 |
|
|
|
|
|
Book Reviews
|
|
|
|
Wake up... You're Liberal: How we can take
America back from the Right
by Ted Rall
(Soft Skull Press; 2004;$15.95; 315pps)
|
|
|
|
Another book that came out this year from Soft Skull Press is by cartoonist Ted Rall, called Wake up ... You’re Liberal: How we can take America back from the Right. He argues that most Republican voters agree with liberals on most issues but have been conned into working against themselves. He attacks conventional political wisdom, hypocrites, and cultural shibboleths with gleeful abandon. If you are into strategies, he has a chapter called “Getting the Left Together.” He writes about how successful the right wing Republicans have gotten in the past 30 years and how the left/liberals should be doing a similar strategy rather than having all these splinter groups narrowly focused on their specific passionate issue. We need an umbrella fast that includes all the progressive elements, but since many on the left have a tendency to be anarchistic and independent, it will be a struggle for sure.
He has a detailed account of the growth and development of the PNAC, the Project for a New American Century that incorporated extremist right-wing thinking into the Republican Party. The book is an insightful read of why people are liberal but have been hoodwinked and fooled by the Democratic Party; he dissects Democratic Party defeats and explains how different actions could have saved the issue. An interesting chart reveals that the US has zero legally-mandated vacation days per year compared to an average of 15-20 in other first world countries. Compared to days actually taken off, we see the US with 10 compared to an average of 25 in those same countries. I was just reading today in Harpers that people in the US really feel they have the best standard of living in the world. “They don’t, but they don’t know they don’t. Virtually every nation in Western Europe has universal health care.” In many countries the social benefits are so generous that poverty has been practically eliminated. “Wages in most European countries now outpace wages in the US.” (Ron D. Daniels, in the August issue). Back to another chart in Rall’s book, one about voter turnout: the US is 114 out of 140 countries. Average voter participation from 1945 to1998 is 48.3%. Ranked as the top five are Italy, Cambodia, Seychelles, Iceland and Indonesia.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|