New Books in Politics and Polemics

We’ve all been there – the family dinners turned full-fledged political debates, the awkward chat in the kitchen at work, the difficulty of discussing politics on a first date or even at dinner with a long-time partner. Today’s divisive climate – and the seemingly neverending circus of Brexit – has made discussion of current events uncomfortable and often uncivil. So, how exactly do we find ways to reach across the aisle to those whose views we find unpalatable?Psychotherapist and lifetime liberal Jeanne Safer hopes to shed some light on the situation. Combining her professional expertise with personal experience gleaned from over forty years of happy marriage to her stalwart conservative husband Richard Brookhiser, as well as a wealth of interviews with politically mixed couples, Safer offers frank advice for salvaging and strengthening relationships strained by political differences.Part relationship guide, part anthropological study, I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics: How to Protect Your Intimate Relationships in a Poisonous Partisan World (Bitback, 2019) is a helpful and entertaining how-to for anyone who has felt they are walking on eggshells in these increasingly uncertain times.Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

High drama at the high court. Grandstanding at Senate hearings. Distrust on all sides. Nominations made by presidents and ignored or voted down by the Senate or withdrawn due to scandal, calumny or nominee intellectual nullity or professional capacity issues. The personal character of nominees assailed. Questions asked of nominees; detailed answers politely refused. Cries of illegitimacy and calls for reform.All of this and more is on offer in Ilya Shapiro’s 2020 book, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court (Gateway, 2020)Everyone who cares about the law and the history and the future of the United States should read this book. It offers something to every sort of reader.First, it is a serious work of scholarship that examines such questions as:Is the Court, as progressives claim, really in some sort of crisis and merely a tool of a cabal involving the rather unlikely combination of corporate America and the supposedly evil religious right?Or, as many on the right argue, has the legislative branch, for expediency’s sake and in a cowardly and self-serving fashion, abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, thereby ceding far too much power to both the administrative state and the courts?Shapiro parses these questions with authority, weighing the pros and cons of the various reform measures of recent years with shrewdness, fairness and wit.Second, for general readers it is an entertaining yet substantive tour of the American political and legal landscape since the Founding Era and abounds in fascinating facts (e.g., when the first public Senate hearings on a Supreme Court nominee were held, the first time such a nominee testified in person before the Senate, the first time such hearings were televised).We learn about everything from the famous “Midnight Judges” to the fiascos of the nomination of Harriet Miers and those of Haysworth and Carswell. The book provides succinct profiles of such people that present them as distinct individuals and not as punchlines.The book is perfectly timed given that it was published just before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Senate hearings on the confirmation of now Justice Amy Coney Barrett.This is the book to turn to in coming years for solid analysis as the left pushes for “reform” of not only the Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary—which Shapiro also discusses in depth.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

