A Certain Idea of America, by Peggy Noonan (Portfolio; 352 pp., $31.00). Having long considered the speech President Ronald Reagan delivered after the Challenger Disaster in 1986 to be among the finest delivered by a 20th-century American president, I give more attention to that speech’s author, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, than I typically do most newspaper columnists.
While Noonan’s frequent rebukes of President Donald Trump and others aligned with a more populist rendering of the GOP have grown admittedly tiresome, there remain numerous aspects of her writing that warrant attention and, yes, praise. Her new anthology A Certain Idea of America contains many columns well worth reading.
Someone new to Noonan’s work learns a few things about her. She is fascinated by the Civil War and the mutual respect shared by Grant and Lee: “Would you have let your enemy go home in dignity, with the horses and guns?” She loves literature (including the Russian variety) and music. Throughout A Certain Idea of America, she writes touchingly of her favorite artists and icons: Tom Wolfe, Paul Simon, Queen Elizabeth, and John Paul II.
And she doesn’t mind calling out the omnipresent improprieties of 21st-century life. “I Don’t Mind Being Stern,” one of her chapter headings reads. She rightfully castigates Senator John Fetterman’s gym shorts and Prince Harry’s airing of the Royal Family’s dirty laundry, and she calls for more American men to be gentlemen.
Perhaps more than anything else, the reader comes to grasp that Noonan is a serious Catholic. She writes memorably about how the fire that burned Notre Dame spared the altar and speaks of the souls of the children murdered in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting racing toward heaven. “There is a God, and he is good and you are here to know him, love him, and show your feeling through your work and how you live,” she writes. Radicals from Robespierre to Mao Zedong, she reminds us, have been quick to close churches.
While I am not in lockstep with her political sympathies, I largely share her aesthetic commitments. She sees America not as a collection of atomized individuals, like an Edward Hopper painting, but rather as a place where citizens strive to live well in community with others. Like Charles Krauthammer’s similar 2013 anthology Things That Matter, Noonan aims to speak to the timeless and fundamental aspects of both individual and national life.
(Erich J. Prince)
Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, by Paola Ramos (Pantheon; 256 pp., $28.00). A significant fraction of American Latinos have recently left the Democratic Party to become Republicans. In 2024, Trump won 43 percent of the Latino vote, the most of any Republican candidate. This phenomenon deserves serious study, but does not receive it in Defectors, a book whose very title frames such voters as disloyal aberrations.
Ramos, who has worked for Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, writes not just from a left-wing perspective but from the far-left, identity-politics end of the spectrum. She tends to label anyone who disagrees with her an extremist, racist, misogynist, or white supremacist (even nonwhites).
She interviews several Latinos who have changed their allegiances but immediately dismisses their views. Her descriptions of conservative Latinos are often dehumanizing. A Latino border patrol agent is “like an animal.” A Latina has had her brain “contaminated.” A Hispanic GOP candidate does not speak but “spews” hateful rhetoric. On the other hand, Ramos presents the various Democrats and hard-left activists she interviews as intelligent, sensitive, and well-dressed. The book consists of a calculated selection of evidence to fit the conclusions Ramos has already drawn.
She pins the rightward shift on the insidious, conspiratorial plans of the Republicans to spread fake news and misinformation through Fox News and social media. She even tries to tie in the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the source code for the Republican plot to nab Latino votes. The mere mention of Trump makes her sputter with indignation.
Ramos accepts that Latinos have a strong sense of family, community, and religious faith, but she can’t connect those attributes to their voluntary rightward move. One wonders how Ramos can miss something so obvious: People with conservative values are eventually likely to move to the right, especially when the party they previously supported has marched to the radical edge. It’s not rocket science, Paola.
Her contention that alt-right brainwashing drove the shift fundamentally misses the point. Latino voters, like others, are entirely capable of making their own decisions, and they do not need the GOP—or Ramos—to manipulate them.
In the end, Ramos says more than she intends to show—including the elitism, disdain, and presumptuousness that has come to define the American left. It is a revealing story, but probably not the one she meant to tell.
(Derek Parker)
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