Publishers Weekly
08/07/2023
Wall Street Journal editor-at-large Baker argues in this uneven debut that the multiple crises afflicting America today all stem from a loss of trust. Asserting that “the last twenty years have been among the most dispiriting periods in the relatively short history of the United States,” Baker attributes this state of affairs to a common, corrosive factor: Americans have lost trust in “their leaders, in their important social and civil institutions, even in their common values and ideals, or ultimately in one another.” He blames the usual suspects: namely the misguided and mismanaged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the lack of genuine accountability for the 2008 financial collapse, failures to accept election results, mixed messaging in response to Covid-19, biased media, and corporate greed. But Baker’s review of the facts is selective; he cites the Bible to disprove climate change. (“Weather events have been with us for some time.... The Bible is full of them.”) He is also less than scrupulous about being consistent; allegations that Trump colluded with Russia are both “mainly false” and “false.” This is a missed opportunity for Baker, a media leader, to begin to restore trust for Americans by finding common ground after a balanced diagnosis of current ills. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
America in fact hasn’t failed. Americans have been failed—by lying politicians, phony executives, woke academics, and activist scientists. That's the argument of Gerry Baker’s AMERICAN BREAKDOWN, an immigrant journalist’s passionate J’accuse against this country’s elites. It’s a book about two decades of declining public trust in just about every institution. But it has a hopeful message. The extremists in the culture war have fewer followers than social media might suggest. Like past periods of polarization and distrust, this breakdown, too, shall pass.”—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
“Baker masterfully unpacks Americans’ growing distrust in their institutions with a compelling breakdown of the many ways societal leaders have destroyed their credibility—and the continued threat from today’s Davos Men and Little Maoists. AMERICAN BREAKDOWN makes the persuasive case that distrust is at the heart of so much U.S. dysfunction, even as it offers a critical guide to how we rebuild that social capital.”—Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal columnist and author of The Biden Malaise
“Well, this is the one I’ve been waiting for: a truly fresh and compelling account of what’s gone wrong in America over the past twenty years from someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the failures of the people in charge—because he’s seen it from the inside, as editor of the Wall Street Journal and now the masterful chronicler of the arrogance, hubris, and sheer incompetence of our ruling class. Baker vividly explains how collapsing trust in the key institutions of American life is at the root of the nation’s political and social turbulence. Only when the elites who have led the country astray through ideological extremism and reckless mismanagement acknowledge the vast gulf between themselves and the people can trust be restored. If you want to understand how America recovers its soul, you need this book. Not least because it’s also a brilliant read.”—Steve Hilton, Fox News contributor
Wall Street Journal columnist and author of The Bi Kimberley Strassel
Baker masterfully unpacks Americans’ growing distrust in their institutions with a compelling breakdown of the many ways societal leaders have destroyed their credibility—and the continued threat from today’s Davos Men and Little Maoists. AMERICAN BREAKDOWN makes the persuasive case that distrust is at the heart of so much U.S. dysfunction, even as it offers a critical guide to how we rebuild that social capital.
Niall Ferguson
America in fact hasn’t failed. Americans have been failed—by lying politicians, phony executives, woke academics, and activist scientists. That's the argument of Gerry Baker’s AMERICAN BREAKDOWN, an immigrant journalist’s passionate J’accuse against this country’s elites. It’s a book about two decades of declining public trust in just about every institution. But it has a hopeful message. The extremists in the culture war have fewer followers than social media might suggest. Like past periods of polarization and distrust, this breakdown, too, shall pass.
Fox News contributor Steve Hilton
Well, this is the one I’ve been waiting for: a truly fresh and compelling account of what’s gone wrong in America over the past twenty years from someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the failures of the people in charge—because he’s seen it from the inside, as editor of the Wall Street Journal and now the masterful chronicler of the arrogance, hubris, and sheer incompetence of our ruling class. Baker vividly explains how collapsing trust in the key institutions of American life is at the root of the nation’s political and social turbulence. Only when the elites who have led the country astray through ideological extremism and reckless mismanagement acknowledge the vast gulf between themselves and the people can trust be restored. If you want to understand how America recovers its soul, you need this book. Not least because it’s also a brilliant read.
WSJ columnist and author of The Biden Malaise Kimberley Strassel
Baker masterfully unpacks Americans’ growing distrust in their institutions with a compelling breakdown of the many ways societal leaders have destroyed their credibility—and the continued threat from today’s Davos Men and Little Maoists. AMERICAN BREAKDOWN makes the persuasive case that distrust is at the heart of so much U.S. dysfunction, even as it offers a critical guide to how we rebuild that social capital.
Kirkus Reviews
2023-07-05
The former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal adds to the why-American-society-is-in-such-a-mess genre.
Baker, now a WSJ editor at large and a regular commentator on Fox News, maintains that he is nonpartisan and that “there is plenty of blame to go around,” but readers will quickly discover that he is an old-school conservative. Like many traditional conservatives, the author deplores Donald Trump and his followers. However, if forced to choose between a die-hard, right-wing conspiracy theorist and a conventional liberal, he would throw up his hands in despair. Baker blames much of our current crisis on “the rapid advance in progressive ideologies in American institutions in the last thirty years or so.” Perhaps his greatest anger is directed at his own profession, journalism, which—with the exception of his WSJ—has dropped all pretense of objectivity. “Taking their cue from Karl Marx,” news organizations refuse to merely report the world but work actively to change it. Baker also excoriates American universities, a conservative bugbear long dominated by liberals who shout down guest speakers and harass nonconformist professors. Least effective is the author’s chapter on the medical profession, an uncomfortably Trumpian attack on pandemic-era public health measures. He mostly denounces quarantines as hysterical fearmongering, and he maintains that vaccines, although modestly effective, have been oversold and should be voluntary. Since he blames America’s “cultural revolution” on a powerful, isolated cabal and opposes violence, his conclusion is short on specifics. He places his trust in the blameless, salt-of-the-earth American citizenry who “believe in traditional American values and ideals, put American…interests ahead of global concerns, and favor tough immigration restrictions and the reassertion of American sovereignty.” Although Baker believes in climate change, he also argues that the matter is overblown and that “climate extremism” is the new global religion, “a temporal canon, with its own moral and doctrinal heft.”
A polemic that will arouse conservatives and irritate liberals.