It is often assumed that American politics is dominated by financial elites and the 1%, who use their massive wealth to gain power and influence, pushing for legislation that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. The actual mechanics of how this works, however, are often difficult to see and understand, obscured by distortion via the media, politicians, and the stories we often tell ourselves about how political change happens. These narratives often tell us about noble figures who come forward with powerful speeches and pieces of legislation that pushes us forward, as well as figures who sell out and cave to the powers that be. What these narratives often leave out is the broader context that those leaders were in the middle of, not only shaping but being shaped by the organizing that was happening around them. Filling in this gap are my guests today, Kevin Young and Michael Schwartz (cowriter Tarun Banerjee was unable to join us), here to discuss their book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (Verso, 2020). A work of political theory, sociology and history, this book covers a lot of different areas, but underlying it all is a belief in the importance of mass organizing to resist the power of capital. The first half of the book delivers an insightful and critical look at the Obama presidency, looking at his failures and limitations when it came to healthcare reform, Wall Street regulation and environmental protection, looking to understand the underlying mechanics of his political orientation and how they were insufficient for the tasks at hand. The later chapters of the book then look at various political successes, such as the labor movements during the depression of the 1930's and the struggles for civil rights in the 1960's, analyzing the ways massive organizing efforts were made to apply political and financial pressure and force capital to the bargaining table.Written with a brilliant combination of academic rigor and accessibility, this is a how-to guide for how to organize movements and challenge power, and will be of interest not just to people who want to understand the world, but who want to change it as well.Kevin Young is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also the author of Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017). Michael Schwartz is a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology at Stony Brook University, and is also the author of The War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (2008). Tarun Banerjee is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Mark Nowak's Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020) is a history of the poetry workshop "from below and to the left." Inspired by previous workers' poetry workshops led by writers like June Jordan and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nowak's book traces the history of worker poetry both in the US and abroad. It also details Nowak's own involvement with workers' poetry workshops held with autoworkers facing layoffs, farm workers in Hudson Valley, and metal workers in South Africa. Nowak shows that poetry is not a luxury for the elite, but a vital tool in describing working class lives and in imagining a classless future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Historically, marriage was understood to be a conjugal relationship; that is to say, a bond uniting a man and a woman as husband and wife in a partnership shaped by its special aptness for conceiving and rearing children. Thus, its norms included sexual complementarity, exclusivity, fidelity, and a pledge of permanence. In 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, held that states could no longer define marriage as a distinctively male-female bond. The Court required all fifty states to eliminate the norm of sexual complementarity so that the relationships of same-sex partners could be recognized as “marriages.” To many Americans, justice had triumphed, “bigotry” had been defeated, so-called “marriage equality” would usher in a golden era of tolerance and there would be absolutely no negative repercussions.Those people and institutions (such as religious bodies) who cling to the idea of marriage as a conjugal bond and therefore oppose this sweeping change were henceforth to be treated as not just defeated foes in a series of court cases but as hate-filled yahoos suffering from a form of moral insanity. This was despite the fact that those who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman were assured repeatedly by their opponents throughout the period up until Obergefell—and by the majority itself in that decision—that they had nothing to fear from what was, they insisted, a mere extension of marriage not its redefinition.They were told no harm would result to either individuals of conscience or to parents or children who would now be brought up in a world in which marriage is defined as basically an emotional union between adults of whatever sex, not one based on the bodily union of a man and a woman made possible by their sexual-reproductive complementarity. When defenders of the conjugal view of marriage pointed out that its legal abolition left no principled basis for norms such as permanence, monogamy, and fidelity, their arguments went for the most part unaddressed, except by the occasional candid critic, such as the gay activist writer Michelangelo Signorile, who replied that the abolition of traditional norms of morality represented a form of “liberation” from outmoded strictures. The norms were to be relegated to the history books and those who expressed allegiance to them were to find themselves increasingly in danger of losing their jobs, their businesses, and their rights to educate their children in their own beliefs.The authors of a book published in 2012, and in 2020 out in a second edition with a powerful new afterword, saw all of this coming. That book was What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (Encounter Books,  by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson & Robert P. George. We will talk to Mr. Anderson about the new edition of the book and what he and his co-authors got right about what was likely to happen in terms of religious freedom generally and in areas such as foster care and adoption assistance in a same-sex marriage world and what even he and his co-authors did not foresee. All of this affects all of us.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

An explosive and unprecedented inside look at Steve Bannon's entourage of global powerbrokers and the hidden alliances shaping today's geopolitical upheaval.In 2015, Bloomberg News named Steve Bannon “the most dangerous political operative in America.” Since then, he has grown exponentially more powerful—and not only in the United States. In this groundbreaking and urgent account, award-winning scholar of the radical right Benjamin Teitelbaum takes readers behind-the-scenes of Bannon's global campaign against modernity in War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (Dey Street Books, 2020).Inspired by a radical twentieth-century ideology called Traditionalism, Bannon and a small group of right-wing powerbrokers are planning new political mobilizations on a global scale—discussed and debated in secret meetings organized by Bannon in hotel suites and private apartments in DC, Europe and South America. Their goal? To upend the world order and reorganize geopolitics on the basis of archaic values rather than modern ideals of democracy, freedom, social progress, and human rights. Their strenuous efforts are already producing results, from the fortification of borders throughout the world and the targeting of immigrants, to the undermining of the European Union and United States governments, and the expansion of Russian influence.Drawing from exclusive interviews with Bannon’s hidden network of far-right thinkers, years of academic research into the radical right, and with unprecedented access to the esoteric salons where they meet, Teitelbaum exposes their considerable impact on the world and their radical vision for the future.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Let’s face it, 2020 has been a hell of a year. We could all use a good laugh. But as historians and/or fans of history, we have to read something historically grounded, right? Well, fear not! Felix Biederman, Virgil Texas, Will Menaker, Brendan James, and Matt Christman, those rapscallions from the Chapo Trap House podcast wrote a book, The Chapo Guide to Revolution; A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason (Simon & Schuster, 2018), and it’s got a lot of history in it. I sat down with Matt Christman to talk about history, humor, and the hell-world of late capitalism. He offers his critiques of American liberalism and conservatism, as well as discussing how history shapes his thinking and analysis.Matt Christman co-hosts Chapo Trap House, a hugely popular and rather influential podcast. The Chapo crew includes the above authors (although the traitorous Brendan James was purged for revisionism and replaced with Amber A'Lee Frost). For the uninitiated, Chapo Trap House is a comedic political podcast that has been branded as the “Dirt Bag Left”. With a solid dose of scatological humor and subversive irony, it’s not for everyone, but I find it to be some of today’s smartest and most well-informed political and cultural criticism. On the Chapo podcast and in his other appearances, he displays an impressive command of history, frequently grounding his analysis in historical context. He also put out a few special episodes of Chapo Trap House called “The Inebriated Past”, the best of which offered insightful discussions of topics ranging from fascism to sewer socialism.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

