Our favorite books 2004.

• Position: Books - Journalists share their favorites

by Kate Clinton

For a year and a half, I've had the great pleasure of being in a study group which meets the second Thursday of every month. We've slogged through Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Amartya Serfs Development as Freedom, and Mike Hill's After Whiteness. I generally feel as if I should be at the children's table.

When we met at our apartment, aka "The Anti-Bush Book Annex," we discussed Against Love: A Polemic, by Laura Kipnis. Reading this case against marriage and its legalized monogamy as a killjoy control mechanism of the patriarchy made me laugh out loud at its dash, zip, and outrageous endorsement of adultery as if it were a popular uprising against the domestic gulag. The ten pages of coupled interdictions, "the things you can't do," are best read out loud if there ever is a Marriage Slam. The conversation this book provoked was the most personal and blushing of all our discussions.

If I could get my group to veer into fiction, I would recommend The Book of Salt by first-time novelist Monique Truong. The richly imagined story is told from the perspective of Binh, a gay man, who narrates his disgraced flight from his Vietnamese homeland to Paris as personal cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The metaphor of salt stands for "food, sweat, tears, and the sea." The novel explores not only the domestic partnership of Stein and Toklas but also French-colonized Vietnam, emotions lost in translation, and the life of a gay man in the 1930s.

And because sometimes my study group is way too serious, I would recommend to it and to you Jon Stewart's America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. The book's mock textbook style (with photos, graphs, and pie charts the envy of USA Today) is both silly and satiric. The punditocracy has recently been wringing its hands that young people get their news from Stewart's The Daily Show and not from their blowholes. This book could be the companion to Howard Zinn's A People's History. You will guffaw when you read America, so I recommend that you eat at least an hour before and clear the table.

Kate Clinton is a humorist.

by Ruth Conniff

Since 2004 was, above all, an election year, I spent it contemplating electoral politics. The fight to defeat Bush brought together progressives and Democrats across the left spectrum and threw into sharp relief both the uniting themes and divisive weaknesses in the Democratic Party.

E. J. Dionne Jr.'s book Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge offered an overview of recent liberal political history and a hopeful forecast for a progressive future.

Like virtually everyone I know, Dionne finds the Democratic establishment "flaccid" and lacking in conviction: "afraid of being too liberal, afraid of being weak on defense, afraid of being culturally permissive, afraid of being seen as apologizing for big government. Democrats are obsessed with telling people who they are not. As a result, no one knows who they are."

His critique reminded me of our late editor Erwin Knoll's favorite definition of a liberal: "Someone who leaves the room when the fight starts." But unlike Knoll, Dionne is no radical. A self-described moderate, he praises Joe Lieberman an awful lot for someone searching for a more robust opposition to the Republicans.

"The need to represent both the center and the left is a problem for the Democrats," Dionne writes. It can lead to a kind of fuzzy, muddled politics. But it can also, he says, lead to a winning majority.

Like Ralph Nader, who barely receives a mention in the book, Dionne argues that our current political moment is similar to the one at the dawn of the Progressive Era. Big business is sucking up the wealth of the nation, and the majority of American workers, consumers, and even stockholders need protection from raw corporate greed. Providing that protection could be the job of the Democrats.

Dionne laments the free market fundamentalist takeover of our language. Democrats and the left need to stop sounding like accountants, he suggests. Instead of talking about the need to immunize little children, we now talk about investing in "human capital," he says.

This is a timely example, given the recent shortage of flu vaccine. Because there is no money in protecting the weak and vulnerable, pharmaceutical companies concentrate on peddling cures for erectile dysfunction and hair loss. The profit motive is a terrible driver for our health care system. Government needs to step in.

Another recent example is New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's headline-making lawsuit against the insurance companies--the biggest crackdown on collusion and price-fixing in the history of that industry.

These are the sorts of causes the Democrats should champion. But they are hamstrung, Dionne argues, because they've lost the language of right and wrong. "It is hard to express your own beliefs if you are forced to speak in the tongue of your opponents," he writes.

Meanwhile, Republicans have, in recent years, become ever more emboldened to pursue a far-right politics. Dionne uses the example of Bush's tax cuts. The Democrats' cave-in set the stage for the whole outrageously shameless Bush program. Then came 9/11 and The Wall Street Journal editorial that laid out the Bush strategy: "Americans of all stars and stripes are uniting behind their President," the Journal wrote, and urged Bush to use the moment to push for a capital gains tax cut, drill in the Arctic, and appoint conservative judges. It was the beginning of a bitter, ugly period leading up to the present moment.

Dionne has many conservative friends. He is a believer in left-right coalitions, and even had high hopes for President Bush's faith-based initiatives. All of this makes his perspective different from that of many Bush opponents. When Dionne debunks the "compassionate conservative" project, his critique is interesting because of his willingness to give the President the benefit of the doubt early on.

While I am far less forgiving of Bible-thumping and flag-waving than Dionne, I was interested in his suggestions for a winning progressive message--one that speaks to moderates and lefties alike.

This is a book about tone and language--the kind of political consultant thinking that, while not deeply philosophical, is nonetheless essential if the goal is to win elections.

A lot of us on the left are more willing to think in those terms these days.

My old boss Erwin Knoll prided himself on not voting at all. Ralph Nader seems to have gone down a road that takes us farther and farther from wresting power from the right.

Dionne suggests that we think about what it might mean to govern the nation in the interests of most of the citizens.

Why not?

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.

by Anne-Marie Cusac

Here's a must-read for anyone who wonders...