of anti-Semitism. In her slim new book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Weiss confesses she is no longer so sanguine about the status of the “Jewish question” in the land of the free, even if the symptoms of a resurgent anti-Semitism aren’t as acute as they are in the Old World. A fair reading of the times suggests that her newfound anxiety is prudent.

Not so long ago, sounding the alarm about the Jewish place in American life would have been dismissed as hyperbolic or hysterical. By the standards of Jewish history, the asylum discovered in the United States after the Shoah was an almost unimaginable gift. Weiss recounts that growing up on American soil around the turn of the 21st century, members of her community knew they were “the lucky ones.” The faint echoes of anti-Semitism were at a safe remove in this secular republic so profoundly shaped by its confrontations with both the Nazi abattoir and the Soviet gulag. “Survival had no longer been our concern,” she writes. In America, the sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah managed to flourish “like no other diaspora in history,” even if ample evidence of the vehemence ranged against their tribe could be found in the foreign press: pictures of buses blown apart by suicide bombers in Jerusalem, the YouTube video showing Daniel Pearl’s gruesome beheading in Karachi, firebombed synagogues in Stockholm, Jewish cemeteries desecrated in Paris, or attacks on those wearing a kippah in Berlin.

Weiss suspects that the failure of anti-Semitism to take hold on this side of the Atlantic can be credited to the American regime’s early efforts to inoculate the country against this venomous mania. In 1790, George Washington gave his assurance to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., that American Jews would “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” In the same letter, America’s first president promised that the new republic would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” As a nation founded on the universalist claims of the Declaration of Independence, the United States has seemed, for all its flaws, particularly ill-suited to federally sanctioned prejudice. In addition, the “special nature of America,” in Weiss’s telling, includes an attachment to the Hebraic tradition as reflected in the dizzying array of biblical place names that dot its landscape. This, in turn, has nourished America’s long-standing alliance with the State of Israel. All of this has predisposed America to be “a New Jerusalem for the Jewish people.”

This is not to deny that American Jews occasionally found themselves (as the author did, growing up in Pittsburgh) on the receiving end of rancid jokes about “picking up pennies,” along with creepy “questions about horns.” More often than not, however, these insults didn’t escalate into injuries, in large part because this ill-concealed prejudice was understood by mainstream society to be anathema to American politics and philosophy. It was tempting, therefore, to write off these churlish anti-Jewish outbursts as nothing more than “vestiges of an uglier, more violent past.” Any suggestion that they were harbingers of a resurgent chauvinism threatening Jewish life and limb would have been greeted with mirth.

Weiss’s visceral confidence that Jews (along with other religious minorities) would continue to enjoy the fruits of an apparently eternal American exceptionalism was shattered when her kehilla, or community, was visited by evil. In October 2018, eleven Jews were murdered in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where Weiss became a bat mitzvah. In that event, her hometown temple earned the awful distinction of suffering the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. The perpetrator of this heinous act was decidedly “homegrown,” to use the contemporary argot, attacking a synagogue that had opened its doors to persecuted people of all faiths as part of National Refugee Shabbat, a project of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Those who insisted that this was a singular episode of mass murder would be proved wrong a few months later when another white supremacist struck a synagogue in San Diego. The roots of anti-Jewish violence (if not yet anti-Jewish pogroms) that had long found infertile soil in the United States at last discovered a more hospitable patch of terrain.

Anyone familiar with the sordid record of fear and loathing toward Jews knows that severing these roots will be a task fraught with difficulty. (If you are not familiar, procuring a copy of How to Fight Anti-Semitism would be a very good place to start.) The first problem in understanding this complex phenomenon is that Judaism itself is properly understood not merely as a religion or an ethnicity, but as a people and a civilization. It follows, as Weiss succinctly explains, that there is no single reason for anti-Semitism.

Considering this hatred, one cannot fail to be struck — as Jean-Paul Sartre was in his essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” — by its lack of any recognizable logic save “the logic of passion.” Call me unlucky, but in the past year alone, in places as diverse as Dubai, Beirut, and Istanbul, your obedient servant has encountered this fit of illogic at close range. Over dinner or drinks, elite members of these societies (anti-Semitism frequently infects the pseudo-intellectual) unburdened themselves of the opinion that the official narrative about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is a cheap ruse, and al-Qaeda’s holy warriors were not responsible for this obscenity. (No prizes for guessing which intelligence service of a certain Levantine nation was fingered instead.)

This ancient animosity would not have proved so dynamic and durable down the centuries if it weren’t essentially protean. Though it’s often thought of as a neurosis, Saul Bellow insisted that it was a psychosis. It involves no exaggeration to say that the Weltanschauung of Jew-hatred is so replete with contradiction as to be schizophrenic.

After originating in Egypt, Judeophobia has been maintained as a fashion by such discrepant forces as medieval Christianity and modern Islam. In the 20th century, virulent forms of the virus broke out in the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church (the former being in sympathy with fascism and the latter blessing the execrable Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion that is the source of many conspiracy theories relating to the Jews, which were later reproduced in Hamas’s charter). In its various permutations, anti-Semitism has conscripted the Jew as a nefarious partisan and practitioner of capitalism and, alternately, of Bolshevism. (As Marx proved, not even being born a Jew according to the strict matrilineal principles of Jewish law is a guarantee against indulging this primitive stupidity.) Jews have been portrayed as vicious race contaminators as well as an all-powerful tribe standing apart from society. Anti-Semitism is not, in other words, a run-of-the-mill prejudice akin to racism against, say, “black” Africans. Rather, in the words of the historian Peter Hayes, it is “a kind of superstition” that conceives of a universal conspiracy in which the Jews are the sinister vanguard.

