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1929: INSIDE THE GREATEST CRASH IN WALL STREET HISTORY – AND HOW IT SHATTERED A NATION
By Andrew Ross Sorkin

There have been many books written about the most famous if not the greatest stock market crash in American history, starting with John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic The Great Crash. Unfortunately, writing seventy years after Galbraith, Andrew Ross Sorkin doesn’t have much to add to the record and is far from being as good a writer.

Gabraith, in an introduction to a later edition of his book, made it clear that the reason for its longevity was that financial crashes were a naturally reoccurring part of the economic cycle. Writing at another market peak at the end of the 1990s, he observed how “There is now far more money flowing into the stock market than there is intelligence to guide it. There are many more mutual funds than there are financially acute, historically aware men and women to manage them.” This is just as true today, even granting that now we have thinking machines to do the management and guidance. Hence the need to constantly revisit the subject.

And one would have thought that Sorkin, whose previous bestseller was Too Big to Fail, an account of the 2008 GFC (now the accepted acronym for the Great Financial Crisis), was just the fellow to bring us all up to date. But Sorkin takes more of a popular-press approach, focusing on some key personalities in the year leading up to Black Thursday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday of October 1929. Given that people haven’t changed that much in the last hundred years, this tells us little that is important. Sorkin is also mostly uninterested in pursuing the culpability of the proto-Masters of the Universe in the disaster. Even now the system is dominated by an elite who, as always, want to be free from all constraint (read: oversight and regulation), but back then it really was the Wild West days of Wall Street and few things were strictly illegal. Meanwhile, the mechanics of the crash and what lessons it might have for today are left unaddressed. It’s hard to imagine a flabbier conclusion than this:

The enduring lesson is not that booms can be prevented or that busts can be fully averted. It is that we need to remember how easily we forget. The antidote to irrational exuberance is not regulation by itself, nor skepticism, but humility – the humility to know that no system is foolproof, no market fully rational, and no generation exempt. The greater the heights of our certainty, the longer and harder we fall.

So just don’t get too comfortable, or proud. Things like this have happened before and they’ll happen again. Nothing much we can do about it.

A better takeaway is suggested at the beginning of the book, where Sorkin writes that “The almost singular through line behind every major financial crisis is one thing: debt.” This was as true in 1929 as it was in 2008, and no doubt as true as it will be in the future. The Great Crash didn’t hit everyone with the same impact. If you were debt-free, chances were you’d be in good shape. A couple of months before the crash an economist named Roger Babson had provided some good advice:

“More people are borrowing and speculating today than ever in our history. Sooner or later a crash is coming and it may be terrific. Wise are those investors who now get out of debt and reef their sails. This does not mean selling all you have, but it does mean paying up your loans and avoiding market speculation.”

That’s a warning worth heeding as much today as it was a hundred years ago. But we are a species drawn to living beyond our means.

Notes:
Review first published online June 8, 2026.

A WORLD AFTER LIBERALISM: PHILOSOPHERS OF THE RADICAL RIGHT
By Matt Rose

One of the things that makes a discussion of the intellectual foundations of today’s right-wingers difficult is that their very foundations are anti-rational. From its beginnings, meaning Edmund Burke, conservative thought has set itself against Enlightenment values. But for today’s “philosophers of the radical right” conservatism is no longer a proper label anyway. As Matthew Rose writes:

They take as a premise, not a possibility, that American conservatism as it has defined itself for generations, is intellectually dead. Its defense of individual liberty, limited government, and free trade is today a symptom of political decadence, they argue, not its solution. Perhaps more significant, they see it as an obstacle to the future they already embody: a political right prepared to dismantle liberal institutions, not simply manage their decline.

One example of just how radical these thinkers are is that among those liberal institutions in need of dismantling is Christianity and the church. This isn’t your father’s political right.

