Despite the best of motives, Nader shoots down his own case for convergence.
Activist Nader (The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future, 2012, etc.) sketches out places of “convergence” where liberals and conservatives can start working together for the public good.
Though increasingly rare, the author points to a number of instances when lawmakers worked in concert to support automobile airbags, prison reform, halt media concentration, and oppose taxpayer-funded stadiums and arenas. Sometimes they found success; often, they got bogged down in committee or watered down during the process. However, as Nader argues, we also must acknowledge the global corporate giants, whose “DNA commands them to control, undermine or eliminate any force, tradition, or institution that impedes their expansion of sales, profits, and executive compensation.” Certainly, there is endless ammunition to support this point, and Nader trots out one infuriating illustration after another—e.g., “the Department of Defense cannot or will not make an annual audit of it sprawling $527 billion yearly budget, not counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”—but corporate and governmental malfeasance are givens. The issue is how to make government heed “the supremacy of civic values to which commercial pursuits must adjust.” Nader lists reforms with which many lawmakers would agree, including breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, protecting children from commercialism and ending corporate personhood. However, he also delivers many examples where lawmakers are despairing, stymied by partisanship or in the corporate pocket. “Whether Democrats or Republicans are in control, corporations still receive the same wasteful or expanding assorted privileges,” while corporate welfare is ever more varied and bipartisan. Nader hopes that “convergence stimulates the depth of our basic humanity and sense of justice,” but it feels awfully distant from this vantage point. If the best we can do is “agree on a general policy or stance without having to also agree on the exact implications or use that would be made of a policy,” that sounds like planting seeds with no hope of rain.
Despite the best of motives, Nader shoots down his own case for convergence.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56858-454-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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