A provocative, welcome platform for wresting economic conversations away from the moneyed class.
Political journalist and Democracy editor-in-chief Tomasky delivers a strong argument for Democrats to take the lead in articulating middle-class–boosting economics.
Democracy, freedom, and economic justice are the hallmarks of America’s conception of itself. “They are inseparable,” writes the author. “It is up to the Democrats to defend all three. And they must see this as not three fights but one. It’s Republican doctrine that the market must be free and unregulated, which works supremely well “for those with the means to eat at high-end locavore restaurants or purchase the right to skip the lines at Disney World.” For the rest of society, the market goes hand in hand with Republican resistance to social spending programs such as the American Rescue Plan, which, though carrying a staggering $1.9 trillion price tag, came in at a lower percentage of GDP than Franklin Roosevelt’s “broadly popular” New Deal programs. Tomasky notes that public investment grows the economy, and it addresses both aspects of ordinary economic thought, which has both a fiscal and a moral dimension. Chalk the Republican program up to the likes of Milton Friedman, whose influence over economics Tomasky calls “deeply unfortunate” and who had strange ideas that continue to hold sway over a certain element of the political class (including the fact that “he was against national parks”). Whereas some level of inequality is inevitable in a noncommand economy, the current fiscal structure rewards the rich at the expense of the rest. The author urges that a Democratic brand of economics requires a good name, one that doesn’t include the prefix post- (“if you’re still using ‘post,’ you don’t have a movement”) and that advances the idea that “prosperity is built from the middle out”—i.e., founded on a strong middle and working class, repudiating the false notions that taxes are bad and greed is good.
A provocative, welcome platform for wresting economic conversations away from the moneyed class.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54716-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
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