Nor is it a unified movement, at least on the level of ideas. “On what do the postliberals agree?” Rose asks. “On almost nothing.” But I think part of the answer lies in the name. If we can’t call this conservative politics but take “postliberal” or more exactly “antiliberal” as the preferred label I think things come into sharper focus through a process of negative definition. The radical, postliberal right is against individual rights and freedoms, against reason or rationalism, against democracy, and against materialism. So if you turn these around you wind up with a politics that champions collective duties, is grounded in “traditional” values, is controlled by authoritarian great men and aristocratic/oligarchic elites, and appeals to transcendent, spiritual truths (albeit ones grounded in mythic conceptions of race more than established religion).

Of the five writers Rose covers in this book the only one I had read, or even recall having heard of, was Oswald Spengler. And while I found The Decline of the West to be a stimulating read, as a paradigm for understanding the progress of world history it struck me as a joke. Which leads to one of my disagreements with Rose. As he puts it,

The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of seductive power.

I feel like false binaries are being introduced here. The alt-right is neither stupid nor deep; it operates out of self-interest. The ideas of the alt-right are ridiculous, but have to be taken seriously because ridiculous ideas can have serious consequences. Arguments that are obnoxious, racist, and obscene may have a seductive power precisely for those very qualities. Twentieth-century political ideologies like Nazism and Stalinism weren’t profound or reasonable and were certainly morally idiotic, to put it mildly. But they had seductive power as well. I approach the ideas presented by these philosophers of the radical right in much the same way. They are ridiculous but still need to be understood and the conditions that have given rise to their popularity addressed.

To some extent the ideas themselves are nothing new. For example, it feels like the intellectual forefather of many of these writers, acknowledged or not, is Nietzsche. But where Nietzsche was the philosopher of joy his inheritors are the legion of anger, spinning their politics not out of a spirit of creative destruction but sheer ressentiment. Hero worship is the true slave philosophy and, as Nietzsche understood, love of one’s own culture is only a spiritual and intellectual crutch.

To return to where I began then, the real strength of these ideas is not in what they stand for so much as what they stand against. It is the rot of liberalism and its manifest failures that gives the writings of the radical right their “seductive power.” They identify problems but offer no credible solutions. They do philosophy with a hammer while building castles in the air, with foundations on sands that washed out to sea a long time ago.

Notes:
Review first published online May 18, 2026.

WASTE LAND: A WORLD IN PERMANENT CRISIS
By Robert D. Kaplan

The word “conservative,” at least when used to describe a political philosophy, has been debased in the twenty-first century to the point where it’s refreshing to read an author whose conservatism is so deeply rooted in Edmund Burke that he might be speaking to us direct from the eighteenth century. Robert Kaplan’s Waste Land doesn’t take the fashionable form of a neoliberal manifesto, or preach reactionary nationalism, but instead appeals to the importance of monarchy – yes, a leviathan! – to preserve us from what he sees as the coming anarchy.

“The Coming Anarchy” is the title of an essay by Kaplan published in The Atlantic in 1994 and that he then expanded into a book of the same name in 2000. I won’t get into its argument here, but only say that Kaplan could have easily carried the title forward another thirty years because a coming anarchy is still what he’s all about. His political vision is grounded in the idea that “order must come before freedom, because without order there is no freedom for anyone.” Without order there is only anarchy. And the opposite of anarchy is not some vague system of liberal government or socialist anarchy but hierarchy, and the best sort of hierarchy is one rooted in tradition. A passage like this might as well be quoting Burke: “Because the past up to this point in time is all we know, we must always exercise a monumental level of caution in order to protect our civilization from tipping over into a heretofore unimagined disorder.” As you might expect from this, Kaplan is no fan of revolution, or any kind of innovation, at least in terms of politics. It takes a special kind of conservative point of view, not to mention one that uses a bit of squinting and side vision, to hold up Deng Xiaoping as an enlightened despot, ruling over a country unready for democracy and maintaining its traditional sense of order.

Kaplan is an ancien school right-winger, casting doubt not just on the French and Russian, but the American Revolution as well. “The Trump presidency from 2017 to 2021 [Kaplan still only had evidence of the first administration to draw on] made us question the very viability of American democracy and political order.” Might it have been wiser for the colonists to have stuck with George III? Monarchs, you see, no matter how corrupt or incompetent, are a bulwark against the unimagined disorder of the coming anarchy: a “vacuum of legitimate political authority” that allows “thugs and bullies to run riot, invading the political space.” The twentieth century was rife with examples of how when “monarchical rule with its inherent legitimacy has been replaced by modernizing dictatorships” totalitarianism is sure to follow.

