Front Burner - The books that explained 2025

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Some of our favourite guests of the year return to talk about books that helped meaningfully explain 2025. We talk about the evergreen appeal of Plato as well as Jewish identity with former Yale fascism scholar Jason Stanley. The déjà vu of trade wars and Canadian nationalism are tackled by journalist and author Stephen Maher. His pick is a book that details the last election of Sir John A. Macdonald and first election of Wilfrid Laurier.Then the career works of Herman Melville as a blueprint for modern America with historian Rick Perlstein.This is part one, in a series that will continue on tomorrow’s show! The books:The Republic Book 8 by Plato Being Jewish After Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter BeinartThe History of Canada Series: The Destiny of Canada by Christopher PenningtonThe Lightning-Rod Man by Herman Melville

When Christy Lee started her podcast, she wanted to avoid the spotlight. But that's kind of become impossible. Canadian True Crime has over 70 million downloads and is constantly at the top of the charts. This week on Crime Story, behind the scenes with Canadian True Crime and Christy Lee. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts. The CBC podcast. Hey, everybody. It's Jamie.

Well, there are just a couple of days left in 2025. We've done about 250 episodes this year, if you can believe it, really geared at trying to understand this moment that we're in. Threats of economic invasion and trade. War's political crashouts and turnarounds, assassinations, a half-century world order abandoned. I mean, that is just a short list. So today, we're going to do something a little bit different. We've invited a bunch of our favorite guests back onto the show, people that have helped

us make sense of that grim list and much more. And we've asked them one simple question, what book helped you understand 2025? They were excited to talk so much so that we're going to split this across two episodes today and tomorrow. Stephen Marr is back. He's been essential to so much of our Canadian political coverage this year. So is author, journalist, and historian Rick Pearlstein, who we had on to talk about the legacy of Ronald Reagan. But first, we are joined by Jason Stanley, the philosopher and scholar of fascism who left Yale and moved to Canada at the start of Trump's second administration. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's great to have you.

It's great to be in discussion with you again. So you have had a year of enormous change yourself, leaving Yale, moving to Canada, watching the political landscape in the U.S. shift away from anything that we'd long recognized as normal. And when we asked you to pick a book that helped explain the year, we just lived through, you actually pointed to two books. Plato's Republic, book eight, and Peter Bynardt's, being Jewish after Gaza, a reckoning. And I want to start with Plato because you are a philosopher after all. And what was it about book eight specifically that made you think this was a text of particular relevance in 2025? So it's been a book of particular relevance, I think, for quite

some time in the United States, because it's about how democracy leads to tyranny. And Plato gives this argument that's been sort of should be the foundation of democratic political philosophy. And the argument is that democracy allows anyone to run for office. And so that means that some people who completely are unsuitable for office should be, will run for office. And they will lie and they will lie in a particular way. They'll exploit free speech in a particular way. they'll create fear. They'll create fear of an external enemy and an internal enemy. And they'll tell the people that they will protect the people from this external enemy and from this internal enemy. And then Plato says some things like they'll promise money to the people. So what you see now is Donald Trump promising checks, Trump checks for people, all the while keeping. fear alive and telling the people, I am your protector. I am the only one who can save you from the internal enemy and the external enemy. What do you think this all says about the

enduring relevance of a book that was written thousands of years ago? It shows us that we are not in a new moment. It shows us that democracy has always been fragile and unstable. If we let ourselves fall into this demagoguery. It shows that there's something that philosophers have always recognized about people, about our vulnerabilities, to fear, to scapegoating, to being afraid of scapegoats. What we've learned from, I think, once from the last 200 years, once nationalism arose is that xenophobia is one of the easiest kinds of scapegoating tactics to create fear of foreigners. And that itself is something that is discussed in the history of democratic political philosophy.

In Pericles' funeral oration, he talks about how democracies welcome the foreigner to the city. And so you know you're moving into an anti-democratic, moment when foreigners, people coming into the city from outside, are treated as something to fear. Pericles, as democracies do not fear the outsider coming in. Plato describes this ladder of decline to outline how states eventually degenerate. Where do you think the U.S. is on that ladder today? And what does Plato say about how this backsliding kind of ultimately happened? Well, I think the United States today is not, you can't really bring Plato to bear to talk about the kind of structure, a political structure of the United States.