How to Fight Anti-Semitism focuses more on present than past manifestations of this “disease of the mind,” as Weiss dubs it, in echo of the historian Paul Johnson. The primary targets of her sharp pen are not the Gospel of John or even Marxist revolutionaries (it’s not for nothing that the German socialist August Bebel described anti-Semitism as the socialism of fools). Anti-Semitism has spread and mutated, appearing in the guise of a modern theocratic fascism while also poisoning diverse political movements in the West.

As Weiss is fully aware, her book is most apt to court controversy by providing a political guide to these fresh outbreaks of anti-Semitism. She begins rather dauntingly by noting that Jews in the West, especially in Europe, are confronted by a “three-headed dragon.” First, there is an antagonistic environment for Jews, thanks in large measure to the rapid growth of Islamism on the Old Continent. Second, there is ideological vilification by the political Left, which increasingly regards Israel as an illegitimate state serving no other purpose than as a bastion of Western (read: white) colonialism. Third, there is a recrudescence of reactionary populism on the political right that, while often professing sympathy for Israel, evinces a fervent commitment to blood-and-soil politics that seldom ends well for Jews.

Not everybody will agree with Weiss’s portrait of the hydra-headed enemy, which itself points to part of the problem. The tribal impulse in our political life has grown so pronounced that it has overwhelmed a common civic culture, rendering many classical liberals politically homeless. There is a well-oiled habit among the political class and in the press of excusing obvious, often deplorable, transgressions by one’s “own” side. The acid test for fighting anti-Semitism, as with so many other derangements, is to face it down with equal enthusiasm and commitment when it flares up on one’s team — or, better yet, to be more discriminating about which team one belongs to in the first place.

The Left
The true anti-Semite is easy enough to spot on the lunatic fringe, but it’s another matter if you’re not aware of the existence of plural lunatic fringes. Most children of the Enlightenment have been trained to discern this toxic ideology when religious fanatics inveigh against the Jews’ supposed responsibility for the murder of Christ or when voices of the “alt-right” curse the Jews for deriving from the racial gutter. But symptoms of the toxin are no less definitive when one hears of an occult world government whose “lobby” distorts U.S. foreign policy and global financial markets, or is treated to the filthy argument that, in its methods of warfare against Hamas — a terrorist organization as well as a regime based in large measure on the desire to stamp international Jewry out of existence — the Israel Defense Forces have taken a leaf from Hitler’s book.

As the Democratic party’s center of gravity has moved sharply to the left in recent years, the anti-imperialist mindset has gained traction, attributing the ills of the Middle East to British and French (and, latterly, Israeli and American) power. This political evolution has been exemplified by the now-famous freshman congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have brought critical (if maladroit) scrutiny to bear against the U.S.-Israel alliance. Another member of “the Squad,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has openly consorted with Jeremy Corbyn of Britain’s Labour party, a fellow traveler with Islamist movements whose tenure as Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition has been marred by one anti-Semitic scandal after another.

At its worst, this mindset is prone to detecting arcane Jewish manipulations behind all earthly power. More commonly, the insurgent progressive perspective masquerades as merely anti-Zionist, conceiving of Jews as part of the coalition of the oppressor while Israel, “the Jew among the nations,” is treated with frenzied derision. In addition to being indicted as the sole party responsible for the conflict with the Palestinians, and therefore almost entirely to blame for their miserable plight, Israel is portrayed as a uniquely malevolent force in the world. The dramatic rise of the BDS movement (deemed by the German Bundestag, not unjustifiably, as anti-Semitic) across the West today capably demonstrates that these vicious and extreme detractors of the Zionist entity are on the march.

This palpable and supercharged hostility has taken by surprise many liberal Zionists — as appears to have been the case for Weiss — who are given to assuming that the Left instinctively takes the side of the underdog, the immigrant, and the outsider. Although the Left has largely come by this reputation honestly, it does little good for Jews, who, despite being the principal target of hate crimes in the United States and most of Europe, scarcely qualify as an oppressed minority in the eyes of today’s Left. Weiss is keen to announce and decry progressives’ evolving hierarchy of privilege, whereby Zionists (i.e., the vast majority of worldwide Jewry) generally occupy the top rung as defenders of a colonial state embodying the “white man’s burden.” (This narrative seldom accounts for the Mizrahi Jews, more than half of Israel’s population, whose roots lie in the Middle East.)

The progressive temper does not merely direct suspicion and ire toward Israel and all its works but shows every sign of failing to recognize an enemy even when it meets one. The mainstream Left is proving increasingly blind to the clear and present danger posed by Islamist ideology and, worse, often lends aid and comfort to its cause. This vile tendency crops up regularly, but two prominent examples include the Southern Poverty Law Center (which designated the liberal Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz an “anti-Muslim extremist” and was later compelled to pay damages) and the Women’s March (whose unscrupulous leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour embraced the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan).

Weiss does not make the common mistake of conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This has always been a self-refuting standard, since, as Weiss reminds us, the earliest anti-Zionists to scorn Theodor Herzl’s dream of der judenstaat were themselves Jewish (not only the left-wing critics of Palestinian-Arab dispossession but the Orthodox sects that regarded Jewish political sovereignty prior to the arrival of the messiah as blasphemous). Incidentally, some Zionists have also been quite nasty anti-Semites, including British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour whose famous 1917 declaration “viewed with favor” a Jewish home in the mandate of Palestine in order to empty Britain of its Jewish population.

Nor does Weiss argue that stinging dissent from the Israeli government, let alone a harmlessly critical HBO mini-series, constitutes anti-Semitism, or even anti-Zionism. Nonetheless, it has become difficult in practice to disentangle anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, given that manifestations of both often share the purpose of demonization and delegitimization of the only Jewish state. (By contrast, try to imagine, if you can, a movement of similar breadth and depth aimed against another “faith-based” state, Pakistan, that was similarly cobbled together out of rival ethno-religious nationalisms amid the collapsing British imperial order in 1947.)