Kaplan’s cornerstone case in point is Weimar Germany, and he takes his lead from a comment made by Winston Churchill that if, after the First World War, the allies “had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittlesbach, and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler.” Alas, Churchill could only shake his head at the “imagined . . . progress” of democratic rule, which is just an open door for “modernizing dictatorships.” Reading this, you have to understand that progress and modernization (and liberalism, as well as, to some extent, freedom and democracy), are pejoratives for a conservative. Weimar’s weak democracy, in Kaplan’s words, was “no safeguard against Hitler,” while

Hohenzollern and Wittlesbach monarchs, even constitutional ones with little real power in Berlin and Munich, might well have been up to the task had they remained in place after World War I. That is because the very age-old tradition of those monarchies would have helped stabilize their governing systems. It would have made the politicians more serious, and made them less afraid, since they would have been holding up something estimable and mystical even that had stood the test of time.

Really? Really? Wilhelm II was an ultranationalist militarist who didn’t exactly pump the brakes on World War I. He was, reportedly, unimpressed with Hitler while in exile, but had he still been emperor I don’t think he would have been any effective counterweight to the Nazi takeover even if he had wanted to play that role (and I don’t think he would have wanted to). Did Victor Emmanuel III do anything to “stabilize” Italy during Mussolini’s rise? No, he welcomed a strong man who would heal Italy’s divisions, and anyway saw himself as too weak to be able to do much to stop him. Or take the case of Japan. The Emperor Hirohito, someone who did enjoy real political legitimacy (mystical even), didn’t do anything to stop a military junta from taking over his country or exert much of an effort to stop its slide into war. When Kaplan wistfully regrets that “there will be no return in the 21st century to anything approaching monarchy, with its inherent legitimacy that staves off compulsion for extremist ideology and violent control,” I don’t know what to say because I’m not sure what it is he’s talking about. The notion that a traditional monarchic order provides a safeguard of freedom from extremist political ideologies is not borne out by history. A traditional order, following what I’ve called Galbraith’s law, has more often authored its own destruction by calling forth the forces of revolution and civil war.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this because it is so central to Kaplan’s argument. And he’s not shy about loading the dice when arguing his case. It’s hard to know where to begin, but to start where Kaplan does, I don’t know how far I’d want to take the principle that there is no freedom without order. Wouldn’t it make as much sense to put it the other way around? Classical conservatives, we are told, “prefer stability to illusions of progress.” Well, when you put it that way who wouldn’t? But what if we said that they prefer repressive authoritarianism to freedom and progress? What if “order” is just another word for unearned privilege? Against “stabilizing tradition” Kaplan can only place a modern Hobbesian nightmare of fanaticism, idealism, righteousness, and “abstract and utopian movements from the Nazis to the Bolsheviks to Pol Pot and Ayatollah Khomeini, each in its own way constituting a dictatorship of perfect virtue, since in each case ideology was paramount.” Were these monsters all progressives? And wasn’t the old order a form of dictatorship? Did it not see itself as righteous and virtuous? Is monarchy non-ideological?

I think Kaplan would allow that it is, but following the thinking of Jeane Kirkpatrick he has a rationalization for why traditional autocracies are good and revolutionary ones bad. And in any event, historically autocracy is the “default option” for governing a state “while democracy is problematic.” I want to pause there because I began by saying how conservatism has experienced not just an expansion but a warping in the Trump era and that Kaplan was a welcome throwback. But at moments like these (autocracy being the “default option”) we get a clipped point of view that rhymes with current radical thinkers on today’s right who wonder why we can’t go back to the glory days of Mesopotamian god-kings.

