Episodes
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We continue our conversation about “Landslide,” the fantastic new NPR podcast series – and about the transformation of politics in the 1970s, the emergence of a new kind of populist politics, how the Republican Party was taken over by rightwing radicalism that ultimately rose to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980, and how all that relates to what we are experiencing today.
In last week’s Part I, we already talked about the process of partisan sorting and party realignment – certainly one of the key stories in recent U.S. history; about the reaction of the Republican establishment to the Reagan-led rightwing insurgency that oscillated between arrogance, helplessness, and complicity; we discussed Reagan as a radical figure in U.S. history and why we can only understand the rise of these rightwing insurgents if we focus on the racial and cultural grievances around which their political project was organized.
In this Part II, we start by tackling the question of how to reconcile individual agency and structural contexts, presidential politics and grassroots activism, the contingencies of the political process and broader cultural and ideological shifts when we think about and try to explain history. We also reflect on the question of how to relate Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump – on the relationship between the political styles, promises, and projects they embody: Reaganism and Trumpism; on the similarities and echoes, but also the differences between these two brands of reactionary politics. And finally, we reflect on the lessons we ought to learn (or not learn) from the 1970s for our own political moment, and whether the story of Gerald Ford and is best interpreted as a role model for a more moderate politics oriented towards compromise – or as a cautionary tale of what happens when the Republican establishment tries to appease and harness, rather than oppose, the forces of rightwing extremism.
Show notes:
“Landslide” at the NPR podcast network: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510376/landslide
Nuance Tales – Ben Bradford’s podcast production studio https://www.nuancetales.com/home -
“Landslide” is a new NPR podcast series that tells the story of American politics in the 1970s, specifically of the 1976 and 1980 presidential elections, of Jimmy Carter’s unlikely path to the White House and, most importantly, of how Ronald Reagan and the New Right rose to power. And as you will hear in our conversation with our guest Ben Bradford, the man who created, hosted, narrated, and produced “Landslide,” it is also so much more. For this episode, I recruited the help of Seth Cotlar, professor of history at Willamette University (and our first returning guest on the show), who is currently writing a book about the relationship between establishment Republicanism and far-right activism in Oregon since the 1950s. Together, we discuss the story of “Landslide” with Ben Bradford – and the many questions of fundamental historical and political importance it tackles. We investigate the Republican Party’s radicalization to the Right and the role Ronald Reagan played in this process; the emergence of a new kind of politics and political culture; the relationship between Reagan and Trump – and between the political styles, promises, and projects they embody: Reaganism and Trumpism. And we reflect on the lessons we ought to learn (or not learn) from the 1970s for our own political moment, and whether the story of Gerald Ford and is best interpreted as a role model for a more moderate politics oriented towards compromise – or as a cautionary tale of what happens when the Republican establishment tries to appease and harness, rather than oppose, the forces of rightwing extremism. If you are interested in the pre-historie(s) of our present and how we got to where we are today, I promise this conversation is for you. We actually had so much to talk about that we are releasing the conversation in two episodes – look out for Part II early next week.
Show notes:
“Landslide” at the NPR podcast network: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510376/landslide
Nuance Tales – Ben Bradford’s podcast production studio https://www.nuancetales.com/home
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Episodes manquant?
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Have we learned anything new about the Republican Party, its base, and MAGA America from the GOP primaries? We talk about why Trump was always going to win, why he is the dominant force in Republican politics – but also, even though too many people pretend he is electoral magic, a relatively weak general election candidate. We also discuss what is animating the group of self-identifying conservatives who do not like MAGA, but still overwhelmingly vote for Trump. And we examine the role of the Republican establishment: Nikki Haley’s primary campaign can tell us a lot about the trajectory of conservative politics; the way Mitch McConnell’s career ends perfectly encapsulates the dangerous combination of reactionary ideology and cynical opportunism; and the fate of Mike Pence is a reminder of how Republican elites have tried – and failed – for decades to harness the rightwing populist energies of the base that are now fully dominating the party. Finally, we end the episode with some thoughts on Biden’s State of the Union address, Robert Hur and Merrick Garland, what the liberal justices on the Supreme Court are up to, and why, so far, what the political system has offered in response to the Trumpian threat is, at best, a whole lot of handwringing – and, quite often, a whole lot of complicity.
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Joe Biden is “too old” and should step aside – at least that is what many of the nation’s most prominent commentators are telling us. But do their arguments actually hold up to scrutiny? Is Joe Biden too old and unfit to be president? Is he incapable of campaigning and defeating Donald Trump in the 2024 election? And if he were to step aside, what should be the plan going forward? Specifically, is an open convention in the summer, as Ezra Klein has argued, the best path towards a Democratic victory in November? We discuss why this discourse, although frustrating and exhausting, matters; we evaluate the arguments of those who describe Biden as manifestly unfit; and we explain why, even though we are concerned too, we remain staunchly unconvinced by the arguments and suggestions the “Biden too old” camp has presented. Finally, we reflect on the case against voting for Biden that is coming from the Left, where “Biden too old” is often seen as merely a distraction from what are supposedly the much more significant reasons to reject the president, especially his stance on Gaza. We offer our thoughts on how people should approach an election in which we are confronted with a binary choice between either, in all likelihood, Joe Biden – or Donald Trump as the extremist leader of a party fully controlled by a radicalizing anti-democratic movement that is seeking to impose a vengeful authoritarian order on the country.
Show notes:
Ezra Klein, “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden,” New York Times, February 16, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/opinion/ezra-klein-biden-audio-essay.html
Perry Bacon, “Biden’s Democratic Party is to the left of Obama’s. Thank a progressive,” Washington Post, July 13, 2023 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/13/why-progressives-winning-inside-democratic-party/
Thomas Zimmer, “What the ‘Biden too old’ discourse is really about,” Democracy Americana, February 13, 2024 https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/what-the-biden-too-old-discourse -
What would a second Trump presidency look like? We dive deep into the detailed plans that have emerged on the Right for what they want to do immediately upon getting back to power. Almost two years ago, “Project 2025” was launched under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation. Different factions on the Right are preparing separate plans, but “Project 2025” stands out because it unites much of the conservative machine behind the goal of installing a much more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime. We look at the people behind these plans and what animates them – specifically Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, who embodies the siege mentality, self-victimization, and grievance-driven lust for revenge that is fueling the Right. And we dissect the plans and proposals “Project 2025” has to offer, department by department: The goal is to vastly expand presidential power and transform American government into a revenge machine, purge tens of thousands of federal employees and replace them all with loyalists. Already, “Project 2025” is engaged in an unprecedented headhunting operation to ensure ideological conformity. We discuss the tension between the goals of weaponizing the government while dismantling the “deep state” at the same time, and how it is indicative of a larger conflict on the Right between a “traditionalist” and a more rightwing-libertarian wing. Finally, we reflect on why a second Trump term would be much more dangerous, as it could rely on a fully Trumpified GOP in Congress, on a supermajority on the Supreme Court, and on the prospect of escalating violence as the ubiquitous threat against anyone daring to defy Trumpism.
Show notes:
Project 25 https://www.project2025.org/
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative promise https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism, NYT, January 21, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html
Don Moynihan, Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’, NYT, November 27, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/opinion/trump-deep-state-schedule-f.html
Don Moynihan, The risks of Schedule F for administrative capacity and government accountability, December 12, 2024 https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-risks-of-schedule-f-for-administrative-capacity-and-government-accountability/
Sam Adler-Bell, The Shadow War to Determine the Next Trump Administration, January 10, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/opinion/shadow-war-trump-transition.html
Chris Geidner, On Trump's "deep state" attack plans and where they would lead in a second term, November 27, 2024 https://www.lawdork.com/p/trump-deep-state-attack-v-admin-state-attacks
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Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resigned on January 2 – the endpoint of a brutally dishonest rightwing campaign that could not have succeeded without the mainstream media eagerly joining the crusade to get her fired. We discuss why this disastrous affair matters: It was the latest iteration of the eternal reactionary grievance against higher education, which conservatives have always seen as a place of subversive liberal indoctrination and dangerous social engineering; part of an attempt to recapture the institutions of American life that “the Left” has supposedly hijacked; and a crucial battle in a much broader struggle to extinguish whatever progress towards diversity and integration has been made. Harvard matters because this sets the precedent for other places, other universities, other institutions. The campaign was orchestrated by far-right activists like Christopher Rufo, promoted and financed by a rightwing billionaire donor class, and pushed by MAGA Republicans like Elise Stefanik. But wait, even if bad actors were behind it, did Claudine Gay not still plagiarize? We discuss that too and assess the substance of the plagiarism allegations against her. Friends, there is no there there. Then why did the mainstream media propagate, launder, and legitimize such a dangerous campaign and ardently accept the role Rufo needed it – publicly told it! – to play? They didn’t just “fall for it,” they deliberately joined this crusade – a decision indicative of the media favoring “neutrality”-theater journalism over accuracy, of an increasingly reactionary, anti-“woke” stance on the center, and of America’s elites rapidly accommodating extremism. We are in for a rough ride.
Show notes:
Alvin Tillery, “Putting the Racist Crusade against Harvard’s Dr. Claudine Gay in Context” https://medium.com/@atillery2/putting-the-racist-crusade-against-harvards-dr-claudine-gay-in-context-26535c307f96
Don Moynihan, “The campaign that removed the President of Harvard was about DEI, not plagiarism,” https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-campaign-to-remove-the-president
Moira Donegan, “Claudine Gay’s resignation had nothing to do with plagiarism” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/04/claudine-gay-harvard-resignation
Claudine Gay, “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/opinion/claudine-gay-harvard-president.html
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In early November the New York Times released a poll that had Donald Trump clearly ahead in 5 of the 6 battleground states that will decide the 2024 election. It caused an earthquake and outright panic among (small-d) democrats. But just two days later, Democrats emerged victorious from an actual election. What on earth is going on in American politics right now? What are we to make of poll after poll claiming that Trump is on a path back to the White House? Do they tell us anything about what’s actually going on in the electorate? How should Democrats react in this situation?