Weiss shrewdly analogizes modern anti-Zionism to the situation of a young couple weighing whether to have a child. All of the credible and practical concerns fall away once they have the baby, or else the parents are behaving immorally. Such is the case today, when the State of Israel is an established fact. To have questioned or opposed the project of building a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland before the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 is one thing. It is quite another to endorse tearing down that living, breathing state today, in full knowledge of the enormity that would ensue. The offense here is compounded when those agitating to make Israel a pariah state demonstrate little knowledge or concern about formulating and executing a strategy to confront bellicose regimes and militant Islamist groups that imperil the Jewish state and the civilized world.

The Right
In addition to being more diffuse than many imagine, the lunatic fringe is also thicker than is generally understood. Weiss is justly concerned by the spike in violence against Jews and other minorities from the identitarian right and about the grisly ideology behind it. After some years of dormancy, in August 2017 it flared into the open in Charlottesville when a “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists gathered at the University of Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Carrying tiki torches, these doughy goons shouted the slogans: “Blood and soil,” “White Lives Matter,” and, in a nod to the ancient anti-Semitic notion of the Jew as the evil puppeteer, “Jews will not replace us.” Lest we forget, President Trump’s reflexive response to this wicked nonsense was to put in a good word for such “very fine people.”

Weiss’s handling of the ugly movement known as the “alt-right” is fairly comprehensive, and the reader emerges on guard against this ethno-religious movement in our midst. She is also alert to the threat posed by unsavory authoritarian populists across the West who, though generally willing to dispel any impression of being motivated by racism, aim to turn their societies away from the liberal tradition. In either of these guises, the chauvinist Right tends to regard Muslims as the “other” and casts Israel (in Weiss’s wry description) as a “kind of anti-Muslim Sparta” rather than a pluralist democracy preserving its Jewish character even under existential threat.

The longer Israel and America remain in the saddle of populist nationalism, the more this crude description of Israel risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. (As Weiss must know, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank will eventually become all but irrevocable, at which point the Zionist project will cease to be recognizable as a democratic Jewish state.) Stuck in a defensive crouch, Israel’s conservative partisans in both countries tend to dismiss liberal scruples about the Israeli government’s innumerable follies and injustices. They cheer Prime Minister Netanyahu’s no-holds-barred posture against the Left, and the actions taken in self-defense against a militant Sunni gang in Gaza and a swelling “Shiite crescent” across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. These conservatives also cite the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, among other items, as reason to embrace Trump for being in the running for “the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House.”

Among Zionists, Weiss helpfully distinguishes between “the David people and the Goliath people.” The former think that Zion is always under siege, that any Israeli weakness will be exploited by its enemies, and that most other considerations are secondary. The latter think that Israel has accumulated such a preponderance of power that its vulnerability has been greatly diminished, and that illiberal aspects of Israel’s character (consider last year’s Jewish nation-state law that privileges Israel’s sectarian features over its secular pluralist claims) are sapping precious legitimacy at home and abroad. Weiss’s conclusion that each of these tendencies contains partial truths is fair enough as far as it goes, which is not far enough. In reality, the difference cannot be so evenly split.

As long as the political Right believes Israel’s society and government require an unqualified defense, the David people cannot be acquitted on the charge of loving the Jewish state “not wisely, but too well.” By refusing to hold Israel to its own standards as an exemplar of liberal democracy, such ostensible friends are rendering a grave disservice to the Zionist cause. Weiss can hardly be counted among them. She posits that “supporting Israel . . . means demanding that Israel live up to its ideals,” but never gets around to spelling out just what those ideals dictate in relation to the pressing need to reach a decent accommodation with the Palestinians. To be fair, Weiss does mention in passing the settlement enterprise as a valid point of criticism of Israel, and not a species of the phenomenon that is her subject. What’s more, she registers a genuine sense of “despair” when observing Palestinians waiting at checkpoints, and says that Palestinian suffering in the course of occupation constitutes a “stain” on her Jewish soul.

Nonetheless, the dogma of a “chosen people” has enabled a strident intolerance among many of Weiss’s coreligionists that demands a more thoroughgoing critique than it receives in How to Fight Anti-Semitism. This is not because anti-Semitism is a response to the behavior of Jews (it absolutely is not). Rather, Israel’s “accidental empire” of systematic land seizure in biblical Judea and Samaria is premised on a “civilization state” model of nationalism profoundly at odds with the liberal ideal that will render the case for Israel increasingly toxic.

Many years ago, Yehoshua Leibowitz, the editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, warned of a “Judeo-Nazi” tendency among the messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967.  One need not go that far to recognize that Israel’s defensive occupation of the post-1967 territories has unloosed a xenophobic current that not only serves to deprive Palestinians of their rights and sovereignty, but also cements sectarian and racist feelings within Israel proper. (To instance one example, courtesy of the Israel Democracy Institute, 70 percent of Jewish Israelis now oppose appointing Arab Israelis to cabinet posts.)

Weiss appears more panicked by the related matter of Israel’s new nationalist allies (e.g., Victor Orbán’s government in Hungary) who are self-proclaimed illiberal democrats and give off more than a whiff of anti-Semitism. Weiss also passionately criticizes the rabbinate’s suffocating influence among Israeli Jews, and scorches Netanyahu’s unfathomably crude move to pull the racist party Otzma Yehudit into his governing coalition. This is all to the good, but the failure to offer a straightforward denunciation of Israel’s occupation of land claimed and inhabited by Palestinians is a baffling omission in a book about fighting anti-Semitism — again, not because Jewish settlement beyond the Green Line is in any way related to anti-Semitism, but because it weakens Israel’s moral defenses when it needs them most.

