Is This Democracy

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 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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.”

We are in the midst of an escalating moral panic around “Critical Race Theory” that is serving, across Republican-led states, as justification to censor and purge anything that dares to dissent from a white nationalist understanding of America’s past or present. That is the context in which Victor Ray published his book “On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care.”   Victor Ray is a sociologist, a professor at the Universitxy of Iowa, and you’ll hear in this conversation that he really is an incredibly thoughtful observer of race and racism in America. In his book, Victor does an incredible job to make CRT, this complex body of thought, the intellectual traditions on which it builds, the key insights and criticisms it offers, accessible. This, to me is, the best introduction to CRT. And it is much more than that, actually, it is a broad reflection on structural/systemic racism, on race in America and how it shapes all aspects of life in this country.   If you haven’t yet, go back and listen to Part I, in which we talked about Victor’s personal story and how it relates to CRT, about what CRT actually is, when it emerged, why it emerged. We pick it up right there in Part II: We continue to talk about the actual CRT (not the demonized bogeyman), different strands and debates within the field, its critique of racial progress narratives. And then we do get into the reactionary moral panic around CRT, how and why it took off in the fall of 2020; the political, social, and cultural context in which it could be so successful; why it’s useful to compare the rightwing crusade against CRT to climate change denialism; and how we should think about ways to counter this reactionary campaign. And then, finally, we also talk about what Victor expects going forward, where he sees the country going over the next few decades – and we even manage to end on a somewhat hopeful note.

After an unexpected hiatus, we are back! And we focus on what is undoubtedly one of the most pressing democracy and civil rights issues in America today: The escalating assault on trans rights, the reactionary crusade against one of the country’s most vulnerable communities. We talk about the situation of trans people in the U.S. and do our best to address the confusion, misinformation, and anxiety that are constantly being weaponized. We look at the unprecedented wave of anti-trans bills, the efforts to legislate trans people out of the public square and out of existence, and why all this is happening now; explore the longer-term historical context of crusades against the LGBTQ community in general and examine what’s changed from the more recent, and mostly unsuccessful, wave of “bathroom bills” from just a few years ago to what we are currently witnessing; and situate this attack on trans people in the broader context of the reactionary attempts to roll back the post-1960s rights revolution. We also explore both the tactical, opportunistic as well as the ideological reasons for why the attack on trans people is, even by the standards of today’s rightwing politics, so particularly aggressive and vile. Finally, we discuss why much of the mainstream media coverage has decided not to present this as the struggle for equality and civil rights protections it is, but is overwhelmingly focused on the entirely misleading idea that too many kids and teenagers are being pushed into transitioning, that there is a “trans problem” that constitutes a national emergency: A coverage that exemplifies the worst of neutrality theater journalism and displays all the hallmarks of the ways in which an ostensibly liberal media covered past moral panics – We also look at the idea of a “national divorce”, of dissolving the country into red states and blue states, that, interestingly, quite a few people on both sides seem to find attractive, at least in theory. We discuss what to make of this “national divorce” discourse, whether or not to take it seriously, and why it is predicated on a misleading view of America’s political geography that is not so much shaped by “red states vs blue states,” but by a sharp urban vs rural divide. We end on a rather sober note: While a “national divorce” cannot be the solution, the fact that a shrinking minority of white conservatives is consistently being enabled to hold on to power against the will of the majority of voters does indeed constitute a rapidly worsening political crisis that will have to be resolved - one way or the other.

We share our thoughts on the murder of Tyre Nichols, on why we need to grapple with structural, systemic racism and how it produces discriminatory outcomes, and why the lack of accountability for police departments is a democratic crisis – We then focus on Ron DeSantis’ authoritarian takeover of the education system in Florida: We discuss why the rejection of the AP African American Studies course is emblematic of an escalating assault on public education, of a reactionary rollback of all attempts to establish a more gender and race inclusive education; we talk about the longer-term context of the Right’s disdain for public education and how these recurring curriculum or “history wars” are really conflicts over who gets to define American national identity and who gets to draw the boundaries of what counts as America and American; and we emphasize how this is not just a Florida story, as Republicans are trying to mandate a white nationalist understanding of the past and the present, and censor any critical dissent, wherever they are in charge – Finally, we make the case *for* teaching the importance of structural, systemic racism, of race and gender as organizing principles of American life: Because it is the only way the get the American story right and develop an adequate understanding of U.S. history and society; but also because a society that mandates a version of history and national identity that privileges white conservative Christian sensibilities and perspectives while ignoring or degrading all others will not be an egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

We asked for your questions – and you delivered. We tried our best to answer some of them. The result is a wide-ranging discussion on a bunch of crucial issues, including: Why “economic anxiety” is not what fuels Trumpism or the rightwing radicalization, and why the eagerness with which some people cling to this narrative despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary is indicative of a tendency to sanitize the political discourse; how Democrats should react to the GOP’s radical abandonment of all norms, and what the pitfalls of “hardball” politics (or the lack thereof) are; the inter-and transnational dimension of the reactionary counter-mobilization against democracy, and how the political struggle in the U.S. relates to the situation across the “West” and beyond; how we would address people who are frustrated by the state of national politics, don’t think their voice matters, and might believe both sides are the same anyway; and finally, what myths about America’s past or present we would like to dispel once and for all. Oh, and we also talk a little bit about how we got to know each other and how the podcast came together.

