Stella Morabito
The Politics of Envy by Anne Hendershott Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted: “Our envy of others devours us most of all.” This observation is at the core of Hendershott’s extraordinary book, which is a desperately needed investigation into that destructive human emotion.
Envy is the main force behind today’s polarization, unrest, and violence. Hendershott really nails the green-eyed monster, tracing its corrosive power from ancient times to the modern practice of scapegoating in politics, in academia, in social media, and even in religion, where the “social justice gospel” subsists on cultivating envy. Advertisers, demagogues, and media figures stoke envy as a path to power. Envy is also the driving force behind excessive taxation, regulations, and all manner of social control by the state.
Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. (Image: Caleb Minear/Unsplash.com)
In the midst of our current stagnation and exhaustion from the recent election, I keep returning to something President Trump said back in 2016: “I’m a conservative, but at this point who cares? We’ve got to straighten out the country.”
Whatever one thinks about President Trump and conservatism, it seems clear that the last four years have given a new kind of direction and even encouragement for conservative thought and practice. While I do not want to equate “conservative principles” with “Donald Trump,” I do think Trump’s presidency has been a catalyst for renewed reflection upon national conservatism. Along with this, I would say there is a real possibility of a revitalized coalition bringing together conservatives and liberals. As the political philosopher Yoram Hazony recently argued:
What Nathan Glazer Can Teach Joe Biden
Can the new president remember the answers?
One day in the autumn of 1967, the Berkeley sociologist Nathan Glazer visited Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He was there to debate the community activist Saul Alinsky. The subject was the New Left. Glazer was a well-known critic of the radical politics then making its way through American social, cultural, and educational institutions. But he was no stranger to radicalism itself.
A 1944 graduate of the City College of New York, Glazer belonged to the coterie that had lunched in the campus dining hall’s Alcove No. 1, where non-Stalinist Marxists and other members of the left opposition argued over history, reform, class, and war. Many members of this circle, which included Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Seymour Melman, and Philip Selznick, went on to perform distinguished work in the social sciences.
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