A well-researched and uncompromising case against today’s Republican Party.
A former Republican takes on President Donald Trump and the modern GOP in this political work.
As a professor emeritus at Boston University and an associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, much of Clemens’ prodigious scholarship has focused on complexity theory and international relations. In this book, he offers an impassioned and personal case against Trump not just as an academic, but also as an ex-Republican. Thus, while the work opens by quoting conservative icon Ayn Rand, it argues that “what was the Grand Old Party now ignores many of the principles championed” by that luminary, from an emphasis on personal character to sound government. Clemens implores both conservatives and progressives to reject the “evil…Trump-Republican virus” that “has sickened America’s body politic” and threatens to turn the nation into an autocracy. Refusing to pull his punches, the author devotes an entire chapter, for example, to examining the “parallels” between Hitler and Trump, who follows the “Nazi model” by deploying “colorful language to people who felt left behind,” exploiting racism, and skirting the law to solidify power. Yet the administration’s political machinations are limited by its ineptitude, as Clemens describes Trump’s regime as a “kakistocracy” ruled by the “ignorant, incompetent, and venal.” Blending a polemic with a scholarly analysis (and ample footnotes), other chapters look at Trump’s ability to unite the alt-right and evangelical Christians behind a rhetoric that blends faith and nationalism, which provides legitimacy to extremists and an excuse for religious fundamentalists to ignore the president’s own salacious history. Both groups are unified through their “hostility to liberal democracy,” which celebrates racial, religious, and cultural diversity.
Additional chapters skillfully showcase Trump’s hypocrisy of “imposing Law and Order with Storm Troopers” on Black protesters while filling his cabinet with criminal “Dirty Old Men,” like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, who brazenly defy the law. Indeed, the book’s most compelling chapters are those that systematically detail case after case of corruption inside Republican administrations since the 1980s. While Trump and the modern GOP are the villains of his narrative, Clemens—despite his past affiliation with the party—sees the president as the culmination of a Republican strategy since the late 20th century. Tellingly, Republicans have allowed Trump to supplant traditional conservative ideas, such as family values, fiscal responsibility, and a foreign policy that promotes freedom, with a new “Amoral Code” that justifies criminal behavior and ignores the national debt in favor of a tax system that rewards political donors. This code has turned the nation away from alliances with liberal democracies, embracing authoritarian partners in Saudi Arabia and Russia. The volume concludes with a pragmatic and comprehensive plan to “reboot America” that includes a massive federal investment in science and technology and a host of voter empowerment initiatives. Overall, this is a searing indictment not just of Trump and his cronies, but also of insincere Republican politicians who have for nearly a generation supplanted President Ronald Reagan’s idealized “city on a hill” with “a model of venal greed mocked and despised by people of good will.” Though some may dismiss Clemens’ comparisons between Trump and Hitler as hyperbolic, the author’s scholarly bona fides and Republican background lend credibility to a book that is both erudite and accessible.
A well-researched and uncompromising case against today’s Republican Party. (afterword, acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-76719-2
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Clemens
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2020
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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