Book review: Rafael Behr's survival guide to modern politics
"Drawing on his own experiences, the book is an elegant diagnosis of the chronic condition facing contemporary politics — the strains on democracy — and a prescription for restoring its health." Rafael Behr, a political journalist and Guardian columnist, has written a survival guide to modern politics. His book, Politics: A Survivor’s Guide, was published after Behr experienced a massive heart attack during a busy New Year's Eve. The book explores Behr's own personal experiences and offers an elegant diagnosis of contemporary politics, including the strains on democracy and a prescription for restoring its health. Behr was born in Britain to parents who emigrated from South Africa and worked as a foreign correspondent in Russia. He also experienced ‘psychological exile’ since the 2016 referendum and the nationalistic impulses it generated questioned his sense of belonging. The author's focus on the book is on the ongoing conflict between the UK and Russia, which he describes as ‘the country that had abandoned its belief in gravity’ and the need for a functioning democracy.
Được phát hành : 2 năm trước qua Brendan Daly trong Politics Lifestyle
In the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2019, Rafael Behr, a political journalist and Guardian columnist, went for a jog and nearly never returned.
As he ran, the then 45-year-old felt a familiar tightness in his lungs before “waves of hot pain came streaming out from behind my lungs, like lava from a volcano”.
Behr was experiencing a massive heart attack, the type that old-school cardiologists refer to as ‘the widow-maker’.
It happened at the end of a tumultuous year at Westminster: after Theresa May resigned as prime minister, Boris Johnson, her replacement, prorogued parliament and, in December, won a landslide general election.
The author was infuriated about the convulsions in British politics and how those convulsions were affecting him.
His heart attack represented the political suddenly becoming personal.
If Behr was to resume his career, he realised he had to change how he viewed politics.
“I wanted to reengage without getting enraged,” he writes in Politics: A Survivor’s Guide.
Drawing on his own experiences, the book is an elegant diagnosis of the chronic condition facing contemporary politics — the strains on democracy — and a prescription for restoring its health.
A brilliant stylist, Behr has been a deft chronicler of the Brexit permacrisis, emphasising the inconsistent logic animating the ‘revolution’ that was simultaneously a kickback against the elites and executed by a branch of the elite.
What emerges with real force from this book, though, is how, to Behr, Brexit felt like a personal affront.
Since the 2016 referendum and the nationalistic impulses it unleashed that questioned his sense of belonging, Behr has experienced “psychological exile”.
He was born in Britain to parents who emigrated from South Africa.
While working as a foreign correspondent in Russia, Behr visited the town in Lithuania where his Jewish ancestors originated.
When the Nazis invaded in 1941, the local police rounded up the Jews, including an unknown number of his relatives.
They were brought to a nearby forest and shot and buried in the mass graves they had just dug.
Behr’s disgust at Brexit echoes the revulsion he felt in Moscow reporting on Boris Yeltsin and then Vladimir Putin, witnessing the aspirations for a functioning democracy destroyed by corrupt politicians who facilitated the handover of the country’s enormous wealth to gangsters.
Behr dissects how Russian governance deliberately orchestrates division to accentuate grievance and spark radicalisation.
He consoled himself that his homeland was immune from such politics, but then returned to a polarised Britain beset by culture wars.
In 2022, after nearly two years as an outpatient, Behr received the all-clear.
His recovery reflects the arc of the book as it moves from ferocious despair to fledgling hope.
The journalist’s political remedy for a healthy democracy includes acknowledging that governing is complex, maintaining balance and perspective, and realising that “the cacophony of maniacs should not be mistaken for proof that they are the majority”.
His signature prose is carefully considered analogies and metaphors that succinctly illuminate his subject.
The way conspiracy theories offer the (illusory) reassurance that someone is in control is “like probing a toothache with your tongue to find the exact point that triggers a spasm of pain”.
The book’s drumbeat is Behr’s wry humour: he reminds us Jacob Rees-Mogg is younger than Kylie Minogue.
Behr briefly became an internet sensation in 2019 when a clip was uploaded to YouTube of him as a pundit on the BBC where he offered an exasperated demolition of Brexit Britain as a country that had abandoned its belief in gravity.
“If I had known I was going to go viral,” Behr writes, “I would have ironed my shirt.”
Chủ đề: Reviews