New Books in Politics and Polemics

You mean big business is good, contributes to our general welfare, and is not generally guilty--with notable exceptions--of all of the charges made against it? That's the argument libertarian economist Tyler Cowen makes in his book Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero (St. Martins, 2019) Most NBN listeners will raise an eyebrow to that claim, but most of those same NBN listeners are up for a good back-and-forth on the virtues and demerits of our market system. And to that end, being familiar with Cowen's arguments--made in this book and his many other publications and platforms--is very useful. The shift in the reputational balance between government and big business as a result of the Covid-19 crisis is another reason to consider Cowen's argument.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.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

Polarization, a disaffected and frustrated electorate, and widespread distrust of government, media, and traditional politicians set the stage in 2016 for an unprecedented presidential contest. For many, Donald Trump’s campaign speeches and other rhetoric seemed on the surface to be simplistic, repetitive, and disorganized. In Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (Texas A&M University Press, 2020), Jennifer Mercieca shows that Trump’s rhetoric was anything but.As a political communication expert, Mercieca describes the Trump campaign’s expert use of the common demagogic rhetorical techniques. These strategies were meant to appeal to a segment of an already distrustful electorate. Mercieca analyzes Trump’s rhetorical strategies, including argument ad hominem, reification, and paralipsis, to reveal a campaign that was morally repugnant to some, but that was also effective and that may have fundamentally changed the discourse of the American public sphere.Carrie Gillon received her PhD from the Linguistics program at the University of British Columbia in 2006. She is currently an editor and writing coach and the cohost of the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. She is also the author of ​The Semantics of Determiners and the co-author of Nominal Contact in Michif. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

What is truly at stake in politics? Nothing less than how we should live, as individuals and as communities. This book goes beyond the surface headlines, the fake news and the hysteria to explore the timeless questions posed and answers offered by a diverse group of the 30 greatest political thinkers who have ever lived.Notably, they blur boundaries of ancient and modern, Western, Chinese and Islamic thought, religious and seculary thinkers to provide a much wider survey than normally is the case in such overviews.Are we political, economic, or religious animals? Should we live in small city-states, nations, or multinational empires? What values should politics promote? Should wealth be owned privately or in common? Do animals also have rights? There is no idea too radical for this global assortment of thinkers, which includes: Confucius; Plato; Augustine; Maimonides; Machiavelli; Burke; Wollstonecraft; Marx; Nietzsche; Gandhi; Qutb; Arendt; Mao; Nussbaum, Naess and Rawls.In How to Think Politically: Sages, Scholars and Statesmen Whose Ideas Have Shaped the World (Bloomsbury, 2019), the authors paint a vivid portrait of these often prescient, always compelling political thinkers, showing how their ideas grew out of their own dramatic lives and times and evolved beyond them. Now more than ever we need to be reminded that politics can be a noble, inspiring and civilising art, concerned with both power and justice. And if we want to understand today's political world, we need to understand the foundations of politics and its architects. This is the perfect guide to both.James Bernard Murphy is Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA where he has taught since 1990. His newest book is titled Your Whole Life: Childhood and Adulthood in Dialogue (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).Graeme Garrard has taught political thought at Cardiff University, UK since 1995 and at the Harvard Summer School, USA since 2006. He has lectured at colleges and universities in Canada, the United States, Britain and France for 25 years. He is the author of two books:  Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment (2000) and CounterEnlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present  (2006).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 his classic essay on the fear of breakdown, Donald Winnicott famously conveys to a patient that the disaster powerfully feared has, in fact, already happened. Taking her cue from Winnicott, Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2019), explores the implications of breakdown fears for the practice of democracy.Democracy, as you may dimly recall, demands the capacity to bear difference, tolerate loss, and to speak into the unknown. Meanwhile we have come to live in a world where, if my clinical practice and personal life are any indication, people often prefer writing to speaking. Patients who want to make a schedule change--never a neutral event in psychoanalysis—write me. I say, addressing the resistance, “This is a talking cure. Get your money’s worth. Speak!” Among intimates, bad news is something I too often read about. I surmise that in speaking desire or conveying pain, a fantasized recipient is sought, an ideal listener, who, like a blow up doll lover can be invoked, controlled and then deflated at will.Circling back to difference and loss, ideas that do not mirror our already existing thoughts find themselves batted out of the park to an elsewhere not worth enunciating. Cultivating a protective bubble—such a heartbreak right?  It seems there is something about democracy that frightens the shit out of us.Deploying the work of Winnicott, Klein, Green and Kristeva, Mcafee reminds us of our original loss—what she calls “plenum”. That loss, to the degree it is recognized, initiates our undoing. Mother’s other—be it her lover, her piano lessons, a visit to the dentist for a cavity—tears a hole in our emotional shield. In her wake, we cling to seemingly strong leaders, a father, or failing that potent ideologies reeking of misogyny, all the while hoping for compensation for an unfathomable loss.Embedded within democracy lies the demand that we see other than ourselves. This demand challenges the thin-skinned among us. And all of us are thin-skinned from time to time. How to manage?Mcafee adds her voice to the popular chorus of those practicing applied psychoanalysis and suggests we embrace mourning. It is an inarguable position yet also nice work if you can get it! Of course, with the original disaster elided, like sleepwalkers in our night fog, we will helplessly seek it out; worse, we will make it manifest, with a vengeance. What is not remembered gets repeated. Trapped in America, as I am, one wonders about democracy. What might lure us to revisit the sight of the disaster, “the thing itself’,” to quote Adrienne Rich, “and not the myth?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