Of course there have been a lot of things society and human civilizations have done that, taking the long view, have to be considered humanity’s default option. We can take this to absurd lengths though. It’s only an ideology that enshrines stability and tradition, indeed even age, over youth or any notion of change or problematic “progress” that allows people to think that autocracy is somehow good. And I’m sure nobody does think like this. It’s just a way of defending a status quo. Which of course is never based in an ideology itself because it’s “natural” or “organic” or something like that. Throw in some other right-wing talking points like how in American politics “the countryside is assailing the city, which has grown effete in the course of many decades of luxury and cultural refinement,” and I was near ready to give up. I even wrote in the margins beside this final point “Does he really believe this?” I think he does, given how he approvingly cites Spengler for the idea that traditions “ultimately are rooted in the soil” and other nonsense. There is definitely a rural-urban split in the American vote, but what Kaplan describes is the cartoon version.

I can’t resist drawing attention to another point I just adverted to. “The triumph of youth over age, rather than leading to hope, as conventional wisdom has it, leads instead to disintegration,” Kaplan writes. Age is like order and tradition, a paramount conservative virtue. It’s only progressive media idiots (and Kaplan does hate the invariably liberal media) who don’t realize “how age carries the memories of a culture with all of its traditions, in which youth has first to be instructed. To put youth on an even higher pedestal, therefore, is to destroy civilization.” Again with the fall of Western Civ. That it was the anti-civilizational fury of the Boomers that brought us Brexit and Trump doesn’t seem to register. This was a revolution of retirees. But I’ve said enough about this many times before.

Kaplan does make some points worth attending to, but I found most of them to be general and not very original. The title of the book is borrowed from Eliot’s poem, but I don’t think there’s much of a connection to be made there beyond the older order being ground into fragments and ruin. Similarly, the notion that “the entire world is one big Weimar now” because it doesn’t cohere struck me as superficial. “Shakespearean decline” is defined as political collapse through the failure of powerful individual leaders. I don’t think any of this will stick with me.

Sometimes Kagan gets carried away by his reading, or his rhetoric. His political heroes from the twentieth century include mystics like Oswald Spengler (“the great German philosopher-historian and polymath of the early 20th century, perhaps the greatest of all time”) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (“not merely a great man of literature, but one of the great men of the 20th century”). I think both have to be read in context and with more than a grain of salt. Then there are moments like his account of the outbreak of the First World War, which reaches for this mangled metaphor: “People sleepwalked backward into the horrors of the 20^th century, blindly slashed by its revolving blades.” What does it mean to sleepwalk backward? Are the blades of history blindly slashing, or the people being blindly slashed?

This book came out just before Trump’s second term kicked off, an administration whose bad impact has already as of this writing been both incalculable and, I believe, irremediable. Kagan doesn’t say a lot about Trump, mainly casting him as an example of the decline in American leadership (which he doesn’t think has been as bad as in Russia and China, which is a point I don’t agree with) and seeing him as the result of an excess of democracy, pumped up by social media and other fragmenting social forces. He’s right, but Trump is also an autocrat who cast himself very much as the defender of a traditional order, a bulwark against the coming anarchy of radical socialism, the woke mind virus, and every other progressive shibboleth. In part this was all just propaganda, as Trump was a committed radical without a whiff of authentic conservatism about him. But what still styled itself as conservatism largely lined up behind the MAGA movement anyway. All of which leads one to question how real any part of the conservative message ever was, and whether every political order, old or new and with whatever label, has the same ends in view.

Notes:
Review first published online May 4, 2026.

PALE HORSE RIDER: WILLIAM COOPER, THE RISE OF CONSPIRACY, AND THE FALL OF TRUST IN AMERICA
By Mark Jacobson

Pale Horse Rider is a valuable book that I didn’t enjoy reading.

The reason is simple. It’s a biography, not hagiographic but not as critical as it needed to be, of a repellent and dangerous individual named Milton William Cooper, a conspiracy theorist who wrote a nonsense book and broadcast on shortwave radio during the 1990s. An alt-right podcaster, we would now say, before such things became big business.

