An analytically incisive account of the Electoral College’s foibles.
McIntee gives a comprehensive critique of the Electoral College that includes a consideration of its mathematical failings.
McIntee observes that the Electoral College is not only “peculiar,” but also “immensely unpopular,” and yet it has managed to endure as an American institution since the nation’s inception. Its longevity seems partly due to a mythology that has enshrouded it, a set of misconceptions the author swiftly but rigorously dismantles. This baroque system was not, despite insistence to the contrary, created to protect the representative power of smaller states or rural parts of the country, nor does it do so. Nor was it designed in order to enshrine slavery or to discourage the popular vote. Rather, it was the result of confusion regarding the nature of democracy, more specifically who gets to vote and how. Yet according to McIntee, the Electoral College is ineffective and obsolete—it is unacceptably chaotic, often undermines democratic representation and proportionality, and does not encourage candidates to aim for politically or regionally broad appeal: These are all issues McIntee handles with clarity. Also, he furnishes a remarkably concise history of the Electoral College and its shifting permutations. The author is especially astute when appraising the Electoral College’s “basic mathematical properties” (he is a mathematician by training). Further, this is a genuinely thoughtful study and not a political polemic: “The fact is that we don’t actually know what is the best way to elect a president....We don’t honestly know how American voters will behave either in the short term or the long term when faced with an entirely different voting system.” The only failing of this otherwise edifying work is its neglect of deeper philosophical arguments in favor of the Electoral College and pertaining to the nature of federal republicanism—one can see this in his lack of serious analysis of the Federalist Papers. Nevertheless, this book remains a vital contribution to an important national debate.
An analytically incisive account of the Electoral College’s foibles.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781959266006
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Hurricane Lamp Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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