Published in the Washington Post's Sunday book review section, The Atlantic’s Emma Green penned a less-than glowing review of Senator Elizabeth Warren's new book, This Is Our Fight. Newsbusters provides the summary of Green's review:
But Warren’s book also reveals the moral languages the senator is less able to speak. She never truly grapples with why Democrats lost, why middle-class voters would choose Trump or whether their anger might be about more than the economy. Warren sees the world through the narrow lens of economic interests, ignoring the deeply held values and beliefs that often determine people’s politics. This attitude is condescending, but more important, it limits Warren’s understanding of America — and why her party has failed so badly.
[The book's] focus on regulation and corruption, not taxing and spending...and at every possible moment, highlight the hypocrisy and corruption of the other side. ...Warren styles herself as a populist Cassandra who expected Trump’s victory ...[while offering] no praise for [Hillary Clinton’s] policies or leadership."
Green ceded a few points to Warren in her review, only to assail the far-left senator towards the conclusion:
Warren has nominated herself as the person to answer that question — perhaps as a senator, perhaps as president...Now she seems to be offering her own soft pitch: Unlike other Democrats, she understands the anger of the American people, she predicted Trump’s success, and she knows what the party should do next.
Yet the story Warren tells about the election and America’s anxieties is curiously one-dimensional. She uses standard progressive math to explain Trump voters: Some are racist bigots, some were taken in by a huckster casino owner and some are suffering from intense economic despair. One of the women she follows, Gina, lives in a mobile home in a small North Carolina town. She and her husband barely get by on her hourly wage from Walmart. “We need to tell this story!” Gina tells Warren. “But I really need this job.”
Gina, we find out at the end of the book, “proudly voted for Donald Trump, hoping he would ‘shake things up.’?” In Warren’s world, the Democratic Party would win the vote of every Gina in America by fighting for a “playing field that isn’t tilted so hard against her.” But Warren never really tells us why America’s Ginas aren’t voting for Democrats now.
Perhaps Warren’s narrow lens has something to do with it. While she mentions the problems of racism and tosses in an obligatory shout-out to Planned Parenthood, those issues are not central to her narrative of how America got the way it is and how Democrats need to fix it. She gives no credence to people’s religious convictions and moral crises. She spends no time on battles over LGBT identity or racialized policing. And she has no patience for arguments in favor of smaller government. To Warren, real political action is never local and communal, but always federal.
Green has been on a roll this week, having also published on Monday a piece critical of the anti-Trump Anne Frank Center. Sometimes the Left is too far out even for, well, leftists.