Cooper’s ideas were fluid, to the point where he seems to have stopped caring whether anything he said was true. In a move that would later become very familiar he seemed to embrace a position of radical doubt (“Listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing until you yourself, can prove it with your own research”) that in turn left one confused at his reasons for believing what he did believe, most of which was sheer nonsense. In Cooper’s first attempts at a world philosophy there were aliens working alongside the government in a way that X-Files creator Chris Carter was happy to admit he borrowed from. After that it was mainly just the usual right-wing Fed scare about cover-ups and shadowy elites like the Illuminati running a New World Order whose goal was to take away the freedoms of the sovereign citizens of the United States as guaranteed by the Constitution.

By freedom what Cooper mainly meant was being free from having to pay taxes. This is a stand that would lead to his undoing, as he was charged with tax evasion in 1998 and avoided arrest by mostly becoming a shut-in until a fatal night in 2001 when a team of law enforcement officers were seeking to bring him in on unrelated charges dealing with his threatening others with a deadly weapon. A gunfight ensued in which he severely injured an officer and was himself killed.

There is nothing appealing in Cooper’s character, as he was a violent alcoholic and serial domestic abuser whose talent was the gift of confident gab. As one early wife put it, “it didn’t make a difference what the topic was, he knew everything about it.” Which isn’t true at all. What she meant is that he could sound like he knew everything about any subject under the sun. This made him a natural as a shortwave talk radio host. Today he would make millions with his own channel on YouTube but it was his fate to play John the Baptist for grifters like Alex Jones.

The authorities, who did keep a file on him, diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder, which again would only later become a super power. He railed against people who didn’t buy into the gospel he had brought them, referring to them as sheep (sheeple) or cattle – “beasts of burden and steaks on the table by choice and consent.” But of course he wanted to be their shepherd, their leader: “if only the sheeple would just wake up from their slumber, and listen to what he had to tell them, the nation could be saved.” Delusions of grandeur led him to see himself as generalissimo over a rag-tag army of citizen soldiers, or alternatively the CEO of a global media empire. In fact he was a bitter loser who had largely been forgotten even among those who followed in his footsteps, aside from a curious popularity among prisoners and rappers. If he is still of any importance it is because he was a representative figure, not because of any influence he had. He didn’t invent right-wing talk radio (there were many others more popular than he was in the ‘90s), and wasn’t the first to rage against the medical establishment, or champion home schooling, or lead calls to “do your own research.” With regard to that last, doing one’s own research was well on its way to becoming a punchline but in pre-Internet days it at least involved some legwork, spending time “in the back shelves of musty bookshops where the books on the so-called occult were kept.” Now it means doing scarcely any research at all but rather letting the algorithm lead one by the nose.

Cooper was, in short, just part of a broader cultural movement that responded to what had become a widespread disease: the sense of confusion and powerlessness in a complex society leading to individuals making oversized claims of importance and authority. With modern man a slave to “an enforced alien authority” the need to assert individual freedom from a tyrannical (and, yes, alien) elite was becoming a psychological necessity. Cooper was one among many to offer a postmodern balm. “Truth was singular and personal. In a world that could not be trusted, where school systems were suspect and everyone was trying to sell you everything you didn’t need and didn’t want, self-education was the best defense. Right or wrong, at least it was yours.”

This is a dangerous philosophy, which is a point worth reinforcing. Maturity and wisdom come from understanding that we are all constrained and limited in our lives to some degree, however unfair and oppressive these constraints may be. To reject all limits, all sources of authority aside from the individual will, all knowledge aside from what one has picked out for oneself, is not living in the real world and courts disaster. To see any viewpoint contradictory to your own as being tyranny or willful ignorance is terminal narcissism.

Here is an account of the eulogy at Cooper’s funeral delivered by Norio Hayakawa, a friend of Cooper’s from his UFO days:

“The world will always remember Bill Cooper as an egotistic paranoia monger,” Hayakawa’s remembrance begins, going on to call Cooper an “obnoxious,” “choleric,” “self-aggrandizing,” and “vengeful person” whose tumultuous life ended by a “self-fulfilled prophecy” embodied by his “violent act.” But still, Hayakawa said, “we must admit the fact that he did indeed make a tremendous impact among hundreds, if not thousands.”

Perhaps. But what was the impact? What good came of it? What good came of any of Cooper’s writings or broadcasts? He was just telling a select audience what they wanted to hear, which wasn’t helping them at all.

