Background Briefing: January 1, 2025
Will the Democrats Confront the Economic Conditions That Gave Rise to Right Wing Populism?
We begin on this New Year’s Day as we broadcast the last of our retrospective of 2024 from a compilation of programs throughout the year we started back in January and ended this month as we worked back through the major stories of the year as they evolved to the present. We start off today as half the nation anticipates the worst ahead while the other half hopes for the best even though the writing is on the wall that they have been conned and will get shafted along with the rest of us. We begin with a broadcast of Background Briefing from November 18, 2024 titled Will the Democrats Confront the Economic Conditions That Gave Rise to Right Wing Populism? We assessed how the Democrats cannot move forward to meaningfully address a deepening crisis of liberal democracy without first confronting the economic conditions that gave rise to right-wing populism. We spoke then with Wendy Brown, a professor of Social Science at The Institute For Advanced Study in Princeton. She was formerly a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley where she was a core faculty member in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Her books include Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Her latest book is Nihilistic Times: Thinking Max Weber and we discussed her article at Dissent “A Party Out of Touch.”
How 9/11 Made the Trump Presidency Possible and Hollowed Out the Very Idea of Citizenship in the US
Then we go to a broadcast of Background Briefing from December 5, 2024 titled How 9/11 Made the Trump Presidency Possible and Hollowed Out the Very Idea Of Citizenship in the US when we discussed the case made in the new book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Lifethat we have lived for 23 years in the shadow of the burning Twin Towers and that almost no aspect of American life—economic, social, political, cultural—remains untouched by the collective trauma of 9/11 and our responses to it. Joining us wasRichard Beck, a writer at n+1 magazine based in New York. He is the author of We Believe the Children and most recently, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life in which he argues that it was the war on terror that made Trump’s presidency possible and how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States. He also has an article at Time we discussed, “The War on Terror and the Demonization of Student Protests.”