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

  • France’s Yellow Vest Movement Explained
    Neither the traditional French Socialist Party nor the right wing National Front, the yellow vest movement sweeping across France is something new, leaving the political powers including President Macron befuddled. With about 70% public support, the people on the streets throughout urban and rural France want to shake things up. They see a government serving the richest at the expense of everyone else. According to our guest Paris-based journalist Cole Stangler, it is a new front of struggle against neoliberalism. And he says it is not the nationalist anti-immigrant populism of Hungary’s Orban or America’s Trump. It is indeed something new, demanding more democracy, appealing very much to the young of France. Listen in!
    1 hr
  • Democrats Took The Wrong Lessons From McGovern ’72
    Conventional Democratic Party wisdom is that McGovern lost to Nixon because he was too liberal, and as a result of that belief, ever since that loss party insiders have trended steadily to the right. But if today’s measuring tools had been available, it would have been obvious no Democrat could win that year. So according to author and historian Joshua Mound, the party took all the wrong lessons from that election. There was a a prophetic element in McGovern’s message and the coalition was way ahead of its time. The irony is those same party insiders still push for the direction of our recent nominee who lost what should have been easy, whereas no Democrat had a chance in 1972. The wrong lessons were learned.
    1 hr
  • Obvious Migrant Solution//CNN Fires Professor
    A wall isn’t going to work. What will work is addressing the reasons desperate Central Americans walk a thousand miles. Foreign Affairs columnist Patrick Lawrence suggests ways to alleviate the conditions causing the caravan. And on part two, why did CNN fire commentator Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill? Did he really call for destruction of the State of Israel? Middle East specialist Phyllis Bennis clarifies.
    1 hr
  • Populism Ain’t What It Used To Be
    At its birth, American populism was about economic fairness: The average citizen demanding power over his or her own life against the un-American economic royalist political influence of the rich and powerful. But that was then. Populism today is cultural: a variant of McCarthyism, nativists against “The Others.” Uneducated becoming equally valuable to experts with education. Our guest on this show Kevin Mattson who teaches American history at Ohio University says that today’s populist anti-intellectualism can be traced back to LBJs Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, an intellectual who showed he was not to be trusted about the Vietnam War. Mattson looks at how much of a threat to our republic is today’s racist, nationalist cultural populism.
    1 hr
  • Cracking Down on Democracy//White, Rural, Republican
    In an unprecedented power grab, Republicans in Wisconsin are doing all they can while they still have the power to shut out democracy itself. On part one, The Progressive’s Ruth Conniff in Wisconsin describes the brazen moves by the lame duck Republican state government to quash the will of the people. And on part two, how rural white voters are now all the Republicans have left. History professor and author Daniel K. Williams examines what happened to rural white voters and ponders how Democrats might get them back.
    1 hr
  • Worshiping Waste As Long as It’s Military Waste
    If the word conservative means anything, it means conserving and not wasting money. Especially public money. How long can politicians claim to be conservative when they studiously avoid looking at obvious waste? Billions, hundreds of billions, trillions. On the first part, we look into hidden military realities in Afghanistan with Brian Cloughley former deputy head of the UN Military Mission in Kashmir, who argues “Afghanistan is collapsing. Get Out: Now.” What happens when the US does pull out? He says “the world will just yawn.” And on part two, award winning investigative reporter Dave Lindorff, who covers national security and military issues for The Nation, reveals the success of the Pentagon to crush a legally required audit. The accounting tricks are nothing short of astounding. He says it’s not secret money it’s fake money, in the trillions. Yet no one in congress speaks out. Time to stop the madness?
    1 hr
  • Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective
    When myths inform legislation, harm often results. So much of today’s welfare reform, based on myth, works to keep people in poverty. It’s been created from a top-down, men-dominant model and it brings not dignity but despair. In her new book Ensuring Poverty, co-author Felicia Kornbluh argues that work that contributes to a stable economy is valuable; it is important to be able to take care of young kids and older or infirm relatives. That work is valuable and must be recognized as such. Kornbluh argues that welfare reform under President Clinton worsened poverty as it threw people off welfare but created no jobs. And that that legislation was the start of the current divisions in the Democratic Party, with traditional Democrats fighting against the poorly thought-out plan. She also says the widely held notion of “deadbeat dads” is faux feminism which hurts working women. Looking at the challenges from a feminist perspective offers much better solutions.
    59 min
  • Not Learning From History: Franco Not Dead Anymore//WWI Women
    It’s right there for us to learn from. Not facing history has terrible consequences. With the rise of right wing authoritarian Trumpism in America the long dead Spanish dictator Franco is being reborn. As Spanish political history professor at Oberlin, Sebastiaan Faber explains on the first part of this podcast, when Catalonia sought to secede from Spain, it triggered a reaction from the nationalist right wing. And when the new prime minister announced a plan to face the ugly history of Francoism and the Spanish Civil War by exhuming his body from the cathedral like Valley of the Fallen, again there was reaction from the right. Until recently, alone among European nations Spain had escaped the rise of the right. A battle over national identity has begun. And on part two we look at the hidden role of American women in the Great War (World War One).
    1 hr
  • Midterms Reveal Dangerous Regional Divides
    America was not created as one nation. There were, and still are, eleven distinct nations in North America. The recent midterm elections show that we remain more and more like a set of different nations divided by geography. To gain the White House, presidential campaigns only need to win the majority of regions, not of the entire country. So divides continue. On this show, Colin Woodard, author of American Nations and the follow up American Character talks about how parties come and parties go (reversal of 19th century Democrat and Republican platform) but fissures remain. He dissects the recent results in the eleven regions and how and why it is largely trending away from Trumpism and becoming more blue as we head into the next cycle.
    1 hr
  • The Death of Democracy: The Weimar Republic. And America?
    Antiglobalism. The little guy not feeling heard. City sophisticates and their culture mistrusted by country people. A pretend anti-elite which actually caters to the powerful elites. Intense hatred of the press. Big business targeting the regulatory system. An out of touch unsophisticated leader firing up huge angry rallies. You thought I was talking about Trump’s America. Well, according to historian Benjamin Carter Hett, this accurately describes the sudden and surprising rise of the Nazis out of the democratic Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 30s. It is indeed chilling. In both cases traditional conservatives realized that this rather odd guy got votes they never could get on their own. So they used him, and then… we all know what happened. This is one powerful interview.
    1 hr

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