Nostalgia Trap

Rick Perlstein is a historian and the author of a series of bestselling, massively entertaining books on the rise of American conservatism in the late 20th century. His 2008 book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America sharpened his mega-thesis about the historical significance of “the Sixties” in the American political imagination, demonstrating how Nixon and other conservatives drove a wedge through public discourse by manipulating and nurturing the reactionary impulse that boiled underneath the surface of the era. In this conversation, Perlstein discusses his latest book Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, shares stories about the methods behind the construction of his labyrinthine historical narrative, and reflects on the ways that nostalgia functions to distort our vision of the past, present, and future.

The 1993 film Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas and directed by Joel Schumacher, divided audiences and critics with a story of a man’s descent into vigilante violence on a hot Los Angeles day. Viewed from 2020, the film shows us something deep and dark about American social reality in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War. Danny Bessner joins us for a detailed analysis of an important piece of 90s pop culture, connecting the history of Los Angeles as the rising center of American empire to the emotional disintegration of Douglas’ character. 

Jon Wiener is an American historian and co-author, along with Mike Davis, of the extraordinary book Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties. In this conversation, Wiener explains why it’s so vital, particularly in 2020, to recover L.A.’s radical history, and explains the process behind communicating a complicated movement narrative to a broad audience. We also hear bits from Wiener’s incredible career as a writer and journalist, including his involvement with the groundbreaking progressive radio station KPFK, and his unbelievable legal battle with the FBI to declassify their records of surveilling and harassing John Lennon. 

Daegan Miller’s first appearance on Nostalgia Trap, in which he discussed both his painful exit from academia and his stunning book This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, remains one of our most popular episodes. From the outskirts of a tiny town in rural Massachusetts, Miller returns to update us on his life outside the tortured confines of the university. In this conversation, in addition to the prerequisite nostalgia trip through late 20th century Ani DiFranco-style MTV radicalism, we talk about the everyday reality of being a “writer in the woods,” the hyper-nationalist (read: eco-fascist) environmentalism of the Trump era, mixed emotions about the fading relevance of boomer culture, and the weird feeling of watching “the kids” make memes about Karl Marx.   

What happened to the world of independently-operated head shops, feminist and black-owned bookstores, and health food markets that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s? Josh Davis, professor of history and author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs, joins us to explain how a movement to change the world was slowly subsumed into the neoliberal hellscape of consumer capitalism. 

Stuart Schrader is a Lecturer and Assistant Research Scientist in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. In this conversation, he shares details from the book about the Office of Public Safety, a 1960s American Cold War project that gave U.S. aid to counter-revolutionary police forces around the globe. As Schrader’s work documents, the expansion of domestic police powers in the post-World War II mirrored, and was in fact a critical element of, the larger project of global American empire. 

Sean Lawrence works as a bartender and manager at a couple of the most popular eating and drinking establishments in downtown Ventura, California. In this conversation, he shares amazing stories from the world of restaurants and bars during the pandemic, from fights with MAGA trolls and the anti-mask crowd, to the agony of layoffs and closings, to the continued suffocating fear of catching COVID, we shine a light on a rough but undeniably clarifying moment for workers in the food service industry.    

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history at Calvin University whose work focuses on the intersection of religion, gender, and politics in American life. Her new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation traces the development of a white, militant, patriarchal Christian culture in the decades since the 1960s, when the rise of feminism and the civil rights movement triggered an evangelical backlash that led directly to the Trump era. In this conversation, she explains how a “tough guy” ideal gained traction in Christian culture, as white evangelicals came to embrace a brutal ideology of authority, domination, and violence.

Eddie Pepitone is an actor and comedian whose latest standup special For the Masses captures the visceral hell of life in late capitalism. In this conversation, he talks about his path in comedy, the development of a “working class” voice, why he avoids trite topics like dating and pizza, and how his left-wing politics and Eastern spirituality find their way into his material. 

How does the way we live reflect all the traps of American ideology? This week, one of our favorites, writer and activist Yasmin Nair,  joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on the historical, social, and economic dimensions of U.S. housing policy. From current debates around gentrification and rent strikes to the romanticized image of suburban nuclear families in pop culture, we explore how ideas of home ownership are at the core of the national-imperial project.