Is This Democracy

Is This Democracy

By Lilliana Mason and Thomas ZimmerNewsPolitics
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Is This Democracy episodes

  • 24. “Cancel Culture”: How a Moral Panic Is Capturing America and the World – with Adrian Daub

    Let’s dive deep into the “cancel culture” moral panic, what it can tell us about U.S. society, culture, and politics, and how it has spread across the “West.” There is no one better equipped to help us do that than Adrian Daub. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality. In the fall of 2022, Adrian published “Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic is Gripping the World” – which is currently available in German only, but will be out in English soon; it is by far the most in-depth, most incisive dissection of the “cancel culture” moral panic and its transnational dimensions that anyone has offered to date.

     
    In this conversation, we do not spend much time on debunking the idea that there is widespread “cancel culture” – because it’s been debunked so convincingly, so many times. The “cancel culture” narrative diagnoses a national emergency: an acutely dangerous situation in which radical “woke” leftists are succeeding at undermining free speech by imposing an ever-more restrictive culture of censoriousness on the country, with dramatic consequences for anyone who dares to speak up. Our argument is *not* that no one has ever had to face unfair consequences for what they said publicly – but that the evidence for such a worsening national emergency caused by “wokeism” running amok is simply not there.
     
    What, then, can we learn from such a rampant moral panic: If we don’t accept the pervasive “cancel culture” discourse as a mere representation of an objectively existing free speech crisis, then how do we explain and interpret its omnipresence and the fact that so many people are fully committed to it at this exact moment?
    We talk about why the college campus is playing such a crucial role in the “cancel culture” discourse, and in the elite imagination more broadly, and discuss how our own experience as college professors relates to these debates. We grapple with why all this is happening now, with the genealogy of the moral panic, how to situate it in the long tradition of reactionary moral panics, and how it began to crystallize as a distinct phenomenon in the mid-2010s.
     
    Then we turn our attention Germany as a case study of how the moral panic has spread internationally. German conservatives are obsessed with the idea of “woke cancel culture” spilling over from the U.S., and they have found willing allies among self-proclaimed moderates and liberals who have propagated the idea that “cancel culture” constitutes an acute threat to liberty and freedom. Across the “West,” the moral panic is, to a significant degree, a creation of the “respectable” center. What can we learn from German “cancel culture” fixation about the role of the U.S. in the imaginary of Germany’s political and cultural elite? How does the transfer of “cancel culture” anecdotes and anxieties across the Atlantic work in practice?
    Finally, we manage to end on a somewhat hopeful note: Across the “West,” the self-proclaimed defenders of freedom get into trouble as soon as they have to present concrete suggestions of how to fight back against “cancel culture”: Those always turn out to be blatantly illiberal, authoritarian measures, and they uniformly fail to attract majority support.  
     
    Adrian Daub, Cancel Culture Transfer: How a Moral Panic is Gripping the World

    Dreams in the Witch House – Adrian’s newsletter


    On "Cancel Culture" by Thomas Zimmer


    Keep up with Adrian’s work via his personal website


    “The Sabotage of Twitter Is a Disaster for Democracy” – Thomas’ reflection on the politics of Elon Musk and tech oligarchs as a threat to the democratic public square


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    This episode was produced by ⁠Connor Lynch



    1 hr 48 min
  • 23. “Polarization” Is Not the Problem. It Obscures the Problem – with Shannon McGregor
    We need to be a lot more critical towards the pervasive polarization narrative, towards “polarization” as the central diagnosis of our time. “Polarization” obscures not only what the key challenge is – the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right – but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.
    We start by outlining the central arguments and claims of the polarization narrative. We then offer an empirical, normative, and historical critique. On the empirical level, it is true that the gap between “Left” and “Right” is very wide in many areas, by international standards. But where that’s the case, it has often been almost entirely a function of conservatives moving sharply to the Right. Most importantly, the “polarization” narrative completely obscures the fact that on the central issue that is at the core of the political conflict, the two parties, and Left and Right more generally, are very much not the same – that issue is democracy. One party is dominated by a white reactionary minority that is rapidly radicalizing against democracy and will no longer accept the principle of majoritarian rule; the other thinks democracy and constitutional government should be upheld. That’s not “polarization.”
    On the normative level, the “polarization” paradigm privileges unity, stability, and social cohesion over social justice and equal participation. It doesn’t adequately grapple with the fact that the former stifles the latter, that calls for racial and social justice will be inherently de-stabilizing to a system that is built on traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion – that they are indeed polarizing, but from a (small-d) democratic perspective, are necessary and good.
    As a historical paradigm, “polarization” tends to mythologize past eras of “consensus” and supposed unity. But in U.S. history, political “consensus” was usually based on a cross-partisan agreement to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights. In many ways, “polarization” is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress towards multiracial pluralistic democracy.
    Why do scholars, politicians, journalists, and pundits cling to the idea of “polarization”? The answer lies in the fact that the empirical, normative, and historical inadequacy is not a bug, but a feature of the polarization narrative – it is precisely the fact that it obscures rather than illuminates the actual problem that makes it attractive. The “polarization” concept is useful if you want to lament major problems in American politics, but either don’t see or simply can’t bring yourself to address the fact that the major threat to American democracy is a radicalizing Right, is the threat of rightwing authoritarian minority rule. In this way, the concept even provides a rhetoric of rapprochement since it does not require agreement as to what is actually ailing America, only that “polarization” is to the detriment of all. The “polarization” narrative never breeds contention, it makes everybody nod in approval; it engenders unanimity. That’s the genius of the polarization narrative: It provides the language for a lament that blames nobody and everybody, and satisfies the longing for unity – which it constantly fuels in turn! – by offering a consensual interpretation; consensus re-established through the back door.
     
