The Politics of Heaven
America in Fearful Times
By Earl Shorris
NORTON; 371 PAGES; $25.95

How did George W. Bush happen? That question has preoccupied the American left for more than six years, producing several shelves of books - reasoned, paranoid, polemical, hortatory, despairing, hopeful, rueful, angry, scornful, apologetic and so on through the gamut of attitudes that constitute political discourse in this country.

Few of the books have been as erudite as Earl Shorris' "The Politics of Heaven." Shorris created the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a program that provides "great books" courses for people whose economic or educational circumstances might otherwise deprive them of exposure to the classics. And he has no hesitation in mining the classics to construct his theories about how the United States found itself with a widening gap between rich and poor, a politics colored by fringe issues such as abortion and gay rights, a government unable to cope with calamities such as Hurricane Katrina and a war against terrorism that seems only to have encouraged more terrorism.

In the first 30 pages of the book, Shorris invokes Donne, Aeschylus, Wittgenstein, Socrates, Hegel, Marx, Homer, Lincoln, Tacitus, Dylan Thomas, Descartes, Pericles, Thucydides, Leo Strauss, Daniel Defoe, First Corinthians, Dante, Jonathan Edwards, "Gilgamesh" and Freud. So maybe it's appropriate to invoke another dead white European male, Francis Bacon, and say that "The Politics of Heaven" is a book "to be chewed and digested." There may be some indigestible bits of gristle in it, but Shorris' serving up of recent American political and social history is both palatable and provocative.

Shorris has homes in two of the capitals of anti-Bush sentiment, San Francisco and New York, but he's no flyover pundit, surveying the heartland from a pressurized cabin in the sky. He has talked to people in the red states, especially the evangelical Christians and other middle Americans who get blamed by the left for an administration that Shorris denounces for "its incompetence and [...] its killing of innocents and violations of the rules of war, decency, and civil rights." And he has assimilated their views into a book informed by a lifetime of reading, teaching, writing about and reflecting upon history, literature and philosophy.

"In 1965," Shorris notes, "the last major liberal legislation was passed. Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Medicare, and then it stopped." A pessimism about the direction the country was taking, Jimmy Carter's infamous "malaise," set in. Ronald Reagan proclaimed "morning in America," but it was a chill morning for those dependent on the government to provide a safety net.

Other writers have drawn on economics and demographic changes to explain the great shift in the United States from New Deal liberalism to Reagan-Bush conservatism. Shorris singles out one principal cause: fear. Specifically, the fear of death. The New Deal was a response to the fear of the social misery made manifest by the Great Depression. But the currently dominant politics in America is a response to the fear of death roused by the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945, by the Cold War that followed it and lately by Islamic terrorism.
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