There is no one else better equipped to discuss these questions – and shatter a few well-entrenched myths about elections and politics in the process – than Michael Podhorzer. He was, until recently, the long-time political director of the AFL-CIO and is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. And Mike is, without any exaggeration, a legend in progressive policy circles, having been instrumental in building and organizing an infrastructure for data-driven and evidence-based progressive politics. He is also someone who thinks deeply and sincerely about American politics and combines that with decades of experience as a leading progressive strategist and campaigner. The result is a clarity that few other political observers can rival – something he demonstrates regularly in his Weekend Reading Substack newsletter, in which he offers some of the very best political analysis out there.
We talk with Mike about why horse-race polling is “worse than useless” and should be ignored entirely; we dissect the dogma of “popularism” that is extremely influential in Democratic politics – even though (or, perhaps: precisely because) it offers white male identity politics rather than an adequate diagnosis or campaign strategy; and we discuss what’s actually going on in the electorate: Why there is so much frustration in U.S. society; the massive impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision; and why the pervasive idea of “education polarization” sanitizes and obscures the fault lines that actually shape U.S. politics.
Show notes:
Michael Podhorzer’s Weekend Reading Substack newsletter: https://www.weekendreading.net/
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We start with a reflection on the results in Tuesday’s elections, and how they relate to polls that indicate Joe Biden is not just unpopular, but actually trailing Donald Trump in key swing states. What can and can’t we take away from such polling, one year out from the presidential election?
We then dive deep into a very different kind of polling and survey data: the 2023 American Values Survey – arguably the most in-depth attempt to capture the values, ideas, and attitudes that shape American society and politics. What do American think of democracy, political violence, authoritarianism, and all the many issues – from abortion and history education to trans rights and QAnon – that define the political conflict? On the basis of this major survey, we try to take the temperature on where things currently stand in America. The results is… mostly not very encouraging.
Show notes:
The complete 2023 American Values Survey can be found here: https://www.prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/
“What Do Americans Think About the Health of Our Democracy and the Upcoming Presidential Election?” Panel discussion on the findings of the 2023 American Values Survey, with Lily Mason and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbeuG-lGiyU
“Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds,” New York Times, November 5, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/us/politics/biden-trump-2024-poll.html
Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, W.W. Norton & Company 2023 https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324006497
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The Speaker drama is over (for now) – but who is Mike Johnson? His ascension is not only further evidence that the January 6 insurrectionists are now fully in charge of the House, but also a manifestation of how much the Republican Party is dominated by the interests and sensibilities of religious reactionaries. Johnson rejects the separation of church and state, he disdains pluralism, and he certainly doesn’t like “democracy.”
We also discuss the role threats of violence played in this whole affair. The MAGA base wanted Jim Jordan – and threatened those who didn’t support him. We talk about the surge of political violence from the Right, violent threats as a form of political communication, and the kind of political culture that has been established on the Right and is constantly being normalized not just by Donald Trump, but also by an inability and/or unwillingness of America’s elected leaders and political institutions to hold the line. Does the fact that some Republicans publicly resisted these threats signal that this is about to change? We are skeptical: After all, even those Republicans who lamented the MAGA threats have not been willing to break with Trump or critically reflect on the escalating demonization of “the Left” that is animating the rise of rightwing violence.
Finally, we are taking a big-picture look at the state of the 2024 presidential race. On the Republican side, Trump’s “legal troubles” have not hurt him – he is not only in a stronger position now than before he was first indicted, but also than at a comparable point in time before the 2016 election. What are the reasons for his hold over the Right, and what does this tell us about the field of Republican “challengers”? On the Democratic side, we discuss what to make of all the polling data that suggests a tough road ahead for Joe Biden – and why the conventional wisdom about the electoral effect of presidential approval rating and perceptions of the economy might not apply. We also discuss the question of Biden’s age: There is a real issue here, as America’s political elite is indeed significantly older than that of any other comparable democracy. But the mainstream media’s fixation on the “Biden so old” trope also signals something else.
Sources and Further Reading:
Annie Karni, “In Johnson, House Republicans Elevate One of Their Staunchest Conservatives,” NYT, October 25, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/politics/mike-johnson-house-speaker.html
“They Legitimized the Myth of a Stolen Election — and Reaped the Rewards,” NYT, October 3, 2022 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/politics/republican-election-objectors.html
Sarah Posner, “The Christian Legal Army Behind ‘Masterpiece Cakeshop,’ The Nation, November 28, 2017 https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-christian-legal-army-behind-masterpiece-cakeshop/
Jamelle Bouie, “The Apotheosis of Jim Jordan Is a Sight to Behold,” NYT, October 17, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/opinion/jim-jordan-house-speaker.html
Ron Brownstein, “The Threat to Democracy Is Coming From Inside the U.S. House,” The Atlantic, October 18, 2023 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/10/us-house-democracy-threat-republican-speaker-race/675679/
Aaron Blake, “Threats couldn’t save Jim Jordan. But Trump-era intimidation has had an impact,” WaPo, October 20, 2023 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/20/threats-havent-saved-jordan-trump-era-intimidation-has-had-an-impact/
“Threats to American Democracy Ahead of an Unprecedented Presidential Election,” PRRI, October 25, 2023 https://www.prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/
Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, “Threats as Political Communication,” Political Communication, October 18, 2023 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2023.2270539
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After a very long summer break, “Is This Democracy” is back! We start with a reflection on the terrorist attack on Israel and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war, how it’s being discussed in the U.S., and the moral, political, and intellectual obligations that shape our own perspective.
