Is This Democracy – Details, episodes & analysis

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

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? Follow The Show⁠ ⁠Follow Thomas⁠ ⁠Follow Lily⁠ This episode was produced by ⁠Connor Lynch

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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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, 2023 Liliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Chicago 2018 Thomas Zimmer, ‘Reflections on the Challenges of Writing a (Pre-) History of the “Polarized” Present,’ Modern American History, 2 (2019): 403-8

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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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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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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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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