A powerful, much-needed political and social analysis that all lovers of democracy should read.
An alarming but useful perspective on antiliberalism.
According to this timely, well-informed analysis, there is nothing new in the Trump populist movement, save for Trump himself. Kagan, a neoconservative scholar and author of The Ghost at the Feast and The World America Made, demonstrates that the forces of antiliberalism and white supremacy, which extend from the Revolutionary period to today, have never disappeared. Rather, they merely accepted what they were forced to accept—liberal democratic government as established by the Founders—until political and cultural conditions allowed rebellion to flourish once more. The polarized 2024 political landscape bears a striking resemblance to the years immediately preceding the Civil War, writes Kagan, a Washington Post columnist and foreign policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations. The author warns that the coming election may determine whether liberal democracy will survive the new surge in antiliberalism, its racist underpinnings, and the authoritarian, vengeful impulse demonstrated by Trump. This struggle between liberal democracy and those fundamentally opposed to it also continues to shape international politics. In relating how democratic government cannot endure when half the country does not believe in the core principles that undergird the American system, Kagan’s survey, not generally given to dire pronouncements, seems overheated at times. Some readers may question his assurance that Trump is a unique, unrepeatable phenomenon or that Trumpism and the greatest risks to the republic will dissipate with his passing from the scene. Nonetheless, Kagan cogently examines the bright long-term prospects for the Founders’ concept of liberalism, especially with the nation’s rapidly changing demographics—if Trump does not win the election. The author also points out where modern American liberalism is failing, not least in the antiliberal excesses of its progressive wing, and how they fan the antiliberal blaze.
A powerful, much-needed political and social analysis that all lovers of democracy should read.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593535783
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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