Enemy At The Gates Blu Ray Review
Giraldo Allain
Enemy at the Gates is the 20th book in the Mitch Rapp series, becoming Mills 7th novel, who has had a great run since the death of Vince Flynn. I enjoy this series immensely and regularly find myself re-reading them! I have written reviews for the later books in the series as I only started the series when the American Assassin film was made! If you are interested in those reviews, then you can check them out by clicking the name of the novel, Red War, Lethal Agent, Total Power. All of the novels are something that I struggle to put down and in general I read them over a couple days (And sometimes just the 1 sitting!). The books are always a solid 7.5/10 at least, over the time that Mills has been writing he has spent a lot of time creating new characters with whom he spends most of the narrative rather than using those created by Vince Flynn. This is why I was pleasantly surprised at some of the creations and inclusions this time around for Rapp!
This book gave us new characters as per usual, with the introduction of a new president in Anthony Cook, and his wife Catherine Cook, they are placed to become the main antagonists of future novels with their role here mainly been that of oversight. It is clear from early on in the book that they have risen to power only because of the events that took place in Total Power and that they have plans together that should lead to the Cooks being in control of The White House for many years to come. This posed an interesting question to the reader as to what the title of this book truly meant whether it was a question about the literal characters who find themselves at a gate later on, or the potential enemy who is lurking in the White House for future novels. Over the course of the books, the presidents have previously always been people who are noble and have an opinion regarding terrorism and politics that led to them trying to do their best for the American people, but it is easily identifiable that the Cooks are not the same, generating intrigue from me as to how this is going to play out in the future.
Is America living in the shadow of the post-Cold War liberalism? Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins argues that some liberal intellectuals are still looking for an enemy who can give a cause to their political actions.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is a historian of modern political and intellectual thought with a specific focus on Western Europe and the United States from the Cold War to the present. He primarily concentrates on such topics as liberalism, conservatism, populism, secularism and religion. He serves as the managing editor of Modern Intellectual History.
Kasia Krzyżanowska: The years of the Trump presidency proliferated with outspoken critical voices about liberalism delivered by diverse conservatives, integralists or identitarians, but also by scholars trying to reinvigorate liberalism. Why did liberalism become the enemy, but also a carrier of hope for many intellectuals in the Trump era? And if liberalism played so many different roles in diverse spectacles, does it still have some core features?
Of course, other people would stress the connection between liberalism and the welfare state. I think really it was a kind of proxy debate for getting out on the table what, on all sides of the political spectrum, what many saw as the wrong direction that liberalism had taken even under the Obama administration.
You mentioned the role of an overlapping consensus, which is an interesting notion. On one hand we can criticize it because of its failure to engage more citizens, but on the other hand, can it be a promise for defeating the current social polarisation that is currently in the American society so pressing?
There is a strand of thought, mainly neo-conservative, that says that you need an foreign enemy to rally the people and for solidarity. Is there a way beyond that? It is a pretty cynical view which I discussed in an aforementioned paper I wrote with Michael Brenes. If you are coming from the left, the point would be to overcome these divisions by looking at the socio-economic factors that create them. But the emphasis does not seem to be on that, at least with the consensus approach, which focuses on the politics of citizenship, the politics of consensus, and usually involves a political philosophy of representation and the party system functioning properly, rather than making major New Deal era advances in terms of welfare.
As you mentioned, looking for enemies is present in many books published by liberals. For example, when Ivan Krastev wrote a review of the latest book by Anne Applebaum he mentioned that she is much influenced by this Cold War thinking. Perhaps the end of the Cold War could be compared with the current situation: Trump is gone and so are the hard times for democracy. With Biden in office there is no other cause for liberal intellectuals to fight for. Would you agree with this comparison?
Absolutely. I mentioned one in the Rawlsian notion of overlapping consensus figuring out a way of engaging with each other in the public sphere where we are able to put to the side what he describes as comprehensive doctrines, and reason with each other in a way that we can arrive at reasonable agreements on policies.
There are different traditions in this country and a big one is the tradition of American pragmatism. John Dewey and others, there is a neo-pragmatist movement in the eighties, Richard Rorty and others, that was also relying on this tradition. There are the Habermasians that are from this point of view liberals, and they cherish high view of human reason and what it can accomplish in terms of achieving consensus. Jan-Werner Muller early work was on Carl Schmitt and I think he has written some new pieces on militant democracy, that tradition does seem to be appealing for a certain kind of liberal today who is concerned with domestic terror threats and the groups who are opposed to liberal constitutional democracy. And with militant democracy you can use illiberal means to achieve liberal ends, right? And that has risk and we saw that with the Patriot Act, risk to privacy, risk to long standing liberal freedoms.
A lot of the discontent today that many have towards liberalism, whether they are liberals but feel like the tradition is problematic, or they are anti-liberals is perhaps not critical of liberalism as a whole.
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