An informative but starchy history of primaries and how they have hurt democracy and enabled Trumpism.
A political scientist scrutinizes the underappreciated role of America’s primary-election system in the nation’s ideological polarization and the rise of Donald Trump.
Jacobs, the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, argues that primary elections undermine democracy, offering a timely but pedantic blend of a scholarly history of primaries and a critique of their enduring harms. Fearing rule by “the mob” instead of the gentry, James Madison and other framers made no mention of primaries in the Constitution, and as late as 1968, party bosses still controlled the selection of most delegates. That began to change with the election reforms of the 1970s, following Richard Nixon’s defeat of Hubert Humphrey, who ran in no primaries. The reforms weakened the influence of the old-school bosses and strengthened “a new network of party activists, organized groups, and donors.” These groups demand loyalty to their favored policies rather than to a party and, like Trump supporters, tend to be more ideologically extreme than voters in general. The author’s tightly structured arguments often read like expanded PowerPoint presentations without bullet points, as he covers the “two profound shifts in the party system in the past 50 years; the “three features” of strong democracy in the 1780s; the “four critical junctures” for election rules; “the five extraordinary consequences” of the rise of presidential primaries; and other enumerations. Jacobs also describes the “three sturdy barriers” to reforms he supports, such as having more unpledged “superdelegates” to nominating conventions, and he recalls historical injustices in the Jim Crow South, where Black voters were barred from casting ballots. All of this material will have high appeal for primary-election wonks, but it gives the sense that its natural readership consists of people who will be tested on the material at the end of the semester.
An informative but starchy history of primaries and how they have hurt democracy and enabled Trumpism.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-087724-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.
A collection of personal journal entries from the feminist writer that explores power dynamics and “a subject [she] kept coming back to: women strong in public, weak in private.”
Cultural critic and essayist Roiphe (Cultural Reporting and Criticism/New York Univ.; The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, 2016, etc.), perhaps best known for the views she expressed on victimization in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), is used to being at the center of controversy. In her latest work, the author uses her personal journals to examine the contradictions that often exist between the public and private lives of women, including her own. At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis. As Roiphe shares details from her own life, she weaves in quotes from the writings of other seemingly powerful female writers who had similar experiences, including Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Hillary Clinton. In one entry, Roiphe theorizes that her early published writings were an attempt to “control and tame the narrative,” further explaining that she has “so long and so passionately resisted the victim role” because she does not view herself as “purely a victim” and not “purely powerless.” However, she adds, that does not mean she “was not facing a man who was twisting or distorting his power; it does not mean that the wrongness, the overwhelmed feeling was not there.” Throughout the book, the author probes the question of why women so often subjugate their power in their private lives, but she never quite finds a satisfying answer. The final entry, however, answers the question of why she chose to share these personal journal entries with the public: “To be so exposed feels dangerous, but having done it, I also feel free.”
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2801-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A potent Sontag capsule compounded of legendarily smart prose and clever editorial decisions.
A crisp new collection of early Sontag pieces on gender, sexuality, and feminism.
The energetic pacing and well-chosen variety of pieces (kudos to editor Rieff, the author’s only child) highlight both Sontag’s ideas at the peak of the women’s movement and the breadth of her boldly ranging rhetoric. “The Double Standard of Aging” reads like a transcript of ambient social attitudes: “Society is much more permissive about aging in men,” while “everyone finds the signs of old age in women aesthetically offensive.” In “The Third World of Women,” Sontag speculates about the means and possibilities of gender and class revolution. “The liberation of women,” she writes, “is a necessary preparation for building a just society—not the other way around, as Marxists always claim.” Writing about “Fascinating Fascism,” the author advances an argument about the lingering endurance of fascist aesthetics with an engrossing evidentiary walk-through: Leni Riefenstahl’s public comeback via a popular paperback on SS uniforms glimpsed at an airport newsstand. Later, in “Double Standard,” Sontag writes about how “beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement. Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.” Trading open letters with Adrienne Rich, the author is forcefully eloquent. “Virtually everything deplorable in human history,” she writes, “furnishes material for a restatement of the feminist plaint (the ravages of the patriarchy, etc.), just as every story of a life could lead to a reflection on our common mortality and the vanity of human wishes. But if the point is to have meaning some of the time, it can’t be made all the time.” To move through this collection is to watch Sontag practice what she also preaches to cultural critics and to liberated women: “lead the fullest, freest, and most imaginative life she can” and always maintain “her solidarity with other women.” Merve Emre provides the foreword.
A potent Sontag capsule compounded of legendarily smart prose and clever editorial decisions.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9781250876850
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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