Shooting Blanks

In an 1852 letter, Gustave Flaubert announced his ambition to write “a book about nothing, a book with no external attachments." He added: "The most beautiful books are those with the least matter."

Flaubert managed to assault bourgeois sensibilities with such scandalous, if exquisitely wrought, works as Madame Bovary. But he never quite succeeded in writing a book about nothing. That achievement had to wait until the 21st century for fulfillment. The judges are still out, but I suspect that the palm for that award might well go to Michael J. Knowles, a recent graduate in history from Yale, for the incisive political analysis in Reasons to Vote for Democrats.

There is a reason that this brief, but comprehensive, inquiry shot to the number-one spot on Amazon. First, it covers all the bases: There are chapters on Economics, Foreign Policy, Civil Rights, Education, Homeland Security, Energy, Jobs, Crime, Immigration, and (perhaps the weightiest section) Values. Knowles has covered the waterfront. Second, as his extensive bibliography suggests, Knowles has done his homework: He has drawn on a wide and bipartisan range of works, from Saul Alinsky's classic handbook for community organizers, Rules for Radicals, to Peter Schweizer's critical investigation into the Clintons' finances in Clinton Cash—and many other books.

The conservative pundit Ben Shapiro summed up Knowles's achievement in this pithy endorsement: "Thorough." And the Amazon entry calls Reasons "the most exhaustively researched and coherently argued Democrat Party apologia to date." I think that is about right, and one of the 2,000 or so Amazon reviews, expands on this assessment:

In this poetic work, I have found what my heart has felt, but my words could never express. He captures the very soul of the Democratic party with a profundity of insight I never would have thought to find in a fellow cisgendered male. This is more than the petty political rants that dominate the bestseller list. Within these pages lies the fundamental substance and logic behind placing equality of outcome over equality of opportunity, defining one's beliefs according to the content of one's loins or the melanin levels of one's skin, accommodating and inviting mass immigration from cultures that hate us, and the ultimate truth that every material necessity is a fundamental human right that the government must provide at the expense of the one percent.