Alterman’s conclusion—triangulate or perish—will be familiar to anyone who paid attention during the Clinton years, and it’s...
A longtime cheerleader for progressive causes makes an enthusiastic though not entirely original case that liberalism is poised to rise again.
“Liberal” is only a “dirty word” so long as people are confused about what it means, avers Alterman (What Liberal Media?: The Truth about Bias and the News, 2003, etc.). In reality, he argues, most Americans are liberal. They believe that government should care for those who can’t care for themselves, that health care is a fundamental human right, that corporate profits are out of control. Starting with the Enlightenment, Alterman walks briskly through the history of American liberalism, pinpointing as the end of its hegemony the late 1960s, when liberal policies improved the living conditions of minorities but greatly increased the insecurity of the white working class. Since then, left-wing activists and thinkers have been systematically driven from American political and intellectual life, he contends, while conservatives have hijacked the mainstream media, claimed “tradition” and “patriotism” as conservative, not American, values and painted liberalism as a philosophy that rejects religion, is oblivious to national security, embraces elitism and supports restrictions on individual freedom. Alterman outlines a long list of obstacles liberals will have to overcome if they want to return to their former position of power: racial, ethnic and class conflicts among potential allies; the divide between secular and religious Americans; and a lack of disciplined networks to recruit converts. Nonetheless, after seven years under the Bush Administration, he thinks liberals can reclaim American hearts and minds, as long as they’re willing to embrace the term “liberal” and welcome people into the party who harbor conservative social positions or strong religious convictions—a majority of the U.S. population, the author notes.
Alterman’s conclusion—triangulate or perish—will be familiar to anyone who paid attention during the Clinton years, and it’s unlikely to provide much comfort to readers who’d rather have their liberalism without a stiff shot of cultural conservatism.Pub Date: March 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01860-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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