A dark but substantive examination of the state of American politics.
Political analyst Chohan cautions readers about the rise of antidemocratic sentiments in this nonfiction book.
According to the author, right-wing forces in the United States are cloaked in “campaign slogans, flag pins, and policy proposals wrapped in red, white, and blue.” However, although these popular symbols evoke ideals of American freedom and national pride, he says, modern conservatives are secretly committed to “shaping America to serve a concentrated few while convincing the public it’s for everyone.” Chohan begins his analysis with the well-known Powell memorandum of 1971. This missive, drafted by then-future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, offered conservative think tanks and lobbyists a blueprint for rolling back decades of liberal reforms enacted by New Deal and Great Society legislation. According to Chohan’s cogent analysis, conservative operatives followed Powell’s guidance over the past half-century and systematically employed lobbyist groups, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, to influence politicians. They’ve also created an entire media industry, he says, which feeds Americans a constant stream of disinformation. Overall, Chohan’s work effectively makes a case that economic and political power is wielded by a select few by covering topics such as voter suppression, conservative saturation of the federal judicial system, and rollbacks of educational freedom, reproductive rights, and regulatory restraints on big business. Although the book is almost dystopian in its assessment of contemporary America—particularly since the reelection of President Donald Trump—its final chapter sees hope in a rising resistance movement, and it calls for readers to “flip the script” with mass mobilization. Although the volume is polemic in its writing style, it’s backed by solid research from reputable academic and journalistic sources and concludes each chapter with helpful reference endnotes. In just over 200 pages, it carefully balances sound research and detailed coverage of contemporary conservativism in efficient, concise prose, replete with accessible, bullet-pointed lists. Its acerbic manner may alienate some conservatives, but its abundance of research will allow readers to come to their own conclusions.
A dark but substantive examination of the state of American politics.Pub Date: July 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798317805258
Page Count: 300
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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