RaveThe New Republic\"Fortunately, he comes away from his globe-trotting search with critical lessons for activists both here and abroad. Setting the world afire, it turns out, is easier than one might expect. Tending to the flames is harder ... as reliably appalling as police crackdowns against mass demonstrations are, Bevins contends that their role in inspiring further action prevented the movements he surveyed from developing conceptual roots as deep as the problems they hoped to confront—outrage at the state’s violence rarely yielded to coherent shared analyses of the social, economic, and political conditions upholding the state … The causas episode captures well what gradually emerges as Bevins’s central theme. There is both power and peril in leaderless mass action. And the leaderlessness that spontaneous, social media–driven protest lends itself to was adopted as an outright virtue too readily in too many places … the institutions underpinning our politics and our economy have survived the decade mostly unchanged and unscathed; in general, we have about as many reasons to hit the streets now as we did 10 years ago. And when we do, we ought to take more than mere inspiration from movements abroad—it’s their failures that we might learn the most from.”
Alan Taylor
RaveThe New RepublicTaylor augments his analysis of war politics, including the conflict’s impact on the slavery question, with an unvarnished look at the war as it was actually conducted and, even at the time, condemned—not only by its political opponents but by voices within the American military ... It’s plainly important to Taylor that his books stand as accounts of all the blood we’ve let seep through the cracks ... [The American] habit of self-deception can imbue the reading of work like Taylor’s with the thrill of accessing illicit knowledge. And one of the most subversive and challenging ideas all good works of history offer is a sense that history can also move backward ... The generalization that our predecessors couldn’t have known or done better is challenged by the examples of those who did ... One leaves Taylor’s work understanding this fully—this isn’t Great Man history, but Some Guys history. The political leaders and famous personages that tower over our imaginations are condensed to life-size. They make grubby, horrid choices; they bumble, fumble, and scheme their way through moments of import alongside the extraordinary supporting cast of madmen, buffoons, and grifters that Taylor brings to life.
Barack Obama
MixedThe New Republic...now Obama himself is striding back into the American psyche with a book offering more audacity and more hope ... Obama has asked readers to wade through more than 700 pages in the service of that conclusion; the book itself—only the first of two volumes—is a testament to his faith in the perseverance of the American people ... the book is more than a collection of familiar Obamaisms and biographical miscellany—there are tick-tock accounts of the major events in his first term. Liberals and progressives who clutched their heads in frustration wondering what Obama could be thinking at various points between his inauguration and the bin Laden raid in 2011 now have a set of answers from the man himself ... Overall, the story being told at length here is one we’ve already heard in condensed form ... What will it take to correct course? There’s a perfunctory nod above to social solidarity. But Obama, as ever, is fundamentally an evangelist for personal responsibility. This comes out most glaringly, as it did during his presidency, in his comments about race and Black men in particular.
Ezra Klein
MixedThe New RepublicIt does not fully succeed: The sources of our divide appear more complicated than Klein suggests, and the path beyond polarization will be more fraught than he lets on ... Of all the forces thought to drive political attitudes and action, Klein focuses almost exclusively on the behavioral dynamics theorized by evolutionary psychologists ... Yet the state of American politics appears altogether different from partisan arrangements across the world ... the psychological perspective also leaves one with a muddled view of the American sociopolitical scene ... Oddly for a book by the co-founder of Vox—maybe America’s top publisher of policy journalism—Why We’re Polarized leaves little room for material politics. Of all the identities Klein examines, economic class is mentioned the least ... The way forward lies in convincing Americans not to retreat from national politics but to think even more broadly and abstractly about where this country ought to go. Why We’re Polarized does some of the job, but leaves a daunting truth unsaid: To fight polarization, we’ll have to get much more polarized. The only way out is through.
