Right Now With Perry Bacon

As tech billionaires build out massive, energy-hungry infrastructure to power artificial intelligence, a surprising bottom-up resistance is uniting communities across the country. Astra Taylor—documentary filmmaker, Debt Collective co-founder, and co-author of an upcoming book on fascism with Naomi Klein—joins the show to explain why the fight against hyperscale data centers is fundamentally about political economy and democratic control. We discuss how these multi-billion-dollar developments drain local water and power supplies while offering little more than a handful of low-wage jobs, why the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is missing a major winning issue by running away from anti-monopoly politics and student debt cancellation, and how localized, collective organizing remains our best defense against a rising oligarchy.

Right Now with Perry Bacon: a twice-weekly show diving into U.S. politics, democracy, and the authoritarian threats facing America. Each episode, Perry strives to go beyond daily headlines and actually connect the dots to what’s happening in America.

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Frustration with the political establishment isn’t only about economic issues and won’t be solved simply by focusing on gross domestic product growth, inflation, or affordability. That’s the argument of Justin Gest, a policy and government professor at George Mason University. Gest has studied the rise of far-right and far-left parties both in the United States and Europe. The people drawn to those parties are not uniformly the poorest or those whose financial circumstances have worsened the most. Instead, populist sentiment springs from what Gest describes as “nostalgic deprivation”—the belief that a person’s social group has declined in wealth, respect, or influence over the past generation. So while Gest favors economic policies that help the working class, he argues that center-left and center-right parties also must connect with people’s sense of identity, history, and belonging. He calls for a “politics of recognition” that would emphasize what Americans have in common, such as largely being descended from other nations.

Fascist leaders nearly always try to invade other countries, says University of Toronto philosophy professor Jason Stanley, author of the 2018 book How Fascism Works. So President Trump’s decisions to overthrow the governments in Venezuela and Iran were not unexpected, even though some analysts had in the past cast Trump as antiwar and isolationist. In the latest edition of Right Now, Stanley argues it’s critical to understand that Trump is not just autocratic, authoritarian, or far-right, but fascist. That fascism connects his actions, from shifting U.S. immigration policy to favor white immigrants to deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terrorize liberal cities. Stanley says an effective anti-fascism requires people crossing ideological lines and downplaying whatever policy differences they have. He cites the recent protests in Minnesota as an example of effective anti-fascist organizing. Stanley also explained his decision to leave the United States and his perch at Yale for Canada and the University of Toronto. Stanley says he is still deeply committed to fighting Trump and fascism in the U.S. but felt he would be more effective in defending American democracy from outside of the country. And he was wary of paying taxes that go to implementing Trump’s policies.