You know, Plato isn't talking about a Supreme Court or a division of powers. He's talking more about the way democratic culture erodes into a culture of tyranny because democracy is fundamentally, a culture. It's a culture of equal respect and maximum freedom. So what you do, what fear does is, and what scapegoating does is you make people afraid of certain groups and then afraid of the freedom you're giving groups. Think of the attacks on women that are so central to attacks on democracy, attacks on women's freedom. What you're saying is that women's freedoms are a threat. So the freedom for an abortion, that that is a threat to you. So you represent freedoms as threats.

So you're representing the chief value of democracy, freedom as a threat and equality as a threat. And so I think what we're seeing in the United States with the open cruelty of the Trump administration, of the Trump regime, with a kind of like flaunting and bragging about the cruelty. to immigrants, we're seeing a direct attack on the basis of equal respect, which is empathy. it's obviously very different in form, though you have certainly just convinced me to read Plato's book eight. But this book that Bynard has written is grappling with questions that feel

just as central to the year, questions around identity, belonging, and more. And just what made this book stand out to you as a way of understanding 2025? Well, right now we're seeing the weaponization of anti-Semitism. And of course, anti-Semitism is very real. Antisemitism is ancient. And, Jews have faced terrible persecution throughout European history and the 20th century is particularly bloody. But what Beinhard does is he shows how that history of victimization has been used as a way, what he calls a way of not seeing, as a way to mask the crimes that the state of Israel is doing to people who are not Jewish, the Palestinian people. And so we, you know, obviously many,

there's a long history of Jewish people who were not Zionists. But whether you're a Zionist or not, you don't have to approve of the actions of the state of Israel. And being Jewish is not identical with supporting the actions of the state of Israel or, or supporting, even supporting Zionism, religiously based states. But what we've seen is the weaponization of anti-Semitism against democracy. So it's particularly bad in the United States but also bad in Germany and many countries where basically you're using it to attack free speech. The actions of a state should never be immune from criticism and open debate.

And when you attack criticism and open debate, when you're doing, when you're trying to mask a genocide, then what you're doing is you're attacking democracy itself. And we Jewish people have always lived off democracy. Liberalism and democracy is what made the Nazis target us because they thought we were behind liberalism and democracy. And it's what gave us our freedoms in Europe before World War II is liberalism. We argue that states should not be based on religion and ethnicity, so we could get equal rights. So that anti-Semitism is being weaponized against the very thing that allows us to live in the countries that we live in outside of Israel, like the United States or Germany or Canada.

This is disastrous, I think. And also, obviously, what's happening in Gaza is disastrous. And as a Jewish person, myself, as a child of Holocaust survivors, I want to be free to do what I can to stop this. In the book, Beiner, you know, he wrestles with, like, this idea of separating Jewish identity from the behavior of the state of Israel. And he also really wrestles with the personal cost of dissent. And I wonder if you don't mind me asking if these are things that you can relate to. Yes, I think both Peter and I, Judaism is being Jewish. I mean, Peter is a very religious Jewish, and I am less religious. I'm reform Jewish. My children are raised Jewish. My children.

It's just very important to me being Jewish and very important to Peter. You know, I mean, I think that Jewish people always argue amongst themselves, and we definitely argue amongst ourselves about Israel. That's just the history of the 20th century with whole movements like the Jewish Bund. But yeah, it's a difficult moment because I always feel like my fellow Jewish people are, you know, can tolerate disagreement with me and still recognize that, you know, we're probably related as fifth cousins. But it is very, very tough when these existential things come between us. But, and it's tough because I believe that the Palestinian people deserve our support right now, given what they face and what they have faced. And that puts me in conflict

with, you know, people who I'm tied to very closely. But yes, it's been, it comes with definite personal costs. It comes with fear of being accepted in a community that I look to for primary acceptance. You know, we've talked about how in your own life you left the U.S. at the start of Trump's second administration. And just when you look at both of these books, I wonder, did they speak to anything else that was personal for you about exile, for example, fear, belonging? Well, I think you, I think there's a sense in which you become estranged from your people or your country, a sense in which you can become estranged because of the behavior. I mean, I don't think, I don't think, I mean, I think there are so many left-wing Jews.

