A comprehensive and very readable history of two political parties switching identities.
Fraser offers a new history of seismic ideological changes in the American Democratic and Republican parties.
In his latest work of history, the author, a teacher of history to adults through the Osher Lifelong Learning Center, focuses on the evolution of the United States’ two major political parties, from their origins to their current declared positions, which are, in many cases, inversions of their original orientations. Fraser begins his account with the Founding Fathers and their concerns regarding state-level government and centralized government. The author’s primary aim is to demonstrate the many ways that liberals and conservatives have, over “the long sweep of American history,” swapped positions on that central role of energetic government: “It was initially the conservatives who pushed for a powerful central government,” Fraser writes, “in part to transform the United States into an industrial society.” Looking at political, social, racial, and economic factors over the course of two centuries, the author charts the course of the Republican and Democratic parties. All of this is popular history done very, very well. Fraser is uniformly excellent at breaking down complex subjects into readable, comprehensible narratives—a godsend considering the intricacies of the material he’s covering. He deploys his many well-utilized sources smoothly and unobtrusively, and he strikes a welcomingly nonpartisan tone while discussing social and political subjects that have become radioactively divisive in the 21st century. The author is also superb at crafting economical but evocative portraits of the many larger-than-life figures in his story, from the Founding Fathers to titans of the Progressive Era like William Jennings Bryan (and his wife; as Fraser puts it, “When he married Mary Baird, he not only found the love of his life but also a woman who aided his rise in politics”) to William McKinley in the pivotal presidential campaign of 1896, which the author identifies as a turning point in American politics.
A comprehensive and very readable history of two political parties switching identities.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Fraser & Associates
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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