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THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Name: THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Author: John B. Judis
ISBN: 0-679-43254-X

ELITES, SPECIAL INTERESTS, AND THE BETRAYAL OF PUBLIC TRUST

by John B. Judis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2000

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The senior editor of the New Republic (Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century, 1992, etc.) wonders how we can “strengthen our institutions” when they are so firmly in the grip of “vested interests.— Surveying the American landscape, Judis identifies a variety of problems that threaten our political integrity. He is most concerned with the enormous power now exercised by interest groups and lobbyists, and by the coalition of big business and conservative Republicans that has been able to thwart recent reform initiatives. Judis begins by examining the 1960s—a period he believes actually extended from the Rosa Parks incident (1955) to the resignation of President Nixon (1974). The radical left of that period, he maintains, “wielded enormous influence over the nation’s political and legislative agenda,” and produced necessary reform in race relations, environmental policy, and women’s issues. In response to what they viewed as a dangerous increase in the scope of the government, conservative foundations and business alliances began a campaign to alter public opinion, to create the perception that the government, rather than business, was “responsible for America’s ills.— Their success bore the fruits of the Reagan Revolution, the advent of centrist Democrats, the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich, the defeat of health care and campaign-finance reform, and the Clinton impeachment, which he characterizes as a “travesty of Constitutional government.— A clear-eyed marksman, Judis misses few targets: Henry Kissinger’s lobbying efforts “confirmed the public’s perception that everyone was for sale—; the post-—60s generation was “narcissistic”; Gingrich embraced “mundane and craven strategies.— To remedy our political ills, Judis prescribes several plans, including an effort to encourage our “best and brightest to serve rather than sell out.— Although Judis cuts a wide swath through the political right, his principal targets are greed and self-interest, two persistent and pervasive enemies of American democracy.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-679-43254-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | POLITICS | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

- BOOK REVIEW
WHERE HAVE ALL THE DEMOCRATS GONE?
by John B. Judis & Ruy Teixeira

- BOOK REVIEW
THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME
by John B. Judis

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING
by John B. Judis

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.