We then tackle the latest round of Speaker drama: It took Kevin McCarthy 15 tries to get elected – and just 269 days later, he is out. Can we learn anything new from this Republican chaos? Maybe not – but it is a crucial reminder of what defines and animates today’s GOP. We talk about the dogma of rightwing politics that regards Democrats as not just a political opponent, but a fundamentally illegitimate, “Un-American” enemy that must not be allowed to govern; about the underlying dynamic that explains why moments of chaos almost inevitably result in a further radicalization of the Republican Party; about the GOP’s structural weakness, that makes it so hard to discipline individual members like Matt Gaetz; and about the politics and ideology of Steve Scalise who, at the time of recording yesterday, looked like he might become the next Speaker, and what he meant when he described himself as “David Duke without the baggage.” He has now withdrawn - more chaos. Finally, we talk about recurring themes that shape mainstream media coverage of these events in predictably misleading fashion: There is the idea that only Democrats have agency – and therefore are ultimately to be blamed for the chaos; and the pervasive trope of government “dysfunction” that entirely obscures the actual issue, but allows the media to take a “neutral” position from which it can blame “both sides.”
Show notes – articles that have particularly shaped this week’s discussion (not necessarily endorsements, mind you!):
Gideon Levi, Israel can’t imprison 2 million Gazans without paying a cruel price, Haaretz, October 9, 2023 https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-10-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-cant-imprison-2-million-gazans-without-paying-a-cruel-price/0000018b-1476-d465-abbb-14f6262a0000
The Hamas Attacks and Israeli Response: An Explainer, Jewish Currents, October 10, 2023 https://jewishcurrents.org/the-hamas-attacks-and-israeli-response-an-explainer
Emily Tamkin, What Does It Mean to Stand with Israel?, Slate, October 10, 2023 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/israel-hamas-war-palestine-stand-with-israel-netanyahu.html
Eric Levitz, A Left That Refuses to Condemn Mass Murder Is Doomed, New York Magazine, October 11, 2023 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/a-left-that-refuses-to-condemn-mass-murder-is-doomed.html
Steven Erlanger, As War Rages, Netanyahu Battles for Reputation and Legacy, New York Times, October 10, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/world/europe/netanyahu-israel-gaza-war.html
Ronald Brownstein, The Only Sin that Republicans Can’t Forgive, The Atlantic, October 3, 2023 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/10/the-only-sin-that-republicans-cant-forgive/675534/n
Moira Donegan, McCarthy ouster shows Republicans don’t want to govern - and they don’t want anyone else to either, The Guardian, October 4, 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/04/republicans-freedom-caucus-kevin-maccarthy
Osita Nwanevu, The McCarthy debacle barely scrapes the surface of how dysfunctional Congress is, The Guardian, October 6, 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/06/kevin-mccarthy-congress-corruption-ageing
What is Broken in American Politics Is the Republican Party, Politico, October 6, 2023 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/06/republican-leaders-mccarthy-expert-roundup-00120170
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Let’s survey the political landscape and take stock of where things stand almost halfway through 2023. We started this podcast a little over half a year ago, just a few days before the midterms. The election ended in a better result for Democrats than most people expected. That led to a lot of commentary about how the guardrails were supposedly holding, the system was working. Then in early December, the January 6 Committee referred Trump to the Department of Justice for prosecution. All that convinced a lot of commentators that 2022 had been a good year, that the ship had been turned around, that democracy was winning.
It says a lot about our current predicament that, in June 2023, such a big-picture look at the political landscape still has to start with Donald Trump. What are we to make of the fact that Trump, despite all the recent legal trouble, is still the clear favorite to be the next Republican presidential nominee? We also look at his wannabe-authoritarian challengers, particularly at Ron DeSantis, and why there seems to be little appetite on the rightwing base for his kind of Trumpless Trumpism.
We then look at the escalating assault on equality and the post-1960s civil rights order – on women’s rights; on the lgbtq community and the rights of trans people, in particular; on public education, academic freedom, and freedom of speech. There are signs of an anti-reactionary counter-mobilization – against rightwing book bans, specifically – and we’ll need a lot more of that, as it’s difficult to see how America’s slide into authoritarianism could be stopped without a mass mobilization of pro-democratic civil society forces outside and beyond the established political institutions.
We look at those institutions next – and the Democratic Party’s response, in particular. We specifically discuss why Democrats have been unable and/or unwilling to hold Clarence Thomas accountable for the cartoonish level of corruption in which he has engaged, and why there is still no plausible Democratic answer to the problem that the Supreme Court acts as the spearhead of the reactionary assault on democracy and the modern state.
