Another rousing plea to all Americans to stand against authoritarianism.
An urgent alarm about the nation’s future.
In a New York Times op-ed piece in 2018 and again in his book A Warning, both published anonymously, Taylor exposed the lies, corruption, and craziness within the Trump administration—of which he was a member—and argued vehemently against his reelection in 2020. Now facing the 2024 contest, Taylor reiterates his dire predictions. “The MAGA movement—or Trumpism, which I use interchangeably—remains the fastest-growing political coalition in America,” he contends. Even if Trump himself is not the Republican Party’s standard bearer, “the rule of a savvier successor” will promote the same policies, authoritarian postures, vindictiveness, and hatred. Taylor had an inside view of the administration, serving as a national security adviser under John Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security; when Kelly became Trump’s chief of staff, Taylor stayed on at the DHS. He witnessed a president who was impulsive, raging, and out of control, focused on building a wall on the southern border, to the exclusion of most else. Trump demanded protestations of loyalty, and he was quick to fire anyone who dared to cross him. Taylor predicts that “appointees in the next GOP White House will be heavily vetted for obedience,” and career civil servants will be ousted in favor of lackeys. There will be “what might be called the Two Houses of MAGA (the White House and a right-leaning House of Representatives)” that would “do each other’s bidding.” The culture wars—“guns, gays, and girls”—a GOP operative told Taylor, “will be the primary legislative agenda,” and the “Next Trump…will exacerbate political violence and push the nation to the brink of a Second Civil War.” The author urges citizens to speak out against extremism. “Social fear,” he writes, “is creating a mass bystander effect in our politics,” but “the final guardrail of our collective democracy,” he declares, is truth.
Another rousing plea to all Americans to stand against authoritarianism.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781668015988
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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