Sure to cause howls of disagreement, but in the current toxic partisan climate, Brennan’s polemic is as worth weighing as...
A brash, well-argued diatribe against the democratic system.
There is much to mull over in this brazen stab at the American electoral process by Bleeding Heart Libertarians blogger Brennan (Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy/McDonough School of Business, Georgetown Univ.; Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2016, etc.). The problem with most voters, according to the author, is that they are “ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists”—not because they are dumb, mind you, but because political engagement is not worth the effort. Brennan divides citizens into three groups: the hobbits, who are apathetic and have no opinion; the hooligans, the majority, who have strong, fixed views and learn about other views only to support their own; and the vulcans, the rare few who “think scientifically and rationally about politics” and try to be unbiased—i.e., well-educated people like Brennan and his readers. Since political liberties—e.g., the right to vote and hold offices and positions of political power—are not like other (civil) liberties, the author asks “why it’s legitimate” to allow hooligans, for the most part, to “impose incompetently made decisions on innocent people.” As he argues, voters should be chosen and culled as carefully as jurors are selected, such as by an exam or lottery. Already foreseeing readers’ objections to what he calls an epistocracy, or rule by the knowledgeable, Brennan attempts to systematically destroy the objections—for example, that his proposed system would delegate civil duty even more unequally among demographic groups than it already does. Moreover, “restricted suffrage” smacks of past and current voter restrictions, such as against minority and poor voters. However, Brennan makes the compelling argument that politics as currently practiced make us “situational enemies.”
Sure to cause howls of disagreement, but in the current toxic partisan climate, Brennan’s polemic is as worth weighing as any other.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-16260-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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