It's obviously not all the Democrats’ fault. The mainstream media is also not coming to the rescue of democracy. We talk about what to make of the disastrous CNN Trump town hall and the way the “both sides” coverage of the debt ceiling crisis once again displayed all the usual, harmful tropes of the “Dysfunction in Washington” narrative that only serves to obscure the extent of Republican sabotage.
We then turn our attention to the problem of political violence. Across the political spectrum, the percentage of people describing political violence as potentially acceptable has significantly increased. But in practice, the rise in actual violence has almost entirely come from the Right. And, crucially, the reactions to the killing of Jordan Neely on the NYC subway were a reminder that all strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are now openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence.
Finally, we reflect on where that all leaves us. As we are heading into summer, normalcy bias is destined to take over even more than it always does. One of the key challenges since the start of the Trump era has been how to communicate effectively to the American public that something other than “politics as usual” is going on, that the threat of democratic erosion is real. The crucial question remains: How do we pierce that sense of “normalcy”? How do we create moments of meaningful disruption?
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Let’s tackle the philosophy and culture of Silicon Valley, and how they help us explain the politics of reactionary-to-far-right tech titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. In 2020, Adrian Daub published “What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley.” In the book, he applied his skills as a literary and cultural scholar, as someone who is trained to dissect and analyze the stories that help us make sense of the world, to his immediate surroundings. Adrian is a Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality – he works in a place that is shaped and dominated by the tech industry like probably no other in the world.
We talk about why it is important to dissect the philosophies Silicon Valley is built on, the stories it likes to tell about itself, the narratives surrounding the tech industry. We then try to outline the philosophical and ideological universe that shapes the imaginary of Silicon Valley and discuss why figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are so fixated on certain thinkers, how these philosophies and ideas translate into politics, and what to make of the very pronounced tech libertarian to far-right pipeline.
Finally, we talk about why so many people in the liberal camp, specifically, have been, at least until recently, under the misguided impression that these tech giants were political allies, when they have so clearly never been on board with the idea of leveling traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, or gender. And why have so many people in positions of power and influence been willing to accept them not just as entrepreneurs, but as thinkers in their own right whose grand ideas about the world matter somehow, whose guidance we should seek? Why has our culture glorified them as visionaries – and is that finally changing, as the reactionary mask has slipped?
Show notes:
What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley
Dreams in the Witch House – Adrian’s newsletter
Keep up with Adrian’s work via his personal website
“The Sabotage of Twitter Is a Disaster for Democracy” – Thomas’ reflection on the politics of Elon Musk and tech oligarchs as a threat to the democratic public square
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Let’s dive deep into the “cancel culture” moral panic, what it can tell us about U.S. society, culture, and politics, and how it has spread across the “West.” There is no one better equipped to help us do that than Adrian Daub. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality. In the fall of 2022, Adrian published “Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic is Gripping the World” – which is currently available in German only, but will be out in English soon; it is by far the most in-depth, most incisive dissection of the “cancel culture” moral panic and its transnational dimensions that anyone has offered to date. In this conversation, we do not spend much time on debunking the idea that there is widespread “cancel culture” – because it’s been debunked so convincingly, so many times. The “cancel culture” narrative diagnoses a national emergency: an acutely dangerous situation in which radical “woke” leftists are succeeding at undermining free speech by imposing an ever-more restrictive culture of censoriousness on the country, with dramatic consequences for anyone who dares to speak up. Our argument is *not* that no one has ever had to face unfair consequences for what they said publicly – but that the evidence for such a worsening national emergency caused by “wokeism” running amok is simply not there. What, then, can we learn from such a rampant moral panic: If we don’t accept the pervasive “cancel culture” discourse as a mere representation of an objectively existing free speech crisis, then how do we explain and interpret its omnipresence and the fact that so many people are fully committed to it at this exact moment?We talk about why the college campus is playing such a crucial role in the “cancel culture” discourse, and in the elite imagination more broadly, and discuss how our own experience as college professors relates to these debates. We grapple with why all this is happening now, with the genealogy of the moral panic, how to situate it in the long tradition of reactionary moral panics, and how it began to crystallize as a distinct phenomenon in the mid-2010s. Then we turn our attention Germany as a case study of how the moral panic has spread internationally. German conservatives are obsessed with the idea of “woke cancel culture” spilling over from the U.S., and they have found willing allies among self-proclaimed moderates and liberals who have propagated the idea that “cancel culture” constitutes an acute threat to liberty and freedom. Across the “West,” the moral panic is, to a significant degree, a creation of the “respectable” center. What can we learn from German “cancel culture” fixation about the role of the U.S. in the imaginary of Germany’s political and cultural elite? How does the transfer of “cancel culture” anecdotes and anxieties across the Atlantic work in practice? Finally, we manage to end on a somewhat hopeful note: Across the “West,” the self-proclaimed defenders of freedom get into trouble as soon as they have to present concrete suggestions of how to fight back against “cancel culture”: Those always turn out to be blatantly illiberal, authoritarian measures, and they uniformly fail to attract majority support. Adrian Daub, Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic is Gripping the World
