New Books in Politics and Polemics

From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2023), Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance.Drawing on a wealth of data, including interviews with students of Color around the country and analyses of millions of social media posts over the past decade, Eschmann investigates the influence of online communication on face-to-face interactions. When the Hood Comes Off highlights the power of the internet as an organizing tool, and shows that online racism can be a profound wake-up call. How will we respond? 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 World Economic Forum has become the bugbear of the right-wing in Canada, and beyond. Conspiracies swirl about how this shadowy, globalist cabal wants us to live in pods, eat bugs, and “own nothing, but be happy.”These may be mere conspiracy theory and faux populism, but there are many things wrong with the WEF.On this episode, we examine the shifting political discourse surrounding our global financial elites. How can the left operate in this ideologically confusing moment?First, we take it back to the heyday of the 90s global justice movement and revisit the Battle in Seattle. Reactionary forces were pushing an anti-globalization line against the WTO. However, the real politics there were different: it was built on global justice and global solidarity.Then, we go to Davos and look for left-leaning protesters organizing against the WEF. Each year, there is a planned protest hike, quite far from the actual WEF site, because Swiss authorities push demonstrates away. Yet, the WEF also invites individual activists in. We learn about that push and pull.Finally, filmmaker and documentarian Joel Bakan is well-known for his hit documentary The Corporation, which was released in 2003–not long after the Battle in Seattle. Today, he tells us the politics are completely different: corporate leaders, including those at WEF, tell us they’re actually the good guys. His new follow-up film The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel says that this new warm-and-fuzzy branding makes the corporation even more dangerous.SUPPORT THE SHOWYou can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.ABOUT THE SHOWFor a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. 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 Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in "Postracial" America (University Press of Mississippi, 2023), Penelope Ingram examines the role played by media in the resurgence of white nationalism and neo-Nazi movements in the Obama-to-Trump era. As politicians on the right stoked anxieties about whites “losing ground” and “being left behind,” media platforms turned whiteness into a commodity that was packaged and disseminated to a white populace. Reading popular film and television franchises (Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and The Walking Dead) through political flashpoints, such as debates over immigration reform, gun control, and Black Lives Matter protests, Ingram reveals how media cultivated feelings of white vulnerability and loss among white consumers. By exploring the convergence of entertainment, news, and social media in a digital networked environment, Ingram demonstrates how media’s renewed attention to “imperiled whiteness” enabled and sanctioned the return of overt white supremacy exhibited by alt-right groups in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the Capitol riots in 2021.Anna E. Lindner received her doctorate in Communication from Wayne State University. On Twitter. 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 Supreme Court recently wrapped up their term – and announced that they will hear a very controversial case about domestic abuse, the power of Congress, and the right to keep and bear arms called United States v. Rahimi. The Court will decide whether a Texas man who assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone has been deprived of his Second Amendment rights. When the assaulted woman later obtained a restraining order against Mr. Zackey Rahimi, federal law made illegal for him to possess a firearm or ammunition while under that order.In 2019, Mr. Zackey Rahimi had an argument with his girlfriend in a parking lot. Mr. Rahimi knocked the woman to the ground. As he dragged her back to his car, she hit her head on the car’s dashboard. Later, in a telephone call. Mr. Rahimi threatened the woman that he would shoot her if she told anyone about the assault. Later, a Texas state court entered a domestic violence restraining order against Rahimi. The order also barred Rahimi from possessing a gun based on a part of a federal statute: the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Mr. Rahimi claims that the statute violates his Second Amendment rights.Postscript invites authors to react to contemporary events that engage their scholarship and we have two experts on the Second Amendment to unpack the case. Joseph Blocher, Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law co-authored The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018) with Darrell Miller and has a forthcoming article in the Yale Law Review (co-authored with Eric Ruben) entitled Originalism-by-Analogy and Second Amendment Adjudication. In addition to his numerous influential law review articles and nuanced public facing scholarship in print, radio, and tv, he was one of the attorneys who helped write the brief for the District of C in Heller and he contributed an important brief to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century? Or simply a debonair and generous French intellectual happy to talk redistributive justice? Join this 2020 conversation with John and Adaner Usmani (star of RTB’s episode 44: Racism as idea, Racism as Power Relation) to find out.Why did we invite him? John thinks nobody is better than Piketty at mapping and explaining the nature and origin of the glaring and growing inequality that everywhere defines wealth distribution in the 21st century—both between societies and within them. His recent magnum opus, Capital and Ideology. ask what sorts of stories societies (and individuals within those societies) tell themselves so as to tolerate such inequality—and the poverty and misery it produces. Or even to see that inequality as part of the natural order of things.Why did he accept our invitation? A mystery, but who are we to look a gift economist in the mouth?Mentioned in the EpisodePhilip Larkin, “Why aren’t they screaming?” (from the poem “The Old Fools”)Bonus: Here is John’s question about his favorite writer, the one Adaner teased him for not asking:“Mr. Piketty, you are interested in hinge points where people cease being captivated by one ideology and begin seeing differently (might one also say, begin being captivated by another ideology?) In 2014, Ursula le Guin said:‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.