Democracy

     In which a concerned citizen gets around to reading a couple of books on democracy.

1.

Sensible people who favor democracy can agree on what an authoritarian is. What they may not agree on is a solution for protecting democracy. Or what they mean by democracy. That was what I thought after reading Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracy Dies (2018). The writers are in favor of democracy - but not too much of it. "Gatekeeping," one of the key terms of the book, is the process of filtering out unsuitable candidates for higher office before they can be voted into power. Going back to Alexander Hamilton and the origin of the Electoral College, they acknowledge that it's arguably not so democratic for candidates to be handpicked for voters through backroom wheeling and dealing but ultimately stand by that system as the best of bad options. Henry Ford, a wealthy businessman (the Ford in Ford Motor Company), widely admired for his rags-to-riches tale, had a vanity publication he used to spread antisemitic ravings. Hitler was an admirer. The Nazis later awarded him with a medal. In the 1920s, his name surfaced as a potential presidential candidate and, despite having no experience in public office, garnered enough support among voters to give him a shot. But the gatekeepers refused to take him seriously, putting an end to his campaign before it started. Then there was the popularity of Joe McCarthy, which peaked at around 40%, the same as Trump. Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize that a functioning democracy is one that has some protection from the people.

But, after the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention, the primaries were made binding, weakening that protection. The writers praise Democrats for a change that came soon after to retain the gatekeeping function: superdelegates. Republicans, on the other hand, held on to the too-democratic primary system, leaving the gate wide open for the candidate they call the modern Henry Ford. Other contributing factors to democratic regression should be well known to anyone who's followed politics closely for even the last year or so. If not, here it is in one place: Racism. The changed media landscape that profits handsomely by serving up whatever interpretation of reality people want to hear, warping them, making them more susceptible to extremist views, reducing common ground. Rightwing politicians like Newt Gingrich, who devised and distributed an outline for attacking the opposition with inflammatory language, or like Tom DeLay, who encouraged his fellow Republicans to do anything that wasn't illegal to gain an advantage. The Supreme Court. Laws aren't enough, they say. Politicians in a democracy must be committed to democracy, compromise even if it means their party suffers a temporary setback, and uphold standards of conduct. 

No constructive answer is provided for how to get them to ignore the incentives to break these rules. As for restoring the gatekeepers to power, I see no reason why people would forfeit the right to choose candidates once given it, or that much of anything can be kept behind closed doors in the age of the internet and social media and camera phones. The book's argument is neat and simple and appeals to the US citizen's fear and anger with thoughts that were readily available when the book was first published. It's written as a warning but, more accurately, it's written as a warning to those in power. In this discussion of democracy, the average citizen is abstract victim, nuisance, or threat, not rightful participant. And so I take my business elsewhere.

2.

Recommendations

Among the reviews of How Democracy Dies, I found one in the Guardian by a writer, Cambridge professor, and podcast host named David Runciman. He criticizes it for having "remarkably little" to say about why people are discontented with democracy. His conclusion:

This is a provocative and readable book, but in the end it is also an unsatisfying one. It shares the weakness of too much contemporary political science, by treating history as a useful guide to the future, despite the paucity of the dataset, the superficiality of much of the evidence, and the long track record we have of being surprised by what comes next. I say this as a historian: if we want to know how our democracies might die, we have to stop looking to our yesterdays.

Then I encountered a couple of recommendations in two other publications: David Runciman, David Runciman. Finally I discovered David Runciman in the "Democracy" section of my reading list, added I don't remember when. ...David Runciman? I ordered a book of his called How Democracy Ends (from the same year, 2018).

The first compliment I'll pay to the book is this: how democracy ends, appropriately enough, defies easy summary. In the time since I finished, I've felt daunted about returning to my notes, which include pages and pages of rather long, quoted passages, to give an accurate sense of where he stands and why. There are writers for whom "nuance" means subjecting the reader to endless lectures to grasp every last strand of a thought, which can be doubly damaging if the thought isn't worth it (if the reader hasn't already hanged herself by the time the strands are all gathered). Runciman is a nuanced thinker, in mild, pithy, aphoristic style. He establishes his position drawing from a wider range of sources than Levitsky and Ziblatt, boosting the force of his argument, and confronting the counterarguments to it in the same manner, as Levitsky and Ziblatt neglect to do. He takes care to make distinctions between forms of government and historical moments. He's thorough as he covers much ground. As a result, it's almost three books for the price of one that read like one, too. The fatigue it causes is the ideal kind, frequently paying off by uncovering the molten core of a crucial idea. A daunting but worthwhile challenge to lay out what Runciman thinks because of how he thinks.