    Further reading:
    Daniel Kreiss / Shannon C. McGregor, ‘A Review and Provocation: On Polarization and Platforms,’ New Media & Society, April 11, 2023
    Liliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Chicago 2018
    Thomas Zimmer, ‘Reflections on the Challenges of Writing a (Pre-) History of the “Polarized” Present,’ Modern American History, 2 (2019): 403-8
    1 hr 15 min
  • 22. Land of Unlimited Gun Violence

    Gun violence is a political problem, a democracy problem, an exceptionally American problem. We decided to do this episode after the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville. But that was over three weeks ago, and so there have been so many more mass shootings since, so much more death and destruction. In the U.S., it’s always right after and right before a mass shooting, regardless of whether we apply the term to shootings in public space or in the home. And day after day, myriad social interactions and conflicts escalate because guns are ever present.

     
    We start our discussion with a personal reflection on how we react to the news of mass shootings, and how our thinking around this issue is shaped by the fact that we are parents, fearing for the lives of our children. We then reflect on why this issue is so complex: All the pathologies of American political culture, all the dysfunction of the political system, all the radicalization of the Republican Party are on full display; gun violence is not just a random fact of life in the U.S., but the result of an underlying social order that puts the right of some people – of white men, specifically – to defend their place and status against any and all threats, real and perceived, and defend it by violently lashing out, by preemptively using excessive violence, above all else. The U.S. is a country built on and around that social order, in which powerful political and economic forces have decided that the right to use violence, be violent, and access guns to be violent, must not be meaningfully restricted.
     
    We put the U.S. situation in an international context. Among comparable nations, the U.S. has by far the most guns, the most gun violence, the most mass shootings, the highest homicide rate – all of it by a wide margin. Gun violence is also one of the key factors for why life expectancy at birth has been falling in this country - falling significantly behind comparable nations. Here it is, the true face of American exceptionalism.
     
    We then discuss gun violence as a political issue, an issue directly related to and intertwined with the struggle over democracy in this country. That discussion has to start with the radicalization of the Republican Party. We try to explain why Republicans are almost uniformly embracing the gun cult and will only ever double down on the gun-toting militancy conservatives have made a key element of their political identity. The problem is not confined to “red” states: The Right, led by the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court, is determined to impose its vision of gun supremacy on the entire country. The vast majority of the population, however, rejects the gun cult. And yet, this has not translated to legislation or any kind of action that would be commensurate with the problem – a disconnect we also tackle. The escalation of gun violence constitutes an acute threat to the core tenets of any democratic society: Democracy depends on people feeling safe in the public square. If they don’t, because it’s ruled by intimidation and threats of violence, they won’t be able to participate. It’s what rightwing extremists want: Abolish democracy through coercion and harassment.
     
