A compelling case for considering the Constitution as palimpsest and not Mosaic tablet.
An urgent argument against the seemingly prevailing interpretation of the Constitution today, with no room for anyone but well-to-do white Americans.
“The Declaration of Independence…tells us that government legitimacy requires consent of the governed.” So writes legal scholar Dennie, who maintains that this foundational tenet has been abandoned by a government active in disenfranchising the governed, especially minority voters and especially at the level of the judiciary. Many leading jurists subscribe to the theory of “originalism,” which holds that if it’s not in the Constitution as the Founders wrote it, then it’s irrelevant. This leads to legal gymnastics, of course. There’s no specific statement in the Constitution permitting gun control, allowing the Supreme Court to declare that regulation is beyond the law. However, “when it comes to regulating abortion, a lack of past regulation is no barrier to a legislative free-for-all in my uterus.” Advocating for “inclusive constitutionalism,” Dennie argues that the law is an evolving instrument—one that might recognize, for instance, that an AR-15 is not a flintlock—and that there’s no compelling reason for the Supreme Court to engage in historicism in the first place. And yet, there we are, the Supreme Court maintaining that the Constitution is frozen in time and inalterable. More feats of gymnastics ensue: The Court argues that racial gerrymandering is “justiciable” while political gerrymandering is not, when in fact so much political gerrymandering is designed to disempower non-white voters. Originalism, Dennie concludes in this cogent text, keeps the nation “from achieving a functioning democracy,” which would appear to be the point—and, she concludes, it will require a popular upswell of democratic activism, to say nothing of new laws and a new Court, to shake loose from originalism once and for all.
A compelling case for considering the Constitution as palimpsest and not Mosaic tablet.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780593729250
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“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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