A novel, intriguing reading of how power politics works—and, with a little imagination, might work.
A sharp assessment of American political history and the arc of its pendulum, which tends not toward justice but toward the wealthy.
“If there’s an abiding winner in the long history of American democracy,” writes history professor and Dissent co-editor Shenk, “it’s the people with money.” The uber-wealthy are usually more or less in the background, but they back members of what the author calls the “democratic elite” who span the distance between rulers and the ruled. It’s these people, Shenk suggests, who have been responsible for conjuring realignments whereby political gridlock or monopoly is broken, if perhaps only temporarily. James Madison’s early alliance with Alexander Hamilton fell apart over who would govern, with “the opulent” Hamiltonians believing that democracy was doomed because the people could not govern themselves. The situation with Hamilton ended badly, but the struggle for power between what would become Republicans and Federalists, and then Whigs and Democrats and New Grangers and all the rest, would endure—but not, Shenk notes, before those early Republicans strangled the Federalists through a realignment that essentially gave them a lock on the electorate and “liberated Americans from the burdens of partisanship.” The burden would soon enough be reimposed, only to see new realignments, era after era, notably with Franklin Roosevelt’s building a power base among the working and middle classes while forging racial unity, something that Donald Trump would do in reverse. Most realignments end up failures, notes Shenk, as does everything else: Politics has always been an exercise in crisis management. Still, at the close of this catalog of tangled maneuvering (as when Obama won the elite for the Democratic Party while losing much of the working class), Shenk foresees other possibilities were the two dominant parties to realign to vie for those forgotten workers and a multiracial coalition to emerge to “jolt the legislative process back to life.”
A novel, intriguing reading of how power politics works—and, with a little imagination, might work.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-13800-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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