The good news: Even Donald Trump hasn’t been able to kill democracy. The bad news: Yet.
“Democracy,” writes Runciman (Politics/Cambridge Univ.; Politics: Ideas in Profile, 2015, etc.) provocatively, “is civil war without the fighting.” In the broadest terms, it fails when that symbolic war turns into a real one. By that account, we’re doing OK, inasmuch as even the pitched battles among right- and left-wingers in the United States have not yet descended into bloodshed. The author would seem to share with Steven Pinker the view that the Enlightenment is still alive, if not exactly well, and that overall, we’re in better shape than our forerunners in terms of political violence and the ability to accommodate widely divergent views. It could have been otherwise; Runciman opens with a threefold view of possibilities for what might have come of the 2016 election, including the sitting president’s refusing to yield office, “the route to civil war,” and what actually happened, namely Trump’s gaining that office even as “the American political establishment decides to grin and bear it.” Reminding readers that authoritarianism comes with executive edicts and not the slow-working legal process, Runciman counsels Americans to breathe a little easier on Trump’s judiciary appointments—though, of course, those appointments may be in effect for a generation and more. In the face of Trumpian attacks on laws and customs, he suggests that the institutions of democracy are proving resilient in being effective bulwarks against tyranny. Which is not to say that things can’t be improved, especially as an aging population shows less stamina for the hard work of engaging in representative democracy, a system that Runciman holds is “intended to work against our cognitive biases” in thwarting immediate gratification in favor of long-term benefits.
Democracy isn’t dead, not yet, but it could use some physical therapy while it steps gingerly into the grave. For all its optimism, an urgent, necessary book of cold comforts.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1678-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | WORLD | POLITICS | HISTORY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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