An impassioned and well-reasoned case for political reform.
A political strategist outlines his plan to revitalize the American democratic system.
As a community organizer, the former leader of one of California’s largest unions, and the founder of the Immigration Law Office of Los Angeles, McVarish is no stranger to government. However, during his unsuccessful 2018 congressional Democratic primary campaign, he discovered “how naive I was about American politics.” Campaigns were successful not because they had the best ideas or community support, he found, but because they had ties to big donors. Although the author blames Democratic Party leadership for its complicity in this system, the first half of his book focuses on how Republicans, who make up a minority of the electorate, have consistently outperformed Democrats for a decade. Their success, he asserts, comes from deploying four “Weapons Against Democracy”: dark money, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and diversionary propaganda. The author warns that the GOP will continue to use these tactics in future elections and that Democrats risk losing key seats as soon as 2022, if they don’t adapt. The book’s second half encourages Democratic leaders to “Prioritize Protecting Democracy” through 12 detailed proposals, which include statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, filibuster reform, revitalization of unions, and court reform that limits conservatives’ disproportionate power. The book brims with useful charts, graphs, and oversized illustrations, which, combined with the author’s assertive writing style, make for an engaging read. Although McVarish has a flair for dramatic doomsday predictions, he tempers such moments with solid research and ample footnotes. His personal experiences as a political insider add further appeal. The book’s greatest strength may lie in its 10 appendices, which offer tips on how to create change at the community level, a primer on the basics of grassroots organization, and practical advice for meeting with Democratic candidates running for office. On nearly every page, one gets a sense of McVarish’s love of democracy and his earnest desire to shift power from elites to the electorate.
An impassioned and well-reasoned case for political reform.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73581-912-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: 5journeys Media LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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