While a good read, I also found fault with aspects of Jacobson’s approach to his subject. In particular, he is far too deferential to Cooper’s own self-styling. The note on sources, which tries to sound fair-minded, strikes me as damning:

Researching a book and attempting to get at the nature of truth when the main figure is a world-class fabulist presents its challenges. Is it important to get the story right as the storyteller tells it, or to follow the more traditional route of proof? What matters more, fact or metaphor? Often, with Bill Cooper, a middle path seemed appropriate.

I confess I don’t understand this at all. How can you get a false story, a lie, “right”? That is, “as the storyteller tells it.” What is the middle path between a lie and the truth? This smacks of the same kind of epistemological nihilism that figures like Cooper trafficked in, where only a subjective truth, what you believe, is real. I don’t understand Jacobson’s reference to “the journalist’s dilemma” being the need “to meet the storyteller at least halfway.” At least halfway? Why halfway, or any part of the way, at all? It’s one thing to present what it is Cooper said he believed, but there need be no acceptance of any part of his story as being factual or true. Was Cooper run off the road by government agents, leading to the amputation of his leg? Did Timothy McVeigh come to visit him just before Oklahoma City? I think it very unlikely but Jacobson doesn’t do any sifting of the evidence or come down with any conclusions on these or many other points of interest.

Cooper may have come by his manias honestly, but that doesn’t make them any less in need of being called out. When it comes to fact-checking, and I would add moral judgment, we call on journalists to do more.

Notes:
Review first published online April 13, 2026.

THE NEW PROPHETS OF CAPITAL
By Nicole Aschoff

There are two imperatives that control the psychology of the very rich. The first and most important is the need to hold on to their positions of wealth, power, and privilege. The second is to justify that position, to see it not as the result of luck or morally questionable behaviour but as normal, natural, and inevitable. Perhaps great wealth is the result of some genetic superiority – social Darwinism has never gone out of style, and indeed may be more widely espoused than ever in some variation of evolutionary psychology – or maybe it’s just the reward of merit.

What these two imperatives lead to, invariably, is a defence of the status quo. The rich and powerful are not radicals, looking to overthrow the very system that has placed them at the top. That system is self-evidently working properly. Sure, some tweaks and adjustments might be recommended, but nothing that goes so far as to upset “traditional” values, status hierarchies, and property rights. The guiding principle is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the world as it is, and that whatever happens, those with the most to lose won’t lose anything.

For left-wing political writer Nicole Aschoff the status quo is capitalism, the foundation of which is the belief in profits over people. In The New Prophets of Capital she examines the “spirit of capitalism” as embodied in the pronouncements of four of its contemporary American champions: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Whole Foods founder John Mackey, media icon Oprah Winfrey, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

It goes without saying that all four are extremely wealthy and powerful individuals, which in turns makes nothing of what they say terribly interesting, given the points I made earlier. Sandberg wants more women to be more like her and advance to the commanding heights of corporate culture in America. John Mackey wants businesses to be run more like he runs Whole Foods, being more aware of workers’ rights and environmental issues, a corporate ethos that is “in harmony with the fundamentals of human nature.” Oprah wants more people to . . . be like her (you notice a pattern), embracing the power of positive thinking and the laws of attraction to self-monetize. And Bill Gates wants to save the world by running it more like a good CEO runs his company, optimizing outcomes in the fields of health care and education through better incentive structures.

Aschoff concludes, in far gentler language than I would have used, that this is all just so much capitalist propaganda. Of course none of these people wants to change the world, if we mean by that the operating system of the world economy. Instead they just want to make some tweaks around the edges, or urge individuals to make changes to themselves so as to flourish in this best of all possible worlds. What has been good, what is good, for Sheryl Sandberg, John Mackey, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates, is truly good for the world. A win for Sandberg is a win for all women (“trickle-down feminism”), a win for Mackey is a win for the environment, a win for Oprah is a win for all the underprivileged, a win for Bill Gates is a win for the sick and the poor everywhere. These people recognize some issues with capitalism but each believes “that the solution to our problems lies in refining the existing political and economic system, expanding the reach of capitalist markets, submitting more and more aspects of our lives to a market logic, and channeling our struggles for a better life through corporations.” And by “refining” the current system they mean making it over in their own image.

