The author’s ability to connect the dots is impressive—and depressing, since the politics of ethnic hatred persist.
A critical examination of U.S. immigration policies across the centuries as instruments of racism.
Jones, a professor of geography and environment in Hawaii, reveals that that island state, as well as Puerto Rico, were long excluded from allowing immigrants precisely because both “had large nonwhite citizen populations.” This exclusion followed from a 19th-century policy, born of Jeffersonian tenets at the birth of the republic, that held that the notion of all men being equal applied to White men only, with only “a free white person” eligible for citizenship. Such convictions were common in Jefferson’s day—and in Trump’s. As Jones writes, Reince Priebus, then serving as Republican National Committee chair, warned Trump to tone down his racism during the 2016 campaign “because it could tarnish all of the Republicans running for president,” to which Trump responded by doubling down on his anti-Mexican and then anti-Muslim rhetoric. Jones engages in good investigative journalism to chase down the sources of Trumpthink, given that Trump has never had an original idea of his own, in a complex and “carefully orchestrated effort” to place the racist, exclusionary politics of a century past (pitched largely at excluding Asians from coming to the U.S.) at the center of a new sort of mainstream politics feeding a fearful base. This effort involved the feeding of millions of dollars to anti-immigration groups—$63 million from one donor alone. These groups exalted ideas by the likes of a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton, who asserted that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority.” By this incisive account, that concept was red meat for the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the latter of whom cut his teeth on the racist politics of former Trump ally Jeff Sessions.
The author’s ability to connect the dots is impressive—and depressing, since the politics of ethnic hatred persist.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5406-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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