Democracy in America is still much as de Tocqueville described it: illogical persnickety white folks, especially not-overly-educated non-urban white folks, asserting their independence. So why does a grown-up intellectual like Dworkin, a distinguished legal theorist with Ivy credentials, believe that these people, these Americans, are going to participate in a reasoned debate about anything?
In a new book on American foreign policy, New Republic editor J. Peter Scoblic spends a couple of hundred pages reviewing the historical record of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and the current Bush presidency before getting to the real nub of the issue, in which he is succinctly correct: Conservatism, he writes, "although it has a clear intellectual pedigree, operates on a deep psychological level as well."
The main draw is not the book's humor but its behind-the-scenes tour of the profit-driven, out-of-touch mismanagement of a major record label.
After reading the new book by Kevin Phillips, a painful realization dawns: Not one of the people running for president is addressing how interconnected and serious America's economic, ecological, and security problems are. Worse, the bankers and hedge-fund speculators who created the credit crisis are financing the campaigns of Democrats -- the only politicians likely ever to rein them in.
Tags:
capitalism,
2008 presidential election,
politics,
Kevin Phillips,
Economy,
Wall Street,
climate-change,
credit crisis,
Nonfiction Reviews,
Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
Spanning over a quarter century of conflict in the Middle East, and forwarding the voices of sixty poets from multiple nations, this collection offers an intricate understanding of what it means to resist, to give birth to change, to create meaning out of astonishing political chaos and violence
