Racial and religious anxieties, more than economic worries, fueled Donald Trump’s victory.
Political science professors Sides (George Washington Univ.; The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election, 2013, etc.), Vavreck (UCLA; The Gamble, 2013, etc.), and Tesler (Univ. of California, Irvine; Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era, 2016, etc.) counter some popular assumptions about the surprising outcome of the 2016 presidential election, which pitted two “historically unpopular presidential candidates” against each other. In a narrative replete with graphs and tables, the authors argue against the prevalent idea that Trump attracted white voters who felt victimized by loss of jobs and worries over economic insecurity, instead mounting abundant evidence for their contention that group identities mattered more to voters than perceptions of economic hardship or inequality. “Simple narratives about voter anger,” they write, “obscured who was angry and why.” They assert that in the Republican Party, “divisions centered on how voters felt about groups they did not belong to, including blacks, Muslims, and immigrants.” These groups generated strong emotions and activated white voters’ racial and religious identities, both of which had deepened during Barack Obama’s presidency and caused a backlash against diversity. The authors cite three main reasons for Trump’s victory: “fractured ranks” within the Republican Party that impeded party leaders from coalescing behind any candidate; outsized media coverage of Trump that made him appear to be the front-runner even when coverage focused on scandals; and “racialized economics,” in which racial attitudes “shaped the way voters understood economic outcomes.” Hillary Clinton had problems with both message and campaign strategy, never attracting enough support from diverse voters, including women. The authors doubt that Russian interference changed the outcome of the election. “Russian-sponsored content,” they conclude, “was an infinitesimal fraction” of tweets and posts, and although this content was “misleading and polarizing,” the campaign was already filled with similar incendiary content. Moreover, they maintain, “most voters are predictable partisans whose minds are hard to change.”
A cogent, well-documented analysis of the 2016 election.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-17419-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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