A vivid attack on “the most partisan Senate leader in modern history” that is unlikely to change anyone’s mind.
Another painful account of the decline of American political discourse.
During a four-decade career in Washington, D.C., Shapiro served 12 years in various Senate staff positions, but only during the 20th century, when that institution functioned more or less as the Founders intended. He writes that its decline began during the 1990s but accelerated two decades later, when “Mitch McConnell and his Republican caucus repeatedly and deliberately took actions they knew to be wrong and failed to take actions they knew to be right.” Entering the Senate in 1984, McConnell quickly established his hard-conservative reputation, abetted by the pugnacious Newt Gingrich, among others. By 2008, McConnell had risen to minority leader and proclaimed a goal of making newly elected Barack Obama a one-term president. His tactic was not to propose alternative legislation but to oppose everything. He did not have the votes to defeat the Affordable Care Act, but his denunciation of “Obamacare” as socialized medicine resonated with voters, who gave Republicans a victory in the 2010 elections. Even today, polls reveal that Americans tend to deplore “Obamacare” but approve of the Affordable Care Act. Becoming Senate majority leader in 2015, he blocked nearly all of Obama’s judicial nominees, including to the Supreme Court, resulting in a massive influx of conservative judges after the election of Donald Trump. Aware, like most Republicans, that the new president was a loose cannon but wildly popular, McConnell kept his focus on conservative interests and electable Republicans, even when this irritated Trump, who preferred sycophants. Although he received no thanks, McConnell quashed potentially embarrassing investigations and ensured that the two impeachment trials fizzled. This is an informative but deeply discouraging book; few Republicans will read it, and few Democrats will quarrel with its conclusions. In the past, Congress has endured periods of paralysis, corruption, and violence but then recovered. Readers can only hope the current breakdown is temporary.
A vivid attack on “the most partisan Senate leader in modern history” that is unlikely to change anyone’s mind.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5381-6397-9
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
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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