A rallying cry for a movement to push against Trumpism and its legion of true believers.
A former Republican strategist decries a party that has gone off the rails and plunged into totalitarianism.
According to Lincoln Project senior adviser Stevens, the author of It Was All a Lie, five ingredients fuel “an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party.” These five, in order, are propaganda and its makers; a party willing to be twisted; piles of money and willing suppliers of it; legal theorists willing to distort the law; and a body of shock troops. No one surveying the political landscape would doubt that these five threads are broadly present in the Republican mix. On the first count, the author argues that Fox News did not create the current Republican Party—it was the other way around, with Fox propagandizing in the interest of the authoritarians, among its chief cheerleaders the now-departed Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs. The GOP also enabled Trump by responding to his false claims of election fraud by “humoring him” rather than insisting that he honor constitutional norms. It does no good to “imagine that there is a possibility for the Republican Party to become a ‘normal’ American political party once again”—not with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley roaming the land. Oceans of money are behind this authoritarian impulse, since the doctrinaire insistence on doing away with regulations is music to a capitalist’s ears. The Koch brothers’ political staffers alone, Stevens notes, number “three and a half times more employees than the Republican National Committee.” Crank lawyers and judges are busily eroding legal norms, and then there are the perpetrators and supporters of the events of Jan. 6—who, Stevens suggests without undue alarmism, will be back in even greater numbers come the next election. It all makes for a civil libertarian’s nightmare, but the author offers useful prescriptions for acting to counter the authoritarian impulse.
A rallying cry for a movement to push against Trumpism and its legion of true believers.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781538765401
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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