OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #189, AUGUST 7, 2024.

 

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #189, AUGUST 7, 2024.  Compiled by Dick Bennett

Robert Edwards.  Resisting the Right:

How to Survive the Gathering Storm.  OR Books, 2024.  320 pages   Paperback and E-book.    Foreword by JAMES CARROLL.

“Combines the revelations of unfolding tragedy with the artistry of a story-teller.”  —Bill Moyers

“Profoundly disturbing.”  —Kai Bird

“Details with precision the perilous place we are in as a country.”  —Amy Hanauer

Bottom of Form

Publisher’s description:   Resisting the Right is a handbook for surviving a far-right take-over of the United States. Today, that prospect is a frightening reality. It threatens the irreversible destruction of America’s democratic system.  In a powerful and necessary intervention, Robert Edwards urges that we prepare now for this nightmarish scenario, the better to resist and transcend it.  Edwards shows how a right-wing autocracy can be combatted using political action, civil disobedience, economics, cyberspace, traditional media, social media, the arts, and even our personal relationships.  A former US Army intelligence officer who now works as a successful screenwriter, Edwards draws on his military training to assess “the threat,” and his storyteller’s imagination to play out likely scenarios.  At a time when the future of American democracy teeters on a cliff edge, the urgency of Resisting the Right could not be more acute.

Dick’s comment:
     As soon as I heard of the book and that James Carroll wrote the Foreword, I called Barnes and Noble.    I had read Carroll’s incomparable history of the House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, which Howard Zinn praised as “a masterful achievement.”   It is so impressive--multilayered like the greatest novels--that I organized several  panels to publicize it. 

     I read Edward’s book, therefore, with the strong impetus of Carroll’s recommendation.  I was not disappointed.  The first subject of the book shows the GOP to be an “efficiently functioning machine devoted to the demolition not just of democratic structures, but of the very procedures necessary for governance itself.”  For example, the Republicans with Donald Trump have attacked voting rights and the voting process “at every level of governance.”   They would create an “antidemocratic, theocratic, white nationalist regime.” 

     The second subject of the book, a survey of pro-democracy measures against autocracy, is a call to action.  Readers will see “flashes of light illuminating a way forward in the most consequential American contest since the US Civil War.”  Edwards “reminds us of the ways in which ordinary citizens have risen to such challenges in the past”—public servants, educators, journalists, and you and me “in the front lines of the culture war.”