Shall we overcome?
Jan. 21st, 2024 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Democracy Awakening - Notes on the State of America, by Heather Cox Richardson
Best to read this one early in 2024, I thought, lest things get too depressing later on.
If there is a positive thing to take from the book, it is that democracy in America (and probably elsewhere), has been ever thus, and yet periodically can be recovered. Before Christmas, I watched the excellent mini-series Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, which clarified a lot of "pre-history" about Caesar I hadn't known before, including the Optimates and Populares among the Senate, and that last thing is a theme again here. In essence, the thesis is that whenever a conservative faction or party can't garner sufficient support from an electoral process, it will seek to undermine that electoral process in order to recover its apparent controlling position. The depressing thing is that the undermining is often successful, at least for a while, and at great cost to society as a whole. Stoke outrage about how "your taxes" are being used to fund basic infrastructure in deprived areas, to support migrants, and so on. I had mixed views on Blair's "education, education, education" strategy in the UK, but in one regard at least, I'd have hoped it would provide a bulwark against such transparent demonisation. (Limited evidence so far on that, though.)
Richardson's book is, depressingly though accurately, largely about race; relatively little is said about discrimination against women or LGBTQ+ people: one group generally the property of their husbands, the other selectively invisible. There is a bit of crossover from Dawkins's The God Delusion I read recently, with collusion between political and religious lobbies to convince people of a position on some issues. Reasonably enough, it's written for an American audience, and at times I felt there was probably an assumption that the reader knew more about US history than I do, but it didn't impair the ability to get points across. It's a very readable book, but at the same time, much of it makes for uncomfortable reading.
Best to read this one early in 2024, I thought, lest things get too depressing later on.
If there is a positive thing to take from the book, it is that democracy in America (and probably elsewhere), has been ever thus, and yet periodically can be recovered. Before Christmas, I watched the excellent mini-series Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, which clarified a lot of "pre-history" about Caesar I hadn't known before, including the Optimates and Populares among the Senate, and that last thing is a theme again here. In essence, the thesis is that whenever a conservative faction or party can't garner sufficient support from an electoral process, it will seek to undermine that electoral process in order to recover its apparent controlling position. The depressing thing is that the undermining is often successful, at least for a while, and at great cost to society as a whole. Stoke outrage about how "your taxes" are being used to fund basic infrastructure in deprived areas, to support migrants, and so on. I had mixed views on Blair's "education, education, education" strategy in the UK, but in one regard at least, I'd have hoped it would provide a bulwark against such transparent demonisation. (Limited evidence so far on that, though.)
Richardson's book is, depressingly though accurately, largely about race; relatively little is said about discrimination against women or LGBTQ+ people: one group generally the property of their husbands, the other selectively invisible. There is a bit of crossover from Dawkins's The God Delusion I read recently, with collusion between political and religious lobbies to convince people of a position on some issues. Reasonably enough, it's written for an American audience, and at times I felt there was probably an assumption that the reader knew more about US history than I do, but it didn't impair the ability to get points across. It's a very readable book, but at the same time, much of it makes for uncomfortable reading.