More evidence that today’s Supreme Court, antidemocratic by nature with its unelected judges, is an enemy of democracy.
A cutting analysis of the long-term project to disenfranchise left-leaning voters.
“Our country is bitterly divided today in no small part because conservative political strategists have gerrymandered it to be that way,” writes political commentator and former Salon editor-in-chief Daley, author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count. Gerrymandering is one of the favorite tools in the GOP toolkit to disenfranchise citizens inclined to vote for a Democratic candidate. The chief weapon, Daley argues convincingly, has been the Supreme Court, seeded with far-right-leaning judges who endorse this antidemocracy movement. At the heart is John Roberts, who conveys himself—and whom the media portrays—as a mild-mannered centrist. Wrong: Roberts, as the author clearly shows, operates by small steps, such that “each landmark decision begins with a smaller case that invites the next big question.” This approach disguises Roberts’ role as a “patient bulldozer.” A case in point is the Roberts-led dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, tenet by tenet, with the redistricting of a majority Black legislative district in Alabama so that the majority of its residents were now white. Daley traces this project to the Nixon-era activism of Lewis Powell and his multipronged assault on democracy, one means for which was to fund right-wing law schools and raise generations of antidemocratic judges, five of whom now populate the Supreme Court. Roberts, who began his career as a counsel to Ronald Reagan, had the VRA in his sights as long ago as 1982, “a young ideologue despite his carefully curated image of scarcely having been touched by ideology at all.” The subterfuge means to disguise the complete dismantling of the concept of one person, one vote—and all, Daley proves persuasively and evenhandedly, by careful design.
More evidence that today’s Supreme Court, antidemocratic by nature with its unelected judges, is an enemy of democracy.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780063321090
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Another chapter in a long fight against inequality.
Building on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which this year drew 280,000 people to rallies in red and blue states, Sanders amplifies his enduring campaign for economic fairness. The Vermont senator offers well-timed advice for combating corruption and issues a robust plea for national soul-searching. His argument rests on alarming data on the widening wealth gap’s impact on democracy. Bolstered by a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed campaign finance limits, “100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion” on 2024 elections. Sanders focuses on the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, describing their enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans and big social safety net cuts, as the “largest transfer of wealth” in living memory. But as is his custom, he spreads the blame, dinging Democrats for courting wealthy donors while ignoring the “needs and suffering” of the working class. “Trump filled the political vacuum that the Democrats created,” he writes, a resonant diagnosis. Urging readers not to surrender to despair, Sanders offers numerous legislative proposals. These would empower labor unions, cut the workweek to 32 hours, regulate campaign spending, reduce gerrymandering, and automatically register 18-year-olds to vote. Grassroots supporters can help by running for local office, volunteering with a campaign, and asking educators how to help support public schools. Meanwhile, Sanders asks us “to question the fundamental moral values that underlie” a system that enables “the top 1 percent” to “own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent.” Though his prose sometimes reads like a transcribed speech with built-in applause lines, Sanders’ ideas are specific, clear, and commonsensical. And because it echoes previous statements, his call for collective introspection lands as genuine.
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217089161
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
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