For those who have donned those robes, Scheer’s book will be an affirmation. Those who have not may prefer more evenhanded...
It’s all Nixon’s fault: If he hadn’t gone to China, we wouldn’t have Dubya.
Longtime political journalist Scheer (Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton—and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush, 2006, etc.)—former editor of the long-defunct but much missed Ramparts magazine and proud owner of a thick FBI file—doesn’t quite formulate the problem that way. Yet, as he notes, having discussed the matter with Nixon himself, the Nixonian policy of détente in the waning days of the Cold War gave the neocons of today their raison d’être, a policy to revile and undermine. Those neocons, gathered around Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, “the hawkish Democrat in thrall to the Boeing Company,” took their Cold War very seriously and, by Scheer’s account, were at a loss to know what to do with themselves once the Berlin Wall fell. Many, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, wrapped themselves in the flag of the so-called Project for a New American Century, one of whose fundamental tenets was overthrowing the regime of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Before 9/11, writes Scheer, they labored quietly in various Bush administration sinecures, while Donald Rumsfeld talked about streamlining the Pentagon and reducing the military budget. Afterward, they had the run of things, led and unleashed by the president and vice president, and they went on an “uncontrollable” spending spree. Scheer allows for nonpecuniary motives, but he also observes that the foreign-policy machine was run by those, “like Dick Cheney, who made a huge bundle while claiming to be primarily interested in the security of their country.” Scheer mostly argues along Michael Moorish lines, stopping here and there to cite sources but generally running with an anti-administration jeremiad that seems about right—but also seems very much like preaching to the choir.
For those who have donned those robes, Scheer’s book will be an affirmation. Those who have not may prefer more evenhanded approaches that offer the same conclusion, such as Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier’s America Between the Wars (2008).Pub Date: June 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-50527-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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