An illuminating look at the drivers of illiberal nativism—and of support for its chief modern exponent.
A sociological investigation of Donald Trump’s true believers, who are somewhat different from the usual shorthand descriptions.
“Like the great majority of Americans, I am not a Trump supporter, avid or otherwise,” writes University of Nebraska political scientist Hibbing. “However, unlike the great majority of Americans, I am an empirical social scientist, and this means my job is…to collect and interpret evidence on the nature of the social world.” Where the standard narrative is to depict Trump voters as fearful, hateful, and thick-headed, Hibbing finds such descriptors less useful and less accurate than to describe the base as being “securitarian” versus “unitarian.” Those who have remained in Trump’s camp throughout his term hold a strong commitment to the idea that insiders (read: white American native-born citizens) are to be privileged over and protected from outsiders (everyone else). In this in-group devotion, Hibbing finds Trump believers to be “eerily similar” to supporters of Putin, Orban, Bolsonaro, Farage, Duterte, and other world leaders who have been described as nationalists, authoritarians, and fascists. Trump’s ideology, writes the author, is fundamentally not us vs. them but “us vs. not-us.” The border wall, the immigration crackdown, the denial of DREAM Act supporters, and other Trump hallmarks are manifestations of this securitarian, insider-against-outsider stance. In a narrative that is heavy on social science and statistics, Hibbing chases down the demographics of those true believers: They are white, foremost, and secondarily whites without a college degree. (This same core demographic voted for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, Hibbing observes.) Securitarians are committed to walling off “the other” but do not attribute this to racism or xenophobia and are puzzled when others do. Neither do they hate democracy, adds Hibbing, though “a strong majority of Trump venerators would sacrifice democratic values in a heartbeat if doing so led to greater security.”
An illuminating look at the drivers of illiberal nativism—and of support for its chief modern exponent.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-009648-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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