critical of the behavior of the state of Israel that I feel warmly accepted within that community. But, you know, I mean, there's a feeling that, you know, take the United States, I don't want to be associated with the cruelty of ice. I don't want to be associated with a country that elected Donald, with the mood of a country that elected Donald Trump, even though I do love my country. And so, so that feeling of conflict, between identities. When one of your identities is tied up in something like ice on the one hand or supporting a state that's doing terrible things on the other. Jason, thank you so much for this. This was really wonderful. Just right before we go, do you mind if I just ask you how you're enjoying

your time in Canada so far? Yeah, well, I really didn't know anything about Canada when I came. and I had very idealistic hopes, and, you know, I still think of Canada as this great multiracial democracy, and I feel very safe here. But, you know, Canadians, and, you know, love seem to love Canada. They seem very rooted here. So breaking it and figuring it, it's a much different country than the United States. It's a much different country than I realized. And I'm really, like, looking forward to getting to know it better. Well, we're very happy to have you here and wishing you a wonderful 2026. I hope that we will be able to speak many more times.

Thank you so much. All right. Next up, we asked Canadian political reporter and author Stephen Marr for suggestions of his own, and he brought us to an election which set the course of Canada's modern political history. The book is Christopher Pennington's The Destiny of Canada, a sweeping history of Canada's political formation in the 19th century. Stephen, welcome back to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure for me to be with you. Okay. So when we asked you to pick a book that helps explain the year we just lived through, you went all the way back to the 19th century. And why the destiny

of Canada, why does it feel relevant right now? I read it as journalistic research. I was writing something about Canadian nationalism, decided to look back at the history of Canadian nationalism. So, you know, it's one of those things. Journalistically, you're like sort of fact grubbing, looking around for stuff. And I found myself really absorbed in the story of the election of 1891, the last election of Sir John and McDonald, the first election of Wilford Laurier. And I was amazed by the striking similarities between that election and the 2025 election. And just tell me more about those similarities. It turned on the relationship with the United States. Sir Johnny at that time was 76. His government was corrupt and tired.

And his central policy, the national policy, with tariff barriers to protect Canadian manufacturers and so on, was really causing a lot of economic hardship. At the time, time, it was still a largely agricultural country. And so farmers were complaining that they couldn't get access to U.S. markets tariff-free. And the Americans were trying to use tariffs, a guy named McKinley, who was then a congressman who later became president. They were increasing the tariffs on Canada. And it was widely understood that this was in an effort to force Canada to be annexed to the United States. Well, that sounds familiar. And just other moments of Canada's current political moment, maybe populism, regional anger, distrust of institutions, sovereignty. Do you see any of

those reflected in that earlier period? Well, there was not a populist sort of feeling at that time. That came later. But there's this eternal division between English and French Canada. And one of the stories of the election, Laurier was then the charming and widely admired, but little known leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. And he initially refused to take the job or didn't want to because he was afraid that English Canadians would never vote for a French Canadian leader. And at the time, the Orangemen were still a powerful force in Canadian politics. And they basically wanted. wanted to force French people to speak English, and whereas Sir Johnny McDonald was showing,

for his time, a more open and respectful approach to French Canadians. Reading this book, again, what struck you most about the relationship between elites and popular anger in early Canada and how familiar did that dynamic feel in 2025? The key thing is the sort of desperation that Canadians felt around the economy because of the trade threat. The liberals end up proposing reciprocity, freer trade with the Americans, and McDonald is resisting that. And he manages, there's a fascinating story about really skullduggery on both sides. When I was reading, my eyes popped out of my head. I thought about Kevin of O'Leary.

