Miles Wide and Inches Deep
A Review of Ben Shapiro’s “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps”
Ben Shapiro made his name as the wunderkind of angry right wing partisanship, with videos of him “destroying” undergraduate students and books with subtle titles like How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them. He infamously joked that the “only reason to have a conversation or be friends with anyone on the left…is to humiliate them as badly as possible” and chums around with Dennis “the left ruins everything” Prager. All this was fairly generic stuff for what I’ve called the “right wing outrage machine,” which is better known for its bombast than the quality of its arguments.
The Harvard educated Shapiro has commendably tried to distance himself from lucrative but boring polemic and rebrand as a serious public intellectual; a kind of millennial William F. Buckley or Frank Meyer. He took a crack at this with his earlier book The Right Side of History, which unfortunately wasn’t all that convincing (see my review here). Even conservative journalists like Andrew Neil called Shapiro out for lamenting partisanship and a lack of civil conversation when his own past behavior was hardly exemplary. (Let him who is without sin…)
The Right Side of History was something of an intellectual history, with Shapiro making the argument that Greek…
