Age of Anger: A History of the Present
by pankaj mishra
farrar, straus and giroux, 320 pages, $26
Despite the subtitle of his book, Pankaj Mishra is not interested in understanding the past or the present. His aim, instead, is to dispose of those who voted for Trump, Brexit, Netanyahu, or Modi, arguing that they are deluded by resentment. A cascade of quotations carries him forward: Gandhi, Marx, Girard, Sorel, Mazzini, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and Wagner all appear in motley array. Mishra does not make any attempt to contextualize or elucidate their disparate views; it is enough to invoke their authoritative names against these deplorables. Nearly the only canonical author not invoked by Mishra is Machiavelli. This is a shame, for one epigram from Machiavelli’s Life of Castruccio Castracani would have been instructive: “When someone was boasting of having read many things, Castruccio said: ‘It would be better to boast of having taken them to mind.’”
On one important point, Mishra is right: Contemporary liberal democracies have failed to live up to their promises of universal liberty, equality, and fraternity. Liberalism cannot help but disappoint, because it creates similar, competing desires in every population it conquers. It replaces settled social arrangements with restless striving for the same material success, ensuring that some will inevitably be left unsatisfied and enraged. More dubiously, Mishra argues that this failure has led voters to indulge in “ressentiment,” which he defines as “an existential resentment of other people’s being.” Fascism, Islamist terrorism, and the election of Donald Trump, among many other things, all fall under this broad heading.