An insightful analysis into what went wrong with the founders’ dream.
How the Founding Fathers’ worst fear materialized.
Well-grounded in classical precedents, the founders were worried that their experiment in republican self-government could produce a demagogue, a charismatic leader who would gain and hold on to power by manipulating the public rather than by advancing the public good. Posner, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, contends two presidents have embodied that fear: Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. However, this book is not all about Trump; it is an almost novellike stroll through American history beginning with the founders’ fear and ending with one chapter on Trump. Along the way, Posner charts the careers of such American demagogues as Huey Long, George Wallace, and Joe McCarthy and shows the similarities they share with Trump. The author argues that two things are necessary for a demagogue to rise: a propitious political condition and the right person. In Trump’s case, writes Posner, the condition was that rank-and-file Republicans were blaming “elites” for such failures as the Iraq War and stagnating wages, and they wanted something new. The necessary person not only had to be an outsider—because no one inside the party was showing any hint of anything new—but also someone with significant public recognition, great wealth, or, preferably, both. And he had to be shameless. What better person than Trump? Posner checks off the characteristics of a demagogue and details how deeply each one applies to Trump. For example, they attack anyone who opposes or criticizes them; they have contempt for the truth; they despise institutions, public and private; they blame and attack elite power. As the author writes, his goal was “to persuade the reader that in electing Donald Trump to the presidency, we Americans really did choose a demagogue.” He has succeeded.
An insightful analysis into what went wrong with the founders’ dream.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-30303-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: All Points/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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