Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen

Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen

By Burt CohenSociety & CultureNewsPolitics
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Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen episodes

  • Like it or Not:The Emerging Post-American, Non-West Order
    Here we are well into the 21st century and we’re stuck on imperialism, a 19th century western idea. Meanwhile a new non-western, non-American, nonaligned world is emerging. And perhaps it’s a very good thing. On this show international journalist Patrick Lawrence argues that this is a uniquely important moment in history. In many nations this notion of real independence, envisioned by many inspirational leaders of the mid twentieth century, is at last renewing itself. In Africa, Asia, South America, and elsewhere, new leaders look outside the Cold War definition. The age of imperialism really is over, and as the world changes, it is important that we discern the new directions.
    1 hr
  • Capitalism: Powerful Environmental Ally?
    Saving the planet is not just for hippies anymore. It’s good to remember that when the business community came out against the war in Vietnam, that was the tipping point. In his new book Climatenomics, Washington, Wall Street, and the Economic Battle to Save Our Planet, author Bob Keefe says a change has happened. It took a while but the business community now gets that climate change is killing our economy. And the three million new jobs created in this new economy are everywhere, not just the elitist coasts. Can we make the big change needed? As Keefe points out America used to be all agrarian. Leaders like Hamilton changed that and it worked. Now again the business community is leading the way, educating skittish lawmakers.
    59 min
  • The Unique Success From Undoing Intentional Invisibility
    Divide and rule. It’s worked quite well for many decades. When sectors of America are made invisible, behind walls, it takes away the power of democracy. In their new book Standing Up, Tales of Struggle, authors Ellen Bravo and Larry Miller bring the reader personal stories which have yielded victories to what had been elusive change. Isolation keeps people powerless, but the shared personal stories in this book offer different and effective tools for successful change.
    1 hr
  • The Murderous Power of Imperial Nostalgia
    Of all the motivations for war, nostalgia is at the top. Longing for an imagined glorious past. We see it not only in Ukraine but in many former empires, like France. And this nostalgia plays itself out in racist nationalist bloodletting everywhere. On this show History Professor Lawrence Wittner talks about the power of nostalgia. The former guy uses it, and the right’s rage against Obama was largely about a perceived decline of America’s past glory. But the climate crisis may help steer the world away from the longing for grand empire. Listen in.
    1 hr
  • The Real Intent of Alito’s Assault on Privacy
    The attack on traditional rights is at the vanguard of the culture war, reproductive rights are the floor not the ceiling. Religious nationalists cherry pick what they mean by liberty. We can wish  Samuel Alito was an outlier but he’s just part of the war to reassert while male domination and control over everyone else. On this show Intercept Senior Reporter Jordan Smith gives specifics of the dangerous bulldozer named Alito and the culture warriors’ efforts to quash rights they don’t like. Will this new historic assault on the right to privacy bring out more resistance?
    1 hr
  • The Worldwide Effects of the Ukraine War
    There are concentric circles: innermost being the destruction of Ukraine. But the increased insecurity of so many essential factors as a result of the war is starting to disrupt and bring increased misery to the poor of the world. On this show, Professor Rajan Menon explains how. When security is defined strictly in military terms, global insecurity results. While Ukraine flags are everywhere in the US, nonaligned nations have their own reasons to remain nonaligned. Beyond the war we see on TV, it’s ripples are quite real.
    1 hr
  • Ukraine War: Trying to Bifurcate a Non-Aligned World
    Why does it have to be us or them? Bush II tried to use Iraq to force nonaligned nations to choose; it failed. And it’s not working today on Ukraine. Why do so many nations still insist on not choosing sides? On today’s keepingdemocracyalive.com (subscribe!) international journalist Patrick Lawrence puts the war in Ukraine in a larger context of an emerging world order. Why are so many nations remaining neutral? Is America isolating itself? We need to pay attention to this.
    1 hr
  • Simplistic Binary Genders is Oppressive Cultural Fortification
    “‘Opposite sex’ is a phantom concept—nobody lives it.” So says our guest author Kathryn Bond Stockton. Her new book Gender(s) argues that what seem like obvious genital distinctions are in reality incomplete. When children are born, it’s like parents “lower a cone over the baby,” imposing an identity without consent and even ignoring other actual layers of a newborn’s fetal biology. Men are dealt a bewildering “ideal of masculinity” which today’s far right is using at the vanguard of the culture war. There is much more depth than merely at the surface. Freedom from rigid constraints is challenging but worth it, Stockton argues.
    59 min
  • Horror and Absurdity: Revisiting Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
    One generation held the book and the author in reverence. And with Tom Roston’s new book The Writer’s Crusade and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse Five a new generation is discovering the unique importance of Vonnegut’s vision or war and humanity’s potential. At the time  Vonnegut wrote this classic World War Two fiction mixed with nonfiction,  PTSD was unknown. Today we ask what is sane and what insane about war. Roston’s book about a book shares what Vonnegut meant by the cryptic phrase “So it goes.” And he examines the depression with which Vonnegut lived.
    58 min
  • The Price Democrats Pay for the Clinton/DLC Years
    They decided the remedies of the 30s no longer fit the 90s. They talked about expanding opportunities not government. The economy was strong that decade and so they did not worry about inequality. In her new book: Left Behind, The Democrats Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, author Lily Geismer talks about the deliberate move away from labor and Jesse Jackson’s non-voters instead toward the reliable votes of moderate suburbanites. The focus on tech, trade, and finance left many out. What a price we now pay. But there are some signs the party learned.
    1 hr

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