There was a guy at that time called Aristus Winman, who no one's ever heard of now, but he was a famous Canadian businessman who lived in the United States. And he was proposing what he called commercial union between the two countries, very much like the economic union proposal that Kevin O'Leary was proposing.

I went back and saw you interviewed him when he was trying to sell that idea. Did I ever? Would you say that this book offers like a reassurance that we have weathered similar tensions before? It was tremendously reassuring to me to see that Canadians in that election shows the Canadian nationalist perspective, even though they were aware that they might have to pay a short-term economic price. The central question was almost identical to the central question in our most recent election. Yeah. And this is really, you're making me want to read this book now.

Any other parallels that we haven't talked about yet today? The central turning point, the plot twist in this election, had to do with, Sir John A, accusing the liberals of what he called veiled prison. And there was a similar sort of tone to some of the liberal attacks on Pollyov in the most recent election. And there's this really weird story I want to tell you. During the run-up to the election, there was a guy, at that time, a famous Canadian journalist called Ned Farrer, who was working for the Globe, which was

not yet joined the mail, and Ned Farrer would write speeches, would write editorials, would write speeches for politicians. It was a different journalistic ethic in those days. And he went into a printing house in Toronto to have a pamphlet printed in which he laid out a plan for the Americans to force the annexation of Canada. And a patriotic young man who worked at that printhouse, saw what he was doing, and reported him to the authorities, and the police went down or convinced this guy to make a copy of the pamphlet, which they gave to Sir John and McDonald. And it was then the McDonald's having this kind of proof of liberal treason, because this journalist was associated with the liberal party. He decided to call the

election, knowing all along that he had this explosive information that he can unveil in the middle of it and less, you know, turning the election, which worked. So it was like quite a strange and clever thing that McDonald's did. He's wily and has got a secret that he thinks is going to win in the election. And it does. That's very fun. Stephen, this is great. Thank you for this. My pleasure. We're going to take a short break now, but coming up, we'll hear from historian Rick Perlstein, who joined us earlier this year for a discussion about the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Pearlstein has chosen one of the great American novelists as his pick for 2025.

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You know that. Watch free on CBC Gem. Okay, so we're joined now by historian and author of Nixon Land. and Reganland, Rick Pearlstein, who said that when thinking about books that helped him understand the year that was, he found himself turning to the work of novelist Herman Melville as a blueprint for understanding the contemporary United States. Rick, thank you so much for coming back onto the show. It's great to talk to you. Thanks. It's great to talk to you. I think blueprint is an interesting metaphor. And now we're talking about fiction. Maybe it's more like kind of Borges map of the world on a one-to-one school. scale, you know. Blueprint kind of seems like something you can file away from the drawer and kind of reproduce, you know. Yeah. It's very, very complicated, which is why it's so important

to be reading people artists like Melville who get at the complexity rather than, you know, the idea that we can kind of read some nonfiction book that somehow explains it all. Well, tell me more about why Melville and why not just one book, but a whole constellation of them. Sure. I mean, I should start by a little bit more of an introduction. I mean, I'm a historian, you know, and actually came kind of late to a passion for fiction and literature for various reasons. You know, I didn't like my high school English teachers, you know. So it really was only kind of in my maturity as a historian thinking about deeply about questions about America, right? And its meaning and its prospects. And in both this tragedy. and its glory, that I began approaching people like Dickens and Dostoevsky, who has interesting things to say too. All of them have interesting things to say about our movement, but especially kind of fell in love with Melville and have been reading every word he writes.