If the populist-nationalist view of Israel continues to dominate the right side of the ballot in both Israel and America, and if that view continues to command electoral majorities, it will help vindicate the Left’s suspicion that Israel is in essence an ethnocracy, or will soon evolve into one. As progressive politics lurches to the left, the Israeli Right will find new support in subverting democratic institutions and entrenching the occupation. In place of a smaller, plucky Israel punching above its weight against fearsome enemies while upholding a laudable multiethnic democracy, the cycle of dueling left and right populisms risks helping to foster a Greater Israel that loses sight of the liberal Zionism that birthed it. If this comes to pass, it will be a moral and political catastrophe, no matter where America’s embassy in Israel is situated.

Conclusion
As I turned the final page of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, my mind returned to a vignette that Weiss had earlier extracted from Joachim Fest’s memoir of growing up in interwar Berlin, Not I. Fest recalls his father, a pious Catholic and adamant anti-Nazi, begging his Jewish friends to leave Hitler’s Germany before it was too late. Fest’s father heaped praise on those in this dark time who resolutely persisted in classifying themselves “German citizens of Jewish faith”: “In their self-discipline, their quiet civility and unsentimental brilliance, they had really been the last Prussians.” They had “only one failing,” he said, “which became their undoing: being overwhelmingly governed by their heads, they had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages.”

Only a small number of Jews in the Third Reich lived up to the Jewish reputation for pessimism and understood what lay in wait for them. Victor Klemperer was one of them: The German-Jewish diarist whose writings eerily predicted the Holocaust said that the fate of the Jews was to be a “seismic people.” It would be rash for Jews anywhere, even in America, to allow this premonitory instinct to atrophy, and Weiss deserves credit for keeping it alive.

The most mournful realization generated by How to Fight Anti-Semitism involves the fantastic resilience of this disease and its protean nature, which augurs a fight that is decidedly unlikely to culminate in a decisive victory. To the contrary. Anti-Semitism is a plague whose latent tenacity ensures that Jews will not enjoy a quiet life anytime soon, but are rather condemned to live in a kind of exile — even if they happen to reside in the “safe haven” of the Jewish state.

As this malignant disease is confronted and engaged, the ability of Jews and philo-Semites to hold a tension within themselves between vigilance and realism is vital. Weiss’s book is unbeatable at showing that “never again” is a necessary but insufficient responsibility of Zionism. “Jews did not sustain their magnificent civilization because they were anti-anti-Semites,” Weiss sagely observes. There is a growing peril in allowing an imagination of disaster to disorient Jews and obscure their duties and interests in the world beyond mere survival.

It has been said that Jews must have a bag mentally packed, ready to flee. This paranoia is deeply embedded in the Jewish psyche, and for understandable reasons. Although past generations of Jews could be forgiven for harboring that mental luggage and little else, in fact their achievements proved to be more formidable and enduring; for modern Jews, even while they attend to their perennial fears — and their fanatical enemies’ designs — of a world without Jews, it is important also to bear in mind that Hitler is dead, and there is work to be done outside the realm of security. Modern Jewish power has furnished the moral space to advance and vindicate modern Jewish values.

The peculiar coincidence of great power but also abiding vulnerability demands the acknowledgement, after Jewish fashion, of a rich irony. In his essay “Why We Remain Jews,” the philosopher Leo Strauss laid great emphasis on the tenuousness of existence as well as the illusion of salvation. He argued that “the Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.” The absence of redemption should recommend to Jews (and their well-wishers) a vigorous pursuit of self-defense and self-respect that recognizes ultimate security as a mirage.

As the political center gives way to the ethno-nationalist Right and the anti-colonialist Left, which feed off of and reinforce each other, Weiss and many Jews have begun to ask the breathless question: Could it happen here? Gentiles should by all means join them, though “it” will not be a totalitarian future replete with book burnings and goose-stepping soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division. It is safe to surmise that America remains firmly against that “plot,” even as the erosion of trust in the institutions of free government, at home and abroad, is well under way. If this cycle persists or accelerates, it will be a striking historical anomaly if the Jews do not suffer grievously, though this time their suffering may not be appreciably greater than the rest of ours. 

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Mr. Kleiner’s new book, The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan.

The freezing temperatures in New York City on December 7, 1941, didn’t stop more than 55 thousand football fans from packing the stands at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan. This was the highly anticipated crosstown-rivalry game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. After the underdog Dodgers took a 7-0 lead, they kicked the ball down the field, and listeners at home heard the announcer on WOR radio call the play. “It’s a long one, down to around the three-yard line,” he said, and the Giants’ Ward Cuff made the catch and started to run it down the field. Over the cheers of the crowd, the announcer continued: “Cuff’s still going, he’s up to the 25 and now he’s hit, and hit hard at about the 27-yard line. Bruiser Kinard made the tack—”

Suddenly, the reporting of the game was cut off as another voice broke in: “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. Flash Washington. The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Stay tuned to WOR for further developments, which will be broadcast immediately as received.”

Inside the stadium, the game went on without any kind of announcement. The crowd watched as the Brooklyn Dodgers clinched an upset 21–7 victory. The sun was setting as the fans headed for the exits. Then the public-address system came on: “All navy men in the audience are ordered to report to their posts immediately. All army men are to report to their posts tomorrow morning. This is important.”

“There was a sudden, startled buzz in the crowd,” the sportswriter for the Brooklyn Eagle reported. “What had happened? No one knew, not until he got close to the nearest radio or within hearing range of newsboys yelling in the streets.”

