“That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back”
By Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $12.99
BUY NOW
The writing of Thomas Friedman — the New York Times columnist, author of “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” and “The World is Flat” — is so popular, so peculiar and simply so awful that the “Friedman Takedown” has become a genre in its own right. Like all genres, it has its own conventions and obsessions. Perhaps the central task of any Friedman Takedown is to poke fun at his verbal exuberance, which transforms trite observations into supposedly earth-shattering insights with the help of mixed metaphors. As Matt Taibbi, one of the early luminaries of the field, has written: “It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse.”
Some of Friedman’s trademark shenanigans assault the reader in his new book, “That Used to Be Us.” “Faced with era-defining challenges,” we are told, “the country has responded with all the vigor and determination of a lollipop.” A section heading reads “Flat World 2.0.” In a particularly brazen instance of Friedman’s overestimation of his own talents, he pens four whole pages in the voice of a 21st-century Alexis de Tocqueville-turned-management consultant.
But the Friedman Takedown has entered an unprecedented crisis with the publication of his latest work. Friedman’s assault on the English language has noticeably mellowed. Whole pages go by without a mixed metaphor. One or two paragraphs in the book contain no metaphor at all. It seems almost impossible: Has Friedman taken his critics to heart?
A more likely answer is that the transformation is due to his co-author, Michael Mandelbaum. A professor and leading foreign policy thinker, Mandelbaum must have been convinced that he was doing his old friend Friedman a favor by curbing his verbal excesses. The result, for me at least, produced a feeling of intense relief. Freed from all the usual distractions, I could actually focus on the book’s content. But this, it turns out, was not in the best interest of the authors — for what remains ranges from the true but unoriginal to the nutty and equally unoriginal.
The first two-thirds of the book is a timely yet unexciting description of the challenges America faces. In these pages, Friedman and Mandelbaum chronicle the country’s problems: (1) We are not doing enough to modernize our decrepit infrastructure. (2) American high school students now trail those in many parts of China in math, reading and science. (3) Visas for highly skilled laborers or investors from abroad are increasingly sparse. (4) Funding for research and basic science is dwindling. (5) Trust in experts and in scientists has declined, while lobbyists are more powerful than ever. (6) Public deficits are spiking. (7) Meanwhile, political dysfunction and hyper-partisanship are rife.
If the authors’ diagnosis, however obvious, has some truth to it, their suggested cure, hastily outlined in the last 60 pages of the book, is entertainingly naïve. They prescribe a course of “shock therapy” that is to be brought about by that old refuge of the discontented yet visionless — the third-party presidential candidate.
This chimera would, in Friedman and Mandelbaum’s version, draw on what they consider the most appealing parts of traditional Democratic and Republican positions. But because they recognize the need for sweeping and all-encompassing reform, their dream candidate would not be a “moderate.” No, he or she would, rather, personify a new “radical center.”
The policy platform of this partisanship-flattening savior would be a little bit of everything: “raising more revenue through increasing taxes, including energy taxes; reducing expenditures by cutting government programs, including popular, beneficial programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and defense; and investing more money in education, infrastructure, and research and development in order to upgrade the nation’s traditional formula for economic success.” Crucially, Friedman and Mandelbaum note, these different policies would have to be implemented together. “All are necessary. None can be left out.”
The problem with this daydream is that it is not only more unrealistic than the authors admit but also less widely shared than they assume. While all Americans want the country to be great again, no candidate can simply wave away the real and enduring disagreements among the American people about what would make a return to greatness possible.
Some believe that increasing government revenue is key; others, that lowering taxes is more likely to make America competitive. Some insist that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are necessary; others, that only strong welfare programs can prepare the working class for the jobs of the future. Washington’s hyper-partisanship may exacerbate these differences, but it is foolish of Friedman and Mandelbaum to forget that much of this partisanship exists precisely because there are deep disagreements about such issues.
Ultimately, the authors’ trust that a strong showing by a third-party candidate would force the political establishment to implement their favored policies can only derive from a willful blindness to the very partisanship and political dysfunction they have themselves described in detail. And yet it is only the possibility of such a candidate that, they say, gives them reason for optimism. This renders their bullish conclusions deeply unconvincing: If a successful third-party candidate is our only glimmer of hope, then there is, by their logic, every reason to be depressed.
Yascha Mounk is a political theorist at Harvard University and the founding editor of The Utopian.
By Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $12.99
BUY NOW
The writing of Thomas Friedman — the New York Times columnist, author of “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” and “The World is Flat” — is so popular, so peculiar and simply so awful that the “Friedman Takedown” has become a genre in its own right. Like all genres, it has its own conventions and obsessions. Perhaps the central task of any Friedman Takedown is to poke fun at his verbal exuberance, which transforms trite observations into supposedly earth-shattering insights with the help of mixed metaphors. As Matt Taibbi, one of the early luminaries of the field, has written: “It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse.”
Some of Friedman’s trademark shenanigans assault the reader in his new book, “That Used to Be Us.” “Faced with era-defining challenges,” we are told, “the country has responded with all the vigor and determination of a lollipop.” A section heading reads “Flat World 2.0.” In a particularly brazen instance of Friedman’s overestimation of his own talents, he pens four whole pages in the voice of a 21st-century Alexis de Tocqueville-turned-management consultant.
But the Friedman Takedown has entered an unprecedented crisis with the publication of his latest work. Friedman’s assault on the English language has noticeably mellowed. Whole pages go by without a mixed metaphor. One or two paragraphs in the book contain no metaphor at all. It seems almost impossible: Has Friedman taken his critics to heart?
A more likely answer is that the transformation is due to his co-author, Michael Mandelbaum. A professor and leading foreign policy thinker, Mandelbaum must have been convinced that he was doing his old friend Friedman a favor by curbing his verbal excesses. The result, for me at least, produced a feeling of intense relief. Freed from all the usual distractions, I could actually focus on the book’s content. But this, it turns out, was not in the best interest of the authors — for what remains ranges from the true but unoriginal to the nutty and equally unoriginal.
The first two-thirds of the book is a timely yet unexciting description of the challenges America faces. In these pages, Friedman and Mandelbaum chronicle the country’s problems: (1) We are not doing enough to modernize our decrepit infrastructure. (2) American high school students now trail those in many parts of China in math, reading and science. (3) Visas for highly skilled laborers or investors from abroad are increasingly sparse. (4) Funding for research and basic science is dwindling. (5) Trust in experts and in scientists has declined, while lobbyists are more powerful than ever. (6) Public deficits are spiking. (7) Meanwhile, political dysfunction and hyper-partisanship are rife.
If the authors’ diagnosis, however obvious, has some truth to it, their suggested cure, hastily outlined in the last 60 pages of the book, is entertainingly naïve. They prescribe a course of “shock therapy” that is to be brought about by that old refuge of the discontented yet visionless — the third-party presidential candidate.
This chimera would, in Friedman and Mandelbaum’s version, draw on what they consider the most appealing parts of traditional Democratic and Republican positions. But because they recognize the need for sweeping and all-encompassing reform, their dream candidate would not be a “moderate.” No, he or she would, rather, personify a new “radical center.”
The policy platform of this partisanship-flattening savior would be a little bit of everything: “raising more revenue through increasing taxes, including energy taxes; reducing expenditures by cutting government programs, including popular, beneficial programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and defense; and investing more money in education, infrastructure, and research and development in order to upgrade the nation’s traditional formula for economic success.” Crucially, Friedman and Mandelbaum note, these different policies would have to be implemented together. “All are necessary. None can be left out.”
The problem with this daydream is that it is not only more unrealistic than the authors admit but also less widely shared than they assume. While all Americans want the country to be great again, no candidate can simply wave away the real and enduring disagreements among the American people about what would make a return to greatness possible.
Some believe that increasing government revenue is key; others, that lowering taxes is more likely to make America competitive. Some insist that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are necessary; others, that only strong welfare programs can prepare the working class for the jobs of the future. Washington’s hyper-partisanship may exacerbate these differences, but it is foolish of Friedman and Mandelbaum to forget that much of this partisanship exists precisely because there are deep disagreements about such issues.
Ultimately, the authors’ trust that a strong showing by a third-party candidate would force the political establishment to implement their favored policies can only derive from a willful blindness to the very partisanship and political dysfunction they have themselves described in detail. And yet it is only the possibility of such a candidate that, they say, gives them reason for optimism. This renders their bullish conclusions deeply unconvincing: If a successful third-party candidate is our only glimmer of hope, then there is, by their logic, every reason to be depressed.
Yascha Mounk is a political theorist at Harvard University and the founding editor of The Utopian.
