A collection of the finest New York Times columns written by Roger Cohen over more than a decade, accompanied by an original 20,000-word essay on the state of the world
The hundreds of thousands of readers who followed Roger Cohen’s column and mourned its end responded above all to what they saw as the marriage in his writing of head and heart. That tenor permeates An Affirming Flame.
During his twelve years as a columnist, Cohen attempted to hold power to account at home and abroad in the name of freedom, decency, pluralism, and the importance of truth and dissent in open societies. He watched with alarm as the outside threat of 9/11 morphed into the internal threat of 1/6. This time, the assailants were not jihadi terrorists, they were American white supremacists and seditionists convinced of American decadence but unable to see that they personified it. The threat to American democracy is clear.
Cohen dissects this internal American fracture. His examination of the rising tide of authoritarian rule across the world takes him to China. It dwells on Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its assault on Ukraine. Throughout his work on the plight of refugees, COVID-19, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his writing reflects his belief in the unquenchable human quest for dignity.
In the pieces included here, Cohen explores themes of displacement, belonging, and his own buffeted craft of journalism. His writing, at once lucid and passionate, is sometimes deeply personal. He captures the fight to defend America’s openness, democratic institutions and promise against walls, retrogression, division, and the assault on truth. This struggle, as Cohen writes, is also the world’s. It is inseparable from the battle to save humanity from the creeping autocracy of the twenty-first century. As he writes, On lies is tyranny built.