The Navy Department’s censors delayed releasing photographs of the destruction in Hawaii, but on December 29 Time magazine featured them in its coverage of the “Havoc in Honolulu.” One image showed large clouds of black smoke rising from the wreckage of the U.S.S. Arizona, and another, a P-40 fighter plane that had been wrecked on the field and “never fought.” A hangar at the army’s Hickam Field had also been destroyed. This was the carnage from “Japan’s sneak attack.” Time carried a dire headline in that December 29 issue: “INVASION OF THE U.S.?” It reported that anti-aircraft guns were deployed to New York City to defend “power plants, aircraft factories, docks, and shipyards,” against the threat of a Luftwaffe attack. The fear was more pronounced in the West: “At forest-fire lookout towers, in little tarpaper-covered shacks scattered on the hills along the coast, spotters watched the grey skies, 24 hours a day, in three-hour shifts.” San Francisco was blacked out, and reporter Ernie Pyle said that its darkened streets looked like “the dusty remnants of a city dead and uninhabited for a hundred years.”

But that edition of Time included another story, one that would capture the imaginations and raise the hopes of Americans in the dark days after Pearl Harbor. In China, a unit of U.S. volunteers was battling the Imperial Japanese air force, whose planes had been bombing Chinese cities and killing thousands of civilians for the past four years. They were known as the Flying Tigers, and Time reported their exploits in stirring fashion:

Last week ten Japanese bombers came winging their carefree way into [China], heading directly for Kunming…the Flying Tigers swooped, let the Japanese have it. Of the ten bombers, said [Chinese] reports, four plummeted to earth in flames. The rest turned tail and fled. Tiger casualties: none.

Members of the Tigers would soon become familiar figures: their leader, Colonel Claire L. Chennault, and pilots like David “Tex” Hill and “Scarsdale Jack” Newkirk. Years before American soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy or raised the flag on Iwo Jima, it was Chennault’s Flying Tigers who rallied the country with victories when the Axis at times appeared unstoppable.

“A hundred American volunteers had taken the measure of the enemy,” Clare Boothe wrote in Life. “Who, in the face of that measure, dared doubt that America could—if it would—defeat Japan?”

The Flying Tigers were indeed undertaking an important mission: They helped keep China in the war. If China fell, Japan would be able to focus its forces against an unprepared and under-armed United States.

The Flying Tigers’ shark-nosed P-40s — also known as Tomahawks — would go down in history as one of the iconic images from World War II. Hollywood executives knew a heroic story when they saw one, and in 1942 Republic Pictures rushed out Flying Tigers, starring John Wayne as the swashbuckling commander of the unit. Hollywood produced its own version of their adventures, but the truth was that the pilots were “doing deeds that a movie director would reject, in a script, as too fantastic,” as Time described them in April 1942.

Despite the hyperbole, the Flying Tigers were indeed undertaking an important mission: They helped keep China in the war. If China fell, Japan would be able to focus its forces against an unprepared and under-armed United States.

It would take five decades for the Pentagon to acknowledge the truth about the Flying Tigers — namely, that the mission was a covert operation authorized at the highest levels of the Roosevelt White House, in violation of America’s neutrality, and out of view of an isolationist Congress, months before Pearl Harbor. Its pilots and crew resigned from the U.S. military, bade their loved ones farewell, and crossed the Pacific on ocean liners, carrying passports listing false professions to disguise the truth about their mission. Over 100 pilots arrived at a makeshift camp in the jungles of Burma, to discover planes they didn’t know how to fly. Determined and desperate, they drilled in new techniques to fight the Japanese air force’s more agile planes, and were just about to enter into battle when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. When President Roosevelt declared war, they were the only Americans for thousands of miles, outnumbered and with no reinforcements coming. Yet between December 20, 1941, and July 4, 1942, they shot down scores of Japanese planes in Burma and Southern China.

For 75 years, the most detailed account of the Flying Tigers lay buried in pilots’ diaries and letters that were hidden away in closets and at the backs of drawers after the war and in combat reports that lay moldering in the basement of an unremarkable brick building in Georgetown. Their achievements are even more remarkable and stirring than the myth created by Hollywood.

Now, you buy at Amazon. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Up on the commanding heights of his chairmanship of the board of National Review Inc., when he isn’t overwhelmed with the lunacy that some of us (okay, me) conjure up daily, John Hillen — warrior, professor, entrepreneur — finds time to put pen to paper. Which he did a lot of last year, together with Mark Nevins, and the tag team has produced a terrific new book, What Happens Now? Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You.

In addition to having its own groovy website, the book has received some extremely strong accolades. Such as:

David McCormick, Bridgewater Association CEO: “Hillen and Nevins have hit the mark in describing what it takes to lead at the highest levels of dynamic organizations. Based on my own experiences as a CEO, their key insight rings true: as organizations change and grow, their leaders must adopt new mindsets and behaviors rather than relying solely on those that have made them successful in the past. Adaptability and agility, they rightly argue, will be distinguishing characteristics of those leaders who succeed and a notable gap for those who fail. This is an important book for leaders taking on new challenges and asking what they must do to rise to the occasion.”

General Stan McChrystal: “John Hillen and Mark Nevins astutely focus on how leaders must behave in order to become adaptable in today’s increasingly dynamic world. What Happens Now? is a necessary read for leaders combatting the reality that what worked in the past will no longer be good enough in the near future.”

Larry Kudlow: “Over the many years I have watched and commented on the best performing companies, I’ve observed the best leaders reinvent themselves and their role as fast as they’ve grown their firm. This book helps leaders see challenges in advance and charts a way for them to stay out in front of their enterprise as they take it to new heights. A pragmatic and insightful model for executive development in growing companies.”

