Ten books to understand the world we're now in

Trump’s second term is on track to be more damaging than his first. He has a more loyal central team, unwilling to push back against his madder ideas, and, critically, a co-President in Elon Musk charging around breaking things. Meanwhile those Republicans in Congress who aren’t fully signed-up to the cult, are cowering in fear and, as yet, unprepared to make even the smallest gesture of defiance.

The consequences for the global economy are only just starting to be felt. In Europe there has been a much more dramatic switch to thinking about military and economic independence than almost anyone expected a few months ago.

This is all pretty alarming, especially when combined with some of the wider global trends that contributed to Trump’s victory. Russia’s journey back into full blown totalitarianism happened a while ago, but in more recent years we’ve seen the rise of Putin-backed politicians in Eastern European countries that had transitioned to democracy. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was the first – in the EU at least – but now Robert Fico is the Slovakian Prime Minister, and the Romanians have had to use the courts to block Călin Georgescu. In the upcoming Polish Presidential elections the spectacularly unpleasant Sławomir Mentzen may make the run-off.

And, of course, we’ve seen radical right parties do increasingly well in Western European elections too. Though recent developments are causing problems for parties still aiming at some level of respectability, like Reform.

So I thought subscribers might find it helpful if I listed some of the books that have helped me understand how we ended up here. It is, of course, not comprehensive – there are, no doubt, many excellent books covering this vast ground that I haven’t read so please do add your own recommendations in the comments.

The first five books focus on the US and the coming of the Trump/Musk era and the second five look at Europe and the wider world. I’ve thrown in a few other suggestions for related reading along the way.

1. Rick Perlstein – Chronicle of American Conservatism

OK this is four long books not one – I promise the others are shorter – but they are by far the best guide to the journey the Republicans took, between 1964 and 1980, from being an elite east coast party to winning the south by turning sharply right.

The first book “Before the Storm” covers Barry Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy, which was doomed by his supposed extremism (he’d now be well to the left of the GOP) but started the shift. The second “Nixonland” might be my favourite US history book, blending biography of the paranoid President Nixon and his rise to power with the upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s. It shows how his own grudges against elite America made him the perfect candidate to change the Republican party. Oddly Liz Truss once claimed it was her favourite book too, which can only mean she hasn’t read it.

Even though the 3rd and 4th books cover the period 1972-80 before Ronald Reagan came to power, he’s the protagonist, his rise to political stardom foreshadowing so much of modern politics. The third is built around Reagan’s challenge for the 1976 nomination, which he ultimately lost out on, and is called “The Invisible Bridge” after Khruschev’s famous advice to Nixon: “If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” The final volume looks at the four years that lead to Reagan’s victory.

What makes these books so fascinating is the sheer volume of detail about the way the right built popular movements around cultural and racial issues like school bussing and housing discrimination, and the growing role of evangelical Christians within the Republican party. For this period I’d also recommend Dan T. Carter’s “The Politics of Rage” which covers the rise of the segregationist Alabama Democrat George Wallace and his 1968 third-party Presidential candidacy (he won five southern states).

2. Nicole Hemmer – Partisans

Apparently Perlstein is writing another book covering the period from 2000 to now, but this is a good book on US politics in the 1990s, when the rightwards shift of the Republicans became impossible to ignore. It focuses in particular on Rush Limbaugh, the talk radio host who did so much to shape the aggressive, mocking, tone of modern conservativism; Pat Buchanan, whose failed bids for the Presidency pre-figured Trump in many (but not all) ways; and Newt Gingrich.

If people like Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham changed the tone of Republicanism, paving the way for the Tea Partiers during the Obama era and ultimately Trump, it was Gingrich who changed the norms around formal Washington politics as House Speaker, winning the 1994 midterms and retaining a majority in 1996 even as Bill Clinton won another term as President. He went against the prevailing wisdom by shifting away from what was seen as the political centre and using hyper-partisan tactics and language (though now they just seem normal). “Burning Down the House” by Julian Zelizer is also good on Gingrich during his time as Speaker.

There isn’t yet a really good book about Clinton’s Presidency (that I’ve come across anyway), and perhaps there won’t be while he’s still alive, but probably the best I’ve read is the “Clinton Tapes” by Taylor Branch (author of a brilliant trilogy on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement). Branch, who is sympathetic, recorded a series of interviews with Clinton during the Presidency which he uses to tell the story.

3. Maggie Haberman – Confidence Man

Winding the tape forward again there are shelves of books on Trump and his first term most of which are highly partisan, in both directions, or very gossipy. Of the latter category Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury is probably my favourite. But Haberman’s biography of Trump – looking at his whole career through to just after his first term – is, I think, the most astute and thoughtful book on him so far. Haberman spent years reporting on him and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for her coverage. Trump got quite obsessed with her which becomes part of the story.

The most illuminating sections of the book for me are about his early career cadging money out of state governments to fund his grandiose buildings and his attempts to break into the casino business. My view that he is best understood as an aging mob boss was formed in part by reading those chapters. Those are the people he hung around with, so it’s hardly surprising.

4. Max Chafkin – The Contrarian

This is a biography of a very different character – Peter Thiel – the billionaire patron of J. D. Vance and, as I discussed in a recent post, a critical player in the ongoing convergence of techno-utopianism and the cultural alt right within the GOP.

It covers the development of Thiel’s right-wing philosophy, the story of PayPal and his initial falling out with Elon Musk (who was kicked out as CEO while on honeymoon), and his increasingly dark and anti-democratic views following 9/11 and the financial crisis. The book also looks at the establishment of global data giant Palantir and how Thiel managed to incorrectly imply the company’s technology was responsible for the capturing of Osama Bin Laden, giving it an initial boost amongst defence departments who didn’t want to miss out.

The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, recently published “The Technological Republic” which I have not read, but from the reviews it seems to be a sort of manifesto for applying tech company methods to government. Karp, unlike Thiel, supported Harris not Trump but a lot of what he wants is now happening albeit in an extremely haphazard way. As the Economist review says “Mr Karp has got what he wished for, but he may not like the outcome.”

5. Kate Conger and Ryan Mac – Character Limit

This is the best of the books on Musk – an incredibly well sourced guide to his destruction of Twitter and its reincarnation as the barely functioning cesspit that is X. (I’m now almost exclusively on Bluesky which works much better and doesn’t suppress links or force the owners’ views into your feed).

Musk comes across pretty much exactly as you’d expect – thin-skinned, impulsive, unable to separate fact from fiction, almost entirely lacking in empathy, cycling between mania and self-pity. During the 2023 Superbowl he insists on flying back to Twitter HQ in his private jet for an emergency meeting with engineers after his tweet supporting the Philadelphia Eagles got fewer views than one by Joe Biden. The algorithm is subsequently changed to ensure users see his important takes.

The real value in the book is that DOGE is following the approach he used in dismantling Twitter: cutting staff almost at random and then trying to hire back people who turned out to be critical; insisting on petty cost savings that ultimately led to more expensive failures; refusing to pay bills; and being willing to lose multiple court cases because the costs are lower (in his eyes) that just charging ahead anyway.

Of course, while X has proved valuable to Musk as a propaganda tool, it has lost millions of users and most of its value as a result of his behaviour. Losing what was a functioning social media platform is annoying but doesn’t really matter. Doing the same thing to the US government definitely does. Most worrying of all is the sense that this man, who is now effectively an unelected co-President, is not at all psychologically stable and could easily have a breakdown. Recent interviews indicate as much.

6. Quinn Slobodian – Crack-Up Capitalism

Moving away from America and to books about the wider world, this is a brilliant guide to the global libertarian war against democracy. Slobodian is a Canadian historian, who has spent his career writing about what he calls neoliberalism (defined much more tightly than many who use that phrase). I’ll be writing about his forthcoming book – Hayek’s Bastards – that highlights the connections between libertarian economics and far right racial politics soon.

In Crack-Up Capitalism Slobodian looks at how places like Hong-Kong, Singapore and Dubai have developed as centres for capitalism without democracy. This has inspired other non-democratic states like China, for whom Hong Kong is an explicit model for their rapid development of new cities. But they have also become seen as an increasingly attractive model by Western thinkers. Both in terms of investing in these centres, but also setting up new economic zones in which the usual tiresome rules, like paying tax, don’t apply.

Some of these attempts are quixotic, like the bunch of oddballs who try to set up a new state within Somalia, but the ideas are becoming increasingly mainstream. In my post on Thiel and Musk’s ideology I looked at how the former in particular is obsessed with creating escape routes from democratic states, whether by trying to build artificial islands in the sea or establishing a new private city in Honduras.

7. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes – The Light That Failed

A short book written during the first Trump term by two political scientists from Bulgaria and the US. It’s built around the idea of imitation and the ways that has fostered illiberalism in Eastern Europe, Russia and now the West.

The first section focuses on attempts to impose models of Western liberal democracy on Eastern European states after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the resentments this created both within elites and the wider population. This was partly about the economic shock created by rapid and unfair privatisations, partly about adopting Western cultural norms and partly about emigration. Krastev and Holmes are particularly convincing on this final point – while Western states were panicking about immigration from Eastern European states joining the EU, the process also denuded those countries of younger liberal types, and created a panic about their countries’ long-term futures, which nationalists like Orbán and Lech Kaczyński in Poland were able to exploit.

