“Lions and Scavengers” by Ben Shapiro

This was a roller coaster of a read. Very fast and full of huge ups followed by deep downward plunges. It is essentially a very strident, in your-face, newspaper column extended over 230 pages, so utterly right in some respects and appallingly wrong in others.

Until I picked it up, I had not heard of the author, who is a well-established and very successful American political and cultural commentator, with a podcast and a big online following. This I the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article about him:

Benjamin Aaron Shapiro (born January 15, 1984) is an American conservative political commentator, media host, and attorney. He writes columns for Creators Syndicate, Newsweek, and Ami Magazine, and is editor emeritus for The Daily Wire, which he co-founded in 2015. Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and live radio show. He was editor-at-large of Breitbart News from 2012 until his resignation in 2016. Shapiro has also authored sixteen non-fiction books.

Shapiro has described his political views as economically libertarian and socially conservative, and is critical of the alt-right movement. He opposes abortion, gun control, same-sex marriage, transgender rights and the Affordable Care Act. He supports capital punishment, tax cuts and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He has condemned Hamas, praised Israel and the IDF in their role in the Gaza war and overall Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and denies the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

That sums him up pretty effectively and also gives a good steer as to what his book’s main arguments are.

I am myself a proud classical liberal. So when Ben Shapiro discusses economic matters, the creation of wealth and the need for governments to minimise intervention in order to best facilitate wealth creation I am 100% with him, nodding along happily as he deploys stats and stories to make his points. There are some great quotes from people like Lenin included which I had not come across before and which remind us of just how unpleasant some left-wing people are, even when arguing an ethically-driven case in a high moral tone. His views on freedom of speech and conscience are very sound.

But I am also a liberal on social matters too, and so found myself shaking my head and spitting in anger when he puts over his more conservative ideas. The material on Gaza is just silly propaganda in my view and quite frankly verging on the obscene at times.

But I would still recommend this book, because it is I think the authentic voice of younger Americans who support Donald Trump and American neo-conservativism more generally, and it helped me to start understanding their perspective.

Whether we like it or not, the combination of social conservatism with economic liberalism is shown here to amount to a coherent political philosophy that has to be reckoned with. It is one that seems right now to be spreading around the world pretty ferociously, smashing up the liberal consensus that has tended to dominate throughout my lifetime. I am not a supporter, but want to comprehend its apparent power.

The core idea – which is of course oversimplified, somewhat offensively framed and rather repeated to death in the book – is that contemporary Western societies can usefully be framed as being made up of two main groups – the Lions (who Shapiro approves of) and their opponents, the Scavengers (who he disapproves of). The Lions are people who take it upon themselves to who build businesses and other organisations, create new products, ideas and wealth. They have a strong work ethic and generally keep the wheels of Western civilisation turning. However, they marry this liberal approach to economic life, with a conservative social philosophy rooted in religious virtue, traditional family-values and what a kind of ‘common decency’ in the way that they choose to live their lives. Duty underpins their world view. By contrast the ‘scavengers’ feed off the economic value created by the lions, minimising their own economic contribution and denigrating wealth creators, while happily enjoying the fruits of that wealth via benefits and public services. Their hatred and mistrust of the lions leads them to denigrate civil order and generally break the established moral rules that keep everything together.

The other aspect of the book that I found really interesting – because it is a perspective that is so rarely articulated these days, particularly in the UK – is Ben Shapiro’s unapologetic use of biblical quotations to justify his points of view. He is clearly a devout and practicing Jew, for whom God is very much a living presence guiding his thinking. He fears for the consequences of the rejection by so many of his contemporaries of the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition and builds a lot of his arguments around this narrative.

A thought-provoking, but difficult read for true liberals. I cheered and jeered in equal measure.