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
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.”