Books and Reviews

Ezra Klein reviews the new book The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria:

In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. [...]

The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. [...] We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.

Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.

Liberals see opportunities for cooperation, while conservatives see nothing but competition.

See Newsweek for an excerpt from the book.

So once you've finished the reading list of anti-conservative books, you can get started on these:

• Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, Eric Alterman
• The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
• Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, Robert Reich
• Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success, Paul Waldman
• Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, George Lakoff
• Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation, Jeffrey Feldman

Back in 2006, I remarked "it's about time liberals start taking aim at conservatism itself" and not just individual conservatives like George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter. It looks like others had similar thoughts, because there's a bumper crop of anti-conservative books available now.

• The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, Greg Anrig
• Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean
• Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, Glenn Greenwald
• Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, Jeffrey Feldman
• God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sarah Posner
• The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, Jonathan Chait

Another book to put on your reading list — The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, by Greg Anrig Jr. (TPMCafe):

The real wonder of the conservative enterprise has been its ability to transform the rudimentary desire of a handful of wealthy families to gut the government into a set of public policy ideas that would help accomplish that goal while sounding appetizing enough to attract large numbers of voters. Rather ingeniously, the simple, easy-to-understand ideas they developed are largely consistent with each other and elegantly link to a broader story line that the conservative movement has effectively sold with remarkable sophistication. That's how the right won the war of ideas. It's also the underlying reason why those ideas keep failing in practice.

Raw Story:

The film's most interesting scene is an archived White House conversation between then-President Richard Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman that Moore argues is the starting point of the modern healthcare complex. In the Feb. 7, 1971 recording — part of the hundreds of hours of Nixon's secret White House tapes — Ehrlichman explains "health maintenance organizations like Edward Kaiser's Permanente thing." Kaiser Permanente is now the nation's largest HMO.

"Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. ... All the incentives are toward less medical care," Ehrlichman says to Nixon, according to a transcript. "The less care they give them, the more money they make."

As Christy Hardin Smith asked in January (D4U):

[I]s the purpose of health insurance to provide health care to everyone who pays into the system, and to spread risk across a broad pool of Americans... or is its sole purpose to maximize profits for insurance companies?

The New Yorker:

Each season of "24," which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer — a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland — must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. [...] With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.

The show's appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the "ticking time bomb" plot. [...]

Bob Cochran, who created the show with [Joel] Surnow, admitted, "Most terrorism experts will tell you that the 'ticking time bomb' situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week." [...]

[Lead writer Howard] Gordon, who is a "moderate Democrat," said that it worries him when "critics say that we've enabled and reflected the public's appetite for torture. Nobody wants to be the handmaid to a relaxed policy that accepts torture as a legitimate means of interrogation." He went on, "But the premise of '24' is the ticking time bomb. It takes an unusual situation and turns it into the meat and potatoes of the show." He paused. "I think people can differentiate between a television show and reality."

Here's something for a little change of pace — what were your favorite movies of 2006? My Top 7 list is:

An Inconvenient Truth
Brick
Half Nelson
Stranger Than Fiction
Thank You For Smoking
The Illusionist
Who Killed the Electric Car?

If you need to jog your memory, Metacritic has a good compilation of the major film critics' Top 10 lists, plus a nifty graph at the bottom of the page that shows how many times each movie was cited. The critics' favorites were United 93, The Queen, The Departed, Pan's Labyrinth, and Borat.

I saw Who Killed the Electric Car? last night and it was very good. Starts off a bit slow, but has some real drama in the second half. (Yes, drama... about cars.) If you live in the Salt Lake area, you can see it at the Regency Theatres in Trolley Square. (The NYTimes reports today that Toyota is on track to surpass General Motors as the world's largest auto company, partly due to strong sales of the Prius. GM, what fools you were.)

Also, Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth is still playing at the Broadway Center. Both movies are extremely informative, entertaining, and ultimately inspiring.

Have you seen either movie? What did you think?

Update: A recent YouTube parody of Gore's movie may have been created by ExxonMobil's PR firm.

Review of John Dean's new book Conservatives without Conscience by Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory:

Dean contends, and amply documents, that the "conservative" movement has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of individual power, the absence of which creates fear and insecurity in the individuals who crave it. By definition, its followers' devotion to authority and the movement's own power is supreme, thereby overriding the consciences of its individual members and removing any intellectual and moral limits on what will be justified in defense of their movement. [...]

What excites, enlivens, and drives Bush followers is the identification of the Enemy followed by swarming, rabid attacks on it. It is a movement that defines itself not by identifiable ideas but by that which it is not. Its foreign policy objectives are identifiable by one overriding goal — destroy and kill the Enemy, potential or suspected enemies, and everyone nearby. And it increasingly views its domestic goals through the same lens. It is a movement in a permanent state of war, which views all matters, foreign and domestic, only in terms of this permanent war.

See this post for one example of the right wing terrorizing "the Enemy" — in this case, that perennial enemy, The New York Times.