This is part of our Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle in its dimensions beyond the current American nation-state, including the Black Atlantic, and beyond.Today, our guest is Jared Ball, co-editor of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X (Black Classic Press, 2012).A Lie of Reinvention is a response to Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention. Marable’s book was controversially acclaimed by some as his magnum opus. At the same time, it was denounced and debated by others as a worthless read full of conjecture, errors, and without any new factual content. In this collection of critical essays, editors Jared Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs lead a group of established and emerging Black scholars and activists who take a clear stance in this controversy: Marable’s biography is at best flawed and at worst a major setback in American history, African American studies, and scholarship on the life of Malcolm X.In the tradition of John Henrik Clarke’s classic anthology “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond,” this volume provides a striking critique of Marable’s text. In 1968, Clarke and his assembled writers felt it essential to respond to Styron’s fictionalized and ahistorical Nat Turner, the heroic leader of one of America’s most famous revolts against enslavement. In A Lie of Reinvention, the editors sense a different threat to an African American icon, Malcolm X. This time, the threat is presented as an authoritative biography. To counter the threat, Ball and Burroughs respond with a barbed collection of commentaries of Marable’s text.The essays come from all quarters of the Black community. From behind prison walls, Mumia Abu-Jamal revises his prior public praise of Marable’s book with an essay written specifically for this volume. A. Peter Bailey, a veteran journalist who worked with Malcolm X’s Organization for Afro-American Unity, disputes how he is characterized in Marable’s book. Bill Strickland, who also knew Malcolm X, provides what he calls a “personal critique” of the biography. Younger scholars such as Kali Akuno, Kamau Franklin, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Christopher M. Tinson, Eugene Puryear and Greg Thomas join veterans Rosmari Mealy, Raymond Winbush, Amiri Baraka and Karl Evanzz in pointing out historical problems and ideological misinterpretations in Marable’s work.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In this episode, J.J. Mull interviews Lynne Layton and Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, author and editor respectively of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes, published in 2020 by Routledge as a part of their Relational Perspectives Book Series. This text takes part in an intellectual and political lineage that has called for a more radical understanding of psychoanalysis, encompassing a diverse range of thinkers from Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieau to Eric Fromm and Marie Langer. In this compilation of Layton’s work, we’re given a framework for understanding the intersection between structural forces (gender oppression, racial capitalism, white supremacy, etc.) and the clinical encounter. Over the course of this conversation, Layton and Leavy-Sperounis give an account of the ways in which neoliberalism, capitalism, and other systems of domination give rise to particular kinds of subjective possibilities and gesture towards what psychoanalysis as a field might have to learn from contemporary struggles and insurrections.J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

This episode is part of a Special Series on Malcolm X and Black Nationalism.In this series, we delve into the background of Malcolm X's action and thought in the context of Black Nationalism, correcting the fundamentally mistaken notion that Malcolm X was a civil rights leader. He certainly did not see himself in that way, and explicitly argued otherwise. This helps us place the Afro-American struggle in its dimensions beyond the current American nation-state, including the Black Atlantic, and beyond.Known as 'the angriest black man in America', Malcolm X was one of the most famous activists to ever live. Going beyond biography, Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (Pluto Press, 2020) examines Malcolm X's philosophical system, restoring his thinking to the pantheon of Black Radical Thought.Michael Sawyer argues that the foundational concepts of Malcolm X's political philosophy - economic and social justice, strident opposition to white supremacy and Black internationalism - are often obscured by an emphasis on biography. The text demonstrates the way in which Malcolm X's philosophy lies at the intersection of the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon and is an integral part of the revolutionary politics formed to alleviate the plight of people of African descent globally.Exploring themes of ontology, the body, geographic space and revolution, Black Minded provides a much-needed appraisal of Malcolm X's political philosophy.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics