My Top 10 Books of 2021
I’m not typically big on Top 10 lists, but as 2021 comes to a close, it’s a good time to rank the best books I read over the course of the year. An oddity of this list is that I read three legitimate classics this year - George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America - and none of them made the list. Still, it goes without saying that all three are recommended reads (well, maybe an abridged version of Tocqueville).
Now, on to the list.
10: The Invincible Family by Kimberly Ells
I bought The Invincible Family on a whim, which serves as proof that Regnery Publishing’s marketing e-mails do work. In the book, Ells lays out in disturbing detail the effort on the part of the global elite to disrupt and supplant the family, showing how ideological, political, and economic interests have combined especially to undermine motherhood. Ells thinks that these efforts are ultimately doomed to fail because they run so counter to human needs and nature, but the damage they can do in the meantime are considerable and deserve attention.
9: The Long Slide by Tucker Carlson
The widespread antipathy aimed at Tucker Carlson is evidence of just how much common sense is reviled in the culture today. The Long Slide is a collection of Carlson’s articles and essays from three decades of journalistic writing. Carlson’s acknowledgment at the beginning of the book (shown below), written after Simon & Schuster canceled a book by Senator Josh Hawley for obviously political reasons, is alone worth the price of the book. But the collection of essays is excellent, entertaining, enlightening, and depressing. Of particular interest is an article titled, “Eugenics, American Style.”
8: Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose
Cynical Theories is an assault on Critical Theory in all its forms (race, gender, queer, fat, and the intersectionality that combines them all) from the left. Lindsay and Pluckrose very helpfully detail the errors and contradictions (sometimes intentional) at the root of the modern social justice movement, with a specific focus on the postmodern roots of the movement. This downplays somewhat its harder edge leftism, but it’s a very informative look at how we got here. The only downside is the authors’ facile claim, incessantly repeated, that liberalism, rationalism, and empiricism have been the sole sources of social progress, have resulted only in progress, and are thus the only paths forward.
7: Fault Lines by Voddie T. Baucham, Jr. / Christianity and Wokeness by Owen Strachan
It is cheating to include two books in one entry? Probably. However, Voddie Baucham’s Fault Lines and Owen Strachan’s Christianity and Wokeness and are almost complementary books. Both explore the problem of social justice ideology infiltrating the evangelical church, and while author has a different style and addresses the topic from a unique angle, the two books combine as a clarion call to Christians to stand against ideological social justice in order to protect the tenets of the faith.
6: The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk
The Conservative Mind counts as another classic book. First published in 1953, Russell Kirk’s tome is generally considered to be one of the two or three works that launched the modern conservative movement, and it almost certainly is responsible for giving it the name “conservative.” Kirk is always a joy to read, though I found the fluidity of his prose to be a bit subdued here by the necessity of constantly quoting historical figures, many of whom did not write as poetically as he does. Nevertheless, this book is worthwhile for its depiction of a decidedly conservative strain of thinking and acting that has run through Anglo-American society from Edmund Burke to today.
5: The Dictatorship of Woke Capital by Stephen R. Soukup
When I picked up The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, I expected a book on the increasingly absurd ways that big businesses in America are virtue signaling their wokeness. And while the book does broadly address that topic, it does it in a much more detailed way than I anticipated. Stephen Soukup spends the first part of the book summarizing how social justice ideology arose out of the festering boil of 20th century cultural Marxism, and then how that ideology began it’s “long march through the institutions.” By the 21st century, only business remained as a holdout against the left’s cultural hegemony, and Soukup shows how it has also now been taken over, ironically by the largest holders of capital in the world. Some of the wealthiest people in the world now use their financial might to foist social justice nostrums on the companies they increasingly control, while at the same time reaping bountiful rewards. Soukup paints a bleak picture, though he does offer ways for people with traditional values to fight back.
4: Witness by Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers’ autobiography is at once a portrayal of the communist infiltration of the federal government, beginning in the 1930s, and a profile of the troubled and courageous man who helped bring it to light. Chambers’ words have a special resonance today, particularly in his depiction of the duty to fight evil, to face the consequences of doing so, and to view with skepticism the comforts and distractions that modern life would use to tempt us to inaction.
3: Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte
Herbert Hoover is easily one of the most underrated men in American history, and this biography tells the story of that “extraordinary,” and at times heroic, life. Few Americans know that at one time, after his efforts during World War I saved millions of people from starvation, Hoover was the most popular man in the country. A disastrous presidency, which was not entirely of his making, severely undermined Hoover’s legacy, but Whyte paints a portrait of a complex, brilliant, driven man who deserves better treatment than history has given him.
2: The Cunning of Freedom by Ryszard Legutko
Polish philosopher and statesman Legutko challenges readers to re-think their preconceptions about what freedom really means, seeking to reclaim that concept from the liberal and libertarian definitions that he argues are philosophically untenable and socially destructive. Legutko reveals the modern ideal of the autonomous, free-choosing individual to be nothing more than a slave whose chains, to borrow Samuel Adams’ phrase, set so lightly upon him that he doesn’t even realize they’re there. Real freedom, in contrast, is limited by virtue and oriented towards man’s proper ends. Society, Legutko writes, becomes disordered in exactly the ways we are witnessing today when it loses the classes of men who have traditionally upheld virtue and right reason as limitations on licentious interpretations of liberty.
1: Equality by Default by Philippe Bénéton
If Legutko challenged modern notions of freedom, French philosopher Bénéton challenges its notions of equality. While affirming human equality in a fundamental sense - namely the Christian brotherhood of man - Bénéton criticizes the idea of equality by default, or the idea that all choices and values are equal, and that no person by virtue of his choices and standards can be elevated above another. Bénéton points out that this idea has undermined society from the top and the bottom, leaving the masses without an ideal to strive for and allowing the elites to abandon the duties that have traditionally come with status. Originally published in French in 1997 and translated into English seven years later, Equality by Default is a tremendous corrective to the egalitarian fallacies of modern life, somewhat in the vein of Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.