Dreams in the Witch House – Adrian’s newsletter
On "Cancel Culture" by Thomas Zimmer
Keep up with Adrian’s work via his personal website
“The Sabotage of Twitter Is a Disaster for Democracy” – Thomas’ reflection on the politics of Elon Musk and tech oligarchs as a threat to the democratic public square
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This episode was produced by Connor Lynch
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We need to be a lot more critical towards the pervasive polarization narrative, towards “polarization” as the central diagnosis of our time. “Polarization” obscures not only what the key challenge is – the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right – but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.We start by outlining the central arguments and claims of the polarization narrative. We then offer an empirical, normative, and historical critique. On the empirical level, it is true that the gap between “Left” and “Right” is very wide in many areas, by international standards. But where that’s the case, it has often been almost entirely a function of conservatives moving sharply to the Right. Most importantly, the “polarization” narrative completely obscures the fact that on the central issue that is at the core of the political conflict, the two parties, and Left and Right more generally, are very much not the same – that issue is democracy. One party is dominated by a white reactionary minority that is rapidly radicalizing against democracy and will no longer accept the principle of majoritarian rule; the other thinks democracy and constitutional government should be upheld. That’s not “polarization.”On the normative level, the “polarization” paradigm privileges unity, stability, and social cohesion over social justice and equal participation. It doesn’t adequately grapple with the fact that the former stifles the latter, that calls for racial and social justice will be inherently de-stabilizing to a system that is built on traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion – that they are indeed polarizing, but from a (small-d) democratic perspective, are necessary and good. As a historical paradigm, “polarization” tends to mythologize past eras of “consensus” and supposed unity. But in U.S. history, political “consensus” was usually based on a cross-partisan agreement to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights. In many ways, “polarization” is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress towards multiracial pluralistic democracy. Why do scholars, politicians, journalists, and pundits cling to the idea of “polarization”? The answer lies in the fact that the empirical, normative, and historical inadequacy is not a bug, but a feature of the polarization narrative – it is precisely the fact that it obscures rather than illuminates the actual problem that makes it attractive. The “polarization” concept is useful if you want to lament major problems in American politics, but either don’t see or simply can’t bring yourself to address the fact that the major threat to American democracy is a radicalizing Right, is the threat of rightwing authoritarian minority rule. In this way, the concept even provides a rhetoric of rapprochement since it does not require agreement as to what is actually ailing America, only that “polarization” is to the detriment of all. The “polarization” narrative never breeds contention, it makes everybody nod in approval; it engenders unanimity. That’s the genius of the polarization narrative: It provides the language for a lament that blames nobody and everybody, and satisfies the longing for unity – which it constantly fuels in turn! – by offering a consensual interpretation; consensus re-established through the back door. Further reading:Daniel Kreiss / Shannon C. McGregor, ‘A Review and Provocation: On Polarization and Platforms,’ New Media & Society, April 11, 2023Liliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Chicago 2018Thomas Zimmer, ‘Reflections on the Challenges of Writing a (Pre-) History of the “Polarized” Present,’ Modern American History, 2 (2019): 403-8
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Gun violence is a political problem, a democracy problem, an exceptionally American problem. We decided to do this episode after the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville. But that was over three weeks ago, and so there have been so many more mass shootings since, so much more death and destruction. In the U.S., it’s always right after and right before a mass shooting, regardless of whether we apply the term to shootings in public space or in the home. And day after day, myriad social interactions and conflicts escalate because guns are ever present. We start our discussion with a personal reflection on how we react to the news of mass shootings, and how our thinking around this issue is shaped by the fact that we are parents, fearing for the lives of our children. We then reflect on why this issue is so complex: All the pathologies of American political culture, all the dysfunction of the political system, all the radicalization of the Republican Party are on full display; gun violence is not just a random fact of life in the U.S., but the result of an underlying social order that puts the right of some people – of white men, specifically – to defend their place and status against any and all threats, real and perceived, and defend it by violently lashing out, by preemptively using excessive violence, above all else. The U.S. is a country built on and around that social order, in which powerful political and economic forces have decided that the right to use violence, be violent, and access guns to be violent, must not be meaningfully restricted. We put the U.S. situation in an international context. Among comparable nations, the U.S. has by far the most guns, the most gun violence, the most mass shootings, the highest homicide rate – all of it by a wide margin. Gun violence is also one of the key factors for why life expectancy at birth has been falling in this country - falling significantly behind comparable nations. Here it is, the true face of American exceptionalism. We then discuss gun violence as a political issue, an issue directly related to and intertwined with the struggle over democracy in this country. That discussion has to start with the radicalization of the Republican Party. We try to explain why Republicans are almost uniformly embracing the gun cult and will only ever double down on the gun-toting militancy conservatives have made a key element of their political identity. The problem is not confined to “red” states: The Right, led by the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court, is determined to impose its vision of gun supremacy on the entire country. The vast majority of the population, however, rejects the gun cult. And yet, this