Talk Cocktail

As underemployment grows and many who once seemed solidly middle-class are losing their economic foothold, the working class is getting larger and more frustrated. Both its size and perspective make the working class more important than ever before. So perhaps, more than ever, Americans across the class spectrum have good reason to try and understand working-class culture and experience.

Millions of words have been written about the economic divide in America. An equally powerful divide is the one between those who make policy and those who live with the consequences of that policy. Even among well-meaning progressives, sometimes the consequences of their efforts are counter to their real objectives

Part of that comes from not really understanding the lives of working people in America. Perceptions of poverty and struggling come from our personal experience and often from popular culture and political rhetoric. That’s why it's so singularly unique and powerful when a voice emerges that can make us see what that world is really like. Today Stephanie Land adds her voice in Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive.

My conversation with Stephanie Land:

We’ve talked before about those frightening four words heard all too often. “This time it’s different.” Perhaps, besides Wall Street, nowhere else is that said as much as in Silicon Valley and the among the purveyors of every aspect of today technological and digital revolution.

No question that today is different. But it also fits into a pattern of human invention that has been a part of our evolutionary biology. It’s built around our curiosity, and the need to connect and share stories and information.

In examining this, it appears that there have been several inflection points along the way. Former FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler argues in his new book, that they are Gutenberg and the invention of movable type, and the telegraph. Both of which were every bit as profound as today's insanely great products.

To take us both back and forward on this journey I’m joined by former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. to talk about From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future.

My conversation with Tom Wheeler:

The 19th century has often been referred to as the imperial or British century. The period, after WWII was, in words coined by Henry Luce, the American Century.

Today, as we move headlong into the 21st century, we are entering what Parag Khanna sees as the Asian Century.

This dramatic change is not just about China, although China is a big part of it. It’s also about the 40 other countries that make up Asia, that are connecting in a system of trade and engagement that is both ancient and modern. It’s about the greater integration of Europe and Asia,

It’s about a world and a future where history matters, even in the face of cutting edge modernity. It’s a world where politics, economics, geography, and historical context matter. Where any nation not understanding all of these factors will do so at its own peril.

How we got here is important, as is where we are. This is the subject of Parag Khanna’s new book,The Future Is Asian

My conversation with Parag Khanna:

We live in an age of extremes. We talk about it every day with respect to the economic divide, the political divide, the racial divide, and the gender divide.

Particularly with respect to gender, how can we explain the election of the most patriarchal President ever, in an era of me too? A President whose election was supported by the majority of white women who voted.

Today, in our politics, we devote a great deal of attention to how we can address the economic divide. Think tanks and candidates pursue it endlessly. Pundits and political scientists opine daily, almost hourly, on this socio-political divide. But what is the nexus of all of this to the gender divide? How can we reconcile the seemly successful attacks on patriarchy on the one hand, and it’s powerful persistence on the other?

It's a kind of cognitive dissonance that takes a great thinker about these subjects to try and understand and address. That's what Carol Gilligan does in her new book Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

My conversation with Carol Gilligan:

We wonder why millennials are different. Imagine growing up in our current highly partisan, polarized political environment, and not knowing anything else. Not knowing an America where compromise is possible, where division within the political parties produced candidates that moved to center. They did not watch Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil work across the aisle, or Lyndon Johnson exhibit political courage by championing civil rights legislation.

Imagine if all you knew politically was Rush, Hannity, and Maddow? For a brief and shining moment, we tried something else. Barack Obama captured it. Rather than being radical or progressive, he really was the person who we looked to make America great, to bring back the better way it used to be.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

It seems that every day we are fighting the same battles. Boomers in a kind of one last hurrah are relitigating the fights of the 60s and ’70s and things only get works, as the center cannot hold. These are the divides examined by Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse in Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974

My conversation with Julian Zelizer & Kevin Kruse:

According to a report just released by Freedom House, a watchdog group that advocates for democracy, political rights, and civil liberties became weaker in 68 countries. The report also says the U.S. freedom score has declined by 8 points (from 94 to 86) over the past eight years.

