American politics

‘Read Hillbilly Elegy,’ a friend messaged me a decade ago. ‘The author really gets it.’ So I did, and indeed he did. The young and then obscure J.D. Vance showed, through his family travails in Appalachia, how both Republicans and Democrats had in their different ways screwed blue collar, just-about-working-class families like his. The book went platinum and launched his public career. Three things saved the young Vance from the fate that awaited people like him: a fiercely defensive and religious grandmother (‘Mamaw’), enlisting in the US Marines, and evangelical Christianity. He fell away from this last, however, as he discovered that his fundamentalist faith may have had community love in spades but was very short on good answers to big questions.

In the autumn of 1938, within nine weeks of each other, two boys arrived in New York, fleeing the gathering storm: a 15-year-old Jewish German and a ten-year-old Catholic from Poland. Both would repay the mortal debt they owed by dedicating their lives to the Land of the Free. The older boy was, of course, Henry Kissinger, later Grand High Poobah to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The younger was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser from 1977 to 1981 and the subject of a magisterial biography bythe Financial Times’sWashingtonsupremo, Edward Luce. From the first, Zbigniew Brzezinski (pronounced ‘ZbigNieff BreshinSki’, as Carter helpfully informed his team) sat in Kissinger’s shadow, always a step or two behind the great Bavarian.

The talented military historian Max Boot has published a well-researched life of Ronald Reagan that is fundamentally wrong. First the good parts: he has combed through lots of archives finding new information and has interviewed countless people who worked with or knew Reagan. His style also bears the reader effortlessly along. Yet his claim that Reagan was merely a lightweight pragmatist who had little effect on reviving the American economy, resuscitating the country’s self-esteem or winning the Cold War is absurdly revisionist. It says more about the author’s own rejection of the Republican party than it does about Reagan’s world-historical achievements.

To millions of people across America, Hillary Clinton sits atop a global network of satanic child-traffickers and is battling an underground resistance led by Donald Trump to maintain her malign influence. That is the core tenet of the QAnon movement, a conspiracy theory that originated in obscure corners of the internet before being seized upon by members of the Republican elite for their political advantage. Did the Clintons get rich while undertaking a life of public service? Absolutely QAnon is at the heart of Gabriel Gatehouse’s The Coming Storm. But the book begins with a conspiracy theory from centuries earlier, about witches in medieval Europe.

The tramp of lovers marching through our heroine’s bedroom in the first half of Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker almost deafens the reader. But then not for nothing did Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman become known as the alpha courtesan of the 20th century. What is perhaps not so well covered is her decade-long influence on American politics before becoming the United States Ambassador to France under (no, not literally) Bill Clinton. The Hon Pamela Digby was born on 20 March 1920 and brought up quietly in Dorset, riding, hunting and meeting only those her parents (her father was the 11th Baron Digby) considered above the social plimsoll line. Early on she realised that what gave a woman supreme independence was great wealth – usually acquired through a man.

In 1977, in the wake of the death of the king of rock’n’roll, the American journalist and music critic Lester Bangs said: ‘We will never again agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis.’ The ‘we’ was America. And Bangs was right – until June 1984, when Bruce Springsteen released Born in the U.S.A. The album’s blend of synths, guitars and colossal drums would vault Springsteen into stadiums. It went on to sell 17 million copies, and for a time made its creator the biggest rock star in the world. Steven Hyden looks to trace who Springsteen was before this moment, what happened to him during it, who he became after it – and, with more difficulty, what became of his audience.