A book that avoids simplistic conclusions in its portrayal of the current political landscape.
There are critical changes taking place in the structure of American politics, and this data-driven study explains how and why.
Is demographics destiny? Ruffini, a veteran Republican pollster and co-founder of the data firm Echelon Insights, argues that it is not, but it is an important factor. In this book, the author focuses on the political trends of the past two decades, as wealthy, well-educated voters have moved solidly toward the Democratic Party, while white, working-class voters have gravitated toward the Republican side. Ruffini does not hide his personal dislike of Donald Trump, although acknowledges that his team articulated a message that resonated with millions of voters. One of the most critical divides within the current political system involves education, and Ruffini assembles a mass of data to support his points. He also looks at the attitudes of far-left activists, whose sense of conviction sometimes manifests as disdain for those who don’t share their views. Their obsessiveness can drive away the moderate voters that are needed for any election victory. Ruffini acknowledges that the white working class is slowly shrinking, so the Republicans must look elsewhere for additional support. Republican planners are working hard to make further inroads with moderate voters, but their key problem is Trump, who repels as many people as he attracts. The author suggests that a Republican candidate who does not generate “nonstop chaos” would be hard to beat. Ruffini’s argument that the current Republican Party is multiracial is highly debatable, and Democratic strategists will find plenty of points to attack. However, while the author doesn’t answer every question he asks, he offers some provocative food for thought, especially for conservative Americans who are dismayed by the toxic culture perpetuated by the MAGA-verse.
A book that avoids simplistic conclusions in its portrayal of the current political landscape.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781982198626
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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