And really, it is the depth of the kind of questions he asks, both about what it means to be a human, like his first book he ever wrote was kind of a memoir of being a castaway from a ship in the South Seas and living, as he actually did, among Caribbean natives. And it was kind of a bestseller because it was very sexy. But it was also a very profound meditation way ahead of its time about cultural relativism. And is it really true that the Christian West is. superior to everyone else in the world. So he already kind of opened the door to some very profound questions about how we organize ourselves politically and morally. And then he moved out to writing about America, in which his questions were equally profound. Why is his vision of

immigrants or immigration particularly relevant right now, I think? That is the one I've read most recently. And I should say that he started this evolution from being a popular writer to a more and more morally and artistically complex one as he, his life continued and less popular, right? One of the fun things about his life was the better he wrote and the more profound his answers, the fewer people wanted to read him. And in his last novel, he actually makes that the subject of this allegory about why a person who's come up with this morally profound body of work can't sell his books, but someone who writes kind of shallow stuff can, right? But his first kind of serious novel in which he dealt with serious moral themes was about,

it was called Redburn, and it was about a guy much like himself who a lot of his stuff was semi-autobiographical, who came from a wealthy family that was down on its luck, and he shipped off to sea. And many, many interesting things happen in that novel that were kind of a harbinger of what's generally considered his greatest book, Moby Dick, right? It's the Moby Dick of Melody novels as Moby Dick, right? But in Redburn, on the way back from Liverpool, the ship in which the narrator is a crew member, has 200 Irish migrants, really refugees in the hold, who are are starving to death from the Irish potato famine. And there's this absolutely gorgeous panjyric in the middle of it about why America is a great nation.

And it's because I'm just going to ask you for a cut here. Maybe I can read it. I would love that. Okay. So this is, he is on the crew of a ship that has several hundred Irish migrants in the hold who are starving from the potato famine and because they've kind of been scammed by the shipowner. They don't have enough clothes and they don't have enough food. And there's a terrible epidemic. So there really are truly the tired refuse to the world yearning to breathe

free exactly as was placed on the pedestal of the Statue of the Statue of Liberty in that famous poem, Emma Lazarus. He says, let us wave that agitated national topic. Right. So he's already saying, there's a debate over this. It's the same debate we're having now. Let us wave that agitated national topic as to whether such multitudes of four and four should be landed on our American shores. Let us wave it with the one only thought that if they can get here, they have God's right to come, though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world. There is no telling who does not own a stone in the great wall of China. But we waive all this. And he means wave by, wave away. And we'll only consider how best the immigrants can come hither, since come they do,

and come they wust and will. Of late, a law has passed in Congress restricting ships to a certain number of immigrants, according to a certain rate. If this law were enforced, much good might be done. also might much good be done were the English law likewise enforced, considering this fixed supply of food for every immigrant embarking from Liverpool. But it is hardly to believe that either of these laws is observed. But in all respects, no legislation, even nominally reaches the hard lot of the immigrant. What ordinance makes it obligatory upon the captain of a ship? We talk of the Turks and abhor the cannibals, but may not some of them go to heaven before some of us. We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls, we are blind to the real sights of the

world, deaf to its voice, and deads to its death. And not till we know that one grief outweighs 10,000 joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us. Well, just tell me a little bit more about what you, what you read there. It's pretty, it's pretty profound. It shows how deeply human that exactly what Donald Trump and Stephen

Miller are doing is done which is basically to say we can't have people come from other countries

because they're going to be poor wretched people from poor wretched places quite frankly the places

that Donald Trump calls shithole countries right that he that Stephen Miller

with impassioned you know obsession talks about Somali as a terrible place and that we don't import individuals

we import civilizations and that these places from which we're importing these people we're importing dirt, right? We're importing the ruin of America, right? And

Melville says a couple things here that are really important. He says if these people manage to get here And he's talking in the context and the novel of people who are suffering the worst possible disease and seeing their their loved ones die in front of them, literally surrounded by their own filth and thrown overboard, right? If they have the courage and the valor to get to this country, they're not the worst people, as Donald Trump claims, as Steve Miller. They're literally the best people, right? And then he has that wonderful riff at the end about how, you know, we talk about these terrible civilizations, these cannibals, these non-Christian places, but maybe actually among them are people who are far more profoundly moral than us, right? He's talking about very old-fashioned, very basic ideals about human equality, but he's also talking about the temptation to see anyone who's different from you as worse than you.

