Food for thought for the progressive side of the aisle.
What’s the matter with the Democratic Party? Burmila explores a slate of problems, from poor messaging to ideological inconstancy.
“If you have yet to conclude that the Republican Party is a malignancy that needs to be destroyed rather than appeased or reasoned with, this is the wrong book for you.” So writes the author in an opening gambit to a discussion that finds fault—sometimes a touch excessively, but with cause—with what he regards as the appeasing tactics of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who were both too eager to compromise during their presidencies. A larger problem is that while the Democrats are asking to steer the ship of state, they’re not offering persuasive arguments for why they should be trusted to do the job. The Republicans, courtesy of Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and their ilk, have developed a “scorched earth approach to politics” that in essence says “shove off” to anyone not a true believer. On the other hand, Obama contorted himself to enlist both left and right in a struggle in which one side had no interest in compromise. His successors at nearly every level of electoral politics, Burmila argues, have yet to seize on successes, however partial, and to improve on half victories like the Affordable Care Act, which, he notes, did not reform health care nearly as much as it could have. What to do? Burmila admits that he is stronger on pinpointing problems than coming up with solutions, but some of his fixes make eminent sense, including finding true remedies for the economic struggles of working people rather than kowtowing to the wealthy elite. Otherwise—and Burmila suggests this is the likelier outcome—the Republicans will win, about which he writes, “On the plus side, you might be dead before some of the worst parts happen. See? There’s always a positive.”
Food for thought for the progressive side of the aisle.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64503-002-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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