Our Time is Now by Stacey Abrams
I have mixed feelings about this book, published in 2020. First of all, I think there is a lot of good information in it. I learned a lot about efforts to prevent votes from being counted, and efforts to prevent citizens from voting. I think it is a book worth reading, but I also am very critical of this book.
The entire perspective of this is book is basically: Democrats have better policy, and the only reason we lose is because Republicans engage in voter suppression.
That's a little hyperbolic. But it's a dominant perspective throughout.
The book is very well written. Most chapters start with some personal anecdotes. Either stories of her own, or stories of others she's talked to/worked with. We get a first-hand look at how someone, who made a best-effort at voting, got rejected - either they were unable to cast their vote or their ballot was thrown out. She then goes into the details of how each of these cases of voter suppression functioned at an administrative level.
There is so much to learn from these stories. And I recommend reading this book for that reason.
But on to the criticism.
Firstly - she doesn't even mention Citizens United, or the Democrats' failure to overturn it even though they've had a trifecta once (maybe twice) since Citizens United was passed. CU is the Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to give basically unlimited money to political efforts, and to do so anonymously.
In a late chapter, she wrote that she had disagreements with both Bush's, with Obama, and with Clinton, but that Trump's administration is the first one where she fundamentally disagrees with the foreign policy stance of the United States. This irritated me. She explained that it had to do with trade-wars, isolationist policies, anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, and damaging our reputation on the world stage.
It perturbs me that she doesn't have a fundamental disagreement with the U.S.'s foreign policy stance other than Trump. Because our stance has been to use our military power to bully countries we disagree with. We murder people, and all of our presidents are war criminals. Our foreign affairs are horrendous, and the fact that she's not appalled by them before Trump appalls me.
And this plays into another thing she writes in one of the last two chapters - that the next steps for our country involves returning us to being a moral leader on the global stage. And um, WHAT!? We are not a moral leader. We may have appeared as one. We may present ourselves as one. But we have a LONG history of civil rights abuses, of fascism, of slavery, segregation, oppression of LGBTQIA+ people. Oppression of women. And so-on. And our economic policy is extremely pro-corporate and anti-people.
She has a whole chapter about the rise of Populism, and how Authoritarian Populist leaders are on the rise globally - Trump being one of them. My Best Friend raised a concern that Abrams seems to be opposed to populism generally. And ... I'm not sure if she is definitively against populism, but it feels that way.
This whole book is basically about how terrible our Democracy is because of our long history (and current practices) of voter suppression. And then she has the nerve to say that we were once a leader in democratic innovation. Maybe our Democratic systems were innovative in some respects, but they were implemented in extremely oppressive ways. And we've fallen into a disgusting two-party system, with winner-takes-all elections, which disenfranchises nearly half of our country every single election. We are innovative in some respects, but not broadly speaking, if you ask me.
And back to my early criticism - that she blames Republicans for Democrat losses.
Voter Suppression is a real problem. Yes, it plays a role. Trump is a scumbag and lies and wins people over. Yes, he is a problem.
But Democrats have failed to win support, and she takes almost no accountability for that. Getting into that would be another whole long post, but let's summarize it as: Talking a big game, but then delivering for corporations + putting Hilary up for the 2016 Presidential instead of Bernie + turning their backs on Zohran and other actual progressives.
She does mention that "even [she] didn't escape" the twitter mob. And wrote briefly about factionalism on the Left. And how the "Left" and the "Far Left" basically attacked her for being too corporate. She says this like they are the problem - like we are the problem. Once again, she didn't take accountability for her shortcomings, and instead blamed others.
Oh, and she says maybe one sentence about how Democrats maybe do some gerrymandering too. My state is hella gerrymandered by Democrats. I mostly like the policy outcomes of this, but it IS voter suppression, and I'm not okay with it, and she should call it out.
None of my criticisms are meant to dismiss the very real issues she raises in this book. There are serious problems she talks about, and the book is extremely educational. It is well-written and easy to follow. And it is also hella biased.