A rallying cry for a movement to push against Trumpism and its legion of true believers.
A former Republican strategist decries a party that has gone off the rails and plunged into totalitarianism.
According to Lincoln Project senior adviser Stevens, the author of It Was All a Lie, five ingredients fuel “an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party.” These five, in order, are propaganda and its makers; a party willing to be twisted; piles of money and willing suppliers of it; legal theorists willing to distort the law; and a body of shock troops. No one surveying the political landscape would doubt that these five threads are broadly present in the Republican mix. On the first count, the author argues that Fox News did not create the current Republican Party—it was the other way around, with Fox propagandizing in the interest of the authoritarians, among its chief cheerleaders the now-departed Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs. The GOP also enabled Trump by responding to his false claims of election fraud by “humoring him” rather than insisting that he honor constitutional norms. It does no good to “imagine that there is a possibility for the Republican Party to become a ‘normal’ American political party once again”—not with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley roaming the land. Oceans of money are behind this authoritarian impulse, since the doctrinaire insistence on doing away with regulations is music to a capitalist’s ears. The Koch brothers’ political staffers alone, Stevens notes, number “three and a half times more employees than the Republican National Committee.” Crank lawyers and judges are busily eroding legal norms, and then there are the perpetrators and supporters of the events of Jan. 6—who, Stevens suggests without undue alarmism, will be back in even greater numbers come the next election. It all makes for a civil libertarian’s nightmare, but the author offers useful prescriptions for acting to counter the authoritarian impulse.
A rallying cry for a movement to push against Trumpism and its legion of true believers.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781538765401
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
