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
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
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