‘Can I ask how that resonates with your argument about the rapid changeability of economic paradigms–and moral paradigms for justifying inequality–in Capital and Ideology? “Read transcript here 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 Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989 (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the cold war’s afterlife and the lingering shadows it casts over geopolitics, journalism, and popular culture. She shows how myriad forms of nostalgia across the globe—from those that posit a mythic national past to those critical of neoliberalism that remember a time when people believed in the possibility of a collective good—indelibly shape the post-cold war era.When Western triumphalism moved into the global South and former Eastern bloc spaces, many articulated a powerful sense of loss and a longing for stability. Innovatively bringing together diplomatic archives, museums, films, and video games, Dr. Von Eschen shows that as the United States continuously sought new enemies for its unipolar world, cold war triumphalism fueled the ascendancy of xenophobic right-wing nationalism and the embrace of authoritarian sensibilities in the United States and beyond. Ultimately, she demonstrates that triumphalist claims that capitalism and military might won the cold war distort the past and disfigure the present, undermining democratic values and institutions.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continue today. In Unconditional Equals (Princeton UP, 2021), political philosopher Anne Phillips challenges attempts to justify equality by reference to a shared human nature, arguing that justification turns into conditions and ends up as exclusion. Rejecting the logic of justification, she calls instead for a genuinely unconditional equality.Drawing on political, feminist, and postcolonial theory, Unconditional Equals argues that we should understand equality not as something grounded in shared characteristics but as something people enact when they refuse to be considered inferiors. At a time when the supposedly shared belief in human equality is so patently not shared, the book makes a powerful case for seeing equality as a commitment we make to ourselves and others, and a claim we make on others when they deny us our status as equals.Anne Phillips is the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, where she previously directed the LSE Gender Institute. Her books include Engendering Democracy; The Politics of Presence; Which Equalities Matter?; Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton); Our Body, Whose Property? (Princeton); and The Politics of the Human.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Nobody who sits in traffic on Sedona, Arizona's main stretch or stands shoulder-to-shoulder in its many souvenir shops would call it a ghost town. Neither would anyone renting a room for $2,000 a month or buying a house for a half-million dollars. And yet, the people who built the small town and made it a community are being pushed further and further out. Their home is being sold out from under their feet. In studying the impact of short-term rentals, Brendan O'Brien saw something similar happening in places ranging from Bend, Oregon, to Bar Harbor, Maine. But it isn't just short-term rentals, and it's not just tourism towns. Neighborhoods in Austin and Atlanta have become rows of investment properties. Longtime residents in Spokane and Boston have been replaced by new, high-salaried remote workers. Across the country, a level of unaffordable housing which once seemed unique to global cities like New York and San Francisco has become the norm, with nearly a third of all US households considered housing cost-burdened. This situation has been aided by the direct actions of developers, politicians, and existing homeowners who have sought to drive up the cost of housing. But it's mostly happened due to a societal-wide refusal to see housing as anything more than real estate, another product available to the highest bidder. This trend of putting local housing on a global market has worsened in recent years but is nothing new. Housing in the United States has always been marred by racial and income inequality that mocks the country's highest ideals. Deeply researched and deeply felt, Homesick: Why Housing Is Unaffordable and How We Can Change It (Chicago Review Press, 2023) argues that we can be so much better. And we can start where we live.Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. 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 natural law, and what does it have to do with originalism? Why does the Right defend religion yet so often struggle to define it? Next up in our "Summer of Law" series, Hadley Arkes, the Edward Ney Professor Emeritus of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College and the Founder and Director of the James Wilson Institute sits down to chat about his recent book, Mere Natural Law: Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution (Regnery Publishing, 2023). More on Prof. Arkes is available here. About the The James Wilson Institute, here. The Stanford Review's "religion," referenced during the podcast is here. Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. She graduated from Stanford University in 2021, where she studied Classics and Linguistics. She was also Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Review and a member of the varsity fencing team. Previously, she was a Research Assistant in Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability.Nevertheless, the basic model--a peer-to-peer structure augmented by digital tech--holds the potential to meet its original promises. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back (U California Press, 2021) dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible.Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. She is a New York Times bestselling author and the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Better Future Project.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics