A well-argued, if occasionally disorganized, vision of political politeness.
A podcaster and professional poker player calls for a return to civil discourse in this political commentary.
Like most political liberals, Elwood was devastated by President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. In his anger and confusion, he says, he turned to social media, posting “long winded, righteous” screeds on how voting for Trump “represented a failure of a basic morality test.” He even designed a line of “Trump is Garbage” bumper stickers that he sold online. Looking back on his initial response to the election, Elwood notes that while he wanted people to feel “judged and shamed” for electing Trump, his rhetoric made his Republican acquaintances even more entrenched in their support of the president. The author, writing as someone who’s fought in the trenches of America’s culture wars, says that the “fog of war” has blinded both sides of the aisle and has fostered a “vicious cycle” in which “extreme emotions help create extreme beliefs, which in turn create extreme emotions.” As a retired professional poker player, Elwood is a keen observer of human behavior who’s written multiple books on how to read other people’s “tells.” He now hosts a podcast, People Who Read People, that focuses on human behavior and psychology. Drawing on his lifelong fascination with the human psyche, Elwood encourages those on the political left to make a sustained effort to understand Trump supporters. For instance, he notes how many liberals see Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric as explicitly racist, but some Hispanic Trump supporters interpret the same rhetoric differently.
The author asserts that having contempt for Trump may be “warranted,” but he cautions against making broad accusations against rank-and-file Republicans, which may make them retreat to more extreme beliefs. Understanding one’s political rivals, he writes, “doesn’t mean agreeing, or supporting, or condoning” them. Elwood acknowledges the role that Trump played in ratcheting up extreme rhetoric nationwide, but he argues that it is up to his opponents to create an alternative narrative that eschews “contempt and fear.” In addition, he makes an effective case for why combative discourse erodes the public trust. The final chapter offers practical advice on encouraging depolarization; he urges readers, for example, to push back on extremism on their own side of the political aisle and to “engage with the other side’s more rational beliefs.” Three appendices offer resources for further reading and examples of what the author sees as polarizing language. Readers on the right may disagree with Elwood’s personal politics (“Trump is a very dangerous person”), and those on the left may disagree with his neoliberal emphasis on civility. Still, the book does make compelling arguments, based on astute observations and backed by solid research. This brief, accessible book is complemented by an array of full-color diagrams, charts, and screenshots from X (formerly known as Twitter). Its conversational writing style makes for an engaging read, but the lack of clear divisions between chapters makes its stream-of-consciousness approach a bit dizzying at times.
A well-argued, if occasionally disorganized, vision of political politeness.Pub Date: April 14, 2024
ISBN: 9798987528358
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Via Regia
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
BOOK REVIEW
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