An illuminating blend of dark warnings about the present and optimism that strongman rule can never prevail in the long term.
An examination of the modern rise of authoritarianism.
Vladimir Putin was first to the gate, writes Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. Taking power in 2000, he set about reversing democratic gains won since the fall of the Soviet Union, crushing political opposition, and sweeping aside institutions obstructing his absolutist rule. Xi Jinping, “clearly nostalgic for some of the Maoist themes of his youth,” followed suit in China. The nub, writes the author, is that neither Russia nor China is a superpower as such—not yet, anyway—meaning that their authoritarian power does not yet extend far beyond their borders. Not so with the U.S. under Donald Trump, who clearly studied Putin and other dictators, trading in all the hallmarks of strongman rule: a disdain for the courts and other democratic institutions, a strongly enforced cult of personality, nationalism and anti-globalism, a base that is uneducated and rural, and the insistence that American greatness is undermined by the machinations of the “deep state” and Jewish financier George Soros. Interestingly, writes Rachman, that notion of the deep state is borrowed from the authoritarian regime in Turkey, while the Soros meme is widespread among rightists and antisemites across the world. Just as interestingly, he observes, the intellectual basis for the new authoritarianism is international, linking enough suspect characters to justify a conspiracy theory: Trump confidant Steve Bannon, say, hangs out with Italian fascists and Putin associates and reads the work of Carl Schmitt, the now-rehabilitated Nazi legal philosopher. “Trump’s defeat in 2020 does not mean that the danger has passed,” writes the author. However, by way of small comfort, he also observes that even the longest-lived authoritarian regimes have shelf lives, hastened by the general incompetence of their leaders in the face of such things as the pandemic.
An illuminating blend of dark warnings about the present and optimism that strongman rule can never prevail in the long term.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63542-280-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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
SEEN & HEARD
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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