A polemic that will arouse conservatives and irritate liberals.
The former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal adds to the why-American-society-is-in-such-a-mess genre.
Baker, now a WSJ editor at large and a regular commentator on Fox News, maintains that he is nonpartisan and that “there is plenty of blame to go around,” but readers will quickly discover that he is an old-school conservative. Like many traditional conservatives, the author deplores Donald Trump and his followers. However, if forced to choose between a die-hard, right-wing conspiracy theorist and a conventional liberal, he would throw up his hands in despair. Baker blames much of our current crisis on “the rapid advance in progressive ideologies in American institutions in the last thirty years or so.” Perhaps his greatest anger is directed at his own profession, journalism, which—with the exception of his WSJ—has dropped all pretense of objectivity. “Taking their cue from Karl Marx,” news organizations refuse to merely report the world but work actively to change it. Baker also excoriates American universities, a conservative bugbear long dominated by liberals who shout down guest speakers and harass nonconformist professors. Least effective is the author’s chapter on the medical profession, an uncomfortably Trumpian attack on pandemic-era public health measures. He mostly denounces quarantines as hysterical fearmongering, and he maintains that vaccines, although modestly effective, have been oversold and should be voluntary. Since he blames America’s “cultural revolution” on a powerful, isolated cabal and opposes violence, his conclusion is short on specifics. He places his trust in the blameless, salt-of-the-earth American citizenry who “believe in traditional American values and ideals, put American…interests ahead of global concerns, and favor tough immigration restrictions and the reassertion of American sovereignty.” Although Baker believes in climate change, he also argues that the matter is overblown and that “climate extremism” is the new global religion, “a temporal canon, with its own moral and doctrinal heft.”
A polemic that will arouse conservatives and irritate liberals.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781538705704
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
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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