How can we make sense of the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump? What forces moved American politics from the first African-American president and an all-Democratic Congress (2008) to ethno-nationalist rhetoric and GOP control of Congress (2016)? What do the reactions to these political events – the rise of the Tea Party and the Anti-Trump resistance – tell us about these, and future, presidential elections?In there new book Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2019), Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo focus on changing organizational configurations – such as voluntary local citizens’ groups, elite advocacy organizations, consortia of wealthy donors (e.g., Koch’s Americans For Prosperity), and candidate-led political campaigns – to explain these radical shifts.The book has a unique methodology: a rich mix of quantitative and qualitative data analyzed by a collaborative team of authors from political science, sociology, and history. The range is extraordinary, combining what is best about both field work and big data in the social sciences. The authors document the changing organizational configurations – at both the national and state levels – with an emphasis on the states that were pivotal in the 2016 election: Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The book offer insights about national trends while capturing the importance of federalism – and attending to unique factors in swing states.The authors excavate how top-down efforts (ultra-free market fundamentalism funded by groups like Americans For Prosperity) combined with bottom-up organizations (popular, local, and diverse groups who often channeled ethno-nationalist resentment) to push Republican politics to the right. Their analysis of progressive groups reacting to the Trump presidency reveals grassroots organizing that is both similar and different to the Tea Party movement. Rather than pushing the Democratic party to the left, the resisters work within the Democratic party (often energizing moribund organizations).Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Today’s right wing media has a long history that is largely unknown to its current listeners. In The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement (Oxford University Press, 2020), Paul Matzko details its emergence in the 1950s and the response to its rise by some of the leading political and religious institutions of the era.As Matzko explains, the origins of postwar conservative media lay in the broader changes taking place in broadcasting in 1950s. As the major networks shifted their focus from radio to television, local radio stations were eager to find programmers willing to pay to put programs on the air. This gave conservative religious broadcasters such as Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis an opportunity to spread their message to a nationwide audience. Fearing the growing influence of commentators organizing against their policies, the Kennedy administration sought to use such means as the previously underdeveloped Fairness Doctrine to constrain it. Working in conjunction with the National Council of Churches, they placed growing pressure on the broadcasters – particularly the acerbic McIntire – in an ultimately successful effort to undermine their nationwide stature. Yet while McIntire’s radio ministry was gone by the early 1970s, his example was followed a decade later by others who took advantage of broadcast deregulation in the late 1970s and 1980s to launch the modern era of conservative broadcasting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Americans are living through a social crisis, contends Yuval Levin in his 2020 book A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020)In Levin’s view, acrimony reigns in the media, both social and traditional. Public discussion of crucial policy matters has degenerated into finger-pointing. Congress is more of a platform for demagogues than a workplace for serious legislators who put the national interest above their own personal brands. Donald Trump embodies this performative style of politics. Church attendance and other forms of worship are in decline. Academia is awash in identity politics. Even questions of what constitutes a family are in dispute.Meanwhile, our major social institutions, in past decades the bulwarks of comity and social progress, from universities to government at every level, from the Boy Scouts to the Catholic Church to National Public Radio to Hollywood, have been tarnished by scandals from admissions ones to those related to sexual abuse or harassment. The federal courts have been politicized by both sides.And, as if things were not bleak enough, we are in the midst of a pandemic and consequent economic catastrophe.Depressed yet? Take heart, readers! Levin’s book charts a way out of this mess—as the title suggests. Or do you even agree that things are as bad as Levin paints them or that a renewal of American institutions is the way forward? Let’s hear from the man himself on the moral state of the nation and let’s get the lowdown on why he thinks institutions, troubled as many of them are, can rise from the ashes and why we, as a people, desperately need them to do so.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

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 shocked and surprised a number of commentators, especially because his own attitudes seemed to be in conflict with much of what people often associate with conservatism. Matt McManus argues, however, that Trump and other similar figures and movements represent a new form of conservatism, one with a long history of development, and formed as a response to various social dynamics. The goal of his recent book, ​The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), is to provide a genealogical analysis of this new form of conservative politics.Matthew McManus received his PhD from the Socio-Legal Studies program at York University, Canada in 2017. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of TEC de Monterrey, Mexico, and is also the author of ​Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law: A Critical Legal Argument​. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Hong Kong in 2019 was a city on fire. Anti-government protests, sparked by an ill-fated extradition bill sparked seven months of protest and civil unrest. Protestors clashed with police in the streets, in shopping malls, in residential buildings. Driven by Hong Kong’s young people with their ‘Be Water!’ strategy, the pro-democracy movement grew into a massive force, receiving support from all demographics – from the ‘silver-hairs’, to mothers, from healthcare workers, to journalists and bankers, the ongoing protests polarized the community and changed the urban city space, likely forever.In City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong (Scribe, 2020), Antony Dapiran builds on his previous work City of Protest. He explores the 2019 protest movement, how it has changed the city and what Hong Kong means for the world. Dapiran gets you as close to the action as you can be, without having to experience the direct effects of being tear-gassed. This is a must read for anyone interested Hong Kong, China, democracy and human rights. It is a lesson in policing, in protest, and the power of political mobilization. It is a page turner that is essential to understanding Hong Kong’s ‘revolution of our times.’Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality and criminal law. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

If you’re a despot, there are two people you can’t lie to, your doctor and your chef. This is one of the nuggets explained to me by Witold Szabłowski, author of How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks (Penguin, 2020), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.The author, a tireless journalist, used his skills at getting people to talk and his knowledge of cooking to convince those who served some of the 20th century's most infamous tyrants to open up about the men who employed them, what they ate, and what food can tell you about power. An enlightening, terrifying and deliciously informative read. Since I co-authored a book about Donald Trump, we had some things to discuss about cheeseburgers and fries as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics