Apocalypse Now: What’s Behind the Volatile Mood of Today’s American — and European — Voters

AGE OF ANGER
A History of the Present
By Pankaj Mishra

Across the world, a spirit of anarchy is in bloom — an aimless desire to smash the liberal order, with only the distant, inchoate hope that a better world will emerge from the wreckage. That spirit apparently motivated many Trump voters, who didn’t mind that their tribune spoke in clownish generalities, possessed no relevant experience and exhibited an itchy trigger finger. …

This book presents itself as a “history of the present.” His premise is that broad swaths of the globe are retracing the past, reliving the same traumas and violent dislocations that accompanied Europe’s transition to modernity in the 18th and 19th centuries. CONT.

Franklin Foer, New York Times Sunday Book Review