    Finally, we talk about how we got to this point – and where we might go from here. We outline the long history of gun culture and racialized gun ownership and regulations since the eighteenth century. But we also emphasize how the current situation, the pervasive Second Amendment extremism on the Right, is in many ways the result of rather recent developments and a very specific, deliberate rightwing political campaign since the late 1970s. There might be something to be learned from the decades-long rightwing “gun rights” crusade. And we allow ourselves to end on a slightly hopeful note: A younger generation that has had to grow up in the shadow of the gun seems ready to fight back.
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    This episode was produced by ⁠Connor Lynch


    1 hr 16 min
  • 21. Trump Arraignment in Manhattan, Wisconsin Supreme Court, Tennessee Assembly: Many Different Battles – One Conflict

    It’s hard to keep track of everything that’s happening in the struggle against the reactionary assault on democracy, on so many levels, all at the same time. We go through some of the big stories of the week and reflect on how to relate them to each other, where to direct our attention, how to process it all. We start in Manhattan, where, finally, Donald Trump had to turn himself in, was arrested, had to appear before a judge on Tuesday – and it was all… rather ordinary and boring, exactly the way it should be. We tackle some of the misleading narratives surrounding this case: Why it is indeed “political,” but not a political witch-hunt; why the actual “test for democracy” is the fact that a major party radicalized to the point where it elevated this man to the presidency and won’t break with him even now.

     
    We go to Wisconsin next: On the same day Trump appeared before a judge, Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the state Supreme Court, giving liberals a majority for the first time in 15 years. In a functioning, healthy democratic system, no single state court election should have so much riding on it, but here we are. And once again, just like in the 2022 midterms, a clear majority of voters in a purple state was mobilized for democracy and abortion rights, while Republican fear-mongering over “crime, crime, crime” fell flat.
     
    Finally, to Tennessee: What’s happening in the Tennessee Assembly is a reminder of the increasingly authoritarian measures Republicans are willing to take to punish those who dare to question their dominance. Republicans are trying to expel three Democratic lawmakers who had the audacity to protest in solidarity with an ongoing demonstration of thousands of citizens, mostly schoolchildren, demanding action to protect Americans from gun violence.
     
    These are just some of the stories of this week – how can we make sure not to miss the forest for the trees? Clearly, we must not direct all our attention to Trump. But is the ex-president’s fate just a distraction from what *really* matters? That’s also not the right takeaway. Crucially, we should not separate Trump from the broader political conflict – neither to spend all our energy on his outrageousness nor to ignore his role as the manifestation of the American Right’s anti-democratic radicalization. Ultimately, the challenge is to pay attention to the underlying reactionary political project, to the multi-level attempts to entrench traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, to the increasingly authoritarian measures to prevent multiracial, pluralistic democracy.
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    1 hr 10 min
  • 20. Walter Huss and the History of Republican Radicalization, From the 1950s to Today – with Seth Cotlar

    Let’s talk about the history of American conservatism, the past and present of the Far-Right, and the paths that led to Trumpism’s rise. If there is one underlying assumption that defines this podcast, it is that the central threat to democracy is the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right. In this episode, we talk about when, how, and why that actually happened – and Seth Cotlar is the perfect guest to help us tackle these questions.

    Seth Cotlar is a professor of history at Willamette University and, by training, a specialist on the history of the Early American Republic, the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It is his interest in the political culture in America, specifically changing ideas of democracy, that has led him to focusing more on the recent past and present of the Right – especially since conservatives love to reference a bizarro version of early U.S. history in service of their political agenda.

    The bulk of the episode focuses on Seth’s current project – and the life of Walter Huss. Who? Exactly. Walter Huss is a rather obscure figure, but one with immense significance. He was a leading right-wing activist in Oregon from the late 1950s all the way through the early 2000s – a far-right extremist with ties to the Neo Nazi scene and domestic terrorists. And in the late 70s, Huss managed to take over as chair of the Oregon Republican Party.

    The story of Huss allows us to tackle so many crucial issues: We discuss the far-right world since the 50s, the toxic ideological landscape of antisemitism, anti-communism, and racism, the white Christian nationalist vision of and for America; we explore the far-right media landscape of that era, which sustained this extremism and its networks and also served as fertile ground for the kind of political culture that has come to take over the Republican Party; and we examine the question of how someone like Huss was able to help push the moderate Oregon GOP to the right, the role and failure of moderate elites and the Republican establishment to prevent this from happening, to stop this kind of radical insurgency.

    All that leads us to reflect on the question of how much of this is not just an Oregon story, but an American story: The story of the radicalization of the Republican Party, and in that sense, a pre-history of Trump’s rise. Is there a direct path from Walter Huss to Donald Trump? This question – of how to interpret Trump’s rise, how to situate Trumpism it in the longer-term history of conservatism and the Republican Party: As an aberration and departure or as more in line with certain long-standing trends, tendencies, and impulses – is not just of academic importance: What is Trumpism? Where does it come from? What’s the right way to understand it, tackle it, hopefully defeat it? These are questions with immediate political and policy implications.

     

    Seth Cotlar’s newsletter Rightlandia

    Seth Cotlar on Twitter and Mastodon


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    This episode was produced by Connor Lynch

    1 hr 25 min
  • 19. The Legal Fate of Donald Trump – and What Republicans Really Mean When They Say “Law and Order”

    On Saturday, Donald Trump used his social media propaganda platform to urge his followers “TO TAKE OUR NATION BACK” – by which he really meant: Protect him from being arrested, which he announced was going to happen on Tuesday. We dive into the ex-president’s legal trouble (that’s a euphemism) and use it as a springboard for a discussion of some bigger-picture issues: What conservative reactions can tell us about Trump’s status in the Republican Party and on the Right more generally, and what role criminal prosecution can play in solving what is essentially a political problem. – We then tackle what might seem, on the surface, like a weird situation: The GOP has described itself for decades as the “party of law and order,” yet Republicans can’t bring themselves to break with someone who is easily among the most unlawful people to have ever risen to high office in U.S. history. What’s happening here is not that conservatives have all of a sudden turned on what they always pretended was one of their key principles. Rather, it’s a reminder of what “law and order” has always meant on the Right. We discuss the long history of “law and order” as an instrument to entrench and uphold traditional white male dominance against the “threat” of multiracial pluralism, tracing it back to the post-Civil War era. “Law and order” rhetoric has always been closely tied to white backlash politics, very much not a defense of the rule of law but actually opposed to the very principle of treating everyone the same, as equals, before the law. What we are seeing today from Trump and his Republican enablers is well in line with this tradition of “law and order”: A stark differentiation between those who are supposed to be bound by the rules (“Them”) and those who are not (“Us”) has always been very much at the heart of the conservative political project. Conservatives start from the premise that some groups are worthy of protection and deserve privilege - while others are dangerous and need to be kept in check. Once we acknowledge this as the highest principle, the Republican position is entirely consistent.



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    53 min
  • 18. The War on Public Education Is Escalating – with Jennifer Berkshire

    We are in the midst of an escalating rightwing assault on public education in America. It comes in the form of an attempted authoritarian takeover of schools and universities, in hundreds of bills establishing state censorship, banning books, purging anything that dares to dissent from a white nationalist understanding of the nation’s past or present from the classroom, the libraries, the curriculum – but also as a radical push for school privatization, a dimension that has received far less attention.

    None of this is new – all of it is in line with the decades-long conservative fight against public education that has been central to the modern conservative political project since the beginning. And it also doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but is very much an integral part of the broader attempt to roll back the post-1960s civil rights order. In many ways, the struggle over public education is at the center of the overall political conflict right now.

    I can think of no one better equipped to help us unpack all of this than Jennifer Berkshire. She is a journalist and teaches journalism at Yale and Boston College, she writes about education for many major outlets, including The Nation, The New Republic, and the The Baffler, and she hosts the wonderful podcast “Have You Heard,” in which she and her co-host Jack Schneider dissect all things public education.

    We cover a lot of ground in this conversation: We dissect the Right’s current attack on public education, and what they want to replace it with; we talk about the underlying rightwing political project of maintaining traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, gender, and religion, which sees public education as dangerous, because it can potentially act as an engine of progressive change and contribute to questioning and leveling those traditional hierarchies; we tackle the combination of both state authoritarianism and radical privatization that characterizes the Right’s approach to education; we discuss the long history of modern conservatism’s attack on public education, from the 1950s through today; and we also, crucially, talk about the Democratic side of this story: How and why Democrats adopted a neoliberal idea of education primarily serving as an investment in “human capital”, and why that has opened the door for the kind of undermining of public education the Right is attempting.

    Jennifer Berkshire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BisforBerkshire

    Have You Heard Podcast: https://www.haveyouheardpodcast.com/

    Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, The New Press 2023 (paperback edition) https://www.wolfattheschoolhousedoor.com/


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    1 hr 16 min
  • 17. There Is No “Free Speech Crisis” On Campus – and the Latest in Fox News vs Democracy

