Background Briefing: September 3, 2023
What Happened to America’s Liberals and Can They Reimagine a Vision For the Future?
We begin with the question of what happened to America’s liberal majority that dominated the Supreme Court, the House and Senate for decades from the 1960’s to the 1980’s to the point where now liberals seem to be betting their success less on a positive vision for America’s future and more on the ability of courts to protect the nation from Trump. But this will not rescue American liberalism because the challenge is so much greater than saving our democracy from Trump if a liberal vision is not reimagined. Joining us is Samuel Moyn, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history, human rights history and law, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. His latest book, just out, is Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.
The Greatest Threat to Our Politics, Economy and Culture From Big Tech’s Billionaires Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg and Andreessen
Then we examine the greatest threat to our politics, our economy and our culture from Big Tech in the form of four billionaires Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg and Andreessen. Joining us is Jonathan Taplin, an author and director emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab who has produced music and film for Bob Dylan and the Band, George Harrison, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Gus Van Sant and many others. He was the founder of Intertainer, the first streaming Video On Demand Platform and has produced 12 films including Mean Streets, The Last Waltz, Under Fire and To Die For. He is the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, and his latest book, out this week, is The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto.