A reader email arrived overnight, about a book I’d last read or thought about when I was in college many decades ago. The email said:
I am guessing that you might be aware of a book by Jose Ortega written in Spain in the 1930s and has never been out of print.
There he describes a movement that appeals to a cross-section non-intellectual people across class lines that seems to parallel Donald Trumps cross-cultural appeal. There it seemed to lead to Fascism.
Might you have an opinion about this relating to today's world?
Ah, it comes back to me now! This book would of course be The Revolt of the Masses, by Jose Ortega y Gasset, which I read as an 18-year-old while taking a class from the famous political scientist Samuel Beer on “Western Thought and Institutions.” So I looked around to see what had been written recently on it, and came across a very interesting Daily Beast post by Ted Gioia two years ago, called “The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age was Published in 1929.” My reason for writing now is to point you to Gioia’s piece.