At the same time we know that voters are unhappy, We are told that democracy is collapsing, that fascism is on the rise. We hear particularly from the left about the need for more direct democracy. For greater citizen participation, for more direct referendum and initiatives. One group, on this program recently called for citizen assemblies that would supplant representative government.

Yet it seems the more of this do it yourself politics we have, the more anger there is, the more divided we are.

What if we are going in the wrong direction? What if the answer to democracy’s problems is not more democracy, but more appreciation for the system of parties and representative government that our founders passed down to us.

It seems today that this is a very contrarian view. Perhaps that’s why it just might be correct. It’s put forth by Yale Professor Ian Shapiro in Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself

My conversation with Ian Shapiro:

Ken Starr, Archibald Cox, Leon Jaworski, Lawrence Walsh, and Robert Mueller. These names are almost as familiar as the Presidents they investigated. What does that say about the role of Special Prosecutors, the power the have, the evolution of their role in history and how we should see them today?

When a lesser know name, John Henderson was the special prosecutor pursuing Ulysses S. Grant in 1875 we didn’t have a 24/7 new cycle, and hundreds of former US Attorneys, commenting on his every move.

So once again, the question has to be asked, does this important safeguard of democracy even work in our current political, media and partisan environment.

Of course the best way to know is to examine the history. That what Andrew Coan does in Prosecuting the President: How Special Prosecutors Hold Presidents Accountable and Protect the Rule of Law

My conversation with Andrew Coan:

In an era in which everything it politicized, from the TV shows and the movies we watch to the places we shop, it’s not surprising that architecture and design would also be reflective of the politics of the day. This phenomenon is nothing new.

For proof of this, we need to look no further than Philip Johnson. Considered one of the greatest of modern architects, he would spend a good part of his life caught in the vortex between his politics and his art. His art, on the one hand, reflecting who he really was (because art seldom lies,) but also using the scope and causes of that work, to try and escape from who he was and what he believed.

That dilemma lies at the heart of an insightful new biography of Johnson by Mark Lamster, the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, a professor in the architecture school at the University of Texas at Arlington, a 2017 Loeb Fellow of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the author of The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century.

My conversation with Mark Lamster:

All over the world, as populism surges, as creative destruction makes economic change inevitable, the focus on manufacturing and manufacturing jobs is often front and center. Maybe it’s the old romantic of a nation of big shoulders; the factories and machines spinning noisily, providing well-paying jobs.

But the fact is that far more jobs, almost 30 million, exist in the retail sector in the US, and those jobs are in far greater jeopardy than anything in manufacturing.

We see it all around us on empty main streets and in malls. It’s easy and somewhat lazy to blame it all on Amazon, and the internet. The causes go far deeper. Our entire relationship to shopping, to the acquisition of things, and to brands is changing. And millennials are leading the way.

As both millennials and aging, empty nest boomers move to cities, there simply isn't as much space to store all the stuff that we used to buy. Why else has Marie Kondo become an international icon?

So if retail is to survive, a lot has to change according to Mark Pilkington in his book Retail Therapy: Why the Retail Industry is Broken – and What Can Be Done to Fix It.

My conversation with Mark Pilkington:

The Blue Wave of the recent election would not have been possible without black women voters. The election of Doug Jones in Alabama would not have been possible without the turnout of black women.

The recent focus on Stacy Abrams, Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Oprah, and even Michelle Obama speak to the fact that Democratic and progressive politics today, as well as our cultural politics, is being defined and even redefined by black feminist politics.

When we look back at the history of black women and racial progress, women like Ida B. Wells, Fanny Lou Hammer, and even Rosa Parks, all of this should be no surprise. Today, coupled with the Me Too movement and the resistance to Trump,  this has the makings a lasting, permanent and far-reaching a change in our politics.

Few understand this better, both historically and contemporaneously than Professor Duchess Harris, the author of Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump.

My WhoWhatWhy conversation with Duchess Harris: