A clear and informative history with limited appeal for nonspecialists.
If democracy seems imperiled, don’t blame only cable news and social media. Two media experts argue that it has always lurched from crisis to crisis.
Gershberg, a journalism and media studies professor, and Illing, a Vox reporter and podcaster, challenge the idea that the linchpin of democracy is a set of rules or institutions, such as safeguards for free elections or laws that protect civil rights. In this dense history of the intersection of politics, democracy, and free expression, the authors argue that “the essential democratic freedom” is freedom of expression. That freedom leads to “the paradox of democracy”—“a free and open communication environment…because of its openness, invites exploitation and subversion from within.” Fascists like Mussolini and injustices like Jim Crow laws arise because open communication allows people to persuade others to support their aims, and it’s been that way for millennia. In ancient Athens, Socrates’ death sentence was “democracy’s original sin”: A city known for free speech condemned a philosopher for speaking freely. Moving chronologically through the centuries, Gershberg and Illing show how their “paradox” has played out in movements that include the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the rise and fall of local newspapers, the ascent of cable news and social media, and the eruption of the “cancel culture.” Viewing democracy as inherently messy, the authors offer no global blueprint for fixing the chaos, and their few suggestions are overfamiliar, including their call for “the restoration of local journalism, especially print newspapers.” A flat narrative also works against their worthwhile material: The authors don’t develop or expand their thesis so much as elaborate on the same paradox, again and again, and how it informed successive eras. The result is a book that provides valuable context for the latest assaults on democracy but one that, with a more effective structure, could have reached a general readership.
A clear and informative history with limited appeal for nonspecialists.Pub Date: June 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-226-68170-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
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
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