Mostly evenhanded, occasionally aggrieved, and an interesting angle on the question of political correctness.
A modest treatise defending the right of untrammeled free speech in the face of efforts to silence unpopular opinions.
A public intellectual “of decidedly conservative leanings—and an African American one, no less!,” Loury recounts that he, like many others on university campuses, has faced pressure to temper his publicly stated views and go with the “progressive” flow on campus. That things cut both ways—that moderate Republicans, say, are shouted down in MAGA conclaves—he acknowledges somewhat more obliquely, and with an economist’s image: If Gresham’s law holds, he writes, that bad money will drive good money out of the marketplace, then “people with extreme views can drive moderates…out of a conversation.” The result is then an impoverishment of that conversation and scarcely any conversation at all over questions that demand reasoned deliberation. Speaking to what people want to hear is the definition of the self-censorship of Loury’s title: A speaker may couch opinions in ways that are meant to signal that he or she is on the right side of public opinion, or at least such public opinion as is in the room, or he or she may avoid speaking altogether out of fear of bullying. Again, the result is impoverishment, such that important social problems can’t be talked through without giving offense to someone somewhere. Loury uses an episode of recent history to make his point: Asked to speak at a synagogue in Florida, he “hinted publicly at my growing doubts about Israel’s actions in Gaza,” leading to a chain of angry denunciation and calumny. He might have known, but he risked voicing the thought anyway. “It may well turn out that I couldn’t afford the social cost of speaking my mind on Gaza,” he concludes. “But one thing is certain: if I wanted to maintain my own self-respect, I couldn’t afford not to pay that cost.”
Mostly evenhanded, occasionally aggrieved, and an interesting angle on the question of political correctness.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781509567409
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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