On "thin ideologies" in a postmodern age.

The Reading Club kicks off with an exploration of illiberalism, a "new ideological universe" that exists in "a permanent situational relation to liberalism."

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What are examples of this backlash against liberalism?

How is illiberalism different from populism, conservatism, or the far right?

What is a thin versus a thick ideology? Are we condemned to a 21st century of only thin ideologies?

Is 'illiberalism' a useful term to describe what is going on in politics today?

Is liberalism versus illiberalism just a terminal culture war?

Links:

Illiberalism: a conceptual introduction, Marlene Laruelle, East European Politics (2022)

/114/ Reading Club: The Light That Failed | Patreon

On Trump & radical right ideology.

Jean-François Drolet, a leading researcher into the 'World of the Right', talks to Alex and Lee about Donald Trump's coveting of Greenland, and puts the move into its ideological context.

What is the paleoconservative worldview, how is it different from the neoconservative one, and which is more influential in the Trump regime?

How does paleoconservatism translate into actual foreign policy? What's in Trump's new National Security Strategy?

Are we back to a 19th century-style 'spheres of influence' arrangement?

Does the radical right's foreign policy lead back to a populist kind of isolationism – or to a 'civilisational nationalism'?

Will Trump solidify the transatlantic alliance, or generate a rift?

Links:

/461/ Welcome to the World of the Right ft. Michael C. Williams

World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).

International Relations and the Geopolitics of the European New Right, European Journal of International Relations, JF Drolet

From Critique to Reaction: The New Right, Critical Theory and International Relations, Journal of International Political Theory, JF Drolet & Michael C. Williams

Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy: Goodbye, Liberal International Order; Hello, Radical Right, Lee Jones, American Affairs (forthcoming

On ICE, Minneapolis – and your questions & comments.

Contributing editor Ryan Zickgraf is back from Minnesota and tells us what is happening on the ground. We also discuss:

If this was Trump picking a fight, why Minnesota?

Do the slayings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti mark a step-change in who can be killed in the US with relative impunity?

What are the implications for the 2nd Amendment and will this divide MAGA World?

Does a hard border necessarily entail a hard, militarised society too? Is the interiorisation of the border inevitable?

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We then discuss listener questions on:

What is important that Bungacast cover?

The benefits of citizenship

Capitalists paying themselves for labour

The post-doomer personality

Readings:

South Minneapolis has had enough, Ryan Zickgraf, UnHerd

Enforcement Regime, Michael Macher, Phenomenal World 

Minneapolis Is a Second Amendment Wake-Up Call, Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic

ICE unloads, Ken Klippenstein, Substack

On the social turn in psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysts Christie and Ricky talk to Alex and George about their article in issue #5 of Damage, on ill-fated attempts at solving social problems through therapy.

What is the 'social turn' and is it another case of immediacy?

Why are the social problems to be dealt with treated as both urgent and impossible to resolve?

Is this a case of hyperpolitics? Is psychoanalysis actually white supremacy?

Do the professions need defending? Do they need to accept their limitations?

Subscribers to this podcast get 15% off print subscriptions to Damage magazine – and access to to this episode. Go to patreon.com/bungacast

Links:

The Regression in Psychoanalysis’s “Social Turn”, Christie Offenbacher & Ricky Levitt

/210/ Reading Club: Psychoanalysis & Spirit of Capitalism

On Southeast Asia's scam compounds.

Mark Bo, organised-crime researcher and co-author of Scam, talks to Alex and Lee about his book, his experiences and why this fusion of gangsterism and speculation has taken root in the contemporary economy.

What is the scale of the scam industry?

How do scams like pig butchering, fish butchering, or law-enforcement impersonation work?

How does organised crime structure itself on corporate lines? How does this fit with modern slavery?

Do illicit zones signal the coming of a kind of "compound capitalism"? Is scamming a symptom of the death of the developmental state?

The full episode is only available to subscribers. Sign up at patreon.com/bungacast

Links:

Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, and Mark Bo, Verso

On the making of independent India – and its lessons.

Assistant professor of politics at The New School, Sandipto Dasgupta, talks to contributing editor Alex Gourevitch about this new book, Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony.

Why was the postcolonial movement insufficiently anti-colonial?

What is the difference between the legal and political meaning of popular sovereignty – and why does it matter?

What was the hidden, repressive element to the Indian Constitution?

Did post-colonial leaders create something novel, even heroic? Or did they fail even on their own terms?

Where do the democratic and counter-revolutionary aspects of the Indian revolution express themselves?

How do symbolic substitutes for genuine popular participation play themselves out in Modi's India?

Links:

Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony, Sandipto Dasgupta, Cambridge UP

/198/ Universal India ft. Achin Vanaik

/417/ Has India passed peak Modi? ft. Achin Vanaik

On the collective subject at the end of the End of History.

Panagiotis Sotiris, Historical Materialism editorial board member and assistant professor at the University of the Aegean, talks to Alex and Lee about class and the "national-popular".

Is the way to recover popular sovereignty to "return" to the nation?

Is there a contradiction between this and declaring oneself to be "in favour of open frontiers for migrants and refugees"?

What is the meaning of citizenship in this case?

What's the difference between Gramsci's conceptions of people-nation and nation-rhetoric?

Does the radical right's "civilisational nationalism" offer the left an opportunity to reclaim a popular notion of nationhood?

Links:

Rethinking the “We” of Emancipation, Panagiotis Sotiris, Communis

/471/ Reforming the Deformed ft. Nathan Sperber & George Hoare

On US derangement on screen.

The OG Bunga boys get togther for the annual end-of-year film episode. We discuss Ari Aster's Eddington, as well as a bit of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another and Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia: the three films that together marked 2025, and which deal with paranoia, conspiracy, disinformation and unmoored political activity.

Is this hyperpolitics on screen?

Do these films serve any critical purpose?

Is Eddington a faithful depiction of the society of immediacy or is it guilty of immediacy itself?

Are we all fkin r*****ed?

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Links:

/520/ Conspiracy Culture & Paranoid Styles ft. Catherine Liu

Hell in Ari Aster, Tara Heffernan & Felix McNamara, Corporate Total Art

/458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh (on 'immediacy')

America’s Unraveling on Screen, Monica Marks, New Lines Magazine

On homoploutia and national market liberalism.

Branko Milanovic, Research Professor at City University of New York, talks to Phil and Alex about his most recent book, The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World.

What unites the political trajectories of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump?

How is global inequality, growth and political conflict evolving in the aftermath of globalisation?

How are hierarchies of global income shifting as the world rebalances towards East Asia?

What kind of political theories can we use to model the emergence of this new multipolar world – Adam Smith, Lenin, Luxembourg or John Rawls?

And what is Homoploutia? 

Links:

The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World, Branko Milanovic

Global Inequality 3.0 and More, Branko's substack

An Economist’s Case for Open Borders, Branko Milanovic, Dissent Magazine

The ‘homoploutic’ elephant, with Branko Milanović, FT

On overmedicalisation and the crisis of authority.

Amber Trotter, practicing psychologist and an editor at Damage magazine, and George Hoare tell Alex about their co-written article in the print issue of Damage on "the pre-political".

What is driving the explosion in mental health diagnoses? Why are people seeking diagnosis?

How is it the product of the subjective and the purely scientific?

Does capitalism make us ill? Is blaming 'capitalism' abstractly part of the problem?

What is the crisis of authority? Whose authority?

Can we solve pre-political problems with politics? And political problems with pre-political approaches?

Damage, Issue 5: The Pre-Political