Or, what a long, strange trip it’s been.
In this hefty companion—and at turns rejoinder—to Jules Witcover’s Party of the People (below), political historian Gould (American History/Univ. of Texas at Austin) writes that at its origins the GOP “consisted of disparate groups with different visions of what the party should be and where it ought to go.” Some early members favored an anti-immigrant, nativist stance; others, more liberal, pressed for a coherent antislavery platform. Whatever the case, most suspected that the majority Democrats and Whigs of the 1840s and ’50s were agents of “schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed,” in the words of the Michigan party’s charter. Gaining national prominence with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the party was tested, following the Civil War, by episodes of ineptitude and corruption—to say nothing, writes Gould, of northern voters’ suspicion that something deeply radical underlay Republican efforts to “achieve suffrage for blacks in the South.” If soft on big business, Gould demonstrates, Republicanism from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was eminently moderate, and dominantly urban and suburban, fielding solidly middle-of-the-road candidates such as Wendell Wilkie and Nelson Rockefeller. (The latter, Gould writes, “was not a very good national politician,” in part because he “seemed to think that his money and celebrity appeal entitled him to leadership.”) Enter the rise of Cold War conservatism, led by the likes of a comparatively soft Richard Nixon and a comparatively hard Barry Goldwater, on whose heels came Ronald Reagan and his hard-right cohort. The subsequent realignment of the party essentially pushed out moderates; as Gould writes, come 1992, “the trouble with [GOP presidential aspirant Pat] Buchanan was not that he rejected core Republican values but that he articulated them with damaging clarity.” Whence the current leadership, at turns antifederalist and imperialist, isolationist and unilateralist—all characteristics of a GOP past, present, and presumably future.
Quite lluminating, and at times even entertaining (as when Gould offers his take on the four presidents most representative of the GOP’s core). Just the thing for the 2004 election.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50741-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
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