A vital investigation for this election year—and far beyond.
A two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist attempts “to answer the question of whether a ‘deep state’ exists in America.”
Rodhe, an executive editor of the New Yorker website, examines where the conspiratorial term originated and how the Trump administration has consistently undermined checks-and-balances efforts in order to create its own “parallel, shadow government.” The term, coined by Peter Dale Scott in The Road to 9/11 (2007) to designate nefarious plans by foreign authoritative governments, was appropriated by Trump and associates to mean underhanded attempts by a “policy elite” (primarily the State Department, FBI, and CIA) to sabotage and delegitimize his election and government. Is there really a deep state, or is it an effort by the Trump administration to spread disinformation and distrust of government, a tactic that has been effective in shoring up his conservative base? Rohde agrees that Americans are justified in distrusting the government during periods of scandal and outrageous misconduct, and the author systematically walks through those cases, chronicling violations of citizens’ privacy, from the Cold War to Watergate to trumped-up evidence for Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. On one hand, Rohde continually returns to the success of the Church Committee’s (1975) unprecedented bipartisan efforts to expose early governmental abuses and suggest recommendations that, over time, created new congressional intelligence committees to monitor and check the CIA and other agencies. On the other hand, the author reveals how the “imperial presidency,” thwarted during the Nixon administration, has steadily creeped back in place thanks to work by Attorney General William Barr and others, causing a veritable “collapse of Congressional oversight” that found its apotheosis in the impeachment and acquittal of Trump. Throughout his immaculately researched work, Rohde inserts the career stories of “good civil servants,” including many of the officials who testified in the impeachment hearings. As this revelatory book shows, the deep state, which now incorporates such nonelected loyalists as Rudy Giuliani, Sean Hannity, and Barr, has become the government itself.
A vital investigation for this election year—and far beyond.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00354-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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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