Month: July 2024

Mounting Pressure From Democratic Leaders on Biden to Step Down Could Overwhelm His Stubbornness 

We begin with the possibility President Biden’s third bout of Covid will be the cover for him to step down as Democratic leaders in the House and Senate along with former President Obama appear to be weighing in to suggest to Biden that he will lose the election to Trump and take down control of the Senate and make it impossible to take back the House for the Democrats. Joining us is Alexander Stille, who is a San Paulo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University. He is the author of Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture was taken over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi and his latest book is The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune. We discuss his article at The New Republic, “We Learned Everything We Needed to Know About Biden in 1988: His stubborn refusal to heed wise advice, and bottomless belief in his own greatness, were on display in his first campaign for president.”

Beyond Biden, America Has a Problem With Gerontocracy

Then we speak with 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 Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. His latest book is Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times and we discuss his article at The New York Times, “America’s Gerontocracy Problem Goes Far Beyond the President.”

Doubling Down on America First, the Trump/Vance Ticket Will Undermine Democracy and the Rule of Law at Home and Abroad

Then finally, with the Trump/Vance ticket poised to do lasting and perhaps irreversible damage to Democracy and the rule of law in America and around the world, we speak with Jacob Heilbrunn, a Senior Editor at the National Interest, a non-resident senior fellow at The Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and a columnist for The Spectator. His books include They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons and America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, and we discuss his article at The Washington Monthly, “With Vance Selection, Trump Doubles Down on America First.”