A convincingly argued, well-researched critique of the American Left by a fellow progressive.
Neill challenges fellow liberals to rethink their approach to Trump supporters in this third nonfiction work in a series.
“I do believe Donald Trump spreads misogyny and hate,” the author writes in this book’s introduction, adding that he also believes the president to be “cruel, solipsistic, and amoral.” With that said, the author isn’t trying to persuade readers to share his view of President Trump, but rather to ask fellow progressives to examine how their own actions may have driven nominally apolitical or moderate voters towards Trump as a candidate. Central to the book’s argument is that Trump supporters have legitimate grievances against the establishment, and to reduce their support to raw “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” is an attempt to “gaslight them.” Drawing on the antiracist work of activist Ibram X. Kendi and others, Neill emphasizes that “shaming others is not a tool for social justice,” and instead calls on his colleagues on the Left to apply their core values of compassion and understanding to those with different political beliefs. Sweeping claims that Trump supporters are ignorant or morally deficient, he says, are counterproductive to a winning electoral strategy, which he argues should reach out to people who feel marginalized, rather than further alienate them. By abandoning disillusioned men, he asserts, the Left created a vacuum that was filled by promoters of toxic masculinity. This is the latest work in a multibook series on systemic racism, whose previous volumes tackled structural racism head-on from the perspective of “a well-meaning-but imperfect-ally.” Neill, a past recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Torch of Peace Award, has a solid theoretical foundation in critical race theory and antiracist literature, and he backs his argument with a network of scholarly citations. He’s also the author of more than a dozen SF and fantasy novels, and he balances his academic bona fides (which include a master’s degree in public health from Emory University) with an engaging, well-argued, and accessible writing style, accompanied by personal anecdotes, textbox vignettes, and Spooner’s pen-and-ink illustrations.
A convincingly argued, well-researched critique of the American Left by a fellow progressive.Pub Date: March 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798313818528
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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