(Although both books are equally a letdown in the area of linguistic flavor, which I'm not sure is a feature of political science writing generally. Runciman's opening sentence: "Nothing lasts forever." I omit my quip. Elsewhere: someone is swatted like a fly and people have other fish to fry and people throw up their arms in despair and the forest can't be seen for the trees. And I choose to forget his clangorous, if infrequent, use of exclamation points.)

His interest is in examining the threats not just to any democracy but to democracies such as ours, ones in middle age, with a long history of peaceful transfers of power and resisting total collapse, experiencing a "midlife crisis." The threats he weighs are coups, catastrophes, and technological takeover. 

On Coups

One thing that separates Runciman from Levitsky and Ziblatt, as well as many contemporary writers on politics, is that he's not convinced Trump is capable of destroying US democracy. He uses an example of another democratic collapse of the 20th century, in 1960s Greece. One day, incited by US intelligence, the military announced it was taking over. They had the guns. They seized control of sources of information. And they took over. This is a story that would have fit in How Democracy Dies except Runciman makes a different point: At the time, Greece's democracy was relatively young, foundationally shaky, and thus highly vulnerable to a frontal assault. Then he jumps forward to Greece in the 21st century. Though close to total economic collapse, there was no threat of total democratic collapse. The reason he proffers is that, by then, democracy had been around for decades. It's the same reason he's skeptical of writers that compare US democracy now with the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany: a young, shaky democracy, economic collapse that spread deep discontent with the government, a political figure backed up by an organized legion of thugs that quickly seized control of sources of information. Test this against the Capitol riot: Trump's attempted election theft was backed up by a disorganized mob draped in flags (American and Confederate) and wearing viking helmets whose numbers were too small to ever have a real chance of overthrowing the federal government and seizing control of sources of information across the entire country. Evidence of their crimes spread swiftly and globally. They're being identified and arrested and publicly castigated. Democracy survived. Another thing that separates Runciman: Inclusivity. He says democracy survives in the US because it's been in place for hundreds of years and we, average citizens accustomed to it, are the ones who keep it there. That also makes us complicit.

A coup d'etat works on the basis of intimidation and coercion. But a group that hides behind the workings of democracy can hope to get by on the public's innate passivity. In most functioning democracies, the people are bystanders much of the time anyway. They watch on as political decisions are taken on their behalf by elected representatives who then ask for their assent at election time. If that's what democracy has become, it provides excellent cover for the attempt to undermine democracy, because the two look remarkably similar.

A refreshing modification missing from most opinions on the potential failure of our democracy: we live in a representative democracy. We vote for politicians to take care of the tangled details so we have more time to do what we want. Problems arise from that system. It's not that he believes our democracy is impregnable. The open power grab may be unlikely to work but the one that works slowly, incrementally, anywhere other than the front, where we're not paying much attention, may. What's more, without the clarity of the direct government takeover, we live in a kind of gray space democratically, talking of its potential failure without ever really being sure if it's happened. His preferred term for this state of affairs: "zombie democracy."

Coups and real conspiracies go hand in hand. Another common cause of despair these days, though, is the persistent air of conspiracy theory without the coup. First, consider how representative democracy works: it empowers elites who, sooner or later, work away from the public eye. "Any political system that trumpets the value of openness while holding on to its secrets will create the space in which conspiracy theories can flourish." (Runciman forces me to reassess my earlier assumption: the elites are best positioned to adjust for advances in technology to locate the shadows beyond their reach and maintain the same relationship to society.) So we should always expect conspiracy theories to be floating around. The sense of despair becomes understandable, however, if a majority rather than a minority of people begin subscribing to them.

In this context, Runciman gives his definition of a term that I think is one of the most confusing of our time, seeing as it's been used against politicians as opposed as Trump and Bernie Sanders: populism. For Runciman, populism is the rhetoric of taking back power from the elites, fueled by conspiracy theory, and weaponized by marginal figures on both the right and the left. It's cropped up in the past under certain conditions: "economic distress, technological change, growing inequality and the absence of war." (On these grounds, his preferred comparison, though without suggesting it's a mirror image, for our time is to the 1890s.) And it's proved useful by pushing mainstream politicians to seek reform. Testing this against the financial crash of 2008, which he mentions, I must partially disagree with Runciman. Back then, there were perpetrators, not spectral bogeymen. Bernie Sanders wore no tinfoil hat, starred in no eerie YouTube videos, aimed his ire at no vague target. He sought real justice and real reform within the bounds of democracy. Clearly he did his part pushing the party toward, at the very least, modest reform, while always insisting that the final goal is major reform - the major reform Runciman himself admits would mark real progress. On the other hand, Trump came to prominence in political life with a racist conspiracy theory and ran for president on a vague conspiracy theory that Washington was a swamp he'd drain and once in office conspiracy theory (and, of course, out of office more conspiracy theory - and not in the neutral language of elites but in the inflammatory language of traitors and thieves). But then the other half of the characterization doesn't fit: though his messaging resonated to an extent with the segment of rightwing voters who lost homes and lost jobs and had no safety net to speak of, he pushes his party further right, toward undoing reform on most any level and away from democracy. Which sounds more demagogic and authoritarian than populist. This may be one difference between 2018 and 2021: Populism, he notes, can turn either into social democracy or something more malign. Trump is something more malign. Many would say he made the "turn" a long time ago, the populist element buried with it. Runciman didn't go so far as to call him an aspiring dictator or neofascist when How Democracy Ends was first published but perhaps he's changed his thinking after January 6th, 2020 due to the turn he refers to. Anyway, "populism" remains confusing. A bifurcation of the term (populist social democrat or democratic socialist/populist authoritarian or neofascist) would help but my questions are: Who does it really apply to and how long does the transitional term remain relevant? A blemish but Runciman makes his stance clear instead of continuing on assuming everyone accepts the equivalence. And it returns this section to the theme of popular discontent.

In a young democracy: Potential. Sweeping changes ahead. In a middle-aged democracy: The sweeping changes - expanding the franchise, the state providing social services - have already happened. Fights narrow. There's less potential.

Democracy is not working well - if it were, there would be no populist backlash. But attempts to make it work better focus on what we feel we have lost rather than on what we have never even tried. Political arguments revolve around ideas of recovery and rescue - of the welfare state, the constitution, the economy, our security, our freedom. Each side wants to recapture something that has been taken away. This helps to feed the conspiracist mindset. ...Trying something new can be a shared democratic experience. Rescuing something that has been lost is partial - the losers look for someone else to blame.

Another shared experience that has brought democratic nations together is war. After the 1890s, reforms were enacted that had the potential to bring progress. Then World War I came, and with it, for instance, mass enfranchisement in the US and Britain, since to mobilize people, they must be deeply invested in democracy. The New Deal was a sweeping attempt to address a political and economic crisis. Then World War II came. To fight a war, a nation needs healthy citizens and jobs for them to do. Thus: the welfare state. 

An old political science slogan says that states make war and war makes states. Democracy is not an exception to that. Democracies make wars and wars make democracies. This sometimes gets obscured by another slogan of political science, which states that democracies don't go to war with each other. Even if this were true, there have always been enough militant non-democracies to go around.

Still, while wars between democracies and non-democracies continue to break out today, World War III is unlikely because advances in military weaponry would guarantee annihilation for everyone involved. So rising inequality, one of the primary causes for popular discontent, doesn't have war to mend it this time. "We do not have a historical answer to the question of how to tackle inequality that does not involve large-scale violence. There is no evidence that democracy alone can do it." And:

In democracy we now have a political system that can suppress the causes of violence without being able to address the problems that outbreaks of violence served to resolve in the past. Minor progress is possible. Big progress is elusive, and always liable to be derailed by the backlash small progress provokes. We may be stuck.

2021: Inequality increases. Minor progress. Backlash to minor progress. Mutual mistrust. And we're stuck.

Surely One of the Fugliest Words in the English Language

     Last night I was watching Warriors basketball as my imaginary second eldest daughter, charming pretty intelligent but mischievous Ingrid, played with some blocks nearby. She was talking to herself, as she often does. During the commercial break, I turned my attention to what she was saying and caught her using a bad word: "bulwark." That's almost a gurp. Didn't get it from me. I said: "Hey!" She pretended not to hear me so I picked her up and spun her around, saying, "did I just hear you use a bad word? huh? huh?" I rubbed my stubbly face into her neck, making this munching noise I started employing after I became a father. She laughed her delightful laugh, pushing my face away. I landed her gently on the floor and said: "But, seriously, don't use that word." She asked why. I said: "It's a bad word." She asked why. I said: "Because I say so." She asked why. I said: "Hmmmm, good question. Do you know what the word 'fugly' means, perchance?" She said no. The game was back on and I returned to my seat. She crawled into my lap and asked repeatedly what "fugly" means. Looking around and above her, I told her to ask her mom. She pouted and went limp for a while. Then she slid off and returned to her blocks. During the next commercial break, I opened the dictionary to search for a good synonym. I thought: Wall. Aegis. Barrier. Fortification. Warriors D. But was I missing another? I forced myself to look up the offensive word, in sound and look if not meaning. As I approached the entry, I came across: "buffoonery"..."bugaboo"..."bugbear" and slammed the dictionary shut. The game was back on. Ingrid was crouched near my feet, looking up at me, smiling. When I wasn't paying attention she'd slipped near the basket and gone for the dunk: a block in my cup of water. Redoubt! There's another. I picked her up again. "I'm bout to dunk you, little girl."

Abandoning the Journal

     I've heard it before and I'll hear it again: the humble journal as epic literary project. Someone decides that committing to paper the detritus of the day and the mind, every day, for decades, will equate to nothing less than a masterpiece. The result: thousands and thousands of unreadable pages. What's useful about these stories is that they amplify all the problems inherent to the form I ran into on my own.

There's a certain satisfaction in getting it all on paper. It soothed me. It was habit. After I began thinking of myself as a writer, it became memory and writing exercise. I made vague plans to mine it for real work later. And I must have figured it was better to unload on the page than to try the patience of someone I knew. But eventually I found I was deleteriously repeating myself, today's irritation or worry sounding much like yesterday's and last week's and last month's. If I never noticed, if I never thought past the moment's satisfaction and relief, I would have picked up a bad habit. I would have amassed unreadable pages.

Writing is rewriting, the old truism goes. I wasn't about to disfigure my pages with a lot of erasing. And after completing an entry, I pretty much lost interest. On to the new day. Another writer, however, may take care to rewrite and improve entries, possibly making it easier by using a computer instead of writing longhand. This would require more time, of course, but also deeper self-involvement. Without it, one couldn't stand poring over the minutiae of subjective experience again and again to edit. Another problem: Self-absorption. Seeing little or nothing past your subjective experience. In which case, does the writing really improve?

More time rewriting means less time writing, that is for unloading the new day's details, or for going out to gather them. This may prove intolerable to the diarist, eager for material. So forget rewriting. Thus: pages and pages of details, poorly written, unreadable, wasted. 

Another old truism: books are made from other books. Except reading would reduce time for doing anything else too. For someone working 40 hours a week at a job not directly related to literature, there are few hours to spare. Even less if one is in a relationship. Even less if one is raising kids. If the choice is between writing a journal entry and reading, I choose reading. Another voice. Writing about reading could be a journal entry. But at that point one is writing notes. For those truly consumed with themselves, reading is just another distraction. Instructive outside voices are few, everything is fascinating because it happened to the writer, beliefs go safely unchallenged and calcify. Once more: unreadable pages.

Ideally, somewhere along the way the reader learns to distinguish between an inferior artificial piece of writing and a superior authentic piece of writing. The journal would seem to be an easy path toward the latter: the I-voice with which one is most familiar, the material of the day close at hand. But it can be inauthentic in its way too, not merely an imperfect record but a record of glaring omissions and evasions and justifications, of petty grievances and sickly handwringing given an outsize form. Diary can consume diarist. The easy path to authentic work doesn't exist.

I don't care about your life, in journal or diary form, probably. Almost every one I've tried to read I put down after less than fifty pages. (On the internet, I've read no more than a few pages of them, in the distant past. Online, the form seems to have been supplanted by social media. Telling.) When I look back on how journals and diaries got on my reading list, it wasn't because someone championed them on the basis of aesthetic merit. (Although I've rarely encountered readers who deem them essential and count them among their favorites.) That someone would keep a diary for most of a lifetime is its own promotion. And I've been lured by the prospect of a tour of someone's secrets, albeit without fully considering what that means. What I discovered in one instance, only after purchase and not from any back cover information, were the confessions of a rapist. The journals and diaries that remain on my list or my shelf were written under extreme circumstances, namely political turmoil. And I'd give a canonical writer the benefit of the doubt, the general expectation being that one will get the personal voice of the writer behind better works.

Fervor waned. I began skipping more and more days, reporting less and less about them when I didn't until one day I stopped altogether. So tiresome and suffocating. Since it was never intended as my grand statement, I could move on without fear that my own unreadable pages would never find their proper audience. Still the thought of writing something persisted. Abandoning the journal was like busting out of a gray sweaty windowless room to start the search for whatever that might be.

History as Farrago

      After the unexpected fall of France in the summer of 1940, the British had no choice but to import food and supplies exclusively by sea. So the Nazis directed their U-boats, now departing from the more advantageous ports of the occupied country next door, to target merchant ships. The strategy: Starve the British, force them to give up. Catching them unprepared, it almost worked. In A Game of Birds and Wolves (2020), Simon Parkin examines the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II and finds a profusion of material, beyond the gritty details of combat and the development of tactical maneuvers through gameplay. The reader gets a sense of what life is like on a British ship and a German U-boat. Even as Parkin condemns the Nazis, he takes the additional step of granting them human faces too. He spotlights the personal histories of a number of figures and their experiences during and after the war. He has anecdotes, one of the best involving a woman named Pamela George: She's tasked with delivering an important message from one side of Plymouth to the other, where the commander-in-chief is. She jumps on a motorcycle and flies through the night as the Luftwaffe drop bombs on the city. One blows up near her. She's thrown off and the bike's tires are mangled. She runs the rest of the way. Upon delivering her message, she offers to deliver the response. Parkin traces the origin of the Wrens, women, some fresh out of high school, recruited reluctantly by the navy to, among other things, devise advanced naval tactics through war games and teach them to seasoned veterans. He looks back on the second-class status of women in British society prewar and, to some extent, postwar. He takes an interest in the budding romances between men and women on the job. He speaks directly, contemplating the senselessness of war. He notes his family's connection to the story. Where Parkin falters is in managing all of this.

The opening section ends on a cliffhanger straight out of a generic spy novel or movie. When it is finally revisited, near the end of the book, it turns out to be a minor incident of little importance. Destruction at sea, destruction on land, privation, numerous lives lost - it's plenty grave but Parkin, maybe for fear of losing the reader early, frames it with what comes off like a cheap rug-pull gag. From here, awkward choices continue to grate. Within chapters, chapter after chapter, his tone and perspectives shift, he jumps back and forth through time, digresses, making his story an unnecessary chore to follow. Good luck trying to sort out names. And what he does and doesn't foreground can be baffling. He makes room in the main text for anecdotes about pubic hairs and flatulence. But he relegates the following paragraph to a footnote: 

The British government was also accountable for ensuring its colonial subjects had food during wartime, a responsibility in which it often failed. In Bengal, for example, between two and three million Indians died of preventable famine after the British government prioritized distribution of food supplies to the military, civil servants and other "priority classes." This tragic fact must temper any sense of national pride at this moment of overcoming wartime hunger on the home front that same year. 

Glibness, tortuousness, disproportion. Parkin attempts to capture everything about his subject and nothing quite pierces. He flattens a story of life-or-death consequence.

Notes on a Suicidal Piece Concerning the Art of Biography

     Recently the Times Literary Supplement featured a piece by a biographer named Craig Brown entitled "Nothing is real: The slippery art of biography." In it, he argues that works of the genre written in a classic mode, following the subject from cradle to grave, guided by the facts, through a coherent narrative, can't be trusted. His reasons: 

Biography can't illuminate the nature of creativity through information. For writers and painters (he doesn't mention musicians but I think he means any artist), facts about them, where they were, who they saw, what they did, won't reveal how the art is made. Brown presumes the reader of biography is in search of the master key to unlocking an artist's work. Actually, my aim is more modest: to get to know the artist better.

Too many details. In constructing a story out of the materials of someone's life, the biographer (or memoirist) has to choose what to include and what to omit. Brown presents examples of writers who chose badly that nevertheless fail to prove definitively that no writer is capable of choosing well, to give insight into the subject without harming narrative flow. Not that it matters, according to his logic, since no one could ever tell the story of a life and get to the start. After all, a truly conscientious biographer would have to begin with an account of family history so far into the past and so microscopically thorough, the biographer would die before completing it. And if such a book were somehow completed, the reader would probably abandon it long before reaching the page on which the subject is born.

