Books in Brief

ERIC CHEYFITZ
The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States
New York: Routledge, 2017. xii + 307 pp.

Few books with chapters on Melville address the crisis conditions in the US today with the clarity and urgency of The Disinformation Age. Cheyfitz opens with George Orwell’s 1984, which he reads not as a cautionary tale but as a true story of the neoliberal present: “a corporate, effectively one-party state of omnipresent surveillance, endless war, and endemic income inequality” (6). Countering the notion that we live in the “Information Age,” Cheyfitz identifies the current era, datable from about 1980 forward, as the “Disinformation Age,” in which major media outlets, politicians, and others beholden to corporate capitalism promote the myth of the American Dream even as wages stagnate, class mobility vanishes, technology displaces workers, police brutality kills the innocent, and mass incarceration means virtual slavery for hundreds of thousands of men of color. He maintains that the disjunction between rhetoric and reality is not so much ideology, which would imply narrative coherence, as a Wall Street-engineered con job to hide the fact that the ultra-rich hoard the country’s wealth and use it to purchase political influence. Published in February 2017, the book refers to 2016 election results with an awkwardness that suggests hasty revisions in proof: e.g., “the presidential candidacy and win of Donald Trump” (17). But treating the new administration as incidental hammers home the larger point that corporate agendas shape the political positions of both major parties, to the profound detriment of liberal democracy. Our predicament has deep roots: Cheyfitz explains that propertied men have been writing the rules since the Constitutional Convention and that the nation’s refusal to debate in Congress the link between economic rights and political rights has left us pathologically unable to imagine public policies that do not privilege shareholder capitalism.

Whither Melville in this passionate diagnosis of the national sickness unto death? Cheyfitz summons him as a like-minded cultural critic, who in “Benito Cereno” and The Confidence-Man exposes the original sins of the United States and its citizens’ willed obliviousness to them. “Benito Cereno” arrives with a jolt in the middle of chapter four, “The End of Innocence: Jeremiah Wright’s Anti-Jeremiad Jeremiad,” which analyzes how Wright’s September 16, 2001, sermon, “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” and April 13, 2003, sermon, “God and Government,” delivered three weeks after the US invasion of Iraq, censures Americans’ bad-faith commitment to their own innocence and exceptionalism, which the Chicago pastor regards as untenable given Native American conquest, African-American enslavement, and ongoing massive social inequalities and global military interventionism. Midway through, Cheyfitz hits us with “Benito Cereno,” read as a “satire of American innocence . . . and the exceptionalist narrative that innocence underpins” (139). As in most contemporary criticism on the novella, Delano is a deliberate naïf unwilling to recognize the Africans’ humanity or his own complicity with the murderous history of colonialism. Familiar as it is, the reading packs a punch next to Wright’s outrage at the nation’s ongoing pretensions to innocence. Melville’s story is then no longer only about benighted 1850s Northerners who saw slavery as someone else’s problem, but also, more troublingly, about the collective denial of bloodguilt that underlies American rhetoric and self-perception to this day.

Juxtaposition with current events also electrifies Cheyfitz’s reading of The Confidence-Man. Chapter six of The Disinformation Age assesses how world politicians and bankers responded to the 2008 economic disaster with affirmations that the first priority was...