The Periphery from the Pulaski Institution – Details, episodes & analysis

Benjamin Carter Hett is Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at City University of New York. He specializes in German history, and his books include The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic; The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War; and more.

He is one of my favorite historians, and I was really excited to get to have him on the show. We dive into the parallels he thinks do and don't exist between today and the 1920s and 1930s. We also spend some time on the f-word debate and whether he thinks fascism is the best term to describe what we're facing in Trump 2.0. Then we get into contemporary politics in Germany and the strength of the AfD ahead of the upcoming elections.

Franziska Wagner studied comparative political sciences at the University of Mannheim and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Sciences Po. Her research interests lie in party politics, far-right politics, social media, and computational approaches to social sciences. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D in Political Sciences at the Central European University, where she works on party communication on social media, and the role of discourse and emotions. Franziska is a researcher at the AUTHLIB project (Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response) that aims at exploring the varieties of neo-authoritarian, illiberal ideologies in Europe and their political implications.

You can read her piece here: https://www.authlib.eu/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2024.1390587/full

Matt McManus joins to talk about his newest book, The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity (Routledge). The book is a wide-ranging and gripping exploration of right-wing arguments against egalitarianism. We talk about as many of McManus's subjects as we can fit into an episode, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Patrick Devlin, Patrick Deneen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, and more. 

Matt lectures at the University of Michigan. 

Itoro Bassey is a first-generation Nigerian-American who grew up in Southbridge, Massachusetts. She is a journalist, playwright, cultural worker, educator, and novelist. Her debut novel, Faith, was published by Malarkey Books in 2022. Itoro has previously worked as a correspondent for Arise News and is now a segment producer for the BBC, based in Washington, D.C.

We talk about her experiences growing up in rural New England, her time living in Nigeria, and how identity and ruralness play out in our everyday lives. 

Dr. Kevin Vallier is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, where he directs their program in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law. Vallier’s interests lie primarily in political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE). He is also an affiliate with the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania.

His newest book is All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism.  He joins to talk about Catholic integralism, its vision of politics and freedom, and some of the leading thinkers in America, as well as Hungary, who are driving it forward.

More on Dr. Vallier's book, from the publisher (Oxford University Press): According to a common narrative, the twentieth century spelled the end of faith-infused political movements. Their ideologies, like Catholic integralism, would soon be forgotten. Humans were finally learning to keep religion out of politics. Or were we? In the twenty-first century, nations as diverse as Russia, India, Poland, and Turkey have seen a revival of religious politics, and many religious movements in other countries have proved similarly resilient. A new generation of political theologians passionately reformulates ancient religious doctrines to revolutionize modern political life. They insist that states recognize the true religion, and they reject modern liberal ideals of universal religious freedom and church-state separation. In this book, philosopher Kevin Vallier explores these new doctrines, not as lurid oddities but as though they might be true. The anti-liberal doctrine known as Catholic integralism serves as Vallier’s test case. Yet his approach naturally extends to similar ideologies within Chinese Confucianism and Sunni Islam. Vallier treats anti-liberal thinkers with respect that liberals seldom afford them and offers more moderate skeptics of liberalism a clear account of the alternatives. Many liberals, by contrast, will find these doctrines frightening and strange but of enduring interest. Vallier invites all his readers on a unique intellectual adventure, encouraging them to explore unfamiliar ideals through the lenses of theology, philosophy, politics, economics, and history.

Pulaski fellows Dr. Hanah Stiverson and Dr. Dominik Stecuła join Dr. Michael Simeone from New America and Arizona State to discuss some of the dangers of misinformation and disinformation, with particular attention given to rural and exurban America.

A link to the video version of the panel is here: (488) A Pulaski Panel: Misinformation, Disinformation, and Offline Effects in America's Heartlands - YouTube

Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. Previously, he was Director of the London School of Economics, President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), founder of the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, and a professor there and at UNC-Chapel Hill, Columbia, and Princeton. He is also a member of the Pulaski Board.

Calhoun’s newest book is Degenerations of Democracy (Harvard 2022, co-authored with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor). This takes democracy to be a project, not simply a set of formal arrangements, and looks at the ways disempowerment of citizens, partisan polarization, and politics oriented only to winning and not the public good undermine democracy from within. He has also recently edited The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia 2022, with Benjamin Fong). This explores ways in which the pursuit of better lives and livelihoods for workers could – potentially – be integrated with environmental justice and action to minimize damage from climate change.

Samuel C. Spitale is a media studies expert who has written for Huffington Post, as well as Geek magazine and Advocate.com. Previously, he worked at Lucasfilm Ltd. in global product development. In addition to How to Win the War on Truth, he is the author of Star Wars: Collecting a Galaxy.

We talk about his book, the ways in which he thinks about our emotions and biases, and how to better navigate a fraught informational landscape. 

Matt McManus is a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is the author of The Emergence of Postmodernity and Liberalism and Liberal Rights: A Critical Legal Argument amongst other books. His forthcoming work includes the essay collection Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction for Palgrave MacMillan and The Political Right and Equality for Routledge Press.

You can also find Matt's writings around the web, at places like Arc Digital, Liberal Currents, and Jacobin.  

William Kristol has been a major figure in American political life for decades.  He was a founder of The Weekly Standard, and is a regular guest on leading political commentary shows. Prior to his work at The Weekly Standard, Kristol led the Project for the Republican Future, an organization that helped shape the strategy that produced the 1994 Republican congressional victory.  From 1985 to 1993, Kristol served as chief of staff to Education Secretary William Bennett in the Reagan Administration and as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle in the George H. W. Bush administration. Before coming to Washington, Kristol taught politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. William Kristol is currently editor-at-large of The Bulwark and a leading Never Trump voice. 

We talked about the rising tide of illiberalism in America and abroad. We also discussed how people who believe in liberal democracy can think and act in the interest of preserving it. It was a great conversation.