The permacrisis, if it may be so called, has many causes. In POSITIVE POLITICS: A Proven Playbook to Get into Politics, Change Your Life, and Change the World, Neil Thanedar seeks to solve one of them by promoting citizen-led participation in the political sphere at all levels.
Thanedar decries the United States’ two-party system and castigates regulatory capture. Believing that the people should fight for what he calls “the five fundamentals”—jobs, housing, education, welfare, and transparency—he proposes “Positive Politics” as a way of getting money out of politics and foregrounding benefits for society. It’s hard to argue with Thanedar’s thesis. Extremist politics flourish in conditions where people are desperate: The fact that tens of millions of Americans struggle to make the rent and afford groceries (despite being in what were formerly well-renumerated jobs) is surely a central driver of the current state of the political scene. Thanedar, however, emphasizes that the drive for these “fundamentals” should not be allowed to mask the wider drive for prosperity, even as he rues the personal pursuit of wealth as a fundamentally limiting feature of our lives that prevents us from realizing our own transformative potential.
Despite its lofty ideals, the book is not a theoretical exercise. Thanedar is deeply attentive to the need to show readers how they might actuate his ideas; chapters include action points, recommendations for further reading, and the like. Thanedar is occasionally led astray in the case of the latter. Recognizing the possibility that large swathes of the American public may well lose hope as they witness the corrosion of democracy, he invokes Strauss-Howe theory, which posits that progress comes and goes in cycles that can be measured and, within limits, purports to predict when societal renewal occurs. This is a way of reassuring readers that transformative change is just around the corner, but, given the lack of credibility for the theory in the fields of history and cliodynamics, this is a misstep. Similarly, dumbing down visions of the future to “Good” and “Bad” and reinforcing them with facile references to Star Trek and Black Mirror feels like a misread of the audience.
However, so much more of POSITIVE POLITICS hits its mark than misses; and its confident assertion that we can cure our ills through good, old-fashioned hard work in the political sphere is refreshing. Everyone concerned about the future of democracy should take heed.
Neil Thanedar’s POSITIVE POLITICS: A Proven Playbook to Get into Politics, Change Your Life, and Change the World provides useful, practical, and uplifting ways of transforming contemporary American politics for the better.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader