Ideological and agitational in tone, this will appeal most to liberals.
Progressive talk show host Hartmann (Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People”—and How You Can Fight Back, 2010, etc.) argues that the financial crash of 2008 was just a precursor for the larger-scale disruptions to come in 2016.
The author situates his prognosis for the years ahead within a view of the history of the republic in which democracy is pitted against what he calls, borrowing from Franklin Roosevelt, “Economic Royalists.” These Royalists, typified by the billionaire Koch brothers and others, demand unrestricted expansion for free markets and minimal, or no, taxation on their financial returns. Hartmann argues that they are responsible for policies that have produced unprecedented inequality while hollowing out the core of what used to be the United States’ world-leading manufacturing capability. Results have differed, but the policies have been applied repeatedly in America's history, and these economic crashes have produced a political response from the population affected. For Hartmann, two recent decisions by the Supreme Court have been critical: the Citizens United decision, which upheld the personhood of corporations, and Buckley vs. Valeo, in which corporate political advertising expenditures were equated with speech. The author compares the significance of the former to the Dred Scott decision, and he believes that these two decisions, Citizens and Buckley, have made the crash he anticipates irreversible. The author also provides an intriguing account of the Supreme Court's deliberations on the status of corporations under the Constitution to demonstrate how hard-fought this battle has been. The conceptual driver is Hartmann's controversial thesis that U.S. history is an approximate 80-year political cycle occasioned by successor generations repeatedly forgetting what their predecessors previously knew and took for granted.
Ideological and agitational in tone, this will appeal most to liberals.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-446-58483-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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