Is This Democracy

What would a second Trump presidency look like? We explore the detailed plans of the Right for when they regain power, including expanding presidential power, purging federal employees, and transforming American government into a revenge machine. We delve into the controversial views expressed by the president of the Heritage Foundation and the radical values that underlie these plans. The chapter further discusses the plan to replace personnel with loyalists aligned with the Trump administration's ideology and the implications of transforming the American government by removing experts.

Claudine Gay, Harvard's first black president, resigned after a rightwing campaign that attacked diversity and progress at institutions like Harvard.The campaign was financed by a billionaire donor and pushed by MAGA Republicans like Elise Stefanik.Media coverage of the campaign legitimized dangerous false allegations of plagiarism against Gay.Mainstream media deliberately joined the campaign, indicative of the media's role in normalizing attacks on higher education.The hypocrisy and lack of humanity in the plagiarism accusations were revealed.An analysis of the racist and sexist culture in American universities, highlighting the isolation and lack of protection for marginalized students in social science fields.

Michael Podhorzer, a political analyst, discusses the confusion around poll data and the dynamics of American politics. He challenges the perception of Trump's abilities and the limitations of data analysis. The growth of the anti-Maga coalition and education polarization are also explored.

Discussion on polling data and election results, examining attitudes towards political violence, cultural priorities in American politics, public sentiments on history teaching and abortion, exploring the deep acceptance of a narrative in evangelical churches, and a survey on American political behavior.

The podcast discusses the new Speaker of the House who rejects democracy and the role of threats of violence in politics. It also analyzes the state of the 2024 presidential race, focusing on Trump's popularity and Biden's age.

The podcast reflects on the Israel-Hamas war and the dangerous state of Republican politics. It discusses the chaos and division within the GOP, the role of media in distorting political discourse, and the lack of trust in the Republican Party's ability to govern. The podcast also explores the media's focus on chaos and controversy, as well as the weakness of the party and concerns about governing.

Let’s survey the political landscape and take stock of where things stand almost halfway through 2023. We started this podcast a little over half a year ago, just a few days before the midterms. The election ended in a better result for Democrats than most people expected. That led to a lot of commentary about how the guardrails were supposedly holding, the system was working. Then in early December, the January 6 Committee referred Trump to the Department of Justice for prosecution. All that convinced a lot of commentators that 2022 had been a good year, that the ship had been turned around, that democracy was winning.   It says a lot about our current predicament that, in June 2023, such a big-picture look at the political landscape still has to start with Donald Trump. What are we to make of the fact that Trump, despite all the recent legal trouble, is still the clear favorite to be the next Republican presidential nominee? We also look at his wannabe-authoritarian challengers, particularly at Ron DeSantis, and why there seems to be little appetite on the rightwing base for his kind of Trumpless Trumpism.   We then look at the escalating assault on equality and the post-1960s civil rights order – on women’s rights; on the lgbtq community and the rights of trans people, in particular; on public education, academic freedom, and freedom of speech. There are signs of an anti-reactionary counter-mobilization – against rightwing book bans, specifically – and we’ll need a lot more of that, as it’s difficult to see how America’s slide into authoritarianism could be stopped without a mass mobilization of pro-democratic civil society forces outside and beyond the established political institutions.   We look at those institutions next – and the Democratic Party’s response, in particular. We specifically discuss why Democrats have been unable and/or unwilling to hold Clarence Thomas accountable for the cartoonish level of corruption in which he has engaged, and why there is still no plausible Democratic answer to the problem that the Supreme Court acts as the spearhead of the reactionary assault on democracy and the modern state.   It's obviously not all the Democrats’ fault. The mainstream media is also not coming to the rescue of democracy. We talk about what to make of the disastrous CNN Trump town hall and the way the “both sides” coverage of the debt ceiling crisis once again displayed all the usual, harmful tropes of the “Dysfunction in Washington” narrative that only serves to obscure the extent of Republican sabotage.   We then turn our attention to the problem of political violence. Across the political spectrum, the percentage of people describing political violence as potentially acceptable has significantly increased. But in practice, the rise in actual violence has almost entirely come from the Right. And, crucially, the reactions to the killing of Jordan Neely on the NYC subway were a reminder that all strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are now openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence. Finally, we reflect on where that all leaves us. As we are heading into summer, normalcy bias is destined to take over even more than it always does. One of the key challenges since the start of the Trump era has been how to communicate effectively to the American public that something other than “politics as usual” is going on, that the threat of democratic erosion is real. The crucial question remains: How do we pierce that sense of “normalcy”? How do we create moments of meaningful disruption? Follow The Show⁠ ⁠Follow Thomas⁠ ⁠Follow Lily⁠ This episode was produced by ⁠Connor Lynch

Let’s tackle the philosophy and culture of Silicon Valley, and how they help us explain the politics of reactionary-to-far-right tech titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. In 2020, Adrian Daub published “What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley.” In the book, he applied his skills as a literary and cultural scholar, as someone who is trained to dissect and analyze the stories that help us make sense of the world, to his immediate surroundings. Adrian is a Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality – he works in a place that is shaped and dominated by the tech industry like probably no other in the world.   We talk about why it is important to dissect the philosophies Silicon Valley is built on, the stories it likes to tell about itself, the narratives surrounding the tech industry. We then try to outline the philosophical and ideological universe that shapes the imaginary of Silicon Valley and discuss why figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are so fixated on certain thinkers, how these philosophies and ideas translate into politics, and what to make of the very pronounced tech libertarian to far-right pipeline.   Finally, we talk about why so many people in the liberal camp, specifically, have been, at least until recently, under the misguided impression that these tech giants were political allies, when they have so clearly never been on board with the idea of leveling traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, or gender. And why have so many people in positions of power and influence been willing to accept them not just as entrepreneurs, but as thinkers in their own right whose grand ideas about the world matter somehow, whose guidance we should seek? Why has our culture glorified them as visionaries – and is that finally changing, as the reactionary mask has slipped?   Show notes: What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley Dreams in the Witch House – Adrian’s newsletter Keep up with Adrian’s work via his personal website “The Sabotage of Twitter Is a Disaster for Democracy” – Thomas’ reflection on the politics of Elon Musk and tech oligarchs as a threat to the democratic public square  Follow The Show⁠ ⁠Follow Thomas⁠ ⁠Follow Lily⁠ This episode was produced by ⁠Connor Lynch

Let’s dive deep into the “cancel culture” moral panic, what it can tell us about U.S. society, culture, and politics, and how it has spread across the “West.” There is no one better equipped to help us do that than Adrian Daub. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality. In the fall of 2022, Adrian published “Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic is Gripping the World” – which is currently available in German only, but will be out in English soon; it is by far the most in-depth, most incisive dissection of the “cancel culture” moral panic and its transnational dimensions that anyone has offered to date.   In this conversation, we do not spend much time on debunking the idea that there is widespread “cancel culture” – because it’s been debunked so convincingly, so many times. The “cancel culture” narrative diagnoses a national emergency: an acutely dangerous situation in which radical “woke” leftists are succeeding at undermining free speech by imposing an ever-more restrictive culture of censoriousness on the country, with dramatic consequences for anyone who dares to speak up. Our argument is *not* that no one has ever had to face unfair consequences for what they said publicly – but that the evidence for such a worsening national emergency caused by “wokeism” running amok is simply not there.   What, then, can we learn from such a rampant moral panic: If we don’t accept the pervasive “cancel culture” discourse as a mere representation of an objectively existing free speech crisis, then how do we explain and interpret its omnipresence and the fact that so many people are fully committed to it at this exact moment? We talk about why the college campus is playing such a crucial role in the “cancel culture” discourse, and in the elite imagination more broadly, and discuss how our own experience as college professors relates to these debates. We grapple with why all this is happening now, with the genealogy of the moral panic, how to situate it in the long tradition of reactionary moral panics, and how it began to crystallize as a distinct phenomenon in the mid-2010s.   Then we turn our attention Germany as a case study of how the moral panic has spread internationally. German conservatives are obsessed with the idea of “woke cancel culture” spilling over from the U.S., and they have found willing allies among self-proclaimed moderates and liberals who have propagated the idea that “cancel culture” constitutes an acute threat to liberty and freedom. Across the “West,” the moral panic is, to a significant degree, a creation of the “respectable” center. What can we learn from German “cancel culture” fixation about the role of the U.S. in the imaginary of Germany’s political and cultural elite? How does the transfer of “cancel culture” anecdotes and anxieties across the Atlantic work in practice? Finally, we manage to end on a somewhat hopeful note: Across the “West,” the self-proclaimed defenders of freedom get into trouble as soon as they have to present concrete suggestions of how to fight back against “cancel culture”: Those always turn out to be blatantly illiberal, authoritarian measures, and they uniformly fail to attract majority support.     Adrian Daub, Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic is Gripping the World Dreams in the Witch House – Adrian’s newsletter On "Cancel Culture" by Thomas Zimmer Keep up with Adrian’s work via his personal website “The Sabotage of Twitter Is a Disaster for Democracy” – Thomas’ reflection on the politics of Elon Musk and tech oligarchs as a threat to the democratic public square Follow The Show⁠ ⁠Follow Thomas⁠ ⁠Follow Lily⁠ This episode was produced by ⁠Connor Lynch

We need to be a lot more critical towards the pervasive polarization narrative, towards “polarization” as the central diagnosis of our time. “Polarization” obscures not only what the key challenge is – the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right – but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now. We start by outlining the central arguments and claims of the polarization narrative. We then offer an empirical, normative, and historical critique. On the empirical level, it is true that the gap between “Left” and “Right” is very wide in many areas, by international standards. But where that’s the case, it has often been almost entirely a function of conservatives moving sharply to the Right. Most importantly, the “polarization” narrative completely obscures the fact that on the central issue that is at the core of the political conflict, the two parties, and Left and Right more generally, are very much not the same – that issue is democracy. One party is dominated by a white reactionary minority that is rapidly radicalizing against democracy and will no longer accept the principle of majoritarian rule; the other thinks democracy and constitutional government should be upheld. That’s not “polarization.” On the normative level, the “polarization” paradigm privileges unity, stability, and social cohesion over social justice and equal participation. It doesn’t adequately grapple with the fact that the former stifles the latter, that calls for racial and social justice will be inherently de-stabilizing to a system that is built on traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion – that they are indeed polarizing, but from a (small-d) democratic perspective, are necessary and good. As a historical paradigm, “polarization” tends to mythologize past eras of “consensus” and supposed unity. But in U.S. history, political “consensus” was usually based on a cross-partisan agreement to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights. In many ways, “polarization” is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress towards multiracial pluralistic democracy. Why do scholars, politicians, journalists, and pundits cling to the idea of “polarization”? The answer lies in the fact that the empirical, normative, and historical inadequacy is not a bug, but a feature of the polarization narrative – it is precisely the fact that it obscures rather than illuminates the actual problem that makes it attractive. The “polarization” concept is useful if you want to lament major problems in American politics, but either don’t see or simply can’t bring yourself to address the fact that the major threat to American democracy is a radicalizing Right, is the threat of rightwing authoritarian minority rule. In this way, the concept even provides a rhetoric of rapprochement since it does not require agreement as to what is actually ailing America, only that “polarization” is to the detriment of all. The “polarization” narrative never breeds contention, it makes everybody nod in approval; it engenders unanimity. That’s the genius of the polarization narrative: It provides the language for a lament that blames nobody and everybody, and satisfies the longing for unity – which it constantly fuels in turn! – by offering a consensual interpretation; consensus re-established through the back door.   Further reading: Daniel Kreiss / Shannon C. McGregor, ‘A Review and Provocation: On Polarization and Platforms,’ New Media & Society, April 11, 2023 Liliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Chicago 2018 Thomas Zimmer, ‘Reflections on the Challenges of Writing a (Pre-) History of the “Polarized” Present,’ Modern American History, 2 (2019): 403-8