A full-bore assault on Black politicos who buy the GOP line and are thus tolerated, “but only if they know their place.”
A take-no-prisoners attack on the small but vocal community of Black Trump supporters and their ideological forebears.
“All my skin folk ain’t my kinfolk,” writes Cane, borrowing a line from Zora Neale Hurston. Where emancipation was wrought by Republicans, real advances afterward were effected by people such as Frederick Douglass, “who disrupted the GOP to achieve important victories for Black citizens.” Ever since the Reagan years, the GOP has increasingly become a fortress of white supremacy, and those Black Americans who have supported it, from Mia Love to Tim Scott, are, in Cane’s term, “grifters.” A classic tactic among them is to claim that racism does not exist, then to accuse their political opponents of being racist. A case in point was the “shape-shifter” Republican representative Love, who “would succeed if she moved in a way that supported her white Republican voters’ racist assumptions—but once the racism turned on her and she spoke out, Love would lose her base.” True enough, and Love is now out of office, outflanked on the right. Another classic case is South Carolina senator and now presidential candidate Scott, who earned a mere 8% of the Black vote in his home state in 2016—which, Cane adds, is beside the point, given that “Scott is the mouthpiece to make white conservatives feel good about their anti-Black policies.” Cane singles out a handful of exceptions, such as former Texas representative Will Hurd, a former CIA agent and “throwback Republican” who represented a heavily Hispanic district. By the author’s account, however, most of the players in his book are a rogues’ gallery of crooks, among them Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, and Omarosa Manigault Newman.
A full-bore assault on Black politicos who buy the GOP line and are thus tolerated, “but only if they know their place.”Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781728290225
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
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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