A chilling intimation of the growing entrenchment of partisan politics.
An alarming study of the GOP’s redrawing of the American political map across the country.
According to Salon editor-in-chief Daley, while Democrats were celebrating President Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, they took their eyes off the important state legislatures, especially in key swing states. Subsequently, the defeated Republicans were already hatching nefarious plans to turn the “disaster into legislative majorities so unbreakable, so impregnable, that none of the outcomes are in doubt until after the 2020 census.” According to law, every state redraws its district lines every 10 years, after the census. Both parties use gerrymandering—named after Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who redrew a state Senate map in 1812 so skewed it looked like a salamander—to their advantage, but with wildly more sophisticated mapping abilities, gerrymandering has become a “more lethal weapon.” Republican strategists initiated the Republican State Leadership Committee in order to raise millions of dollars for the Redistricting Majority Project, REDMAP, which would indicate where the money should be spent in order to bolster Republican candidates in Democratic-controlled state legislatures from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Michigan to Wisconsin, flip control of the chamber, lock in redistricting, and thus control Congress for the next decade. This political “dirty deed done dirt cheap” is called “ratfucking,” as designated by Edmund Wilson in the 1920s and used by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. Indeed, this is just what happened after the midterm election of 2010, as the GOP captured 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 680 new seats in the state legislatures. Daley takes on each significant state race in turn and notes that despite the country’s pulling more center-left on many issues, the far right is going to be calling the shots until 2020. The author looks at the masterminds behind the strategy and the mapmaking technology as well as the roles of restrictive voting rights laws, “dark money,” and voter turnout.
A chilling intimation of the growing entrenchment of partisan politics.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-162-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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