Recent Books
186 foreign affairs
We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the
Heart of America
BY JENNIFER M. SILVA. Oxford
University Press, 2019, 224 pp.They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our
Democracy
BY LAWRENCE LESSIG. Dey Street
Books, 2019, 352 pp.Silva and Lessig both seek to diagnose the
troubled American electorate. Silva
depicts a landscape of despair in which the
social institutions that connect individuals
to the “we” around them have largely
disappeared. Lessig paints a searing
portrait of a defective political system that
is nonetheless full of hope, community
spirit, self-empowered individuals, and
ways to fix what is broken.
Silva spent two years interviewing
white, black, and Latino individuals in a
declining coal town in Pennsylvania. They
shared stories of trauma, violence, abuse,
addiction, lack of health care, unemploy-
ment, and jobs that don’t pay enough to
live on. The American dream—to give
their children a better life—has vanished
for them. Unions, churches, and commu-
nity organizations play little if any role:
Silva’s characters turn to themselves for
answers to their pain and disappointment.
They don’t expect help from the govern-
ment and reject the idea that it could or
should help others. Most of them voted
for Donald Trump in 2016. Silva doesn’t
expect much change in these condi-
tions; any that occurs is likely to be
“infinitesimal and slow.”
Lessig’s America could be on another
planet. A passionate advocate of politi-
cal reform, Lessig writes of what is
wrong with “them” (the elites who runUnited States can address the dire
inequality that is tearing apart the fabric
of American democracy.
The Fifth Domain: Defending Our
Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in
the Age of Cyber Threats
BY RICHARD A. CLARKE AND
ROBERT K. KNAKE. Penguin Press,
2019, 352 pp.
Armed with digital weapons, hackers,
criminals, and nation-states have done
incalculable damage to firms, individuals,
and governments. For the past two
decades, the advantage in cyberspace—
which the U.S. military considers a “fifth
domain,” alongside those of land, sea, air,
and space—has been decisively on the
side of offense. In deploying the so-called
Stuxnet virus to shut down Iran’s uranium
enrichment operation in 2009, Israel and
the United States proved that a cyber-
attack can succeed even if the target is not
connected to the Internet. But Clarke and
Knake argue that the advantage is now
shifting toward defense, even though
defending is still far more expensive than
attacking. The best approach, they argue,
is not to counterpunch when struck but to
build resilience into the tools and net-
works of cyberspace. Doing so won’t
prevent attacks but can minimize their
damage, so that the assaults that do get
through won’t matter much. The authors
make digital technology wonderfully
clear for nonexperts (their explanation of
quantum computing is particularly
masterly) and describe dozens of pro-
posed policy fixes to update government’s
lagging role. Unfortunately, they don’t
adequately deal with the difficulties their
proposals would entail or rebut counter-
arguments that critics might pose.