CROSSING THE RUBICON

A searing indictment of American politics since 2000.

In January 46 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar illegally led his troops across the Rubicon, a small river north of Rome, he set the Roman Republic on a course toward dictatorship. For veteran journalist Danner (Torture and Truth, 2004, etc.), the parallels with President Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol are obvious. Yet, as Danner clarifies in this collection of 22 acerbic essays from The New York Review of Books, Jan. 6 was not the first American Rubicon crossing since 2000. Writing with a light touch—he prefers to record his impressions while hustling across the country in rented convertibles—he keeps asking the same probing question: Why have the institutions of the American Republic not provided better safeguards against recent abuse by “grifters and fools?” He begins his chronicle of infamies with the verdict of Bush v. Gore, excoriates the unwinnable war against Iraq, and condemns the global war on terror (“a giant floundering about in search of a small insurgent group”) as a pretext for justifying human rights violations. He does not exempt President Obama, who, for all his personal charisma and commitment to universal health care, the author argues, prolonged many policies of his predecessors, including mass surveillance at home and drone warfare abroad. Danner’s stylistic fireworks culminate in a 2008 essay painting an indelible picture of Obama on the campaign trail, “bursting up onto the stage…shoulders bent slightly concave, gathering everything into those constantly clapping hands,” a man taking pleasure in his own gracefulness. A master of the put-down epithet, Danner calls Trump “the grand artist of grievance” and his son Don Jr. “a just-past-his-prime used-car salesman.” The British politician and writer Horace Walpole once said that “a country will never be saved by the best men in it,” but Danner suggests that a series of not-so-good and bad leaders, aided by a supine Congress, just might break a republic.

Persuasively argues that self-interested leadership has imperiled the American Republic.