A modest contribution to the groaning bookshelves about our divisive times.
A conservative takes aim at the Donald Trump presidency and how to move beyond it.
A veteran Republican senior adviser for George W. Bush, Wehner (co-author: City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era, 2010, etc.) published an op-ed column in the New York Times in which he declared that he would not vote for Trump “under any circumstances. I was perhaps the first prominent Republican to have taken this position, and I did so despite having voted Republican in every presidential election since I first became eligible to vote in 1980.” Here, the author explains why he considered Trump anathema as a candidate and why his presidency, if anything, has been worse than the author feared. He situates his argument within the broader context of American democracy, explaining how and why the citizenry can set right what has gone wrong. It’s an extended civics lesson of sorts, one grounded in American history, the balance of powers, and presidencies good and bad. Wehner also reaches back to Aristotle for foundational philosophies of the functions of government and the body politic. “Democracy requires that we honor the culture of words,” he writes, and later continues, “when words are weaponized and used merely to paint all political opponents as inherently evil, stupid, and weak, then democracy’s foundations are put in peril.” The author urges civility, moderation, and compromise, qualities that would seem to be at odds with the political tenor of the times, and he believes a return to a pre-polarization brand of politics would correct the course” He writes, “the task before us…is how we can rediscover, refine and recalibrate—and in some cases, reenvision and rethink—how we understand politics; to disentangle what politics has become from what it can be, to clear away some of the misconceptions, and to sketch a roadmap for recovery.” In response to the spirit of populist revolution, he offers a number of other “r” words to calm the waters and restore some rationality to the process.
A modest contribution to the groaning bookshelves about our divisive times.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-282079-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
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
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