    Lily and Thomas dissect the “free speech crisis on campus” discourse. The pervasive “free speech crisis” narrative wants us to believe that liberty and freedom in this country are being threatened by “woke” radicals imposing an ever-more authoritarian “cancel culture,” a culture of censoriousness on college life and on the nation in general. According to a never-ending barrage of op-eds and editorials in leading mainstream papers, this is a national emergency in desperate need of intervention. But not only does this diagnosis stand in stark contrast to what we actually experience on campus (we are both college professors, after all, so we can report from the front lines!). We also dive into the survey/polling data as well as the anecdotes that self-proclaimed free speech advocates present as supposedly irrefutable evidence – and it simply does not hold up to scrutiny. Moreover, the “free speech crisis” discourse is entirely ahistorical, conveniently ignoring that the same complaints have been advanced by conservatives for decades – and that mainstream outlets have elevated these resentments to the level of a national moral panic before, notably in the “political correctness” craze of the early 1990s. So, what is actually going on here? The country is in the midst of a profound renegotiation of speech norms and of who gets to define them. And that can be a messy process at times, making a lot of people, especially those in elite positions, uncomfortable. But it’s not “cancel culture.” In a multiracial, pluralistic society, it is necessary. And from a democratic perspective, it is progress. – Finally, we talk about the latest revelations coming out of the ongoing Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News: We discuss the relationship between Fox News and the conservative base; the ways in which Fox News can amplify reactionary resentment, but is beholden to what the base wants; and the rightwing media machine as an integral part of the reactionary political project, something to which there is simply no equivalent on the “Left.”

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    This episode was produced by Connor Lynch

    1 hr 12 min
  • 16. A Conversation on Critical Race Theory and Democracy - with Victor Ray (Part II)

    We are in the midst of an escalating moral panic around “Critical Race Theory” that is serving, across Republican-led states, as justification to censor and purge anything that dares to dissent from a white nationalist understanding of America’s past or present. That is the context in which Victor Ray published his book “On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care.”   Victor Ray is a sociologist, a professor at the Universitxy of Iowa, and you’ll hear in this conversation that he really is an incredibly thoughtful observer of race and racism in America. In his book, Victor does an incredible job to make CRT, this complex body of thought, the intellectual traditions on which it builds, the key insights and criticisms it offers, accessible. This, to me is, the best introduction to CRT. And it is much more than that, actually, it is a broad reflection on structural/systemic racism, on race in America and how it shapes all aspects of life in this country.   If you haven’t yet, go back and listen to Part I, in which we talked about Victor’s personal story and how it relates to CRT, about what CRT actually is, when it emerged, why it emerged. We pick it up right there in Part II: We continue to talk about the actual CRT (not the demonized bogeyman), different strands and debates within the field, its critique of racial progress narratives. And then we do get into the reactionary moral panic around CRT, how and why it took off in the fall of 2020; the political, social, and cultural context in which it could be so successful; why it’s useful to compare the rightwing crusade against CRT to climate change denialism; and how we should think about ways to counter this reactionary campaign. And then, finally, we also talk about what Victor expects going forward, where he sees the country going over the next few decades – and we even manage to end on a somewhat hopeful note.

    A link to “On Critical Race Theory”

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    This episode was produced by Connor Lynch

    58 min
  • 15. A Conversation on Critical Race Theory and Democracy - with Victor Ray (Part I)
    We are in the midst of a reactionary moral panic over “Critical Race Theory” that is being used by Republicans across the country to justify an escalating assault on academic freedom and attempts to stifle, censor, and ban any dissent from the white nationalist patriarchal worldview, anything that dares to upset reactionary sensibilities. This manufactured panic took off in the fall of 2020 – not coincidentally in the aftermath of the mobilization of civil society after the murder of George Floyd, as it is intimately tied to the ongoing racial counter-reckoning.  
     
    The Right talks a lot about “CRT,” but never in good faith, never as anything but an evil, “un-American” plot to undermine the nation. What CRT actually is, however, is a rich, complex intellectual tradition and body of thought that can help us better understand race and racism in America. That’s why it’s worth grappling with CRT in earnest. And there is no one better to help us do just that than Victor Ray. Victor is the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Criminology and African American Studies at the University of Iowa – and he is one of the most thoughtful analysts, observers, commentators on racism. Last summer, he published a book titled “On Critical Race Theory: Why it Matters and Why You Should Care.” And everybody should read it, as it is the best introduction into CRT we know, and actually a lot more than that: It is a broad reflection on structural/systemic/institutional racism, what it is, how it works, how it produces the discriminatory outcomes that shape life in this country.
     
    Please note: This is Part I of our conversation with Victor Ray, focusing on his personal story, how it relates to CRT, how CRT relates to his personal life; on what CRT actually is, when it emerged, what problem it was supposed to be an answer to; and on the kind of diagnosis of America’s past and present it offers. A (longer) Part II will follow early next week, on the CRT critique of racial progress narratives; why the reactionary moral panic around CRT has been so successful, and how we can counter it; and what Victor expects going forward, where he sees the country going over the next few decades.

    A link to “On Critical Race Theory”

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    This episode was produced by Connor Lynch

    32 min

About Is This Democracy

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to Is This Democracy, the podcast where we discuss the ongoing conflict over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America.