A rousing call to rally around popular rule and battle its enemies.
A labor lawyer and one-time political candidate exhorts readers to take a more active role in their democracy.
Geoghegan opens with the thought that our government has become willfully bad at governing, and certainly in representing working people, nonvoters (more than 100 million), and the young, “who face environmental Armageddon and for whom we should get out of the way.” He found his energies sorely tested when he ran for a House seat vacated when Rahm Emanuel became Barack Obama’s chief of staff, which roughly coincided with the financial collapse of 2008 and “our first little brush with the end of the world.” He wound up square in the middle of a field of candidates in a vote settled by the mere 50,000 people who turned out. To broaden representation and citizen involvement, Geoghegan proposes measures that will seem beyond radical to many readers, perhaps the most controversial of which is his demand that the Senate be abolished. As he puts it, if North Dakota has the same senatorial power as New York, then something has gone awry. Instead, he urges, the House—the institution the founders privileged as the place where all revenue bills must originate—must be made gerrymander-free and truly representative. Beyond that, Geoghegan argues, every citizen must participate in governance, particularly the young, who are more likely than not to be nonvoters. Nonvoters, he adds, tend to be moderate, so if they participate, “an ever-shriller GOP will pay the price,” and the country will drift leftward of its own accord. However, Geoghegan is no fan of the Democratic machine, either. He writes dismissively that “both Sanders and Biden owe their years in power to the systematic denial of the principle of one person, one vote.” For all the rhetorical overreach, however, there are plenty of useful provocations here to do a Zinn or Chomsky proud.
A rousing call to rally around popular rule and battle its enemies.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953368-00-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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