An analytically incisive account of the Electoral College’s foibles.
McIntee gives a comprehensive critique of the Electoral College that includes a consideration of its mathematical failings.
McIntee observes that the Electoral College is not only “peculiar,” but also “immensely unpopular,” and yet it has managed to endure as an American institution since the nation’s inception. Its longevity seems partly due to a mythology that has enshrouded it, a set of misconceptions the author swiftly but rigorously dismantles. This baroque system was not, despite insistence to the contrary, created to protect the representative power of smaller states or rural parts of the country, nor does it do so. Nor was it designed in order to enshrine slavery or to discourage the popular vote. Rather, it was the result of confusion regarding the nature of democracy, more specifically who gets to vote and how. Yet according to McIntee, the Electoral College is ineffective and obsolete—it is unacceptably chaotic, often undermines democratic representation and proportionality, and does not encourage candidates to aim for politically or regionally broad appeal: These are all issues McIntee handles with clarity. Also, he furnishes a remarkably concise history of the Electoral College and its shifting permutations. The author is especially astute when appraising the Electoral College’s “basic mathematical properties” (he is a mathematician by training). Further, this is a genuinely thoughtful study and not a political polemic: “The fact is that we don’t actually know what is the best way to elect a president....We don’t honestly know how American voters will behave either in the short term or the long term when faced with an entirely different voting system.” The only failing of this otherwise edifying work is its neglect of deeper philosophical arguments in favor of the Electoral College and pertaining to the nature of federal republicanism—one can see this in his lack of serious analysis of the Federalist Papers. Nevertheless, this book remains a vital contribution to an important national debate.
An analytically incisive account of the Electoral College’s foibles.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781959266006
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Hurricane Lamp Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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