A contentious, stimulating riposte to liberal orthodoxy.
Lyons’ political treatise asserts that growing federal power and bureaucracy have undermined the Constitution, social cohesion, and individual liberty.
The author, an award-winning poet and third-generation printer, follows up The DNA of Democracy (2019) with this study of the inexorable transformation of the U.S. government over the past century—from an institution with limited power and respect for free markets and individual rights into an overweening “Administrative State.” The rot set in, he argues, under President Woodrow Wilson, whom he characterizes as believing the government should have unlimited power to shape society and control citizens; the 16th Amendment, which instituted a federal income tax, empowered that agenda by giving Washington vast financial clout, says the author. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal championed newly minted economic rights, he contends, while violating natural rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and further inflated the “Administrative State”by hatching federal agencies that heavily regulated the economy. Lyons praises Eisenhower’s interstate highway program but condemns Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan for increasing “government dependence” and urban-renewal schemes for bulldozing thriving, predominantly Black city neighborhoods. The author continues on to latter-day alleged federal overreaches, including President Barack Obama’s executive orders extending the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate bodies of water and carbon dioxide emissions. Lyons’ manifesto is a rebuke to big government and a paean to conservative values of faith, religion, individualism, free enterprise, and loyalty to what he sees as the Framers’ constitutional vision. His dissections of political philosophy are cogent and discerning, and his analyses of concrete policies are well thought out, employing elegantly aphoristic prose: “The Great Society…replaced property with government rental housing; it took the natural neighborhood and replaced it with centrally planned projects…it took away the family and replaced it with bureaucrats and social workers.” Democrats, among others, will find much to disagree with here. However, Lyons does offer a thoughtful, if sharp-elbowed, conservative challenge to center-left narratives of progress.
A contentious, stimulating riposte to liberal orthodoxy.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9973462-9-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Lylea Creative Resources
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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