This show was originally broadcast on December 5, 2019.

Origin stories can be educated guesses, or leaps of collective imagination as to who we are, how we got to this point. The Big Bang is one kind, Adam and Eve make another. 1492 and 1776 are American starting points. The argument gets stickier around 1620, when Mayflower Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock; and 1619, when the first African slaves came ashore in Virginia. Just a year apart, they’re the opening chapters of two very different epics of a single nation: one born in the flight of pious Puritans to freedom, the other born in the theft of people and land to build an empire of cotton and capitalism.

It’s a funny thing about origin stories—who we are, how we got here. We know going in that the stories are made up, one way or another. And we come to find out that a lot of them are just plain wrong. Then what? The Sunday magazine of the New York Times took a bold run this past summer at the year 1620 as the start of the American story— the year, of course, when the Mayflower landed about one hundred dissenting English Puritans, our pilgrims, at Plymouth Rock. But no, the Times argued, our first chapter was dated 1619, a year earlier when a ship bearing some 20 African slaves landed in Point Comfort, Virginia, which was to say the drive to implant a slavocracy in the new world had a step on building a temple of freedom.

We’re talking with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Philip Deloria, and Peter Linebaugh about national origin stories. The thread here is storytelling that explains and often hides what happened.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is the writer and editor who led what the Times called a major initiative at the paper to reframe American history. And she strikes the keynote of this radio hour around slavery at the foundations of U.S. history and in our own origin stories in general.

Peter Linebaugh is a transnational historian of economics and culture. He’s been tracking the privatization of common land in England and the New World. 1792 is his magic start date of what is now the world system.

The historian Philip Deloria—the first tenured professor of Native American history at Harvard—considers the Native American encounters with those colonists in the 1600s.

Our unipolar moment may be remembered as the United States’ turn as “king of the hill,” two decades or so between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rocket rise of China’s economy. What comes next is the open question. Multipolarity is the tentative answer we’re getting at the end of 2022: it’s a spirit of “getting to know you” again, in a new light, as if for the first time. Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were practicing it this week on a beach in Bali, where the G20 nations were taking their stand for peace. On another beach, next to the Red Sea in Egypt, the climate defenders were taking stock of a meltdown. We seem to have fallen backwards into a short interval for reinventing order among nations.

Unipolarity is “my way or the highway” in practice. George W. Bush virtually spoke it on his way to war in Iraq in 2003. The nations of the world had to decide, he said: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Twenty years later, the nations of the world seem drawn experimentally to multipolarity as an alternative: emphasis on listening, dispersion of power, peace as a victory. Joe Biden and Xi Jinping—off their collision course of just a month ago—gave the world a fresh image of adversaries cordially relaxed at their beach resort in Bali, rejecting notions of imminent war over Taiwan. And China’s foreign ministry issued a crisp statement that could put multipolarity on a bumper-sticker; it said, “The world is big enough for the two countries to develop themselves and prosper together.” This radio hour is a multi-polar conversation, with views shaped in Brazil and India. Trita Parsi strikes the keynote: born in Iran, raised in Sweden, an American by now well known for three incisive histories of diplomacy in the Middle East, he’s been decorated in particular for “ideas improving world order.”

This is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Here, Connor Echols of Responsible Statecraft (the online magazine of the Quincy Institute), describes responses to the deadly explosion in Poland:

The hatching of a New Right Republican party, under fire, is the substance of this radio hour. It was simpler in Gilbert and Sullivan when the song said: every boy and every gal that’s born into the world alive was either a little liberal, or else a little conservative. The difference this year is the multiple relabelings of Republicans on the right, by factions. You can find, say, an educated version of cultural conservatives and even some lifestyle liberals at odds with evangelicals and nationalists; you can find anti-interventionists, too, in a party of neo-conservatives. Every syllable of those labels can mean something—something to fight about, or to start a new magazine around.

Meet the New Right this hour: the anti-liberal and wannabe populist future of the Republican party. Our guest to start the conversation is Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of the combative, young Compact magazine. The left-liberal podcaster Matt Sitman will put him to the test. Sohrab Ahmari is known for his way with radical ideas, and also for his journey, to the age of 37: born a modern Muslim in Tehran, he’s been moving west since his teens, through many varieties of politics and also journalism, mostly on the right, on the opinion pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. But then he made a very public turn to an articulate Catholicism. And his politics—he calls it conservative—has turned militantly anti-establishment. He could sound like a shape-shifter, or maybe a model of improvisation and growth.