I agree with Aschoff’s critical take, not because capitalism is inherently evil but because it has certain priorities that are, ultimately, incompatible with such things as equality, sustainability, and anything like social justice. Which is why each of those terms have become pejorative buzzwords for the political right. Aschoff’s analysis is much like that provided by Thomas Frank in some of his early books, examining an ideology through the lens of its most popular and prominent avatars and the books they write. Books that became bestsellers and that may, in some circles, be religiously read. But books that I have no intention of picking up, knowing even in advance of Aschoff exactly what I’ll find in them.

Notes:
Review first published online March 16, 2026.

THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS IN AN AGE OF EXTREMISM
By Tim Alberta

In American Carnage Tim Alberta entered what was already a crowded field and wrote what I think is still the best book about the political rise of Donald Trump and his takeover (friendly or hostile) of the Republican Party. The subject of nearly as hefty a haul of books as there have been on Trump has been the phenomenon of evangelical Christian support for Trump. I’ve looked at a number of those (at greatest length here), and again it seems to me that Alberta’s work stands out.

Alberta is a good reporter, someone capable of going into the weeds without losing sight of the important principles in play. The underlying narrative here is a now familiar one. What has happened to religion in America is very similar to what has happened to politics and the media, a process that has come to be known as “audience capture.” Incentivized to maximize their hold on public attention, moribund institutions like the news, political parties, and churches have played up hot-button cultural issues that have taken them away from their traditional core missions. What follows is an accelerating, dopamine-driven hunger for rage-bait. Enragement, as the tech observer Kara Swisher puts it, is what drives engagement. The more angry, depressed, and resentful you make people, the more rewards flow in the form of celebrity, wealth, and proximity to political power.

Alberta presents several cases of this as he travels to churches – both mega- and MAGA – across the United States. Here are a few of the representative figures he meets.

Robert Jeffress:

The man knew how to draw a crowd – and how to keep it. Whether from the pulpit or the television set or the radio booth, Jeffress was a continuous manufacturer of controversy. It could be political one day and theological the next; the substance wasn’t necessarily the point. That long-ago library fight in Wichita Falls [over children’s books dealing with homosexual parents] had taught him the awesome power of publicity: Despite losing the actual dispute, and coming under widespread criticism in the process, Jeffress had grown his church and burnished his celebrity. He built on that model at First Dallas Baptist. Every bit of opposition he generated was an opportunity. Every rebuke he elicited had its own reward.

Greg Locke:

If the Trump presidency was a gold rush for right-wing grifters, Locke struck it positively rich, growing Global Vision in proportion to his own bulging celebrity in evangelical circles. He became difficult to ignore. The churn of controversy was incessant – sometimes about his tirades against transgenderism, sometimes about his alliances with MAGA figures, sometimes about his personal life (following an ugly divorce, Locke scandalized some in the church by marrying his ex-wife’s closest friend). Where others might have pulled back, Locke always charged ahead, picking any and every fight he could.

The payoff came with COVID-19. Refusing to close Global Vision, and publicly degrading any pastor who decided differently, Locke portrayed himself as an avenger fueled by religious vindication, the lonely voice of boldness inside a retreating American Christendom. His following kept increasing and he kept pushing the limits. His viral videos became ever less about Jesus Christ and ever more about Greg Locke . . .

Stephen E. Strang:

The book [God and Donald Trump] sold like crazy – and backed Strang into a corner. He had not always admired Trump, but now, having found commercial success arguing that the man was an imperfect instrument of God’s will, Strang had every incentive to nurture the narrative. The president’s myriad and manifest deficiencies would only underscore the original premise. No matter how bad things would get for Trump in the years to come, the savvy move for Strang was to double down.

So that’s what he did.

You’ll have noted the repetition of celebrity and controversy, and the cycle linking the two. Given the powerful incentive structure at work, it seems an inevitable doom loop for people in such positions to fall into. When one righteous pastor Alberta meets remarks that he has seen many of his old friends in the ministry “seduced by prominence and power, by fame and fortune” and “could not understand why,” one would have thought that he’d answered his own question. But perhaps he is a holdout in believing that a calling to the ministry sets one above any consideration of earthly rewards.

