10-03-06, 8:53 am

Here is another of our occasional book previews or 'meta-reviews,' reviews of reviews of books of interest to the progressive community. PA needs book reviewers so if any of our readers would like to review any of the works previewed here please contact us at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.

Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power, by Thomas B. Edsall, Basic Books, 320 pages, reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, September 12, 2006.

It’s really ironic that politically the term 'Reds' is now being used to describe the Republicans This is not the ‘Red America' many of us on the Left had in mind. Edsall’s new book indicates, as Kakutani’s headline suggests, that 'The Republican Collapse May Not Be So Imminent.' Edsall writes that the Republicans have 'a set of advantages, some substantial and some marginal' that has allowed them to win in close elections. He doesn’t see this changing anytime soon. If so, this is bad news for the Left. But maybe we should not be too glum. The book does point out that the Republicans no not have a really big appeal to the majority of the people. The policies they put forth Edsall says, do 'not have the decisive support of the people.' Well, that’s a relief!

They have retained power by 'the slimmest of political margins' which they have used to attempt 'to remake America -- as well as America’s role in the world.' Their tactics have been working, and Kakutani further quotes the author as saying it looks like they 'will continue to maintain, over the long term, a thin but durable margin of victory.' Let us hope that he wrong.

It is important to not that, as Edsall points out, the Republicans have 'not achieved a political realignment.' Their radical right policies are being forced on the country 'without clear majoritarian support.' Well, if that is the case, why should they be able to continue to get away with such undemocratic behavior?

The Republicans, by using 'wedge' issues such as gay rights, abortion, immigrant rights, etc., have 'tapped into and capitalized on the sense of dislocation and conflict generated by rapid cultural modernization among many middle-class and working-class voters.' Edsall also maintains that the Democrats have failed to build the long-term institutionalized modalities built up by the Republicans that would allow them to wrest power from the Right. The Democrats tend to focus on short-term ideological issues. This weakness is what enables the Republicans to keep their slim lead.

The Democrats are not to be ruled out however. They may get back into power by default. He means the voters may reject Republican excesses rather than embrace what the Democrats are putting forth. It appears to me that he is saying the Democrats lack a unified ideological front. They are split on the war in Iraq, for example, with, most notably, Clinton calling for more troops while the base of the party favors withdrawal.

Kakutani quotes the author on the 'shortcomings' which might cost the Republicans their lead: 'The protective stance of the Republicans toward the rich and the dominant and the acquiescence to a morally and intellectually repressive social agenda are too much at odds with the American egalitarian ethic to achieve the overwhelming strength of the Democratic coalition of the New Deal era.' It will be the job of a center-left coalition to try and unify around the advances made in the New Deal and then to build on them to strengthen the position of the working class and its allies against the Republican ultra-right.

Finally, the reviewer quotes Edsall's conclusion: Politics functions as a market, and the political marketplace is now significantly out of balance -- it is in disequilibrium. If political parties were corporations, the political market would be viewed as territory ripe for takeover or for the entry of an outside competitor.' Lets hope we have the political wherewithal to take advantage of this 'market moment' and oust the Right from control of the Congress in November.

BONDS OF CIVILITY: AESTHETIC NETWORKS AND THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF JAPANESE CULTURE by Eiko Ikegami, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005, 475 pages, reviewed by Christena Turner in SCIENCE vol. 313, 15 September 2006.

The reviewer finds this book 'fascinating.' It seems that Westerners can't seem to figure out where the Japanese are coming from. On the one hand they can be friendly and outgoing and on the other reserved and withdrawn towards non-Japanese. Turner says foreigners in Japan often get the feeling that they don't 'belong.' Ikegami (who teaches at the New School for Social Research) maintains that non-Japanese fall into the 'domain of strangers' which lies 'between friends and enemies.' The Japanese don't really know how to act towards us.

They try to treat us with 'civility,' which is another domain, between 'intimacy and danger.' The author writes that, 'The degree of 'strangership' may be an indication of the degree of civility in a given society.' This is important, the reviewer says, because social scientists want to know what conditions must prevail to bring about 'modern democracies.' In the West they think a precondition is a strong 'civil society,' that is, 'the emergence of voluntary associations of individuals formed outside the realms of both the political institutions of the state and the intimate ties of the family.'

The problem is that non-Western societies do not exhibit our types of civil societies. So, Ikegami wants to study voluntary associations which create 'civility' instead. She calls these associations of 'civility without civil society.' The reviewer says it was such associations that the author thinks 'prepared the population of pre-modern Japan for its strikingly rapid trans-formation into one of the first and most successful modern nations outside of the West.'

Ikegami holds that aesthetic associations in pre-modern Japan prepared the population for modernity. People were brought together in poetry and art associations,. 'Participation in networks of artistic hobbyists,' Turner explains, 'taught people how to moderate closeness and distance, form associations [such as for composing poems, etc.,] and interact in emerging public activities.

Ikegami discusses various kinds of aesthetic networks that developed in the pre-modern period, and ends up maintaining, as the reviewer puts it, 'that these cultural networks and activities subtly but successfully undermined the feudal status system and paved the way for modern forms of civic relationships.'

This is a new way to look at the development of modernity in areas of the world that developed outside of the Western context. It is certainly worthwhile to rethink the historical models of development that Western social scientists, including Marxists, have used to try and explain non-Western civilizations. The better we understand other people's cultures, the better we will understand our own.



--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at