From the Yale Alumni Magazine:

ARTS & CULTURE
Reviews: May/June 2018
Books on Trumpism, gender in the workplace, and Silicon Valley.

Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic
David Frum ’82, ’82MA
HarperCollins, $25.99
Reviewed by David Greenberg ’90

David Greenberg ’90, a historian at Rutgers University, is the author, most recently, of Republic of Spin.

Has any group of thinkers stood faster in defense of its principles since the rise of Donald Trump than the neoconservatives? A decade ago, when the political right had fallen on hard times, the neocons were derided by almost everyone for furnishing an intellectual rationale for the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush ’68. But since 2016, neoconservatives—practically alone on their side of the aisle—have consistently opposed Trump for the damage they see him doing. Writers like Max Boot ’92MA, Eliot Cohen, Jennifer Rubin, James Kirchick ’06, Bret Stephens, Cathy Young, and Bill Kristol have resisted the pressures of tribalism at a moment when few dare to leave their partisan tents.

In the Current Year, are Members of the Tribe as witty as they used to be? Their current moral panic over “tribalism” is a particularly funny example of today’s Jews not getting the joke. An increasing number seem cluelessly humorless, but it’s a hard question to measure objectively.