Elizabeth Drew in NYRB

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 • Politics

Elizabeth Drew has a new piece in the New York Review of Books about Romney and the election, which deviates pretty far into the “Greenwaldian” zone of near-existential dread that used to be the exclusive province of Noam Chomsky types.

I actually have loved Drew ever since she was in The New Yorker comparing Ed Meese to Inspector Closeau (about 30 years ago). Her writing was much more doctrinaire than it is now, which means that she’s gone in the opposite direction from most high-level political journalism. It’s not like NYRB doesn’t do this kind of thing often these days (they’ve been fearless in their anti-AIPAC coverage, and they had Frederick Crews attacking Freud before anyone else). (I think.) Anyway good piece if anyone’s listening. It’s nearly impossible to get find this particular flavor of deep structural critique (i.e. “shrill” concerns about the fundamental failure of representative democracy) anywhere that you can refer to in “polite company” these days.