Okay, so maybe you aren’t a business leader per se. But if you are, or if you know one, this book is something you just have to have, and maybe even to give, because of this fact: The same person who might achieve success creating a company will likely find himself deficient in the skills needed to grow it. I’m going to go out on that limb (maybe I should lose a few pounds first) and say What Happens Now? has the secret sauce, if not the entire recipe, that business leaders need to take on the challenge of growth.

We’re excited for John and Mark because the early indications are that this book is really catching on. So again, order your copies of What Happens Now? (and because we don’t want to shortchange Barnes & Noble, here’s the link for its order page).

And while we have you, here are two fun facts about John: He won a Bronze Star for his wrathful tank action at the Battle of 73 Easting back in the first Iraq War, and if you ever spent half a lifetime playing Call of Duty: WWII, thank him — he was the military adviser.

Renowned journalist, essayist, and novelist Tom Wolfe passed away on Monday at the age of 88, his agent Lynn Nesbit has confirmed to the Associated Press. He had recently been hospitalized with an infection.

Wolfe was known for the colorful prose and explosive punctuation he used to document everything from space exploration to the hippie counter-culture. He pioneered “new journalism,” becoming one of the first reporters to incorporate literary techniques into his work, and “saturation reporting,” in which a reporter embeds with and shadows his subject.

“To pull it off, you casually have to stay with the people you are writing about for long stretches … long enough so that you are actually there when revealing scenes take place in their lives,” Wolfe said of his reporting style.

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he chronicled the blossoming psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s, following Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD on their cross-country travels in a repurposed school bus. In The Right Stuff, he told the stories of the “Mercury Seven,” the first astronauts assigned to the NASA space program, as well as Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager, whom many considered a superior flyer despite the fact that he was passed over by NASA. And in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, he satirized the lust for power and wealth in 1980s New York.

“He is probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else,” William F. Buckley, Jr., once wrote of Wolfe in National Review.

Wolfe, who had lived in Manhattan since 1962, is survived by Sheila Wolfe, his wife of 48 years, and their two children, Alexandra and Tommy.

Populism is always a surprise to those in power. It erupts from time to time, not as regularly as clockwork, but as inevitably as a volcano. Yet even those who live in the shadow of the caldera, those who should be most aware of what looms nearby, are taken unawares. That’s not poor planning, nor is it ignorance of history. It is a necessary component of the blast: Populism comes from forgotten people. If those in power paid them any mind, the pressure would never build up and the explosion would never come.

In The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, Salina Zito and Brad Todd explore the politics of the latest populist explosion and talk to the people who brought it forth in small cities and towns from Scranton to Sioux Falls. Their stories should shake the Many of those interviewed were lifelong Democrats until 2016, and their stories should shake the establishment Democrats to the core. Though party insiders may not have seen Donald Trump coming, there is still time to correct their error. But just as it is the nature of populism to surprise, it is the nature of an establishment to stay established. The Democratic establishment, built as it is on the shifting sands of intersectionality and the latest trends in activism, will have a hard time adapting to the challenge of Trumpian populism.

*    *    *

Articles and books about political trends often rely on anecdote, but Zito and Todd also base their analysis on a survey of Trump voters in the states whose swing to the GOP in 2016 broke the Democrats’ fabled “blue wall” and gave Trump his victory: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. They distilled the results into six archetypes of Midwestern Trump voters, and each section of the book comprises interviews with people fitting each archetype.

Insofar as Trump came out ahead, it is particularly interesting how many people, after reluctantly voting for him, now back him more enthusiastically than ever.

The results are illuminating. Some of the interviewees were Republicans already, so their votes for Trump were not completely surprising. They do, however, fly in the face of the idea, pushed by the Clinton campaign, that Trump alienated too many moderate, suburban Republicans to win. It was clear then that this was no mere talking point: Clinton targeted suburban Republicans, especially women, pleading with them to abandon the candidate who had said and done so many grotesque things over the years.

They failed to consider how grotesque Clinton herself appeared to these same Republican women. The authors quote pollster Wes Anderson to establish a point that sums up these voters and their decision process: “These women may not have decided to vote for Trump until late in the race, but most had decided much earlier that they were definitely not voting for Clinton.” For many, Clinton’s stances on issues like abortion and gun rights ruled her out from the beginning. Many others were repelled by her inauthenticity and dishonesty.

This mostly female cohort is an interesting group, and it shows the power of the two-party system in America. Faced with two odious candidates, most people picked the less obnoxious of the pair. Despite the considerable aversion to both Clinton and Trump, more than 94 percent of voters chose one of the two. Insofar as Trump came out ahead, it is particularly interesting how many people, after reluctantly voting for him, now back him more enthusiastically than ever. Picking a side changes how we think about things, and it could be that the shrieking #Resistance is making things worse on itself by forcing once-persuadable voters to choose between the candidate they have already voted for and the parade of bitter-enders constantly criticizing him on television.

*    *    *

Another theme running through the book’s interviews is how so many voters abandoned the Democratic party, or, as they would likely describe it, how the party abandoned them. Democrats earned their reputation as the workingman’s friend in the New Deal, and exploited it to great political effect for decades thereafter. In a country where most voters are people who work for a living — or retirees who used to do so — being seen as pro-worker is a definite electoral advantage.

The problem with that reputation is that to keep it, the party must continue, at least some of the time, to act in the interests of workers. Or, more specifically, it must promote policies that workers themselves see as in their interests; telling people what their interests really are does not do the job and may actually alienate those voters the party claims to cherish. Ignore this requirement long enough, and eventually even voters who hung pictures of John F. Kennedy on their living-room walls will abandon their political faith.