The end result of all of this is the sort of condition that Alberta tracks in the radicalization of Eric Metaxas, a MAGA mouthpiece who didn’t start out that way but, like the other people just discussed, became increasingly radicalized as his stature in the right-wing political-media ecosystem grew. The result “traced a well-worn dichotomy.” Was Metaxas “knowingly shedding his principles in the pursuit of fame and influence? Or was he actually convinced that America needed saving and that Donald Trump was our national Messiah?” The conclusion Alberta comes to is also well-worn: “Both answers may have been correct. Corruption and psychosis are not mutually exclusive.” If it’s in our interest to believe something, however absurd, it can easily become an honestly held belief.

However absurd, or however evil. Along with incentivization comes escalation. “Something was happening on the religious right,” Alberta observes, “something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it. This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture. This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary.” Now become power-worshippers, evangelicals were hungry for ever more juicy fixes while keeping them locked in a state one critical pastor describes as “permanent rage.”

This then is the way audience capture works, and it provides the benefit of cover for those so enthralled. What it allows for is a shifting of responsibility. If Germans complicit in the crimes of the Nazi regime were “just following orders” then politicians today are just following the algorithms, doing what their online and rally followers (a group not to be confused with the fascist “people”) demand. Just as the term “social media” means the exact opposite, so the label “influencer” gets the direction of influence backward. Someone who is only giving his or her audience what they want isn’t influencing them. They are the creation of their followers, captives of their base.

In addition to the phenomenon of audience capture, Alberta also examines, in depth or in passing, issues such as the separation of church and state, toxic old age, the evangelical siege mentality and persecution complex, and the general melding of religion, politics, and culture into a poisonous paste. The most important of these is the separation of church and state, which is where Alberta directs his strongest critique of the political evangelical church. “Religion and politics are natural enemies,” he writes, in a statement grounded even more in the Bible than the American Constitution. “Tension between the two is healthy and necessary. When one appropriates the other, history shows that oppression – leading to death and human suffering at a woeful scale – is the inevitable result.”

Needless to say, this is anathema to the evangelical right. “The nation was intended to be a Christian nation by our founding fathers,” according to Jerry Falwell back in a 1976 speech. “This idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix’ was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country!” To which a more traditional minister, one whose views Alberta is more sympathetic toward, reponds: “You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus. You have to choose.”

As a final point, and perhaps only because it is one I find myself returning to in many of these books, there is the matter of age demographics. According to one minister uncomfortable with the changes he’s noticed in evangelicalism, “it’s hardly coincidental that most of the churches in chaos are old, white, and evangelical.” They are the ones that have spent the longest time “marinating” in the rhetoric of decline and who most quickly fall to ungodly forces. But to another minister this provides a sense of optimism because “while partisan cheerleading was catnip to the over-fifty crowd,” younger evangelicals “wanted nothing to do with it.” As he puts it:

“There’s been this amazing shift. It used to be the parents coming to me, worried sick about what their kids were watching and listening to, asking what could be done to pull them back. . . . Now, almost everywhere I go – this just happened at a church I visited the other night – it’s the kids coming to me. They say their evangelical parents have gone totally crazy, binge-watching Fox News or Newsmax or One America News, and they want to know how to pull them back.”

The kids, from this viewpoint, are alright, but their parents aren’t. Unfortunately, while I agree with the point being made about the anger of the Boomers being the fertile seedbed of so much of what has gone wrong in Western politics and culture more generally, it gives me less ground for hope, both because the adults probably can’t be pulled back from the place they are now and because the poison has begun to affect their grandchildren. The change that has overtaken the evangelical church will take generations to reverse, and it’s unlikely America has that long to wait. Published in 2023, Alberta didn’t know when writing that Trump would be back and, per the rules we’ve seen in place, more extreme than ever. The takeover of the rage virus continues, and the resulting American carnage, continues apace.

Notes:
Review first published online March 2, 2026.