Monday, February 1, 2016

Book review: America Ascendant


Stanley B. Greenberg, America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation’s Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and leading the 21st Century
New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2015
406 pages



Doubtless you’ve been wondering what’s going on in American politics, our Congress, our state governments and the Republican Party. Greenberg offers many answers in America Ascendant.

He expects we are witnessing the slow unraveling of what ails our body politic: civil dysfunction, the concentration of greed/power/wealth, the conspicuously parochial Republican/conservative/rightwing points of view, and the blatant bigotry that too often masks itself with dissembling, righteous talk of “traditional” American “values” like self-reliance, commitment to family, Jeffersonian “small government” and religious faith. Greenberg expects that better days are coming, but he cautions that the process will be achingly and devastatingly slow.



His essential message is that America is inexorably becoming a less white and more diverse nation—most abundantly, a nation of immigrants, and a nation undeniably represented by young generations of folks who are tolerant and happy to live their lives with culturally and racially and sexually diverse friends, lovers, marriage partners, neighbors and coworkers—the folks who consciously wish to live their lives unfettered by the domination of a select few with great wealth and great power.

To those of us who have struggled to understand the motivations and fears and dreams of the folks who support the divisive and hurtful and dangerous and self-interested antics of so many politicians, America Ascendant offers much more understanding than I have encountered from any other source.

What Greenberg says is not pretty. His book suggests that a good outcome is possible.

I want to believe his message.







Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

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