One man Zito talked to in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. exemplifies this trend. A union employee and Clinton delegate at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, he explained, “I wasn’t just a guy who voted straight Democrat up and down the ballot, it was religion to me, it was my identity, and it was also an essential part of my job.” It is hard to imagine anything that could make such a man pull the lever for a billionaire Republican from New York City, let alone do so enthusiastically. Yet this book is full of tales like his.

Part of the shift has been subtle. Democrats once identified with workers qua workers, in contrast to the bosses and owners for whom they labored. That gradually shifted to “the working class,” and then to “working families.” By 2016, the Clinton camp spoke of “everyday Americans,” a term completely removed from the idea of labor and so vague and anodyne as to be completely meaningless. Democrats used to have what pollster Anderson called “the echo of labor.” Now that echo resounded in a Trump campaign that spoke of work itself and the importance of good jobs, railing against outsourcing and free trade with a striking intensity of purpose.

It is difficult to describe Trump as a workingman, but he sounds like a workingman. That’s a distinction that led to derision from politicos, but for people less deeply connected to the day-to-day goings-on in Washington, it was oddly refreshing. The man had inherited millions and was worth billions, but somehow he sounded like he understood the plight of people whose pleas were not heard in Chappaqua. Meanwhile, the Democrats increasingly became associated with the non-working class, identifying more with the lifelong welfare recipient than with the worker whose taxes pay for that government program. As another lifelong Democrat told Zito, “I used to think that the Republican party stood for country-club folks in nice suburban homes who talked about bottom lines and stock prices. Not anymore; they are for the blue-collar worker, they are for me, and the irony is not lost on me.”

*    *    *

One question the book necessarily leaves unanswered is how deep the shift has been. Was 2016 a one-off reaction against Clinton’s shortcomings, or the first blast of a sustained backlash against neoliberalism? Zito and Todd’s title echoes that of another famous work by John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, and there are similarities Hicks’s 1890s populists and Trump’s movement. Both were rural, although the older movement was necessarily more so, given the far greater number of farmers in late 19th century America. Both were also reactions to the concentration of wealth and power, the perceived duopoly of the major parties, and the parties’ collective inattention to the concerns of people outside the major coastal cities.

Populists then and now fixated on Big versus Small, a third theme that runs through Zito and Todd’s book. Whether big banks, big business, big government, or big labor, any organization that swells to a massive size can feel threatening to an individual. That is especially true for people far removed — geographically and figuratively — from the centers of power. This theme of being crushed by bigness resounded among many of the Trump voters interviewed in the book.

“Big banks, big media, big corporations, I want nothing to do with them,” one man said. Another linked the what Justice Louis Brandeis called the “curse of bigness” to a culture of dependency: “We are Americans, that means something, that means figuring it out without the government giving us free stuff, without the big banks and big companies making us need them so much, and not feeling as though we are entitled to something once we get it.”

All of this is clearly heartfelt and certainly directed against a real problem in our modern, industrialized nation. The confusing part for those who do not buy it is that it makes Trump the representative of the little guy. That is harder to swallow than William Jennings Bryan’s leadership of the 1890s populists. It clearly wrong-footed the Clinton camp, as evidenced by the supreme effort taken to remind the voters just how often Trump had shortchanged, bamboozled, and defrauded various little guys in his long business career.

None of that mattered. With Clinton as the obvious representative of the left’s establishment, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and the rest as representatives of the right’s establishment, and Trump as the eager antagonist of both, the answer was clear to many forgotten men and women: This guy, whatever his past, is in my corner. That is the larger message that comes through time and again in this book. In voting for Trump, as one man put it, “we voted for ourselves.”

Some readers will never be able to wrap their brains around the Trumpist phenomenon, but, again, populism is often incomprehensible and unpredictable. Whether Trumpism becomes a real strain of conservatism, or whether the populist wave transforms the Republican party the way it transformed the Democrats a century ago, only time can tell. But understanding the people who propelled Trump to the most powerful office on Earth is a good start, and The Great Revolt can certainly help with that.

Editor’s Note: Every week, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes an “Off the Shelf” column sharing casual observations on the books he’s reading and the passing scene.

“Most of the people Bruno had encountered in his life had been motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure — if one includes in the definition those narcissistic pleasures so central to the esteem or admiration of others. And thus different strategies are adopted, and these are called human lives.” — The Elementary Particles

My life this week felt like it was being run on a treadmill controlled by an enemy. And I still feel like I’m about to fall face first into the treads.

I was having what you would call a very productive week. I was pumping out the morning baseball newsletter. Turning in columns and blog posts. It seemed like my 15-month-old son was waking up one fewer time per night than usual. On Tuesday, I hastily canceled my online language lesson and drove to New Jersey to attend a wake. On Wednesday I published a column on the Jersey City Katyn Memorial controversy and then attended an event at First Things co-hosted by the Polish consulate in New York. I was handling little things in my house. Until a crashing headache on Thursday afternoon revealed how tired I was. After a long night of sleep, I suddenly realized that the headache was likely due to the fact that I just forgot to feed my coffee habit for two days straight.

All the while I was trying to sneak in a reading of The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq. The novel first came out as something like “Atomised” in the original French. Houellebecq’s more recent novel, Submission, is about a France that finds its national culture revivified as it consents to Islamification. You probably heard of it.

The Elementary Particles follows the lives of two half-brothers, Bruno Clément and Michel Djerzinski, as they live their lives in France during the second half of the 20th century. Bruno is basically a sex addict and political columnist, going from one lifeless assignation to another. Michel is withdrawn from human relationships almost entirely and pushes himself further and further into his career as a biologist. Both of them are depicted as products of their hippie mother, who shipped them off to their respective grandmothers so she could go to a California commune.

