Michael Kazin has a good article up at The New Republic that raises an issue I've been wondering about for a while. Walk into any bookstore and you'll find the shelves packed with fresh copies of books from a conservative bent, some of them coming from the same author in a few months time. In Kazin's article entitled Why Don’t Liberals Write Big Books Anymore? he asks where is this generation's Tom Hayden, Jane Jacobs, James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, Betty Friedman, or Rachel Carson? Liberal authors who didn't just respond defensively to the right, the way Will Bunch, Naomi Klein, or Thomas Frank do, but actually aspired to be visionaries and movement leaders.
Read More