Good evidence that racism, preferably unaddressed, remains an ongoing undercurrent in America.
Accounts of three presidents who broke the iron rule of American politics: Never disturb the racial status quo.
Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University and author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate, begins with Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson. The only Southern senator who opposed secession, he disliked slavery but despised Black people. He treated them rudely, ignored widespread abuse throughout the South, vetoed congressional civil rights acts, and escaped conviction by a single vote after being impeached. Calling this a “backlash” is a weak analogy. While Northern public opinion had turned against slavery, belief in black equality remained a minority view. Blaming Reconstruction’s failure on a backlash is a stretch because Northern white support was lukewarm to begin with. Lyndon Johnson deserves praise for effective 1960s civil rights laws, but Southern malevolence cleared the way. Even conservative Northern whites were horrified at the murders, church bombing, and violence against freedom riders—all vividly covered on TV news. As a result, Johnson’s bills passed overwhelmingly, and more congressional Republicans than Democrats voted in favor. Sadly, malevolence returned following urban unrest. The beneficiary was Richard Nixon, whose law-and-order campaign and “Southern Strategy” began the country’s conservative turn, which is still with us. Impeached for offenses that might be considered small potatoes today, Nixon resigned. Supporters cheered when Ronald Reagan proclaimed the U.S. a colorblind nation where merit alone determined success. This didn’t prevent a backlash after Barack Obama’s election. He was accused of being ineligible to run for fabricated reasons and then denounced as an “affirmative action” president elected solely because of his race. The beneficiary, Donald Trump, maintained the colorblind public discourse while reviling proxy minorities: Muslims and immigrants, including legal ones.
Good evidence that racism, preferably unaddressed, remains an ongoing undercurrent in America.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9780691246956
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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