Houellebecq can be entertainingly nasty when describing the evolution of New Left communes into New Age retreat houses for the almost-rich and aimless. When Bruno “meets” a woman at one of these retreats, she describes the kind of character that floats in:

Talk to them for five minutes and you’ll see they don’t believe any of this bullsh** about chakras and crystal healing and light vibrations. They force themselves to believe it, and sometimes they do for an hour or two. They feel the presence of the Angel or the flower blossoming within but then the workshop’s over and they’re still ugly, aging and alone. So they have crying fits — they do a lot of crying here, have you noticed? Especially after the Zen workshops. They don’t have much choice, really — most of them have money problems too. A lot of them have been in therapy and they’re completely broke. Mantras and tarot may be stupid, but they’re a lot cheaper than therapy.

Bruno also entertains some of what I assume are Houellebecq’s own nasty assessments about the world as it actually is. A mild example:

He was starting to get p***ed off about the world’s stupid obsession with Brazil. What was so great about Brazil? As far as he knew, Brazil was a sh**hole full of morons obsessed with soccer and Formula One. It was the ne plus ultra of violence, corruption and misery. If ever a country were loathsome, that country, specifically, was Brazil.

I give the translator credit for the thrilling cadence of the above. But I’ll be honest in saying I found the whole reading experience unpleasant. It was supposed to be unpleasant. I’ve heard somewhere else that Houellebecq’s translators do him the service of replicating his deliberately flattened prose style. And the effect of this choice in describing Bruno’s sex life achieves what I take to be the intended effect: It utterly disgusts you. Other writers and authors try to give something of the thrill of our renegade minds at work. Houellebecq looks at the modern world with the soul of an unflinching Hugenout, who carries close to his heart Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity. Much of it can’t be quoted in a family publication like National Review, but this gives you a flavor:

The last remaining myth of Western civilization was that sex was something to do; something expedient, a diversion. He put on a pair of swimming trunks and slipped some condoms into his bag — snorting with laughter as he did so. He had been carrying condoms around for years and had never used one of them — after all, whores always had their own.

The beach at Meschers was crawling with jerk-offs in shorts and bimbos in thongs; this was reassuring.

The sexless brother Michel also disgusts readers, in a certain way. Bruno thinks of women as pure objects. But Michel sentimentalizes them: “He could not come to any other conclusion: women were indisputably better than men. They were gentler, more affectionate, loving and compassionate; they were less prone to violence, selfishness, cruelty or self-centeredness. Moreover, they were more rational, intelligent and hardworking.”

At one point, not too long after sharing his view that Huxley’s Brave New World depicted a human utopia, disguised as a dystopia, Bruno concludes that there is no point in having children:

Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value — he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless.

These awful wounds in the family life of Michel and Bruno go a long way toward explaining their almost pathological behavior with women. But they also bring about the startling conclusion, where we discover that Michel’s work in cloning has almost eliminated the human race, and in fact the entire narration has been conducted by a creature descended from his work, a new intelligent species, “made by man ‘in his own image.’”

The conclusion horrifies, because this sordid account of family breakdown, and the vituperative denunciation of the generation of ’68, are revealed to be “a last tribute to humanity.” It explains the tone of condescension that pervades the book. And I have to say, that gut punch at the end worked on me. Our narrator cooly explains that “we live very different lives.” And that, having overcome egotism, cruelty, and personal vanity, the pursuit of Truth and Beauty takes on a less urgent aspect. That last observation is great for a chuckle — it partly explains the ugliness and artlessness of the book. But you may also be gagging.

For reasons related to my own book-writing project, I was also dipping back into Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Patrick Deneen’s more recent Why Liberalism Failed.

There were resonant passages that seemed to chime with The Elementary Particles. When Fukuyama comes to contemplate the last man, and what might endanger democracy, he concludes that the peril will not be an exaggerated quest for equality:

Nature, on the other hand, will conspire to preserve a substantial degree of megalothymia even in our egalitarian, democratic world. For Nietzsche was absolutely correct in his belief that some degree of megalothymia is a necessary precondition for life itself. A civilization devoid of anyone who wanted to be recognized as better than others, and which did not affirm in some way the essential health and goodness of such a desire, would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life. It would be incompetently governed, for few people of quality would choose a life of public service. It would not have much in the way of economic dynamism; its crafts and industries would be pedestrian and unchanging, and its technology second-rate. And perhaps most critically, it would be unable to defend itself from civilizations that were infused with a greater spirit of megalothymia, whose citizens were ready to forsake comfort and safety and who were not afraid to risk their lives for the sake of dominion.

I’m not so sure. At least right now, I’m tired and our civilization seems tired. Are you impressed with the people in public service? Are you impressed with our technology? I’m less and less so. But that’s owed to the fact that I, unlike Michel Djerzinski, really do have children made in my own unruly image. So maybe it’s just another downer mood. Next week, I’m hoping to read another novel in translation, The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin. I’m not sure if I’ll get to it, however. I’m really entering the home stretch of the draft of my own book, and the assignments are piling up.

That’s what she told me. Now you try getting a restful night of sleep.

Also, a Polish woman approached me at that event at First Things, and I can’t get her out of my head. She knew me, from my work here. And she appreciated an earlier edition of this column, where I talked about the way Germans behaved differently on the Western and Eastern fronts. She told me about her grandmother, who suffered immensely under both Nazi and Soviet occupations. She demonstrated, by imitating on me what her grandmother did to her. When her parents left the room, this suffering woman snatched her by the arm and warned her: “The Germans can destroy your body, but the Russians will destroy your soul.”

When she said it, I thought it was something I had heard before, probably because it is now ringing in my ears. That’s what she told me. Now you try getting a restful night of sleep.