These Two Very Different Books Capture the Current Political Moment
“The arc of the moral universe is long,” Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked, “but it bends toward justice.” Dogged journalists like Jerry Mitchell have more than a little to do with that. Mitchell’s exacting and nail-bitingly exciting Race Against Time chronicles a 30-year career spent prying back open and helping to solve some of the most infamous cold cases of the civil rights era.
As a young court reporter in 1989 at the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, Mitchell bore witness to the indelible effect the 1964 roadside slaying of activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, by Klansmen, had on the character of the Magnolia State.
He attended a screening of the movie Mississippi Burning, a dramatized account of the killings, and afterward, while speaking to a few investigators involved in the original case, was stunned that the identities of the culprits were an open secret, yet they had never been tried for murder. In what would be the genesis of a far-reaching, sometimes quixotic quest for the truth, ultimately leading to a conviction in that case and others, Mitchell experienced “the electric feeling of discovering a story that needs to be told.”
Readers can expect the same sensation on every page of Mitchell’s vital and timely inquiry, especially as his remarkable shoe-leather effort finally brings the justice King dreamed of.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, journalist Ezra Klein sought out political scientists, anticipating they’d be as stunned by the outcome as Klein and other pundits had been. “Reality had ruptured,” he felt. “We were owed answers.”
But those feelings weren’t borne out by the data. What emerges in Klein’s eye-opening Why We’re Polarized is that trend lines had remained shockingly stable for decades, with, for example, the same percentage of men—52—casting ballots for Trump as had for Mitt Romney, and with Hispanic support for the candidate who called Mexicans “rapists” only 3 percentage points lower than it had been for John McCain in 2008.
How to account for this calcification, and what does it portend for donkeys and elephants trapped in a zero-sum game? Klein’s brilliant diagnosis and prescription provide a path to understanding—and healing.
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