has not translated to legislation or any kind of action that would be commensurate with the problem – a disconnect we also tackle. The escalation of gun violence constitutes an acute threat to the core tenets of any democratic society: Democracy depends on people feeling safe in the public square. If they don’t, because it’s ruled by intimidation and threats of violence, they won’t be able to participate. It’s what rightwing extremists want: Abolish democracy through coercion and harassment. Finally, we talk about how we got to this point – and where we might go from here. We outline the long history of gun culture and racialized gun ownership and regulations since the eighteenth century. But we also emphasize how the current situation, the pervasive Second Amendment extremism on the Right, is in many ways the result of rather recent developments and a very specific, deliberate rightwing political campaign since the late 1970s. There might be something to be learned from the decades-long rightwing “gun rights” crusade. And we allow ourselves to end on a slightly hopeful note: A younger generation that has had to grow up in the shadow of the gun seems ready to fight back.Follow The Show
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This episode was produced by Connor Lynch
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It’s hard to keep track of everything that’s happening in the struggle against the reactionary assault on democracy, on so many levels, all at the same time. We go through some of the big stories of the week and reflect on how to relate them to each other, where to direct our attention, how to process it all. We start in Manhattan, where, finally, Donald Trump had to turn himself in, was arrested, had to appear before a judge on Tuesday – and it was all… rather ordinary and boring, exactly the way it should be. We tackle some of the misleading narratives surrounding this case: Why it is indeed “political,” but not a political witch-hunt; why the actual “test for democracy” is the fact that a major party radicalized to the point where it elevated this man to the presidency and won’t break with him even now. We go to Wisconsin next: On the same day Trump appeared before a judge, Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the state Supreme Court, giving liberals a majority for the first time in 15 years. In a functioning, healthy democratic system, no single state court election should have so much riding on it, but here we are. And once again, just like in the 2022 midterms, a clear majority of voters in a purple state was mobilized for democracy and abortion rights, while Republican fear-mongering over “crime, crime, crime” fell flat. Finally, to Tennessee: What’s happening in the Tennessee Assembly is a reminder of the increasingly authoritarian measures Republicans are willing to take to punish those who dare to question their dominance. Republicans are trying to expel three Democratic lawmakers who had the audacity to protest in solidarity with an ongoing demonstration of thousands of citizens, mostly schoolchildren, demanding action to protect Americans from gun violence. These are just some of the stories of this week – how can we make sure not to miss the forest for the trees? Clearly, we must not direct all our attention to Trump. But is the ex-president’s fate just a distraction from what *really* matters? That’s also not the right takeaway. Crucially, we should not separate Trump from the broader political conflict – neither to spend all our energy on his outrageousness nor to ignore his role as the manifestation of the American Right’s anti-democratic radicalization. Ultimately, the challenge is to pay attention to the underlying reactionary political project, to the multi-level attempts to entrench traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, to the increasingly authoritarian measures to prevent multiracial, pluralistic democracy.Follow The Show
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This episode was produced by Connor Lynch
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Let’s talk about the history of American conservatism, the past and present of the Far-Right, and the paths that led to Trumpism’s rise. If there is one underlying assumption that defines this podcast, it is that the central threat to democracy is the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right. In this episode, we talk about when, how, and why that actually happened – and Seth Cotlar is the perfect guest to help us tackle these questions.
Seth Cotlar is a professor of history at Willamette University and, by training, a specialist on the history of the Early American Republic, the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It is his interest in the political culture in America, specifically changing ideas of democracy, that has led him to focusing more on the recent past and present of the Right – especially since conservatives love to reference a bizarro version of early U.S. history in service of their political agenda.
The bulk of the episode focuses on Seth’s current project – and the life of Walter Huss. Who? Exactly. Walter Huss is a rather obscure figure, but one with immense significance. He was a leading right-wing activist in Oregon from the late 1950s all the way through the early 2000s – a far-right extremist with ties to the Neo Nazi scene and domestic terrorists. And in the late 70s, Huss managed to take over as chair of the Oregon Republican Party.
The story of Huss allows us to tackle so many crucial issues: We discuss the far-right world since the 50s, the toxic ideological landscape of antisemitism, anti-communism, and racism, the white Christian nationalist vision of and for America; we explore the far-right media landscape of that era, which sustained this extremism and its networks and also served as fertile ground for the kind of political culture that has come to take over the Republican Party; and we examine the question of how someone like Huss was able to help push the moderate Oregon GOP to the right, the role and failure of moderate elites and the Republican establishment to prevent this from happening, to stop this kind of radical insurgency.
All that leads us to reflect on the question of how much of this is not just an Oregon story, but an American story: The story of the radicalization of the Republican Party, and in that sense, a pre-history of Trump’s rise. Is there a direct path from Walter Huss to Donald Trump? This question – of how to interpret Trump’s rise, how to situate Trumpism it in the longer-term history of conservatism and the Republican Party: As an aberration and departure or as more in line with certain long-standing trends, tendencies, and impulses – is not just of academic importance: What is Trumpism? Where does it come from? What’s the right way to understand it, tackle it, hopefully defeat it? These are questions with immediate political and policy implications.
