A conscientious peeling away of the false democratic facade of contemporary authoritarianism.
A politically savvy exposé of the recent rise of “a global antidemocratic movement that claims to be acting in democracy’s defense.”
Beauchamp, a senior correspondent for Vox who focuses on right-wing populism, argues that the emergence of competitive authoritarianism, whose proponents hold (rigged) elections and undermine such democratic institutions as a free press and politically independent courts, is a consequence of a perceived need to defend social hierarchies from advances in social equality. This reactionary spirit pits democracy’s equal citizenship against a form of liberalism that embraces individual freedom and xenophobic nationalism. “Democracy, by its nature,” writes the author, “encourages the upending of social hierarchies,” and it’s “always possible for citizens to elect leaders whose policies would challenge the existing social order.” The rise of competitive authoritarianism was precipitated by postwar decolonization, the formation of welfare states, mass migration, and efforts to reduce discrimination against marginalized groups—e.g., Black citizens in the U.S. and the lower castes in India. Beauchamp uses four cases as illustration: the U.S., Hungary, Israel, and India, epitomized, respectively, by Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Narendra Modi. Although Beauchamp suggests American origins for competitive authoritarianism, his evidence is more congruent with it being a global phenomenon similar to the spread of democracy after World War II. As the author writes, it’s possible that “the consensus around the basic principles of liberal democracy in countries like the United States might not be nearly as widely shared” as many think. To counter the reactionary spirit, Beauchamp argues for democratic activism and evidence-based governance, and he thoughtfully presents the history of competitive authoritarianism and defines its major dimensions. As a broad assessment, the author’s approach is more than sufficient in detail and attentiveness to political theory and academic scholarship.
A conscientious peeling away of the false democratic facade of contemporary authoritarianism.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781541704411
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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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A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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