An undercooked yet relevant reminder of the possibilities of cancel culture and how it can make the powerful accountable.
A cultural commentator advocates for cancel culture as a social movement that mobilizes the weak to “speak truth to power.”
With the rise of social media, the ability of individuals to comment publicly on the behavior of others has increased exponentially. According to Owens, calling out people and corporations for their racism, sexism, greed, and general insensitivity toward others and pressuring them to be accountable is the essence of cancel culture, and he argues that cancel culture is a force of progressive social change for the greater good. Political to its core, cancel culture comes in two styles: conservative and progressive. Conservatives are eager to cancel critical race theory and such groups as Black Lives Matter, yet they hypocritically condemn cancel culture for stifling free speech. Progressives use it to protect the vulnerable from being oppressed and exploited even as many on the left fret about its excesses. Overall, Owens views the negative reaction to cancel culture by the rich and powerful—particularly older, White, heterosexual, elite males regardless of political persuasion—as an attempt to preserve their privilege. Further, he wants us to recognize that cancel culture is not new. Along with the Boston Tea Party, his list of historical cancellations includes the Stonewall riots of 1969, the charging of Harvey Weinstein with sexual harassment in 2020, and Representative Liz Cheney’s recent ouster from Republican leadership in the House. “Once passive on Trump’s racist and incompetent leadership as someone who had previously voted for him,” writes the author, “Cheney was one of the few from the Right in Congress who voted to impeach the former president for wrongdoing in the January 6 insurrection.” By so extending his reach, however, Owens dilutes his argument. Distinctions matter, particularly when it comes to political action. Moreover, his belief that cancel culture can turn individual complaint into collective action needs much more thought.
An undercooked yet relevant reminder of the possibilities of cancel culture and how it can make the powerful accountable.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781250280930
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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