Seth Cotlar’s newsletter Rightlandia
Seth Cotlar on Twitter and Mastodon
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This episode was produced by Connor Lynch
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On Saturday, Donald Trump used his social media propaganda platform to urge his followers “TO TAKE OUR NATION BACK” – by which he really meant: Protect him from being arrested, which he announced was going to happen on Tuesday. We dive into the ex-president’s legal trouble (that’s a euphemism) and use it as a springboard for a discussion of some bigger-picture issues: What conservative reactions can tell us about Trump’s status in the Republican Party and on the Right more generally, and what role criminal prosecution can play in solving what is essentially a political problem. – We then tackle what might seem, on the surface, like a weird situation: The GOP has described itself for decades as the “party of law and order,” yet Republicans can’t bring themselves to break with someone who is easily among the most unlawful people to have ever risen to high office in U.S. history. What’s happening here is not that conservatives have all of a sudden turned on what they always pretended was one of their key principles. Rather, it’s a reminder of what “law and order” has always meant on the Right. We discuss the long history of “law and order” as an instrument to entrench and uphold traditional white male dominance against the “threat” of multiracial pluralism, tracing it back to the post-Civil War era. “Law and order” rhetoric has always been closely tied to white backlash politics, very much not a defense of the rule of law but actually opposed to the very principle of treating everyone the same, as equals, before the law. What we are seeing today from Trump and his Republican enablers is well in line with this tradition of “law and order”: A stark differentiation between those who are supposed to be bound by the rules (“Them”) and those who are not (“Us”) has always been very much at the heart of the conservative political project. Conservatives start from the premise that some groups are worthy of protection and deserve privilege - while others are dangerous and need to be kept in check. Once we acknowledge this as the highest principle, the Republican position is entirely consistent.
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This episode was produced by Connor Lynch
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We are in the midst of an escalating rightwing assault on public education in America. It comes in the form of an attempted authoritarian takeover of schools and universities, in hundreds of bills establishing state censorship, banning books, purging anything that dares to dissent from a white nationalist understanding of the nation’s past or present from the classroom, the libraries, the curriculum – but also as a radical push for school privatization, a dimension that has received far less attention.
None of this is new – all of it is in line with the decades-long conservative fight against public education that has been central to the modern conservative political project since the beginning. And it also doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but is very much an integral part of the broader attempt to roll back the post-1960s civil rights order. In many ways, the struggle over public education is at the center of the overall political conflict right now.
I can think of no one better equipped to help us unpack all of this than Jennifer Berkshire. She is a journalist and teaches journalism at Yale and Boston College, she writes about education for many major outlets, including The Nation, The New Republic, and the The Baffler, and she hosts the wonderful podcast “Have You Heard,” in which she and her co-host Jack Schneider dissect all things public education.
We cover a lot of ground in this conversation: We dissect the Right’s current attack on public education, and what they want to replace it with; we talk about the underlying rightwing political project of maintaining traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, gender, and religion, which sees public education as dangerous, because it can potentially act as an engine of progressive change and contribute to questioning and leveling those traditional hierarchies; we tackle the combination of both state authoritarianism and radical privatization that characterizes the Right’s approach to education; we discuss the long history of modern conservatism’s attack on public education, from the 1950s through today; and we also, crucially, talk about the Democratic side of this story: How and why Democrats adopted a neoliberal idea of education primarily serving as an investment in “human capital”, and why that has opened the door for the kind of undermining of public education the Right is attempting.
Jennifer Berkshire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BisforBerkshire
Have You Heard Podcast: https://www.haveyouheardpodcast.com/
Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, The New Press 2023 (paperback edition) https://www.wolfattheschoolhousedoor.com/
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This episode was produced by Connor Lynch
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Lily and Thomas dissect the “free speech crisis on campus” discourse. The pervasive “free speech crisis” narrative wants us to believe that liberty and freedom in this country are being threatened by “woke” radicals imposing an ever-more authoritarian “cancel culture,” a culture of censoriousness on college life and on the nation in general. According to a never-ending barrage of op-eds and editorials in leading mainstream papers, this is a national emergency in desperate need of intervention. But not only does this diagnosis stand in stark contrast to what we actually experience on campus (we are both college professors, after all, so we can report from the front lines!). We also dive into the survey/polling data as well as the anecdotes that self-proclaimed free speech advocates present as supposedly irrefutable evidence – and it simply does not hold up to scrutiny. Moreover, the “free speech crisis” discourse is entirely ahistorical, conveniently ignoring that the same complaints have been advanced by conservatives for decades – and that mainstream outlets have elevated these resentments to the level of a national moral panic before, notably in the “political correctness” craze of the early 1990s. So, what is actually going on here? The country is in the midst of a profound renegotiation of speech norms and of who gets to define them. And that can be a messy process at times, making a lot of people, especially those in elite positions, uncomfortable. But it’s not “cancel culture.” In a multiracial, pluralistic society, it is necessary. And from a democratic perspective, it is progress. – Finally, we talk about the latest revelations coming out of the ongoing Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News: We discuss the relationship between Fox News and the conservative base; the ways in which Fox News can amplify reactionary resentment, but is beholden to what the base wants; and the rightwing media machine as an integral part of the reactionary political project, something to which there is simply no equivalent on the “Left.”
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This episode was produced by Connor Lynch
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