Decline and Fall

Gibbons famously authored The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Then there were the tomes you may have grown up with, Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War, Carlyle's The French Revolution, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and finally Democracy in America, de Tocqueville’s peripatetic analysis of a political philosophy that ultimately may have outgrown itself. Are populism and democracy fundamentally incompatible? Are the complexities of the constitution its due process and inalienable rights difficult to by a populist base? As January 6 illustrated, it doesn’t take much for a collectivity to turn into lynch mob. Francis Fukuyama discredited his own The End of History and the Last Man, as it became apparent that tribalism would triumph over the notion of a unifying technocracy. The adoption of a precarious citation that some might even regard as tasteless by Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his Min Kamp, illustrates the question mark that hangs over any attempt to encapsulate the politics of the current world. Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz later adopted for television by Fassbinder used place to define Weimar Germany. What’s to be Done was the broadside by Lenin. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and Marx Das Kapital. What soubriquet will grace the book about this turbulent period of American history?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn