New Books in Politics and Polemics

Religious people have played an important role in progressive politics in the US for its entire history. Contemporary leftists should look to build bridges and include religious voices in the pursuit of a more just and sustainable society.Guests: Elizabeth Bruenig, Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne, Washington Post columnist and Professor at Georgetown University Dan McKanan, Professor at Harvard Divinity School 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 American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power (Bombardier, 2023), Washington insider Daniel Runde makes the case for building a new global consensus through vigorous internationalism and the judicious use of soft power.Daniel F. Runde is Senior Vice President and the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Many think modernity is about the rise of science, the spread of democracy and capitalism, or the decline of religion or superstition. But those stories ignore the bigger picture about colonialism and race.Guests:Mayra Rivera, professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University.Jared Hickman, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Author of the book, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

We have been ruled long enough. It is time to govern ourselves. If we are to get past the Constitution and all systems based on constitutions, we need to move past the nation state as the means by which we are governed from above.– Robert Ovetz, We the Elites (2022, p. 167)Written by 55 of the richest white men of early America, and signed by only 39 of them, the constitution is the sacred text of American nationalism. Popular perceptions of it are mired in idolatry, myth, and misinformation - many Americans have opinions on the constitution but have no idea what’s in it.The misplaced faith of social movements in the constitution as a framework for achieving justice actually obstructs social change - incessant lengthy election cycles, staggered terms, and legislative sessions have kept social movements trapped in a redundant loop. This stymies progress on issues like labor rights, public health, and climate change, projecting the American people and the rest of the world towards destruction.Robert Ovetz’s reading of the constitution shows that the system isn’t broken. Far from it. It works as it was designed.From the introduction:‘The Framers genius was in designing a virtually unchangeable system that provides the people with a semblance of participation and allows a few to select some representatives while the rest of us relinquish the power to self-govern. How and why they did that, why it still functions in that same way, and why we need to move past it is the focus of this book.’Professor Ovetz is a senior lecturer in political science and public administration at San Jose State University and a lecturer in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1924, was published in 2018 by Brill/Haymarket Books. His second book was an edited volume in 2020 entitled, Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives also published by Pluto Press.Sydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@gmail.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

It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century (Polity, 2022) Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable in the era of globalization, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Today they fulfill their separation function better and more effectively than ever. While the cross-border movement of people has steadily increased in recent decades, a counter-development has taken place at the same time: in many places, new deterrent walls and militarized border crossings are being created. Borders have also become increasingly selective. Supported by digitalization, they have been upgraded to smart borders, and border control has expanded spatially on a massive scale, even becoming a global enterprise that is detached from territory. Steffen Mau shows how the new sorting machines create mobility and immobility at the same time: for some travellers, borders open like department-store doors, but for others they remain closed more firmly than ever. While a small circle of privileged people are allowed to travel almost everywhere today, the vast majority of the world’s population continues to be systematically excluded. Nowhere is the Janus face of globalization more evident than at the borders of the 21st century.Originally published in German in 2021, this new English edition was translated by Nicola Barfoot.Steffen Mau is Professor of Macrosociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His recent works include The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social (2019) and Inequality, Marketization and the Majority Class: Why Did the European Middle Classes Accept Neo-Liberalism? (2015).Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or 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 election of Donald Trump in 2016 shocked and appalled a number of people, forcing a critical reevaluation of what was possible, and what we ought to be vigilant about. A debate soon emerged about whether Trump represented the possibility of fascism in the United States. This debate centered around the ways in which fascism has often presented itself; the rhetoric and aesthetics in particular, often at the expense of examining the underlying economic form. Against this tendency, Michael Joseph Roberto has emerged with a corrective, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920-1940 (Monthly Review Press, 2018), arguing that fascism is not composed of moral relics of the past but is a distinctly modern movement, tied inherently to the nature of capitalism.Turning to the United States in the roaring 20’s and depressed 30’s, Roberto has several interlinked tasks. Primary to the book is reframing our understanding of fascism as a reaction against revolutionary working class politics. It is an attempt by the bourgeois to maintain order in society via use of the state or various cultural apparatuses such as advertising to maintain political discipline. The United States, being the most advanced capitalist country in the world, is not only not immune to this sort of movement, but is uniquely vulnerable, and that vulnerability has not gone away in our times. To argue this, Roberto not only examines Marx’s Capital, but a whole series of texts written in the period he’s examining to show that his conclusions are not terribly new; they’ve simply been forgotten. The result is a study that combines history, economics and cultural analysis to produce a much-needed corrective to our understanding of what fascism is and how we might fight it.Michael Joseph Roberto is a retired history professor. He has also worked as a journalist and political activist in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in a number of places, including The Monthly Review and Socialism and Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Content note: This episode contains discussions of suicide, as well as allusions to graphic anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black violenceAdvances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past—marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation—have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke UP, 2021), theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Rather than suggesting that such violence is evidence of individual phobias, Stanley shows how it is a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on an archive of suicide notes, AIDS activist histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, they offer a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies to it. In calling for trans/queer organizing and worldmaking beyond these forms, Stanley points to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.Dr. Eric A. Stanley is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.Rine Vieth is a researcher studying how the UK Immigration and Asylum tribunals consider claims of belief, how claims of religious belief are evidenced, and the role of faith communities in asylum-seeker support.Links referenced in the episode:  LGBT Books to Prisoners project Ashley Diamond fundraiser Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Meredith Whittaker, co-founder and faculty director of the AI Now Institute and Minderoo Research Professor at New York University, talks about the politics of digital technologies with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The conversation examines Whittaker’s fascinating career moving between industry and academia, her role in the Google walkout, and her hopes for the future, including the role of social movements in fomenting political change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Trust in government, media, organized religion, businesses and even democracy is at historic lows. But what if the answer to declining faith in institutions isn’t more hope, but more cynicism?Guests Sharon Stanley, Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis and the author of The French Enlightenment and the Emergence of Modern Cynicism. David Mazella, Professor of English at the University of Houston and the author of The Making of Modern Cynicism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Total faith in meritocracy leads to the dangerous belief that all social winners and losers are wholly deserving. Instead, we need an economy of grace.Guests Victor Tan Chen, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics