The Pop Can's book of the week

(Jan. 9): Victor Davis Hanson's The Dying Citizen

“World peace, cooling the planet, lowering the seas…[these] are psychological ways to square the circle of failure to solve concrete problems at home,” writes Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and professor at California State, in his incisive new book, The Dying Citizen. That is, empowered cosmopolitans, technocrats, and globalists in the West are so busy loving humanity abstractly and remotely, that, like Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, they have forgotten about the only people to whom they are actually responsible—those back home: the citizens of their respective nations.

Extrapolating from some of the wisdom shared, much of which resonates with that in Hanson’s The Dying Citizen: it would be prudent not only for our ruling elite to turn their attention back to those who’ve conferred them power and to remember that charity (i.e. especially of the kind performed with other people’s money) starts at home, but to curb the erosion of the meaning and value of citizenship. To do so, we must revisit our national vision.

Article applying Hanson's logic to the Canadian question.

(Jan. 16): Stephen R. Soukup's The Dictatorship of Woke Capital

Part 1 of this book looks at the people, trends, and ideas that "produced the total politicized state and the applications of those ideas to create a total, political societal ethos"; largely taking up leftist, elitist, and technocratic thinkers and activists.

Part 2 of this book delves deep into the matter of how the same trends that corrupted and transmogrified all of the key cultural institutions in the West have similarly swept through Western business, and in so doing, have swept the whole of human enterprise into the total system.

Soukup's book is, in some ways, a spiritual successor to Stephen R.C. Hicks' Explaining Post-Modernism, George Will's The Conservative Sensibility, and Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism, and goes one step further, looking at how leftists, the new oligarchs, and the new clerisy (not mutually exclusive) have cemented their hold on power by turning business and the market against all dissenters, especially conservatives.

Next week's read: I'm going to revisit G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong With The World. Here's a digital copy if you would like to read it as well: Gutenberg.

Let me know if you have any recommendations for future PopCan books of the week.