Astute examination of a stymied system.
A veteran reporter explains the loss of compromise in contemporary American politics.
Los Angeles Times national correspondent Brownstein writes proficiently about the Red/Blue divide, demonstrating how it plays out not so much among voters as in the halls of Congress, where partisanship has virtually destroyed cooperation between Republicans and Democrats. Ignore the overzealous title: There is no civil war, but rather a “dangerous impasse,” as the author writes, where party loyalty and ideology now prevent efficient government action on pressing national issues from health care to immigration. Brownstein provides much-needed perspective by examining the history of modern American politicking, from the four highly partisan decades beginning with the 1896 McKinley-Bryan election to the “golden age” of cooperation in Congress extending from the presidential administrations of FDR to Lyndon Johnson, when politicians were less polarized. Politics became more combative from 1964 to 1990, writes the author, as rising special-interest groups of the Left and Right gradually helped form the Democratic and Republican party “bases,” and Congressional floor debates filled with rhetoric aimed at TV audiences. At the same time, cultural values replaced class as the focus of national politics. The GOP became the party of culturally traditional, churchgoing suburban Americans, and the Democrats attracted primarily singles, seculars, homosexuals, nonwhites and others more comfortable with urban diversity. The Republican strategy under President George W. Bush has exploited and deepened these differences, says Brownstein, fostering a hyper-partisan system that rewards party discipline and discourages compromise. The author traces the roles of the media, lobbyists and other factors, and argues for reforms—restoring the Fairness Doctrine, for example—to create a less confrontational politics of consensus. For all their disagreements, notes the author, voters are less polarized than Washington politicos and would welcome national leadership that reconciles, unites and gets things done.
Astute examination of a stymied system.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59420-139-4
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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