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
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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