Red meat for progressives, tempering its outrage with hopefulness and a plan for moving forward.
Examination of an America driven by right-wing anger and revenge.
Law professors Michaels and Noll start off with a chilling quote from right-wing political strategist Steve Bannon, who offered his podcast listeners some advice: “You just have to impose your will.” He was urging his fans to resist the inauguration of Joe Biden as president; that comment was broadcast on Jan. 5, 2021. Bannon, the authors argue, is in the vanguard of a new class of political vigilantes: ”loosely connected cadres of right-wing activists, lawyers, thugs, grifters, and plutocrats who rally around a twice impeached president and blame their problems—real and manufactured—on Democrats, minorities, foreigners, scientists, bureaucrats, and educators.” The authors trace the origins of what they call “Vigilante Democracy,” a system that recruits “citizen culture warriors” to uphold white Christian power, to right-wing media figures like Rush Limbaugh and politicians like Sarah Palin. They also discuss the right’s embrace of George Zimmerman, who gunned down an unarmed Black teenager in a gated Florida community, and Kyle Rittenhouse, who after an altercation shot and killed a protestor at a Wisconsin racial justice demonstration. Vigilante Democracy, Michaels and Noll write, “deploys lawyers, gunslingers, thugs, parent associations, snitches, podcasters, influencers, keyboard warriors, and QAnon trolls” to ban books, restrict abortion, and demonize transgender children. The remedy, the authors conclude, lies with blue states playing “constitutional hardball”; they propose a series of laws that the states could pass to combat right-wing extremism. Concerned progressives, who have been beaten down by MAGA adherents but energized by recent liberal electoral victories, will find this interesting and inspiring reading. The examples of vigilantism the authors give won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has paid much attention to American political culture, but the book does present a coherent narrative that explains the nation’s descent into violence and authoritarianism.
Red meat for progressives, tempering its outrage with hopefulness and a plan for moving forward.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781668023235
Page Count: 384
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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