Repetitive, but with good points to make against an institution whose time has passed.
A historically based argument for abolishing the Electoral College as a major step toward a better democracy.
It’s not breaking news to observe, as Dupont does, that the Electoral College is tightly bound up in the history of slavery. She adds a subtle nuance to the point, however: The slaveholding states gained an advantage during the Constitutional Convention by counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for census purposes, with the result that South Carolina could command more clout in the national legislature than, say, New Jersey. More pressing was the insistence by the slaveholding and smaller states that direct voting be blocked; since enslaved people could not vote, it would have given the populous northern states an edge over the South. “Slavery did not cause the framers to choose an Electoral College,” writes the author. “But slavery did prompt the Convention repeatedly to reject popular election in preference for Congress selecting the president.” She drums on the no-direct-vote trope a few times too many, but to a useful end—namely, that the winner-take-all system of the college effectively disenfranchises huge numbers of voters, from the 6 million Californians who voted for Trump in 2020 to the larger number of Texans as compared to New Yorkers who voted for Biden. A proportional Electoral College would see Texas as a purplish state where Republicans hold only a six-point advantage, at least for the moment. Put another way, a California electoral vote represents 717,000 voters, whereas a Wyoming electoral vote represents 193,000. In the end, Dupont persuasively urges, the Electoral College is a vestige of slavery and white supremacy that “amounts to blatant and extreme political inequality”—good reason for doing away with it.
Repetitive, but with good points to make against an institution whose time has passed.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781493085989
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Prometheus/Globe Pequot
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
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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