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I seem to recall that a couple of months ago, in the course of a post about the ideological opposites that he respects, Matthew Yglesias wrote something about how the test is whether you can learn something from the people you disagree with. Tyler Cowen, I think, was his example, and rightly so if I’m remembering this correctly. Chris Caldwell of the Weekly Standard is someone I’ve always put in that category. Caldwell has a nimble and inquisitive mind, writes with flair and subtlety, doesn’t caricature his argumentative opponents and has little patience for shibboleths. I was lucky enough to factcheck his old New York Press column when I was in college.
So I would be stunned if Caldwell’s new book, about the growth of Islam in Europe, is halfway as tendentious and hysterical as Stephen Holmes’ American Prospect review makes it sound. I’ve been anticipating reading Reflections on the Revolution in Europe since I heard Caldwell was writing it. As soon as I get a free minute to read a weighty book (sigh) that’s the one I’m reading. His track record suggests he doesn’t have a crappy book in him.
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Needless to say, Caldwell’s book was given a tongue bath
in the neocon controlled NYT Book Review by Fouad Ajami.
But, for balance, the conservatives-reviewed-by-conservatives
are matched with liberals-reviewed-by-conservatives.
See, for example, the semi-hatchet job that the NYTBR commissioned
from George Will on Rick Pearlstein’s Nixonland.
Sadly, yes. Caldwell thought a washed up chatshow host turned extreme rightist was the revolution in 2005; Matt Carr of the UK Institute of Race Relations has a definitive fisk here.
Among other things, you probably want to refer to Randy McDonald’s classic fisking of Eurabia theories as well.
Further, this remark, as well as being repellent, betrays serious ignorance: “Ought these people, assuming they are noncitizens, be put on the next plane out of the country?”
OK, Caldwell is happily speculating about the sociology of the ‘hood in the suburbs of Paris, and he doesn’t know if the people he’s fantasising about deporting are French citizens or not – still less if they are Muslims or not. Hey, why doesn’t the US send all these black people in Queens home? Assuming they are noncitizens? Where’d these terrible immigrants come from?
For some reason, he enjoys a reputation in the US for knowing something about France…but this is as if you imagined that Pakistanis in Bradford arrived there since 2001 or blacks in Notting Hill…wait, his readership do imagine that…