Section two focuses on Russia and Putin’s switch, from the late 2000s onwards, to a more aggressive model of authoritarianism which he justified through mocking imitation of the West’s failings. The authors call this mirroring. So attacks on other countries outside of international law were justified with reference to US/European attacks on Serbia, and election interference was scaled-up, less because Russia wanted particular candidates to win, and more to highlight America’s interference in other countries. One could argue his fury at what he sees as the West’s hypocrisy drives his determination to rebuild Russia’s sphere of influence.

The final section looks at Trump’s imitation of Eastern authoritarianism and broader blow-back into the West – and how despite his MAGA slogan he buys Putin’s arguments that American belief in its own moral superiority has been damaging. Even if one doesn’t agree with the thesis the insights on Hungary, Poland and Russia are extremely valuable.

8. Svetlana Alexievich – Second-Hand Time

This is a masterpiece from the Belarusian Nobel Prize winner – one of the best books I’ve ever read. Her method is to interview hundreds of people, most entirely ordinary, and piece it together into a narrative with almost no authorial interjection. If it sounds a bit dull it’s anything but. All her books are extraordinary but this one is particularly relevant as it covers the post-Soviet period in Russia, and explains better than anything else I’ve read why democracy didn’t stick and we ended up with Putin.

You can understand the facts about Russia in the past few decades by reading some of the excellent and more conventional non-fiction on the topic like Catherine Belton’s “Putin’s People” or Peter Pomerantsev’s “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible”. But Second-Hand Time really helps the reader understand the mixed feelings of seeing the Soviet empire collapse, the brief hope that something better was coming, and the bitter disappointment when it didn’t.

What’s striking to a Westerner is the sense of fatefulness, the feeling of so many that ultimately Russia can never be suited to freedom: “In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing.”

9. Paul Lendvai – Orbán

I’ve already mentioned the Hungarian Prime Minister a few times, as he is the forerunner for so much of what is happening in Europe and America. Quite explicitly so given his role in promoting global right wing movements like CPAC and NatCon conferences.

This is the first full-length biography of Orbán translated into English and Lendvai is a Hungarian-born former FT journalist who covered the region so he knows what he’s talking about. He briskly tells the story of how Orbán first came to attention as a young anti-communist protester during the 1989 uprisings. He formed Fidesz as a liberal party and became PM for the first time in 1998, ironically taking Hungary into NATO against Russia’s wishes. But over the course of his first term his authoritarian instincts became clear. He did not, though, have a majority so was unable to force many of his changes through, and was determined to wait for his opportunity to do so. As he said ominously from opposition: “we only have to win once, but then properly”.

When he returned to power in 2010 he had a supermajority, due to the odd Hungarian election system, allowing him to change the constitution and, over the years erode democracy, destroying the independent judiciary and most independent media. As I’ve written about before he’s an obvious model for those around Trump (and around Fico etc) but the US has a few more checks and balances that haven’t yet crumbled for all the President’s efforts. As for Hungary, there are elections next year and former Orbán ally Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party is leading in the polls. Whether Magyar can battle to a win despite Fidesz’s control of so much of Hungarian society seems critical to whether Hungary can find a way back.

10. Helen Thompson – Disorder

Since the arrival of Trump, and the shock of Brexit, there have been numerous books attempting to explain the turn to illiberalism and nationalism. I can’t claim to have read them all but along with the Krastev and Holmes book this is one of the ones I’ve found most useful. It’s in three sections – the first looking at the role energy has played in shaping geopolitics since the war; the second at financial markets and changes to the wider global economy; and the third looking at the nature of democracy itself and government’s responses to the problems caused by the first two sections.

Thompson – a Cambridge professor and prolific podcaster – has a forceful style with sweeping judgments that don’t always hold. Some critics have picked her up on what they see as errors in the second section, particularly around the Eurozone and it’s response to the financial crisis. But even with these caveats it’s full of information and ideas from an angle that few other books on these issues have taken. The first section on energy, in particular, is masterful and worth the money itself.

There will always be debates about the extent to which global trends are structural or a function of the behaviour of individual leaders like Putin and Trump. As per my own book I, like Thompson, tend more towards structural explanations. But there's certainly a risk that focusing solely on the structural can induce unjustified apathy at our ability to change anything. I do have hope that understanding what’s going on is the first step to changing it – and hopefully the books listed here will help with that.