A strong argument for civic reengagement.
Why the future of democracy is in peril.
Nichols, a columnist for USA Today, contributing writing at the Atlantic, and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, joins other recent political analysts in decrying the weakening of democracy, laying the blame on Americans’ lack of engagement in political life, ignorance of issues, and failure to contribute to the common good. “When we disengage from society and ignore our civic obligations, we are bad citizens,” he writes. The American voter exemplifies a “politics of narrow self-interest” blended with “general cynicism” about government, politicians, and even their fellow Americans. The author’s assessment of the general political landscape is more persuasive than his analysis that disengagement stems from the “peace, affluence, and technological progress” which has afforded most people too much leisure, making them materialistic and narcissistic. With nothing to challenge them, they long “for a great struggle that could give drama and deeper meaning.” This yearning for conflict leads to anger, nostalgia, and social revenge—all sentiments fomented by the populist right. When enough people are “continually angry, entitled, and conspiracy-addled,” Nichols writes, “civic life becomes impossible.” As an example of what a narcissistic community looks like, the author offers a portrait of Chiaramonte, a village in southern Italy that was documented in the 1950s. Widely distrusting politicians and the clergy, the residents cared only for themselves and their families—a tribalism that Nichols sees increasingly in the U.S. Nichols attests to having faith in the durability of liberal democracy, suggesting several ways to revive citizenship: parties should “remain grounded in identifiable principles” instead of being “megaphones for the most vocal activists within them”; young people should be required to fulfill a “summer of service” in the military; and electoral and constitutional reform should include statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., expanding the House. “In a liberal democracy,” he writes, “citizens are masters of their fate.”
A strong argument for civic reengagement.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-751887-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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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