Liberal-minded students of politics will find West’s arguments persuasive and his case well presented.
A think-tanker’s view of the post-Trumpian rubble.
“The United States faces extraordinary problems of polarization, extremism, and radicalization, which make it difficult to safeguard our democratic system and deal with important policy issues.” So writes West, vice president of the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution. Sadly, there’s nothing novel about this observation, but the author is well equipped to observe from his position, where a battery of political scientists studies events and trends. Naturally, they are dismissed and loathed by the MAGA crowd and its allied media. When one Brookings fellow identified the chief culprit as Trump and the authoritarian cult of personality he had built around himself, right-wingers howled even as some of West’s longtime friends on the right “complained about the capital city’s ‘cockroaches’ and said it was time to use the popular bug-killer Raid to get rid of political adversaries.” It all makes for a dangerous moment indeed, requiring long-needed reforms: among many others, abolishing the “antiquated Electoral College,” stopping gerrymandering, and quashing campaign finance rules that privilege the haves over the have-nots. Moreover, West suggests, many institutions in civil society, such as universities, must be overhauled in order to remove dark money. The author attempts to be evenhanded, noting that social media amplifies misinformation by both left and right even as the loudest voices emanate from the right. He also calls for self-policing that falls short of self-censorship, while stronger matters (here he recalls Leon Wieseltier) face a hitherto unexplored “challenge of delivering justice to those with complaints while also protecting the procedural rights of the accused.” Overall, West’s prescriptions are reasonable, but given a time when gerrymandering, fascism, and extreme partisanship are some of the defining features of the political landscapes, most seem unlikely to be enacted.
Liberal-minded students of politics will find West’s arguments persuasive and his case well presented.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8157-3959-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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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