Review: “Don’t Burn This Country” by Dave Rubin

“This book undoubtedly represents an evolution in Rubin’s thinking, and contrary to those who accuse him of changing to suit others, changing one’s mind on philosophical beliefs is not automatically a disqualification.”

I was apprehensive about picking up Dave Rubin’s Don’t Burn This Country, which was released last month, given that I was not the greatest fan of his last book. However, it is nevertheless worth reviewing this book because Rubin has a significant audience through his YouTube channel and now occupies a space in the activist conservative ecosystem, having joined Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media. This book, therefore, reveals both what the conservative base is likely to be absorbing and also what a part of the American conservative commentariat world is thinking. Networks and institutions matter when it comes to spreading ideas, after all.

My main point of disagreement with the book is both ideological and philosophical. Rubin pursues a worldview inimical to the world he says he wants to build. He ends this book by claiming the benefits of community over the collective; however, his solutions will simply strengthen the collectivist impulse he despises by increasing the atomization that dissolves community and creates collectivism. For Rubin, the individual is the main base for life, while “the collective doesn’t exist.” While individuals obviously exist and are indeed the basis for politics in their ineradicable dignity, the idea that collectives do not exist is simply not true.

The book is structured with each chapter offering advice on how to navigate the undoubted weirdness of our times. Chapters are headed with titles like “Dismantling Systems of Structural Stupidity” (rebuttal to systemic oppression), “Propaganda Protection” (resisting fake news, always from the Left, never the Right), “The Declaration of Digital Independence” (get off social media), “Capitalism > Socialism” (free markets are the best), “Embrace your Inner Black Sheep” (think for yourself…in ways that cohere with a certain worldview), “The Eighteenth-Century Lesbian Poetry Trap” (college is a ridiculous waste of time and money), and “You Don’t Need a Bunker (But You Do Need a Plan).” This is all fairly obvious stuff and is similarly seen in many other books published by followers of what we might call right-liberalism.