Holding together The hijacking of rights in America and how to reclaim them for everyone

Political scientists Shattuck (Freedom on Fire), Raman (coauthor, The Coming Good Society), and Risse, colleagues at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, deliver an accessible survey of the struggle to "realize the promise of equal rights" in America. Contending that progress made in expanding rights to marginalized groups has always been met with backlash, the authors draw a direct line from slave patrols to the Red Summer of 1919 to modern-day police brutality and mass incarceration. They also connect recent Republican efforts to pass voting restrictions that "have disproportionately impacted... people of color, the poor, and foreign-born citizens" to voter suppression campaigns in the Jim Crow--era South. Elsewhere, the authors delve into the use of social media to sow discord and misinformation and the challenges inherent in protecting freedom of speech while preventing violent incidents like the January 6 Capitol riot. Their policy recommendations include restoring the Voting Rights Act, eliminating cash bail, and promoting media literacy programs. Though they break little new ground, the authors make salient connections between the past and the present and issue a cogent call for Americans to unite over their shared belief in the importance of individual rights. This is a lucid primer on many of today's most pressing political and social issues. (May)

A spirited defense of the political and civil rights that Americans enjoy--and that are constantly being chipped away. In the middle of the pandemic in July 2020, a nationwide poll showed that 71% of Americans believed that "Americans have more in common than many people think." By May 2021, that figure was 88%, a stunning supermajority. What holds these Americans together, maintain the authors, faculty members at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, is our portfolio of rights, constitutional and agreed-upon and even some that we haven't figured out yet. On the last point, the authors reveal that most Americans hold generous--liberal, even--views on the rights of immigrants, to say nothing of police reform, equal rights for minorities, and the like. The fundamental right is the right to vote, and that is precisely the one that the authors hold is most endangered by the rise of neo-authoritarian attempts to disenfranchise voters, "a direct assault on the voting rights of the electoral majority that had defeated [Trump]." Though the authors try not to evoke the former president too often, they lay many assaults on rights at the door of the previous administration, including the unstated right to have a civil conversation about politics without incorporating that administration's "vast official landscape of disinformation and misinformation." Though the authors add that "ideological tension is a foundation of a healthy democracy," so, too, is a shared standard of objective truth. But the authors show how few institutions are invested in teaching people how to distinguish fact from lie. On that note, they conclude, perhaps controversially, that federal legislation should be enacted to regulate social media and "require algorithms to be used safely and responsibly to promote freedom of speech and protect against racial, gender, religious, disability, or LGBTQ discrimination." A provocative and well-considered argument stressing the necessity of maintaining the sanctity of hard-won liberties. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.