Red meat for the isolationist set.
An attorney and Trump adviser lays into those who espouse a “radical free trade agenda.”
In his first book, Lighthizer, who advised both Trump and Reagan on international trade policy, advances a host of familiar populist and nationalist themes—e.g., that in the matter of the suffering manufacturing and blue-collar heartland, “most people in DC didn’t worry very much, because it was all happening someplace far away to people they didn’t know.” Free trade, of course, has implications that stretch far beyond mere commerce and economics. For example, it’s a useful way of keeping wars from breaking out among trade rivals, which is in keeping with the author’s insistence that “the Chinese government is a lethal adversary” best contained by lowering taxes on corporations so they will stop offshoring jobs that should be American. Econ 101 may tell us that the specialized division of labor and comparative advantage are useful things, but they have little place in a vision of a world where everything is made at home by contented workers with lots of theoretical bargaining power—until they actually try to use it. Lighthizer takes a page from his erstwhile boss by assailing anyone, albeit with a richer vocabulary, who disagrees with him on his China-as-enemy stance as “a liar, a fool, a knave, an irredeemable globalist, or some combination thereof.” In his calmer moments, the author makes some good points, such as the fact that Ireland has become a haven for hiding billions of dollars in American corporate profits that more properly need to be taxed at home—but, as ever, underlying that charge is the demand that taxes be lowered. Arguable, too, is the author’s conviction that trade agreements should be term-limited and frequently renegotiated, a destabilizing strategy guaranteed to consume large amounts of diplomatic oxygen.
Red meat for the isolationist set.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780063282131
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
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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