With evident passion, Fredrickson mixes abstract concepts with specific procedures, making for a useful—but not...
A plan for progressives “to unrig [the] system” created by power-hungry conservatives.
Relying on her experiences as a legislative affairs assistant for Bill Clinton, a staff member for two Democratic senators, and her role as a lawyer for groups advocating for the right to abortions and other civil liberties, Fredrickson (Under the Bus: How Working Women Are Being Run Over, 2015) illuminates how to wrest control of government away from current Republican Party domination. Readers who follow electoral politics will find little fresh rhetoric here, but the author is strong in her deconstruction of the successful Republican playbook. She then adapts legally and morally questionable techniques to a hoped-for progressive playbook that can roll back or erase many of the damaging Republican policies. Throughout the presentation of her agenda, Fredrickson maintains that her allies must forge ahead with the same ruthlessness as their adversaries. A large chunk of the book focuses on increasing the number of judgeships at all levels: federal, state, and municipal. Of course, as the author rightly points out, winning judicial posts means winning elections; most state-level judges run as partisan politicians in robes, and most federal judges rise through appointments from partisan politicians. Furthermore, winning elections requires years—sometime decades—of planning: raising money; recruiting qualified, electable candidates; and guaranteeing a strong turnout of sympathetic voters. Fredrickson offers useful examples of how Republican operatives have mastered such steps and how her own allies can do the same. At the close of the book, the author lists six concepts to “provide the foundation to protect and preserve American democracy for progressive values.” Among others, these include the need to “embrace small-d democracy,” “invest financial resources in progressive outcomes,” and “win elections through long-term constituency building and presence in state houses.”
With evident passion, Fredrickson mixes abstract concepts with specific procedures, making for a useful—but not groundbreaking—title for the progressive library.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-389-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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