An empirically grounded work of interest to political scientists and policymakers as much as social philosophers.
A survey of a political and social landscape in which trust, a key element of democracy, is absent.
“In 2017,” writes philosophy professor Vallier, “around 70 percent of Republicans said they distrusted anyone who voted for Hillary Clinton for president; likewise, around 70 percent of Democrats said they distrusted people who voted for Donald Trump.” Given those facts, “it is unclear how a democracy can remain stable under these conditions.” Furthermore, because the current president revels in the “deliberate erosion of norms” and that norm erosion is a key ingredient of mistrust, the instability is ever more obvious. The decline in trust leads to partisan division, which leads to a decline in trust, and income inequality has a decided effect as well. Uncomfortably, Vallier notes in this data-based treatise, there is also some suggestion that restricting immigration reinforces in-group trust among citizens of a given country, which “means we will have to choose between creating trust and mistreating people, which is unfortunate.” In the complex analysis that follows, the author suggests that promoting diversity and reducing segregation have positive effects on trust. To increase that trust, he writes, we must protect democracy, “which reduces corruption and enhances economic and institutional functioning broadly.” That democracy, Vallier adds, best takes the form of “modest welfare state capitalism,” a system that eschews the nationalism of the right and the socialism of the left to insist upon societal norms that inhibit corruption and protect property rights. Some of the author’s arguments are highly provocative, as when he suggests that lawsuits by the injured may be more effective than government regulations, that the right to unionize is a component of welfare state capitalism, and that higher taxes are acceptable as long as there is high “tax morale,” or the sense that tax revenue is not squandered or wasted.
An empirically grounded work of interest to political scientists and policymakers as much as social philosophers.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-088722-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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
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