Essential reading for activists, poli-sci types, journalists and trend-watchers.
Forget bowling alone: We’re barely talking with anyone who doesn’t share our views, habits, dress and bumper stickers.
Journalist Bishop is a Texan. But, he hastens to note, he lives in an Austin suburb that gave more votes to Nader than Bush in the last election and where the lone “out” Republican is a very lonely man. The mores of the neighborhood encourage political discussion, though only of a like-minded kind. The watershed year was 1965, before which Americans were used to the thought that people of different races, incomes, religions and voting habits might live more or less side by side. Afterward, Bishop observes, through white flight and minority migration, whole cities were remade to be monoethnic, with even income distributions and similar levels of education, some higher and some lower. Thus the fact that in 1970 only 17 percent of the residents of Austin were college-educated, a number that had risen to 45 percent in 2004, whereas in Cleveland “the change was only from 4 percent to 14 percent.” All other things being equal, a liberally inclined college-educated person chose Austin, Portland or San Francisco over any of the old Rust Belt cities, even if the cost of living were substantially lower in the latter. Just so, in those few surviving mixed cities where red- and blue-state types come together, they’re likely to do so only tangentially but live in neighborhoods that are more alike than unlike. The loss of diversity is of interest to more than just marketers, who have a lot of rethinking to do about demographics and target audiences, since “there is no longer national ‘brand loyalty’ in regard to religion,” much less sandwich spread or laundry soap. Instead, by Bishop’s account, this sorting tendency is of concern: We’ve cleansed our personal spaces of heretics but removed all the grit and tumult that make for debate and democracy, which spells trouble ahead for the republic.
Essential reading for activists, poli-sci types, journalists and trend-watchers.Pub Date: May 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-68935-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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