A concise and incisive look at a democracy in peril.
A former professor of public policy analyzes the roots and underlying structural causes of the 2021 insurrection.
Accounts of the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol have tended toward insider narratives that focus on “rumor and gossip” rather than on the many different causes that worked together to instigate the event. Short carefully examines “two long-term processes that unfolded over decades and two shorter-term events that came into full force in 2020.” Long before Trump became president, the public was losing trust in government. Short offers the example of the eternal clash between states’ rights and federal supremacy, a contest that took its bloodiest form in the Civil War. Amid this ongoing battle, the author points to what he calls “a mounting democratic deficit,” which stems from issues such as a political system flooded by too much money and the engineering of specific political outcomes through gerrymandering. Political polarization, along with widening ideological rifts (fueled by an increase in conspiracy thinking) that transformed America into a flawed democracy, came to a head in early 2020 by the pandemic and the policing crisis. Trump’s blatant mishandling of the pandemic called his leadership competence into question. Yet when seething racial tensions in New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere boiled over into violent protests, Trump seized on the moment to pose as a “strong figure in a time of disorder” by contemplating the use of federal troops to quell the chaos. Short argues that it was not a stretch for Trump to go from that extreme to the even greater one of calling for military intervention in the face of election results unfavorable to him. This highly readable study will appeal to anyone seeking to make sense of the uprising that forever changed modern American politics.
A concise and incisive look at a democracy in peril.Pub Date: March 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781789148411
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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