A welcome, revealing study of how political messages can be shaped positively to counter both enmity and disinformation.
A sharp examination of how activists are working to build resistance to the many antidemocratic forces now at work around the world.
In 2013, writes political analyst Giridharadas, a Russian troll farm recruited writers with the pledge of free meals and weekly payments in exchange for social media posts that supported Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. The farm soon added a brief “to foment political unrest in Russia’s great adversary, the United States,” by exploiting already widening divisions in American society in order to undermine belief in democracy. The drumbeat sounded to both left and right at Russian hands: “These people are not to be trusted. They will never change. They are who they are. And who they are is a risk to your being.” Granted, notes the author in a cogent, sometimes encouraging narrative, there were yawning divisions to exploit, and they would widen with the rise of Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. Some of Giridharadas’ subjects seem more or less doctrinaire at first blush: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, say, who came under resounding assault from her own progressive wing for having dared say something nice about John McCain after he died, giving indications that there may be room for common ground after all. Of course, there are plenty of good reasons for political division. As one social justice activist told the author, “You probably don’t want to end up in a partnership with Jared Kushner just because you favor prison reform.” But most of the activists the author illuminatingly profiles are seriously committed to building bridges to a kinder, gentler, more united politics at a time when many purists, agreeing with others on 90% of issues, confine their focus to the 10% difference. Instead, the goal is to help voters find common ground, recognizing, for one thing, that “making manipulated people feel stupid is a terrible way to fight these [antidemocratic] forces.”
A welcome, revealing study of how political messages can be shaped positively to counter both enmity and disinformation.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-31899-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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