the enemy on my generals committee

dear friends,

because i am a bougie academic i was reading the sunday book review in the new york times this morning and happened across a review of dinesh d’souza's "the enemy at home". (sidebar: you know you are a sociologist when you would rather study the amazon reviewers comments than the political questions being discussed). in spite of my troubled youth as a young conservative i was never given a copy of this, so i was largely unfamiliar with d'souza's work. anyway, as further evidence that i am no longer a little thatcherite my generals committee now includes a domestic insurgent!

The “domestic insurgents” who, in D’Souza’s view, constitute the cultural left want “America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.” “I intend to name the enemy at home,” D’Souza proclaims, and so he does. ... Others — the sociologist Paul Starr... are less obvious candidates for inclusion. All these people might charge D’Souza with “McCarthyism” for supposedly exposing them, but he accepts the challenge. McCarthy, after all, was “largely right.”

i initially tried to rack my brain for another edition of "when sociologists do it better", but realized i would never find anything because sociologists don't attempt to answer questions like "how did the american left cause 9/11" or other questions where the outcome is largely decided before the inquiry begins.

for the nerdlingers among you, here is what the domestic insurgent and i have decided on for my reading list.

and since clearly i have a lot of work to do, i am stepping away from the internet.
cam