Catnip for election watchers and politics junkies, who will want to reread the book when the dust of 2020 settles.
Why did Hillary Clinton lose the 2016 presidential election? This book deconstructs the many competing explanations—and shows why they matter in 2020.
Early on, political scientist Masket writes that the book was supposed to be about the Republicans’ shattering loss in the 2016 election, asking “how a patently unelectable candidate like Donald Trump somehow got the nomination and cost them an election that was obviously theirs to win.” It didn’t work out that way, leaving the Democrats to wonder how their eminently well-suited candidate failed to capture the White House. Many narratives were offered: The American public is sexist at the core. Clinton was out of touch with ordinary people. Voters rejected insider politics. Trump’s victory was a fluke. Then—though Masket doesn’t belabor the point—there were Comey, WikiLeaks, and the Russians. All these competing narratives have merited serious conversation. Analyzing them—while saying that the narratives themselves are less important than the interpretations—Masket examines how party politics work: The candidate is usually decided on well before the primaries ever begin, the polity is so polarized that landslides no longer occur, and campaigns are steadily less important than other vehicles of messaging. One critique is that Clinton should have campaigned harder in swing states, but, the author counters, she went all out in Pennsylvania and wound up losing by about a point all the same. “If all that campaign effort couldn’t save her in Pennsylvania, why would we think it would matter in Wisconsin?” he asks. In short, he notes, “there was no consensus explanation of 2016.” Looking at identity politics, messaging, coalition-building, the representation of minority and women voters, and the power of party elites, Masket concludes that by all measures, the Democratic Party is “actually a stronger party than the GOP.”
Catnip for election watchers and politics junkies, who will want to reread the book when the dust of 2020 settles.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-108-48212-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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