And, you know, he could be, again, quoting what Stephen Miller says. Stephen Miller, who in a brand new wonderful piece by Greg Sargent, the New Republic, comes from a family about which the exact same things were said because they were Jews from Tsarist Russia that he now says about Somalian immigrants. And it's really gross and it's really disgusting. And it's also something that we Americans have been struggling with for almost 200 years. A lot of people will know Herman Melville from his most famous book, Moby Dick. And so what do you? Yeah, and just talk to me a bit more about that, about Moby Dick and how it relates to this moment as well.

So very simply, Moby Dick is about the most profound question every. person of liberal and humanitarian temperament asks every day about Donald J. Trump, how can people follow someone who is so bad for their lives, so bad for their families, so bad for their prosperity, so bad for their moral core and their connection to the, you know, whatever is their faith or their wisdom tradition, right? And yet they enthusiastically join forces with him, right? And that is the most deep theme in Moby Dick, which is like, why do all these, not as not why is there this crazy, obsessed authoritarian dictator who wants to kill everyone named Ahab, right? Just in order to redeem his wounded narcissism, right? Just like, you know, a dictator like Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump is trying to redeem their wounded narcissism by leading people into destruction. Why do people follow Ahab? Why do people enthusiastically not mutiny and get just as excited about killing this white whale, which is, you know, literally an impossibility as he does? And it's it's about this very profound strange death drive that human beings have to follow charismatic, um, totalitarian evil people.

And, you know, there's a wonderful writer named Rebecca Solnit. She said, you know, Donald Trump only has one power, and that's the power to make commands. But we also have only one power, which is to refuse those commands. And if we refuse those commands, Donald Trump or Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot or anyone doesn't have any power. You know, so why do we follow the commands? The fact is a lot of people do, right? and that's what he is examining in this very strange and wonderful book that sold 500 copies while he was alive. Wow, I didn't know that it only sold 500 copies while he was.

Yeah, I told my editor and my publisher, I want to read a book like Nobby Dick. I mean, I've hated. Well, your books have sold a lot more than 500 copies. Yeah, I got one more to go, though. So the last book that Herbert Melville wrote is his strangest, and I won't even going to get into it, but it wasn't even accepted by the publisher. Just for people listening, if they could only read one Elville text this year, which one should it be, one we've already talked about or another one altogether?

I mean, there are about like five or six ones that are completely related to their deepest, darkest, fascinations and fears. I mean, he knew us in a way no one knew us, right? But I think the one I'm going to recommend is a short one, right? Because it's easier to write short stuff than long stuff. And it's called the Lightning Rodman. And it's, you know, any book of Melville short stories will have it. It's not famous.

It's about a guy who's living kind of happily in the middle of the woods in a cabin and a traveling salesman. He's really good at talking about American con men, right? He wrote a book called The Confidence Man, which is also pretty amazing, but also very difficult. and how the confidence man, the person who fools people for their own advantage, is the most recognizable American type, right? So think Donald Trump. But in the lightning rod man, a traveling salesman comes to his door and says, you need a lightning rod because your house is about to burn down.

And basically the story, spoiler alert, is him explaining all the different ways his house can burn down. But it turns out that all the different ways you really think about it, kind of contradict each other. They're fantastical. They're totally paranoid. But what we see is the template for Fox News in all right-wing media in which they create these fantasies that the world is about to blow up in order to get people to watch Fox News, right? Because it promises them the redemption.

So again, it's another one of those surrenders we make of our freedom for comfort without which dictators wouldn't be able to thrive. It's very funny and it's short. And you're like, wow, this is so basic. And yet this guy got it in 1850. Why can't we? Huh. Rick, this is great. Thank you.

Thanks. Pleasure. Okay. That was Jason Stanley, Stephen Marr, and Rick Pearlstein on the books and authors that help them make sense of the last year in news and our first installment in a set of two episodes on that theme. Tomorrow we'll be getting reading recommendations from the likes of lawyer and author Brian Stevenson, Canadian journalist and author Paul Wells, and Canadian broadcaster and record-setting Jeopardy Winner, Matea Roach. Their books will take us inside the New York Times

to the front lines of the war in Ukraine and Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, an institution central to American history. Talk to you tomorrow.