A Summer Reading List for the Anti-Woke

Polling data, amply supported by personal observation and interaction, show that Americans read less and less with each passing year. Up to half the population fails to read even one book a year, and the “average” American reads one book in any twelve-month period. All of this is lamentable, as is the addiction of so many Americans (and by no means just the young) to their electronic gadgets, which hardly encourages even the minimal learning and reflection necessary to be a thoughtful human being and an informed citizen. 

Readers survive, nonetheless, and the bookstores I visit on a regular basis are far from empty. But the most depressing section of any contemporary bookstore (besides the sections dedicated to Race, Women’s Studies, and the Environment) is the section dedicated to contemporary politics. Almost all the books are polemical tracts — mainly from the Left but some from the Right — which will date before the end of the season, and which demand very little of readers.  But since summer allows for leisure, and leisure invites reading, and not just of the “light” kind, I will use this occasion to highlight some serious and instructive (and, in several cases, enjoyable) summer reading for the woke-aversive. 

Morality and Faith: Reflections on a Journey Through Time, by David Horowitz, 2019

Let me begin with a deeply thoughtful and moving 2019 book by the recently deceased David Horowitz entitled Mortality and Faith: Reflections on a Journey Through Time. It is a sequel to his 1996 bestseller Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Horowitz’s own gripping account of his movement from the most radical wing of the New Left to a pugnacious conservatism and classical liberalism. 

After he moved right, Horowitz fearlessly, indeed ferociously, took on every iteration of the Left: hard and soft Marxism, the new racialism with its demands for “reparations,” the unholy alliance between the “post-colonialist Left” and Islamism, and the culpable blindness of too many conservatives who failed to notice the revolution unfolding before their eyes. Horowitz’s tone and rhetoric in these writings were not for everybody, and they aimed much more at rallying the troops than convincing the unconvinced. But he was right about almost everything, and well before many other conservatives caught on. 

Morality And Faith is a different kind of work, a moving account of an aging Horowitz’s spiritual life as both a “skeptic and seeker.” Confronting illness and death, and without the benefit of full-fledged faith, Horowitz wrestles sympathetically with Pascal’s famous “wager,” Marcus Aurelius’ noble Stoicism, Dostoevsky’s powerful indictment of revolutionary fanaticism and moral nihilism, and the prospects of hope through the very act of seeking itself. His “agnosticism” is far from crude and dogmatic atheism which, he compellingly argues, can only lead to violence, nihilism, and despair. 

In addition, as Norman Podhoretz rightly suggested in a blurb for Mortality and Faith, Horowitz’s power as a polemicist had led many to forget “how beautifully he writes,” as well as the “deeply considered philosophical perspective and the wide-ranging erudition underlying his political passions.” Readers of his book are invited to discover these admirable qualities for themselves.

Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History, by Thomas Albert Howard, 2025

David Horowitz was a fierce and penetrating opponent of the totalitarian “secular religions” that did so much to deform the political and intellectual life of the twentieth century. Yet as the intellectual historian Thomas Albert Howard compellingly argues in his new book Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History, most contemporary historians, social scientists, and academic philosophers remain single-mindedly obsessed with the connection between religion and violence. They ignore or downplay the totalitarian propensities of radical secularism, and the intolerance that accompanies those forms of enlightenment that identify historical “progress” with hostility to traditional religion. 

With erudition and sobriety, Howard sets the record straight. The reader learns just how intolerant dogmatic secularism can be. Deftly combining historical analysis with due attention to the history and “logic” of ideas, Howard allows the reader to experience murderous and totalitarian secularism in revolutionary France and Spain; in Communist regimes from the Soviet Union and Maoist China to Albania, Mongolia, and North Korea; in a trail of blood, repression, and fanaticism that boggles the mind. 

The thoughtful reader can draw the appropriate lessons about the relevance of Howard’s analysis for contemporary debates about religion and the public square. I should add that the publication of the book by the prestigious and mainstream Oxford University Press is a hopeful sign. I will be treating Broken Altars at much greater length in the Summer 2025 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus, 2025
Let Us Talk of Many Things, by William F. Buckley, 2000
Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations, by William F. Buckley, ed. by Linda Bridges and Roger Kimball, 2010

Many on the “New Right” today are frustrated with a conservative establishment that they identify (with some justification) with fecklessness, time-serving, and a hesitancy to confront the destructive Left head on. They tend to identify, or over-identify, the old conservative establishment with fallen-away standard-bearers like Bill Kristol or David French, former conservatives who now see no enemies to the Left. 