Biography can't grant complete access to any life. He stresses: 

While no life can be recaptured in its entirety, not even one single minute of any life could ever be recaptured as a whole, as there is not a minute in the life of the brain that can be isolated from the rest of its life. We live in the present, but we think in the past and in the present and in the future, and often all at the same time. 

Anything short of being William Faulkner, in other words, makes the very idea of biography a fraudulent enterprise. His ideal doesn't lie on the page, with mere language and structures and imagination, but is a kind of mindhacking.

"Biography as a form is necessarily artificial. In the end, all biography is a form of fiction." Labeling a biographical portrait as fiction doesn't indemnify it against inaccuracy.

"The real life of anyone takes place largely in the mind, yet it is only the secondary, external stuff – people met, places visited, opinions expressed, and so forth – that is accessible to the biographer." A criticism related to the first, only more sweeping. Not only is the creation of the art inaccessible, the true essence of a life is inaccessible too.

The blank spaces of any life tempt a biographer to fill them in with speculation. Again: Brown presents examples of biographers who've written groundlessly and absurdly as if transcribing the subject's thoughts and feelings. This is something to hold against those biographies (though it might not be held against a fictional biography). But in my experience reading them and reading opinions about them, the practice isn't so common that the genre may as well be thrown out entirely. Further, one can make an educated guess while informing the reader that it is a guess and, in general, be open in letting readers know the method undertaken to write the book, leaving it to them to judge whether the writer has done the subject justice.

Firsthand accounts can't be trusted. Personal accounts can't be trusted, either.

Memory is slippery. Biographers, too, are slippery.

"Another shortcoming of biography lies in its bias towards coherence. In their drive to create a seamless narrative, biographers are forced to conceal the randomness of life, the contrived nature of 'character' and the unpredictability of human beings." Our lives are chaos. That is precisely why writers search for a form: to give chaos order. This would be true even if biography is fiction. And if imposing order on any work that sets out to contain a life is false, his judgment would extend to any story, invented or not.

Finally, Brown contrasts it with the mode he deems superior, the subjective, to the point of promoting the value of gossip and hearsay. In defense of one writer's free use of anecdotes of dubious veracity, he says: "He may have swapped fairness for laughter, but he always got a terrific exchange rate." Exaggerations and lies are fit to print so long as they entertain - he certainly sounds slippery here, and cheerfully so. One way to guarantee a loss of credibility is blithe disregard for fairness.

"Nothing is real" - provocative title except, after reading Brown's piece, I'm not sure he even believes that. But his position does seem to be that writing "true" biography is impossible so fuck it. His argument for discrediting the classic mode itself is so unyielding, so halfbaked, for a moment I wondered whether the piece was burlesque. Anyway, some of what he says is worth bearing in mind, if not to suddenly incite everyone to fill dumpsters with biographies, then to prompt consideration of what makes for a better biography. Also, he reminds the reader not to be an innocent certain of discovering the last word (or every word) on a whole life. The biographer is no omniscient deity. 

But what really stuns and amuses me about the piece is that Brown leads the reader to an unexpected question that lies beyond what originally drew my click: Who's trustworthy? 

Skepticism is a virtue. Limiting the scope of the question to literature and sources of information for now, I have warranted suspicions about the scrupulousness of writers and publishers, including those that enjoy a veneer of respectability. (I wouldn't recommend reading anything as a total innocent.) I've even written elsewhere about my caution around reading biography and memoir. Yet I've always held on to a hope, I realize, that there is someone out there I can trust to give it to me straight, without relying on tricks and deceit. Isn't that true of anyone who reads, though? Well, maybe not. Brown goes a step further, implying that no one, under any circumstances, can be trusted - not shady biographers, not the subject of biography, not the people around the subject. Facts are dry, all surface, hardly count. His objections can just as easily be hurled at the broader category of history. And if the past can't be brought to the page, our present can't be either. That sounds a lot like the door opening to misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy theory that is among the most infernal problems of our time. If nothing is real, any version of reality is as legitimate as the next, any version of reality can be sold, any version of reality can be decreed the official, lawful version. 

Let's place ourselves on stable ground and mention a couple of things that are in fact real and relevant to our lives today: (1) The ongoing pandemic (2) Trump's ongoing coup attempt. In the face of rightwing propaganda that says spreading a potentially fatal illness is a personal choice and Trump should be in the White House based on no evidence but his word, maintaining a firm grip on what's real is a matter of survival.

The writer I'm looking for, at a minimum, knows this.