More evidence that today’s Supreme Court, antidemocratic by nature with its unelected judges, is an enemy of democracy.
A cutting analysis of the long-term project to disenfranchise left-leaning voters.
“Our country is bitterly divided today in no small part because conservative political strategists have gerrymandered it to be that way,” writes political commentator and former Salon editor-in-chief Daley, author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count. Gerrymandering is one of the favorite tools in the GOP toolkit to disenfranchise citizens inclined to vote for a Democratic candidate. The chief weapon, Daley argues convincingly, has been the Supreme Court, seeded with far-right-leaning judges who endorse this antidemocracy movement. At the heart is John Roberts, who conveys himself—and whom the media portrays—as a mild-mannered centrist. Wrong: Roberts, as the author clearly shows, operates by small steps, such that “each landmark decision begins with a smaller case that invites the next big question.” This approach disguises Roberts’ role as a “patient bulldozer.” A case in point is the Roberts-led dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, tenet by tenet, with the redistricting of a majority Black legislative district in Alabama so that the majority of its residents were now white. Daley traces this project to the Nixon-era activism of Lewis Powell and his multipronged assault on democracy, one means for which was to fund right-wing law schools and raise generations of antidemocratic judges, five of whom now populate the Supreme Court. Roberts, who began his career as a counsel to Ronald Reagan, had the VRA in his sights as long ago as 1982, “a young ideologue despite his carefully curated image of scarcely having been touched by ideology at all.” The subterfuge means to disguise the complete dismantling of the concept of one person, one vote—and all, Daley proves persuasively and evenhandedly, by careful design.
More evidence that today’s Supreme Court, antidemocratic by nature with its unelected judges, is an enemy of democracy.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780063321090
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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