A concise and prudent discussion of the nation’s bitter political contentions.
Paepke, a former practicing attorney, examines divisiveness and political dysfunction in the United States and proposes a plan for moving forward in this nonfiction work.
The author observes that, contrary to popular belief, the ideological polarization that currently beleaguers the United States is not the historical norm; in fact, following World War II, the country leapt “from strength to strength,” and, despite genuine political disagreement, reasonable compromises and consensus among citizens were concretely brokered. However, this is no longer the case—today, the least temperate members of the citizenry elect the least moderate politicians, and deeply divisive figures like Donald Trump and Joe Biden continue to win nominations for the presidency despite their lack of general support. Paepke asserts that this state of affairs has been engendered in part by an irresponsible media that intentionally stokes the flames of political acrimony and by a presidential primary nomination process designed to prefer voters “louder, angrier, and more extreme than mainstream Americans.” The result, in his estimation, has been a loss of shared national identity and purpose. “This extreme political climate has overflowed into broader society and everyday life. The shared sense of community has declined. Americans increasingly choose their states, their neighborhoods, their social lives, and their friends based on political compatibility. The choice of news and information sources too often becomes a definitive pledge of allegiance.” With great clarity and analytical meticulousness, Paepke sketches a sober, centrist political platform—which would seem to have broad appeal among voters—including positions on crime, climate control, and foreign policy. The author offers much more than a lament; he foresees a future in which widespread discontent is channeled into substantive political action and recommends that either the nomination process be radically revised or that the primaries be bypassed altogether by a presidential candidate independent of the two main parties. Paepke’s important and hopeful contribution is an impressive example of what he preaches: a common-sense pragmatism that earnestly seeks out centrist compromise.
A concise and prudent discussion of the nation’s bitter political contentions.Pub Date: June 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781637557419
Page Count: 190
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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