Finally, there’s a word for it: the polycrisis, to describe the multiple messes we’re in. Our guest the historian Adam Tooze says it’s a polycrisis when old crises like war, weather, and disease are breeding deadly new variants of anxiety and danger. It’s a polycrisis when you feel the old world you knew is undergoing not change but transformation. It’s symptomatic of the polycrisis that the three giant military powers in the world today sit apart and aloof, each one suffering its own identity crisis, each one on the defensive about looking and acting so aggressive. You’re feeling this polycrisis when you realize you can’t go home again, because home’s not there anymore.

Adam Tooze.

Adam Tooze is our rat-a-tat talker on the tightrope, our English-American historian of this age of waking nightmares: pandemic, mega-storms, migration, inflation, grain war, energy war, “war war” in Ukraine. He’s our polymath in what he has just decided to call the polycrisis. The “poly” part refers not just to many crises but to the variety of shapes and sizes and origin stories that come with the disruption. Together they are transforming the world faster now than ever in history, he says. But they are not together, meaning that no common remedy will treat them. One more key thing about the polycrisis, Adam Tooze will tell you, is that nobody really has a handle on this monster: not the bankers, or the military men, or the experts, not even Adam Tooze.

This is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Quincy Institute and the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord recently hosted a discussion with Ambassador Jack Matlock, Svetlana Savranskaya, and Tom Blanton from the National Security Archive on the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The full discussion is available on quincyinst.org— but here are some excerpts.

Talking time around the war in Ukraine may be approaching. This radio hour may be a moment in that trend: reaching out for strong views we hadn’t heard, in head-on disagreement about the morality and the meanings of the war. Ukraine can be hard to talk about, not least because the blind killing since the Russian invasion and the risks of nuclear escalation are almost unspeakable. The risks of talking, and not-talking, are there, too. 30 self-styled progressives in Congress wrote (and then withdrew) a letter to President Biden this week, urging pro-active talks now to end the war. If Republicans win control of the Congress, it is said, they will start cutting expenditures on military aid to Ukraine. So, strong talk of all sorts is on the way.

What we’re hearing this hour is seriously different ways of thinking about the war in Ukraine. James Carroll is the novelist, historian, former Catholic priest and peace activist; Andrew Bacevich is the writer, fighter, and university-based historian. When Jim Carroll went off to the seminary as a teenager, Andy went off to West Point as a soldier and then to Vietnam, but he came round to a strong antiwar conviction and activism in the form of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which is our collaborator in this radio series. James Carroll started this conversation with a six-part essay published last month with the New School in New York, in their online Public Seminar. He called it: “an anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning.” The big surprise was his realization, from last spring, that for the first time in decades, he said: “I was unabashedly in favor of war.”

This is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Next on the global agenda comes Taiwan, the island off China once known as Formosa, meaning shapely, beautiful. Today it’s a puzzle with moving parts: a not-quite nation of 24 million people that has two jealous imperial sponsors—the giants US and China, heading toward their own historic breakdown in relations. The deepest truth about Taiwan, some say, is that it’s a problem that cannot be solved, but can be managed in peace, prosperity, and democracy that have transformed Taiwan since World War II. One trick in thinking about Taiwan is to recognize a success story. The question is how to keep Taiwan from becoming Ukraine: the lost province that a great power decided it had to recover by force.

Taiwan is the world-class puzzle we are inspecting this hour with some urgency. It’s world-class because the thriving, boisterously democratic island off the coast of China lives geopolitically at the junction of giant imperial interests and egos, Chinese and American, both itching for a contest. And still Taiwan is its own identity puzzle on an island ruled for most of the past century by off-islanders. Who is Taiwan, after all? The formula for decades now is that Taiwan is a less-than-sovereign part of One China, bristling also with heavy arms from America. Could today’s Taiwanese stand a fight for independence? Could they stand to be absorbed by the People’s Republic on the mainland? And how, at all events, does Taiwan escape the fate of Ukraine?

This is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Bonus: Sarang Shidore of the Quincy Institute on the Global Divisions over Ukraine