Martha Nussbaum on Our Political Crisis

1 2 3 R S H I P W R E C K W I T H S P E C T A T O R M A R T H A N U S S B A U M O N O U R P O L I T I C A L C R I S I S F E I S A L G . M O H A M E D Experiences we have while reading a book can indelibly mark our response to it. I first flipped through the pages of Martha Nussbaum ’s Monarchy of Fear while taking an Uber to the airport. Glancing out the window, I saw a pickup truck speed by with a bumper sticker that was a relic of the 2016 election, with a redfaced , shouting Trump on the left-hand side, a beleaguered Hillary on the right, and dominated in the middle by capital letters blaring ‘‘TRUMP THAT BITCH.’’ Can there be a more eloquent expression of the sentiment that propelled the forty-fifth president into o≈ce than those three monosyllables? Or a more perfect emblem of the insecure, working-class white American masculinity that reacted with irrational hostility to the prospect of an eminently capable woman as president? The result at the polls seemed accessory to the primary aim of seeing Hillary Clinton publicly humiliated time and again, a spectacle for which Trump’s supporters had a boundless appetite. An analysis of the politics of fear seemed very timely indeed. T h e M o n a r c h y o f Fe a r : A P h i l o s o p h e r L o o k s a t O u r P o l i t i c a l C r i s i s , b y M a r t h a C . N u s s b a u m ( S i m o n a n d S c h u s t e r , 2 7 2 p p . , $ 2 5 . 9 9 c l o t h , $ 1 6 p a p e r ) 1 2 4 M O H A M E D Y As I was reading with interest on my flight, I could see out of the corner of my eye that the woman seated next to me was also actively annotating the book in her hands. As the plane began its descent she asked what I was reading. I told her it was something by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how saving democracy will require us to conquer fear. ‘‘Hey,’’ she said excitedly, ‘‘that’s just like this book!’’ She explained that the book in her hands was written by an expert in management on the way emotions can negatively a√ect our decision making, and she showed me the cover of Brian Tracy’s Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement. It would not have occurred to me before that moment to have placed Nussbaum’s work on the business-advice shelf. But I now found myself making internally a case for this book as philosophy, rather than as vapid pop-psychology-cum-handbook of Puritan conversion urging readers be born again. Doing so turned out to be more di≈cult than I had anticipated. And it certainly made me look skeptically upon Nussbaum’s references to current findings in psychology , which so often passes as iron-clad evidence among the self-help set. The Monarchy of Fear is in fact two books untidily squeezed between a single set of covers. The first is a continued meditation on the politics of emotion, a topic that has been a major focus of Nussbaum’s writings since Upheavals of Thought (2001). Those of us with high regard for her work will be grateful to see another chapter in this ongoing meditation. The second is an analysis of our current political moment. Nussbaum’s e√ort here is an utter disappointment. She o√ers no analysis of the actual workings of American democracy, and insists on a silly bipartisan balance in faulting individuals on...