New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, John Luther Adams
Disunited states
GAVIN O’TOOLE explores how US federalism has been exploited by Republicans, but remains the best arena for progressive solutions
Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally enters Emancipation Park in August 2017
[Anthony Crider/flickr/CC]
Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
SYLVIA HIKINS welcomes a survey of successful contemporary worker co-operatives and economy-based co-operative systems
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends the staging of this Wagnerian classic minus one or two insignificant quibbles
Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics
by Jacob M Grumbach, Princeton, £25
A reflex apparent in US political science after Reagan saw a reinvigorated federalism as a source of innovation in economics, education, and social policy.
The states, so the argument went, were emerging as “laboratories of democracy” in which creative governors experimenting with ideas that went beyond traditional party politics were harbingers of a new “Progressive Era”.
How times change.
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