1. Democracy,
by Henry Adams (1880): Henry Adams was the
original "Anonymous" political author. and Democracy remains one of
the finest political novels ever written. The novel , whose authorship was not
revealed until the 1920s, tells the story of Madeline Lee, a wealthy young widow
who comes to Washington, D.C. a generation after the Civil War. She becomes a
famous hostess, an informal power broker, and the romantic object of several
powerful men, including Silas P. Ratcliff, the new Treasury Secretary and a
likely contender for the presidency.
As Madeline sees how the Washington game is
played, she becomes increasingly comfortable in a world of moral grey areas,
but she holds to the belief that there is some core of virtue underneath the
American system of government that resists the corrupting nature of politics.
The central question of the novel is the question of "American
Exceptionalism": is the American political system fundamentally different
than other political systems? Are Americans, at some level, immune from the
corruptions of power and position? "There is only one thing in life,"
she confides to a friend "that I must and will have before I die. I must
know whether America is right or wrong."
At the time that Adams wrote Democracy, America had yet to
become a military or economic superpower. It was still a young nation, still
licking its wounds from a disastrous civil war. But the novel's central
question could not be more important today, when "American
Exceptionalism" has become a hiss and a buzzword and American power has
shaped the world for more than 75 years.
2. It Can't Happen Here,
by Sinclair Lewis (1935): Generally considered the
best of Sinclair Lewis’s post-Nobel Prize novels, It Can’t Happen Here
still lacks the canonical heft of works such as Main Street, Babbitt,
and Elmer Gantry. And even these novels don’t exactly reside in the
literary canon’s better neighborhoods. But It Can’t Happen Here deserves a place as one of the great
political novels of the 20th century.
In
the novel, a nationalist demagogue named Buzz Windrip becomes President by
appealing to nationalist sentiment and amasses dictatorial power. Many of the
issues that propell Windrip to power will strike modern readers as eerily
familiar, though not as ideologically consistent in 2012. Like real-life almost-dictator
Huey Long, Windrip combines the redistributionist impulses of the left with the
militarism and ultra-nationalism of the right—along with unhealthy doses of
racism, antisemitism, and
instutionalized Protestantism. The result is a plausible scenario for the 1936
election (written only the year before) in which FDR is defeated in the
Democratic primary and replaced by a Homespun Hitler figure who transforms America
into a fascist state.
Lewis
wrote It Can’t Happen Here at a time when it was still possible
for Americans to have a good word for Hitler and Mussolini—and for the extreme
nationalism of fascist government generally. The novel’s main character—a Vermont
journalist named Doremus Jessop—watches the transformation of America, first as
a detached observer, and later as a victim. Throughout the novel, he listens in
amazement as his fellow small-town Americans repeat, over and over, some
version of the novel’s title, “it can’t happen here.”
3. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren (1946): Interest in Warren’s classic novel of American politics has not
quite faded--All the King’s Men
still appears the top of most people’s lists of “Best Political Novels.” But
not many people read it anymore. I was barely aware of its existence until Russell Fox steered me in its
direction. Most of the good things that people say about the novel are true.
All
the King’s Men tells the story of the rise and fall of Willie Talos
(renamed “Willie Stark” by Warren’s editor, and then restored to “Willie Talos”
in the official 2003 reissue). Talos, the governor of an unnamed Southern state,
bears a quite intentional resemblance to Louisiana’s Huey Long, who must be
considered a primary subject of the book. Warren always said that the book was
not about politics, but about human nature—which was kind of a joke, since he
knew perfectly well that the two were the same thing.
What
strikes me the most about All the King’s Men is it’s nuanced
Machiavellianism. The viewpoint character, Jackie Burden, calls Machiavelli “the
founder of the modern world,” which Warren seems to accept. He does not
mean the Machiavelli of myth and legend, but the very real, complex, and
morally complicated political philosopher who actually wrote The Prince.
Willie Talos believes in power alone, which is bad, except that he mostly does
good things with it, which is good, except when he doesn’t, which is . . . .
well, complicated.
4. The Devil's Advocate, by Taylor Caldwell
(1952): Taylor Caldwell is the Ozymandius of 20th century
Anglo-American letters. She was one of the most well-known and highest paid
writers of the mid-century, she wrote more than 40 books, nearly all of them
bestsellers. And today, very few people under 60 have even heard her name.
The
Devil’s Advocate is not even one of her better known novels, but it has had
something of a second life among various right-wing patriot groups, who see in
it something of a blueprint of how they are going to fight the war against the
government. The novel centers around Andrew Durrant, a Constitutional patriot
in an America that has forgotten the Constitution. He is part of a small group
of “Minutemen” who infiltrate the government with the intention of making
things WORSE for the people so that they will remember their liberties and
throw off their oppressors.
