A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn, City Lights Books, 287 pages, $16.95.

FOR A RADICAL HISTORIAN, Howard Zinn certainly enjoys considerable mainstream success. Defying convention, Zinn's A People's History of the United States has surpassed the million-seller mark, a milestone usually reserved for works of a more bourgeois slant. The leftist activist has a mass appeal that would make David McCullough envious.

Part of this appeal no doubt stems from Zinn's lucid writing style and his ability to casually spin historical tales, almost as if his radicalism were just another popular suburban political worldview. A People's History doesn't read like dense Marxist analysis, but populist lore. Zinn's interest is real people, not dialectical materialism.

This approach also results in the most frequent criticism of Zinn's work. Most of his popular writing is without footnotes--brashly unscholarly. Any perceptive fan of Zinn also knows that the word "perhaps" is one of his favorites. For example, in A People's History, when describing late nineteenth century labor unrest and specifically the activities of the Workingmen's Party in St. Louis, Zinn writes: "And here there were perhaps a thousand members of the Workingmen's Party ..."

Perhaps there were a thousand. Perhaps not. But you get the point--there were lots of them.

Such casual estimates are commonplace in Zinn's writing, where precise statistics and citations are often secondary to the telling of the tale. Zinn's critics on the right will call it weak scholarly work (although usually without rebutting the main facts and arguments that Zinn puts forward). The left, and apparently many in the mainstream as well, will call it a good read, scholarly or not.

It is those admirers of Zinn who will enjoy A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, a compilation of columns and commentaries, many previously published, on a variety of topics ranging from tributes to Eugene Debs and Philip Berrigan to perspectives on patriotism, nationalism, and 9/11. This is Zinn the populist, writing about the topics he holds dear, driving home points with the zeal of a true believer.

The themes are likewise vintage Zinn--resistance to power, economic justice, war and peace, common people doing uncommon things, and the meaning of democracy. The reader will find no new grand thesis, no breakthrough theories, but rather the time-tested arguments that have endeared Zinn to several generations.

All of these themes, of course, would typically be of interest to humanists. It is of particular interest, however, when we find Zinn addressing a topic that is uncharacteristic for him--that of religion in politics. He writes: "Our culture is permeated by a Christian fundamentalism ... It permits the mass murder of 'the other' with the same confidence as it accepts the death penalty for individuals convicted of crimes" Zinn then quotes Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's now famously chilling comment: "For a believing Christian, death is no big deal."

Like many from his generation who are on the left, Zinn is personally secular but nevertheless has been hesitant to criticize traditional religion. Remembering the importance of churches in mobilizing blacks in the 1950s and 1960s, and of religious figures such as the Berrigan brothers and other clerics in opposing U.S. aggression in Vietnam, he has avoided debates about faith and politics.

Zinn once explained to me that he learned the power of religious groups to fuel social change while teaching in the 1950s Deep South, where Black churches were centers of social and political activism. "That first became evident to me during the civil rights movement, when I saw the role that churches played and church music played in inspiring people."

Religion may fade away as society advances, Zinn told me, but he has never felt an inclination to hasten its demise. Hence, though nontheism has deep roots on the left (it was Marx, after all, who called religion an opiate), Zinn has never put it in the forefront of his activism.

Despite Zinn's high tolerance of religiosity, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress makes it clear that he understands the downside of mixing religion and government: "Today we have a president who believes he gets messages from God," he writes, noting that George W. Bush is reported to have said: "God told me to strike at Al Qaeda, and I struck at them, and then he told me to strike at Saddam, which I did." With tongue in cheek, Zinn concludes: "It's hard to know if the quote is authentic, especially because it is so literate. But it certainly is consistent with Bush's oft-expressed claims."

Though Zinn's themes are predictable, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress is weighted heavily towards contemporary application of those themes, with much discussion of post-9/11 America. Considering the significance of the religious right as a social and political force, Zinn's treatment of the issue of religious conservatism is light. Instead, with few surprises, the themes mirror those found in previous books, such as Declarations of Independence or even the autobiographical You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, in which Zinn shows how closely his own life intertwines with the issues he cares so much about.

Hence, the book contains the usual Zinn berating of nationalism, patriotism, war, and capitalist excess, interspersed with the usual stories of elitist founding fathers who were concerned primarily with their own commercial interests, racist national heroes who ruthlessly exterminated Native Americans, and warmongering leaders who had little value for human life. Added to the mix are occasional anecdotes of Zinn's life on the activist trail.

It is no doubt Zinn's love of ordinary citizens that makes him an optimist. To Zinn, the problem is always the system, the establishment, but never the masses. Change will come when the people demand it, he declares with an assurance that never seems to consider the possibility that the people simply may not demand it.

With a public that is today comforted into passivity, where even the typical blue-collar American enjoys more material comforts than did royalty a few generations ago, Zinn never considers that apathy--the affirmative desire to be excluded from participation in the political process, the preference to be uninformed--is the establishment's trump card. Instead, he seems confident, or at least hopeful, that the masses will someday soon, in a flash of enlightenment, seize the system that is rightly theirs.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it seems that if such a scenario is ever to occur, the flash of enlightenment will be rooted in rational thinking that itself encompasses an appreciation of education and learning, thereby making social democracy a viable goal. Zinn, though undoubtedly a humanist, seems to have faith that rational public policy will somehow burst forth in America, presumably via a dissatisfied public that finally reaches its breaking point and demands progressive change.

Having waited for this bursting forth for quite some time, today's activist might not share Zinn's patience. With a fondness and appreciation of Zinn that runs deep, and even recognizes the wisdom of his willingness to work with liberal religionists who share humanist values, today's generation of humanist activist may also see that society is unlikely to move forward until humanism itself moves forward. That is, unlike Zinn, the twenty-first-century humanist activist is apt to see humanism as central to progress, not merely incidental to it.

David Niose is an attorney and treasurer of the American Humanist Association.