Jonah:
Have you read John Lukacs’s new book Democracy and Populism? It’s highly pertinent to this topic, & also to some of the ideas we were kicking around in Atlanta the other night.
I never quite know where I am with Lukacs. I’ll find myself pounding on the desk, saying “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Then, ten pages later, I’m pounding “No! No!
No!” His Budapest 1900 is a lovely book, though — one of the best “character sketches” of a city ever done, better than Jan Morris.