I
read this book as a teenager, when I was reading books by Richard Bach and Ayn
Rand and imagining myself to be an intellectual. And though Ms. Caldwell held
many of the same views as Ms. Rand, she was a much better writer and
storyteller. I would argue that she was a more powerful thinker as well. The Devil’s Advocate makes a good case against Constitutional mission creep and large-government totalitarianism; today's liberals would do well to consider it carefully.
5. The Mouse that Roared,
by Leonard Wibberly (1955):
Like many insufferable teenage geeks, I saw the Peter Sellers
movie on TV and thought that that was as good as reading the book. But it wasn’t.
The movie was comic genius, but the book is excellent satire, which
is not the same thing.
The
Mouse that Roared tells the story of the knights of the Grand Duchy of
Fenwick, who (around the time of the Marshall Plan) set out to attack the
United States, lose the war, and “be rehabilitated beyond our wildest dreams.”
They send a small pack of longbowmen in medieval armor to New York City and
manage to capture the world’s leading nuclear scientist and his new
super-weapon that can destroy the entire world. With this weapon in hand, they
form the “League of Small Nations” and force the world’s powers to sue for
peace.
In the process of
telling this story, the Irish-American Wibberly gets his satiric hooks into all
of the principal players in the Cold War: American exceptionalism, Soviet
triumphalism, British colonialism, scientific detachment, and the absurdity of “arming
for peace.” And it is short enough to read in a few hours. Not a bad way to pass an evening with nothing much going on.
6. Advise and Consent,
by Allan Drury (1959): Though it reeks of the Cold
War, Advise and Consent has a number of surprisingly modern themes. It
treated Mormonism, homosexuality, and the politics of personal destruction
before any of the three had an official “moment.” It was the bestselling novel
of 1959, and a Pulitzer Prize winner to boot. And, for all that, it has not
been in print for years.
Advise and Consent tells the story of a
controversial political nomination. A dying president names Robert Leffingwell—a
well-known liberal, a professor, and a supporter of engagement with the Soviet
Union—to be the new Secretary of State. A number of powerful senators
immediately object, and, during the hearings, he is accused of hiding a
Communist past. As the nomination plays out, Utah’s earnest Senator Brigham
Anderson, who holds the nomination in his hands, is blackmailed by somebody
aware of his homosexual past. Things, of course, go drastically astray.
The
most important character in the book, though, is the United States Senate
itself, which Drury treats with reverence. The Senators disagree with each
other, but are able to do so in a cordial way, until one senator breaks ranks
with the august body and stoops to blackmail. He is the only real villain in
the novel, and, once he is exorcised, the democratic process of disagreement,
debate, and compromise produces a desirable result.
7. Mother Night, by Kurt
Vonnegut (1961): Kurt Vonnegut’s reputation as
a major American writer seems secure, but Mother Night remains one of
his least read works, which baffles me, as I consider it one of his best. It is
also, he has said on many occasions, the only one of his works that has a clear
moral, which is this: “you are what you depend to be, so be careful what you
pretend to be.”
The
hero (sort of) of Mother Night is Howard Campbell, Jr., an American
writer who becomes a Nazi propagandist during World War II. Except that he isn’t
really a Nazi agent, he is an American agent who uses his anti-American broadcasts
as a way to get important intelligence out of Germany. But nobody knows this
but the agent who runs him, and, when the war ends, everybody considers him a
traitor.
I
have thought back on this work many times when I look at politicians pretending
to be things to get nominated, to get elected, or to stay elected. We do tend
to become what we pretend to be, so what we pretend to be is every bit as
important as what we are.
8. Our Gang, by Phillip
Roth (1971): Roth has written a number of
brilliant political novels, such as Operation Shylock (1993) I Married a Communist (1998) and The
Plot against America (2004). But none of them hit my funny bone like this
gem of a book published during the first Nixon administration. Before the Watergate
break- in even happened, Roth created a brilliant satire of Nixon’s essential
duplicity.
This
is not really a novel. It is more like six separate satiric shorts featuring
the American President Tricky Dixon (who has followed Lying B. Johnson and John
F. Charisma into office). Tricky is shown giving a press conference on abortion
(confronting accusations that some of the women killed in the My Lai massacre
might have been pregnant, therefore making the heroic act of killing them abortions instead), working with his various advisors to find a way to
prove that he has never had sex, and, in the end, going to hell and mounting a
campaign against Satan.
Our
Gang was Roth’s follow-up to Portnoy’s Complaint, and it has all of the irreverent zing of
the more famous novel. It got lost in the shuffle of Watergate, however, and is
now read only by academic Philip Roth specialists, which is a shame, as it is a
darn funny book.
When the current moment becomes history,
I suspect that historians will be as baffled as I am by the fact that 238
members of the House of Representatives and 41 Senators—all but three of them
Republicans—have signed something called the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” in
which they promise that they will never (ever, ever) cast a single vote to
raise taxes. Given that “the power of the purse” is one of the most important
duties entrusted to Congress by the Constitution, the pledge they have taken
amounts to a solemn oath not to do their jobs.
