‘It’s impossible to understand progressive politics today without grasping the idea of settler colonialism and the worldview that derives from it,” writes Adam Kirsch in On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (Norton, 160 pp., $24.99). His excellent new book is a primer that can be absorbed in a single sitting. Kirsch, a poet and critic and an editor at the Wall Street Journal, traces how an idea that began as a recondite academic theory made its way into progressive activism and mainstream politics and has been used, as so often happens with “idealistic” radical ideologies, to justify violence — most strikingly in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. In the ’80s and ’90s, Kirsch explains, academics began to apply the term “settler colonialism” to nations such as Australia, Canada, and the United States. Their innovation was to view the European settlement of these countries not as a historical event but as a continuing “structure” of invasion and genocide that made them permanently illegitimate and most of their citizens (“settlers” still) guilty of ongoing injustice. Kirsch notes that settler colonialism is more a political theology of original sin than a political program because it longs for an undoing of past evils but makes no concrete demands that could be met. The leap to designate Israel a “settler colonial” society (despite obstacles of history, logic, and fact) not only made it virtuous to call for Israel’s destruction, it provided a rare instance in which the goal could conceivably be achieved.

“My incredible decade at the summit of government and politics arose out of the dust of political collapse,” writes Ken Khachigian in his new memoir, Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Nixon and Reagan (Post Hill Press, 496 pp., $35). Khachigian, a lawyer by training, served as a young communications staffer for Nixon and then, thanks to his work with the former president, as a speechwriter and adviser to President Reagan. His book, released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal, gives colorful accounts of staff maneuvering during moments of drama in both presidencies. Khachigian, who remained a staunch Nixon loyalist — Pat Buchanan dubbed him “Onoda” — had a low opinion of his colleagues’ “folding tents at the first whiffs of gunpowder” in the days leading up to the resignation. Working on Reagan’s 1980 campaign, Khachigian inserted a “small gem” into an October speech: “Look around, then ask yourself: Are you really better off than you were in 1976?” Nixon remained an engaged political observer behind the scenes, sharing his analysis with Khachigian. In a memo to President-elect Reagan, reproduced in an appendix, Nixon offered detailed advice on choosing personnel. It underscored the importance of loyalty and of appointing a “new breed” of bureaucrat: “The liberal academics have had their chance and have failed. It is time to build a new establishment.”

Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, by David V. Hicks, first appeared in 1981, when the author was, as he put it in the preface of the 1990 edition, a “young and relatively inexperienced teacher.” A new edition (Rowman and Littlefield, 216 pp., $24.95) of his spirited polemic, a defense of classical education and an attack on the soullessly utilitarian methods of the educational experts of his day, comes at a time when the classical-education movement is gaining momentum. Yet his central proposition — that education ought to instill wisdom and virtue, to “teach the young to know what is good” and act accordingly — is no closer to being accepted by today’s education establishment. Hicks would like classical education to be available to the many, not the few. In the long run, he argues, democracy requires something more than “analytical, value-free learning.” Without “normative learning,” he warns, “the democratic citizen will doubt his ability to decide the issues shaping his life” and will “put himself at the mercy of a few experts.”