A thoughtful, timely defense of the ideal of a participatory, open society.
A well-considered examination of current threats to democratic societies and how to resist them.
Mounk, a professor of international affairs and contributing editor at the Atlantic, traces the connection between the Founders’ idea of a self-governing republic and the modern ideal of a democracy that protects diverse members of society, majority and minority alike. There are internal tensions everywhere. “The very logic of self-government, with its constant imperative to cobble together a majority of like-minded voters,” writes the author, “makes it tempting for citizens to exclude those they regard as different from full participation in their polity.” Diversity yields conflict, especially in times when identity politics come to the fore. Many Italians, for example, might say that an Italian’s distant ancestors lived in Italy, excluding African and Asian immigrants from any possibility of joining the polity. Mounk allows that immigration is a vexing challenge to European and North American societies, especially when so many politicians decry Islam as being fundamentally incompatible with Western ideals even if most Muslim immigrants wholly support the democratic tenets of their new homes. It will take considerable goodwill to do so, but, Mounk insists, “people drawn from different ethnic and cultural groups can, without needing to give up their own identities, embark on a meaningfully shared life.” Enemies of such a view are legion, of course, and even the best-intentioned among us “are hardwired to form groups” that exclude those who are in some way not like us. Democracies that have failed, such as Lebanon, have devolved into “consociational” societies in which identity politics are everything: Sunni vs. Shia, Muslim vs. Christian. Understandably, nationalism then thrives, the lifeblood of demagogues like Putin and Trump. To counter them, Mounk encourages the development of “civic patriotism” and firmer commitment to democratic ideals, from battling terrorism to providing equal access to “key services like quality health care or core entitlements like paid family leave.”
A thoughtful, timely defense of the ideal of a participatory, open society.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-29681-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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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
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