A provocative pleasure for demography geeks and political trend-watchers.
There are big changes coming to American politics, courtesy of Generation Z.
Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics, notes that members of Gen Z—those born between roughly 1995 and 2015—are “the most diverse and most educated…in history.” Their numbers, at about 70 million, are now larger than the baby boomer generation. The diversity comes in several flavors: They are ethnically diverse, with an uptick in the numbers of multiracial people; they are less bound to binaries than people of the past, with fewer than 80% identifying as heterosexual; and their sense of history is different from that of the boomers and Gen Xers. The oldest of them were scarcely in school on 9/11, and they “have never known their country at peace.” All of this contributes to a generational ethos in which “Zoomers” are concerned with economic equity, curbing gun violence, relaxing laws concerning drugs, forgiving student debt, and a host of other issues on which, say, the GOP is not likely to endorse their views. On that note, Della Volpe observes, there’s a reason that young people aligned with the superannuated Bernie Sanders, who gave voice to their views: “Bernie’s politics are 90 percent targeted to younger people.” The Zoomers boosted the Democrats to a majority in the House in 2018, and, adds Della Volpe, “if voting were capped at age twenty-nine, meaning only Gen Z and the youngest millennials could participate, Joe Biden would have won ten times more electoral votes than Trump in 2020.” This suggests that politicians would be wise to devote their energies to attending to the interests of the young cohort. As the author concludes, their political tendencies will define the future of the nation, for all the efforts of their foes to suppress their vote.
A provocative pleasure for demography geeks and political trend-watchers.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-26046-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
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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