New Books in Politics and Polemics

Old friends--one a Jew, the other a Christian--Leonard (Lenny) Grob and John K. Roth are philosophers who have long studied the Holocaust. That experience makes us anxious about democracy, because we are also Americans living in perilous times. The 2020s remind us of the 1930s when Nazis destroyed democracy in Germany. Carnage followed. In the 2020s, Donald Trump and his followers endanger democracy in the United States. With Vladimir Putin's ruthless assault against Ukraine compounding the difficulties, democracy must not be taken for granted. Americans love democracy--except when we don't. That division and conflict mean that democracy will be on the ballot in the 2024 American elections. Probing the prospects, Warnings: The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy (Cascade Books, 2023) features exchanges between us that underscore the most urgent threats to democracy in the United States and show how to resist them. What's most needed is ethical patriotism that urges us Americans to be our best selves. Our best selves defend liberal democracy; they strive for inclusive pluralism. Our best selves resist decisions and policies like those that led to the Holocaust or genocidal war in Ukraine or conspiracies to overturn fair and free elections in the United States. Our best selves reject antisemitism and racism; they oppose hypocrisy and autocracy. Our best selves hold lying leaders accountable. Our best selves believe that, against all odds, democracy can win out if we never give up trying to be our best.Jeff Bachman is an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. 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 The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions: 2006-2022 (Sublation Media, 2023), Chris Cutrone investigates how and why the Millennial Left did not take up the task of socialism for the their time and relegated themselves to the shadows of the GenX Left and the New Left before them.The Millennial Left, facing the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the Presidencies of Obama and Trump and the political discontents expressed by them and by Bernie Sanders, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, SYRIZA, et al, was tasked with the struggle for socialism in the core of global capital. It failed to even attempt this task. In the essays collected here, spanning the Millennial generation's many agonies, Chris Cutrone cuts through the accumulated legacy of failures that the Millennials inherited from the Left of the 20th century and that blocked their view of the socialist politics needed to turn the crisis of neoliberal capitalism into a struggle to overcome capitalism. A critique of the history of the recent and current Left, the book is also a lesson in politics: the politics marking the 21st century and the absence of Marxism informing the Left as much as the Right. It is essential reading for anybody interested in a socialist politics of freedom. Chris Cutrone teaches Critical Theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute for Clinical Social Work. He completed his PhD on Adorno's Marxism at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years in the Social Sciences Core Curriculum, and is the original lead organizer and chief pedagogue of the Platypus Affiliated Society. 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 first book in the storied career of one of the most influential conservative legal scholars and philosophers of our day is the focus of an upcoming conference in Washington, DC. Making Men Moral (1993) is the book and Robert P. George is the man behind it—Princeton professor of jurisprudence, bioethicist and pro-life and civil liberties champion. Scheduled speakers include some of the most important thinkers on social conservatism and legal thought of the generations he has molded, plus many of his peers and George himself. This conference is our focus for today.As the founder and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University since 2000, George has provided a model for a slew of similar programs, centers and institutes throughout American academia and abroad. He is also a noted public speaker, often in partnership with his good friend the African-American scholar, Cornel West.Because of George’s outsized role in public discussion of moral issues and his unique position as a stalwart Christian voice and admired scholar in the heavily secular academe of our time, rather than interview the author of a book today I will be chatting with one of the organizers of Making Men Moral: 30th Anniversary Conference. This event is co-sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, and the Project on Constitutional Originalism and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Catholic University.And luckily for those unable to attend in person the event at AEI in Washington, DC Thursday, November 30, 2023 | 12:00 PM to 5:30 PM ET and Friday, December 1, 2023 | 9:00 AM to 5:15 PM ET, they can register to follow the proceedings live online for free.This is a welcome opportunity to learn about one of the most important books in the fields of moral philosophy, the philosophy of law, and natural law of the last 30 years.For decades, George’s Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality has been the go-to text for legal scholars, political theorists, philosophers and educated readers who want to grasp what types of human vice and folly can be legitimately regulated, what the relationship is between morals legislation and freedom, what is owed by the individual to the ordering of society, and what falls under the protection of privacy or basic civil liberties legal regimes.The conference features leading lights in the conservative legal firmament such as our guest today--J. Joel Alicea an associate professor at the Columbus School of Law of the Catholic University of America, Sherif Girgis, Melissa Moschella and Professor George himself. It will also feature scholars in the fields of theology and religious learning such as Andrew T. Walker; bioethicists and legal scholars such as O. Carter Snead; luminaries in the field of natural law like Hadley Arkes; journalists such as Timothy P. Carney and Alexandra DeSanctis and notable social scientists such as Mark Regnerus and W. Bradford Wilcox.The first day of the two-day conference will feature an interview of George by his fellow public intellectual and former student, Ryan T. Anderson.Our guest today, Professor Alicea, will not only open the conference but will participate in a panel discussion entitled, “Making Men Moral and Constitutional Interpretation,” the title of which nicely encapsulates two of the many roles Robert P. George serves in the public sphere: George is both a powerful moral voice and a skillful, much loved professor at Princeton where he teaches a famous course on Constitutional Interpretation (the lectures of which were recorded and are available free online).Let’s hear from Professor Alicea.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

In this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit.In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraway’s essay, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationcene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” Environmental Humanities 6 no. 1 (2015): 159-165. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3615934, and Paul Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene’” Earth Systems Science in the Anthropocene ed. Eckhart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Springer, 2006) pp. 13-18. He references B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two (MacMillan, 1962) at the end of our conversation.Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University where he currently serves as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Watson Institute for International Affairs. He studies the history of science, agriculture, and other forms of knowledge-making in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world, focusing on the plantation cultures of the Caribbean and Brazil. He was recently the director of the John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, and many years ago, when he was more optimistic about the current global epoch, he managed grants for the Sierra Club Foundation in San Francisco, California. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (U Chicago, 2008) and is cooking up two new projects, on the historical connections between natural science and plantation agriculture in the Amazon River basin and the global history of collecting.The image for this week comes from Neil’s research on the history of plantation agriculture. This drawing of a plantation from Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue) was reproduced in José Mariano da Conceição Velozo's Fazendeiro do Brazil Tome III Part II (Lisbon, 1799), in the volume dedicated to coffee production. 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 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority (Scribner). Now the pair are back with Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes (Henry Holt, 2023). In their new book, an essential guide to the trends that roil the Democratic Party and threaten its national standing, the authors forthrightly acknowledge that they had underestimated “the defection of the white working class” from party ranks. Our conversation focuses on a core reason for this defection: the rise of a “shadow party” of elite donors, activist groups and media voices that is alienating the white working-class vote with an unbending, culturally-left posture on hot-button matters like race, immigration, climate change and sex and gender. This self-appointed “vanguard” possesses a quasi-religious mindset of a neo-Puritan stamp—an outlook that many Democratic voters, and not only in the white working class, reject. The battle is on, Judis and Teixeira aptly warn, for “the soul of the party in the age of extremes.”Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. 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 Frankfurt School’s own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world. 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 the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve. Today's neoliberal ideology deploys the work ethic on behalf of the One Percent. However, workers and their advocates have long used the work ethic on behalf of ordinary people. By exposing the ideological roots of contemporary neoliberalism as a perversion of the seventeenth-century Protestant work ethic, Elizabeth Anderson shows how we can reclaim the original goals of the work ethic, and uplift ourselves again. Hijacked persuasively and powerfully demonstrates how ideas inspired by the work ethic informed debates among leading political economists of the past, and how these ideas can help us today. Elizabeth Anderson is the Max Mendel Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University of Michigan. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics (1995), The Imperative of Integration (2010), and Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (2017). She is a MacArthur Fellow and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, The New Yorker described her as 'a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent [...] Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life.' 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 democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. In Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton UP, 2023), Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence--the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege.Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy. She connects today's Black Lives Matter protests to the use of lynching photographs to arouse public outrage over post-Reconstruction era racial terror, and she discusses Emmett Till's funeral as a catalyst for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. She also traces the political weaponization of white victimhood during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Calling for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Hooker argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons and to different ends. 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 Unlocking Scots: The Secret Life of the Scots Language (Luath, 2023), Dr. Clive Young sets out to uncover the secret life of Scots – the centuries of vibrant debate and unconscious bilingualism hidden beneath slang and touristy tea-towels. From 19th-century dictionaries to Twitter rammies, Dr. Young explores the evolution, suppression, and potential revitalisation of Scots. He not only investigates its troubled past, but also looks towards the future with hope and a practical action plan that will allow everyone, however estranged from the mither tongue, to keep it hale and hearty for generations to come.He investigates the deep history of Scots and the linguistic tension surrounding those who naturally spoke it and reflects on how Scots has now been saturated in politics – and what that means for the future of Scots speakers.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

A longtime American foreign policy insider’s penetrating and definitive reckoning with this country’s involvement in the Middle EastThe culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (Penguin, 2023) is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when American perception of the region shifted from a cluster of faraway and frequently skirmishing nations to a shining, urgent opportunity for America to (in Reagan’s words) “serve the cause of world peace and the future of mankind.”Reagan fired the starting gun on decades of deepening American involvement, but as the global economy grew, bringing an increasing reliance on oil, U.S. diplomatic and military energies were ever more fatefully absorbed by the Middle East. Grand Delusion explores the motivations, strategies, and shortcomings of each presidential administration from Reagan to today, exposing a web of intertwined events—from the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict amid Israeli domestic politics, Cold War rivalries, and Saudi Arabia’s quest for security, to 9/11 and the war on terror—managed by a Washington policy process frequently ruled by wishful thinking and partisan politics.Simon’s sharp sense of irony and incisive writing brings complex history to life. He illuminates the motives behind America's commitment to Israel; explodes the popular narrative of Desert Storm as a “good war”; and calls out the devastating consequences of our mistakes, particularly for people of the region trapped by the onslaught of American military action and pitiless economic sanctions.Grand Delusion reveals that this story, while episodically impressive, has too often been tragic and at times dishonorable. As we enter a new era in foreign policy, this is an essential book, a cautionary history that illuminates America's propensity for self-deception and misadventure at a moment when the nation is redefining its engagement with a world in crisis.Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu or via andrewopace.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