A review of The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills mentions Mills’ concept of “crackpot realism,” introduced in his Causes of World War Three to explain how a group of highly intelligent people could come to believe that each step in a course of action certain to lead to their destruction was the safest, most prudent one possible. Mills feared that “citizenship was obsolete”; “Modern society made freedom in the liberal sense of autonomous and reflective citizenship increasingly impossible.”
The new Library of America volume The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on his Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now draws a review titled “Sallow, Queer, and Sagacious.” Dissenters from the celebration of Abraham Lincoln as America’s great secular saint are well represented in the volume. Among them are Edmund Wilson, whose portrait of the sixteenth president in 1962′s Patriotic Gore has reminded more than one critic of Stalin, and Lerone Bennett Jr, who since the 1960s has been arguing that Lincoln was no friend to black America.
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