Politics watchers will find Neiwert’s book illuminating—and frightening.
A trenchant analysis of the many dangers of the far right.
In the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol—planned by “paramilitary claques who spearheaded the attack, and supported by…conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists, and far-right street brawlers”—the GOP made noises about disavowing the insurrection and its actors. No more. As Neiwert, author of Red Pill, Blue Pill and Alt-America, writes, instead of “breaking the fever of right-wing extremism, the event ushered in “an age in which insurrection is celebrated, seditionists are defended as ‘patriots,’ and the politics of menace and violence are woven into our everyday discourse and interactions.” Fueling this are all manner of White supremacist complaints, including the fearful view that immigrants and minorities will “replace” the White majority or the “accelerationist” notion that modern civilization itself is a poison and that fascism is the antidote. Neiwert ranges widely to look at actors major and minor, from the tea party members who paved the way for the angrier, more militant radical right of the sort that we saw in Charlottesville to mouthpieces like Tucker Carlson, who “endorsed the idea that Republicans are being forced to abandon democracy and eventually embrace fascism because of liberal hegemony.” Well reported and well written, Neiwert’s book also exposes allies that one wishes the radical right didn’t have—e.g., local police departments such as those of Portland, Oregon, whose leaders saw the Proud Boys as less alien than the left-wing protestors; and even the senior echelons of the Department of Homeland Security, who exhibited “authoritarian incompetence” throughout the Trump years. As long as Trump and Trumpism are on the political stage, there will be more to come, with the Jan. 6 insurrectionists hailed as heroes and “political prisoners” and QAnon bleatings about pedophilia and evil drag queens still common coin among the retrograde set.
Politics watchers will find Neiwert’s book illuminating—and frightening.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781685890360
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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