It took 15 votes, and in the end, the insurrectionists finally captured the House: Our takeaways from how the speaker drama played out and what has transpired since, what it all tells us about the Republican Party, and how the rightwing fringe has moved to the center of conservative politics – Nihilism. Chaos agents. Burning it all down. To many observers, the speaker spectacle confirmed that’s basically all there is to the MAGA Right. We discuss the “nihilism” interpretation, why it risks obscuring the ideological core of the rightwing political project, and why it falls short of explaining what, exactly, holds all the different factions on the Right together – We need to talk about Ron DeSantis: According to Never Trump conservatives and quite a few centrists, DeSantis is a less dangerous, more “normal” alternative to Trump. We dive into his actual record as governor of Florida, which is staunchly anti-democratic and concerningly authoritarian, and discuss why “He is better/worse than Trump” is not a very helpful framework to look at DeSantis and the political project he is pursuing.

We are witnessing a historic spectacle in the House. A deep dive into the Republican inability to elect a speaker from all angles: How to explain it, what the fault lines are, why it’s misleading to present the McCarthy camp as “moderates,” what it means for government and governance going forward – Whatever happened to “moderate” Republicans? We look at the case of Elise Stefanik and reflect on the lure of Trumpism, the relationship between opportunism and ideology, and the personal dynamics of a radicalization that is shifting the GOP ever further to the right – We look back, we look ahead: There is a striking sense of optimism among commentators from the left all the way to the center-right who mostly agree that 2022 was a good year for democracy and 2023 will be even better. We are more skeptical. Our review of what happened last year, and our expectations for what is to come next.

The January 6 Committee is recommending prosecution: Justice is (maybe) coming for Donald Trump. We discuss the larger implications of this decision, the potential pitfalls, and the role of legal procedures in solving a political problem like Trumpism – Now that the Committee has finished its work, we reflect on what it has and has not achieved, about the story the Committee has decided to tell, and on the dangers of focusing too narrowly on Trump as the threat to democracy – Culture wars! Identity politics! We dissect the origins, meaning, and political implications of these terms, assess their utility to make sense of the current situation, and discuss how they have been weaponized in service of reactionary political projects to obscure more than they illuminate.

A deep dive into “centrism,” inspired by Kyrsten Sinema leaving the Democratic Party: What is centrism (as an ideology, a political project, a brand)? Who are the centrists? And what do they actually want? – The centrist critique of the democracy discourse: Why do certain centrists reject the focus on the crisis of American democracy? What kind of democracy do centrists envision for the country? – Anti-“Left” centrism: The centrist critique of “wokeism” and the reactionary sensibilities of the centrist mind.

What the Georgia runoff tells us about American politics, why Republicans mostly stuck with Walker, and why “hypocrisy” is really not a very useful (albeit well-deserved) criticism of conservative politics – What to expect next from the GOP, and why our default assumption based on the evidence of the past several decades of Republican politics should not be “soul-searching” leading to moderation, but further escalation – How to situate the rise of Trumpism in the history of modern conservatism, why Trump is not an aberration, but the manifestation of long-standing anti-democratic tendencies, and why we still need to grapple with a significant radicalization of conservative politics in recent years.

Trump hosted a leading Holocaust denier and white power activist for dinner: What to take away from this latest reminder of who Trump is and what the Republican base wants, and why we must not be lulled into a false sense of security by the ridiculousness of it all – And we dive deep into the question of how to best capture and describe the defining political conflict: Why we are experiencing a counter-mobilization, rather than a backlash; by reactionaries, rather than conservatives; against egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy, rather than simply democracy.

The fate of Twitter: The democratic stakes of having so much of our media infrastructure in the hands of billionaires; the fraud relationship between the libertarian-to-far-right tech oligarchy and democracy; Twitter’s importance as an essential part of the virtual public square – Midterms fallout: The major storylines and key narratives that have emerged; the deepening chasm between “red” and “blue” America; and why Donald Trump remains an acute threat – The relationship between journalism and democracy: Should the media be explicitly pro-democracy? What would this look like in practice? And what does it mean to prioritize “neutrality” when democracy itself has become a partisan issue?

Our mission statement: Podcasting about a democracy on the brink – Joe Biden says democracy is on the ballot: Is he right? – Midterm primer: Why the election is close (when maybe it shouldn’t be?) and what people are voting for; media coverage; Democratic messaging; and what worries us most going forward.