A pertinent scholarly work that highlights a host of significant obstacles to a smooth-functioning democracy.
A sobering look at the forces attacking the current stability of American democracy.
Steinzor, a law professor and the author of Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction, argues convincingly that what she calls “the six”—i.e., the major far-right groups battering the U.S. government over the last few decades—did not rise from the grassroots level, but were “pushed, top-down, by private-sector special interest groups.” These include “big business; the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, its descendant in the House of Representatives; the Federalist Society; Fox News; white evangelicals; and militia members.” While all of these groups have garnered national attention for years, the author examines each in depth and elucidates their shared priorities: power, money, influence, and a determination to peck away at the “size and power of the administrative state, especially agencies that protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment.” Many of these agencies formed in the early 1970s during the Nixon administration and have since been diminished and defunded. During the Reagan era, corporations were empowered to combat the rules of regulations, especially at the Environmental Protection Agency. It got far worse during the Trump administration, when officials attempted to overturn car emission and other standards. The Tea Party was opposed to big government and regulation, the society safety net, and immigration, all issues taken up by the Freedom Caucus. The Federalist Society has essentially aided Republican presidents in choosing the conservative justices on the Supreme Court and elsewhere. Fox News amplifies the far-right talking points, while the white evangelicals and militia direct, often violently, the actions of their extremist leaders. The author concludes with an assessment of the failure of the left to combat these forces.
A pertinent scholarly work that highlights a host of significant obstacles to a smooth-functioning democracy.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781503634596
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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
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