A richly documented political book with significant current relevance.
An exploration of the relentless actions of the right-wing movement seeking to counter the collective voice of the majority.
With the 2024 election looming and democracy's fate potentially at stake, Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and author of Give Us the Ballot (2015), traces the deliberate efforts of extreme right-wing conservatives over recent decades to limit control of the country's majority interests to maintain Republican dominance. This trend began with Pat Buchanan's 1992 White House bid. As Berman notes, Buchanan’s “nativism, racism, and skepticism toward democracy foreshadowed the ideology that now defines the Republican Party.” The author highlights subsequent underhanded policies by polarizing figures like former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who suppressed voting rights, and Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach, who instituted high-profile anti-immigration policies. These actions fall in line with the strategy of Donald Trump and his allies, who actively engage in voter suppression, district manipulation, judicial influence, and historical whitewashing—and all are backed by substantial funding from billionaire donors. In consistently insightful prose, Berman delves into the Constitution's founding intentions, emphasizing its design for a system of checks and balances, and he shows how institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate, with two senators per state regardless of population, can be leveraged to undermine the true will of the people. One of the most telling examples is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin's outsize influence on national politics. Despite these challenges, Berman highlights recent grassroots victories and underscores the potency of state initiatives in countering extremist right-wing threats and preserving a hope for American democracy. “State constitutions empower popular majorities in ways that the federal constitution does not,” he writes. “They were specifically designed to be a majoritarian counterweight to the countermajoritarian features of America’s political institutions.”
A richly documented political book with significant current relevance.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780374600211
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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