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 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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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