But these harsh judgments on the part of the young and impatient are often based on clichés and caricatures that circulate on the internet and owe little or nothing to direct knowledge or experience of the full range of figures under consideration. To dismiss Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, or William F. Buckley Jr. out of hand, is a form of rank ingratitude as well as a manifestation of the “presentism” that we should allow the Left to monopolize. These grand figures faced the challenges of their time — massive moral drift, a systematic assault on patriotism, collectivist economics, the totalitarian threat, and liberal “moral equivalence” — honorably, with courage and moral integrity. 

In his time (and prime), Buckley in particular fought liberal hegemony and complacency with a wit and joie de vivre that were both admirable and infectious. He founded National Review in 1955, the flagship journal of conservatism for decades, and directed it wisely until his retirement in 1990, opening it to all humane and tough-minded forms of conservative thought.  He remained a guiding hand for National Review and a leading voice in the conservative movement until his death in 2008.

In this centennial of his birth, Buckley is the subject of a thousand-page biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, by the liberal journalist Sam Tanenhaus. Buckley begrudgingly acknowledges its subject’s admirable human qualities and his historical importance for American politics and movement conservatism, while raising insinuations of racism (unjust and ungenerous, in my view) and even homosexuality (for which there is absolutely no evidence). 

The strengths and very considerable limits of Tanenhaus’s approach have been ably discussed by the likes of Charles Kesler, Daniel Oliver, and Barton Swaim in the pages of the CRB, The New Criterion, and the Wall Street Journal, respectively. Tanenhaus’s book contains much useful information, so Buckley aficionados will want to dabble in it. But it ignores much of real importance (Buckley’s writings on his Catholic faith, for example) and risibly claims that three prominent liberals—Gary Wills, John Leonard, and Joan Didion—were the three best writers for National Review in its heyday.  Even if Buckley never completed the single masterwork he yearned to finish, Tanenhaus diminishes him as a writer and thinker in the face of his own considerable evidence to the contrary. 

With Charles Kesler, I recommend to the reader Buckley’s stellar collection of speeches and addresses, Let Us Talk of Many Things, which originally came out in the year 2000. And the “William F. Buckley Omnibus” edited by Linda Bridges and Roger Kimball, Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations (published by Encounter Books in 2010) remains an instructive delight. Unlike many more tepid Republicans of the time, Buckley did not hesitate to speak of “heroes and villains” and to defend civilized “manners and morals.” 

Let Us Talk of Many Things ends with a philosophical look at “The Patrimony and Civic Obligation,” a welcome and moving invitation to remember our debt to those who came before us and our obligation to leave a civilized inheritance to those who will follow. The “omnibus” comes with an effusive endorsement from Buckley’s friend Rush Limbaugh. No ”squish” he, or Buckley.

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, by Coleman Hughes, 2024
The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country, by Waller R. Newell, 2003

Let me end by recommending two thoughtful books on race politics and manliness, respectively, that point the way forward. Coleman Hughes, a twenty-nine-year-old writer and podcaster of black and Puerto Rican descent, provides a powerful critique of “neoracism,” as he calls it, and a persuasive defense of a “colorblind America,” in his 2024 book The End of Race Politics. With impressive grace and clarity, and without undue polemics, he exposes the “neoracist charade” that denies our common humanity and that is committed to “race supremacy,” even if in a new and insidious form. The spirit of his admirable book is amply displayed in the following passage:

If this new anti-white bias is justified — if we should accept a concept of justice based on racial-historical bloodguilt, and if we should care about some lives more than others based on their skin color, as racists of all sorts have long claimed — then everything that leaders of the civil rights movement thought about basic morality, and everything that the world’s philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about revenge and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window.

The new edition of the Canadian political theorist Waller R. Newell’s book, The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country, demonstrates that the “toxic masculinity” denounced by feminist ideologues and their allies has nothing to do with “true manliness,” with its deep roots in the Western classical and biblical traditions. 

Manly virtue combines pride and restraint and encourages “moderate, gentlemanly and gallant treatment of others.” A society that attacks manliness leaves men forlorn and women either vulnerable or prone to ideological deformations. Instead of civilized manliness in a society of complementary equals, we leave men with the false choice between becoming “wimps” or “beasts,” as Newell tellingly puts it. 

Newell’s fine book demonstrates just how authentic liberal learning, drawing from the wisdom of the Great Books, can enrich and illumine the self-understanding of men and women necessary for living responsibly and well in free societies. That is a matter of the greatest theoretical and practical import. 

I will end things here, with enough instructive and ennobling reading to last the intellectually curious and spiritually thirsty a leisurely summer (or two). 

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