An optimistic prophecy that a saner, more equitable politics will take the place of whatever it is we have now.
The founder of the Young Turks presents a hopeful thesis that present polarization will resolve itself in a left-leaning democracy.
The Republican Party comes in for heavy shellacking throughout Uygur’s pages. The people who voted for Trump, by that account, didn’t vote for him based on policy issues or a reasoned platform. “They wanted racism, cruelty, and authoritarianism,” writes the author. They certainly got that and more. Yet, Uygur insists, that party is in power despite the fact that it consistently loses the popular vote. Most Americans “are just not fundamentally conservative”; they are opposed to social injustice and the authoritarian suppression of civil rights and the right to choose, wholly in favor of the social safety net provided by government programs. Race, greed, and religion on the one hand, social equity on the other: It’s small wonder, Uygur writes, that young voters are so overwhelmingly left-leaning, to the extent that 60% polled on the matter believed socialism to be more humane than capitalism, and that the Republican Party is therefore doing all it can to disenfranchise them. For all their efforts, writes the author, extreme right-wing politicians will not succeed in passing any spectacularly awful laws, such as making Trump president for life or stripping civil rights away from the LGBTQ+ community, despite a certain amount of fearmongering among progressives that they’re plotting to do just such things. (“It’s so easy to scare Democratic voters.”) That’s not to say they won’t try, though Uygur remains firm in his view that progressives will win in the end because they will somehow convince “our conservative brothers and sisters” that progressives love them—and “when you give out love, it doesn’t make you smaller, it makes you larger.” Magical thinking? Perhaps, but it’s a nice thought.
An optimistic prophecy that a saner, more equitable politics will take the place of whatever it is we have now.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250272799
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
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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