The Backchannel

We’re living through an era of enormous transition, most significantly from a world governed by free market fundamentalism to something new — something we can’t yet quite discern and which could take radically different forms depending on the political decisions we make as a society. Two of the founding scholars of sociology, Karl Marx and Max Weber, tackled broad questions and themes about how economic and political history unfolds, which are helpful to interpreting events today.

Marx and Weber came from very different places in their thinking — politically, philosophically, and methodologically. In this episode of XO, we explore both the insights and the limitations of these two foundational thinkers in making sense of today’s rapidly unraveling global political order.

Professor Dylan Riley is a political sociologist who uses the comparative-historical method to study socialism, capitalism, fascism and democracy. Professor Neil Fligstein is an economic and political sociologist who focuses on how organizations develop, and the interactions between markets and the bureaucracies and institutions of the state.

Charlie Eaton, who studied under both Riley and Fligstein at UC Berkeley, is a professor at UC Merced. He studies the financialization of higher education, and has been on XO before. He co-hosted this episode.

Health care in America remains one of the most important issues for partisans on every side, as costs continue to rise with no end in sight.

Adam Gaffney, President of Physicians for a National Health Program, believes that the best way to tackle this problem is through a single-payer health care system, in which everybody receives health insurance from the U.S. federal government, free at the point of service. 

Chris Pope, who researches health care at the Manhattan Institute, disagrees. He prefers a more market-based approach and argues that government intervention generally makes prices worse.

As a reminder, this podcast is a labor of love, but it does cost time and money to produce it. If you'd like to support us, please go to patreon.com/extremelyoffline.

July's Democratic primary debates were an opportunity for the progressive and more establishment factions of the party to hash out their differences and present voters with different visions going into the 2020 presidential elections.

Bill Scher is a veteran of liberal politics who has been involved in left-of-center organizing since the early 2000s. Today, he's a regular columnist at Politico Magazine, where he often writes in defense of the Democratic Party establishment's approach to achieving legislation.

Richard Eskow was a staffer on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, and hosts a radio show where he discusses a number of issues including retirement security and his belief that the Democratic establishment is seriously out of touch.

On this episode, they'll offer their reactions to the debate and their views on where the Democrats should go in 2020.

Due to technical difficulties and limited time on the part of our guests, this episode will be short and sweet, but we hope you enjoy yourself and look forward to future episodes, where we'll do our best to retain our full-length format.

There's no one who knows the mood of voters who attend presidential campaign events more than the political reporters who are on the trail. While pundits in DC and New York opine on what voters are supposed to care about, these reporters are actually on the ground taking the temperature of the electorate in realtime.

Daniel Marans, a reporter at the left-of-center Huffington Post, has attended events with nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates, and his reporting offers unique perspectives about what voters actually care about versus what we're told they care about on cable news shows. 

Joe Simonson, of the right-of-center Washington Examiner, is doing the same thing, flying around the country following candidates around and talking to the voters who will decide the Democratic nominee. 

These reporters disagree on plenty of things politically, but they share a desire to report out the ground truth of the 2020 presidential election. On this episode, they offer their insight as to what the mainstream media is missing about the Democratic presidential primary.

One of the most influential novelists in the United States is the late Ayn Rand. The Russian-born author's works inspired generations of right-leaning intellectuals, from former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Rand's popularity stems from her simple creed that selfishness is a virtue. In her philosophy, called Objectivism, the highest moral calling is to pursue your rational self-interest. This puts Objectivism in a unique corner, as most of the world's schools of moral philosophy and religion preach that selflessness and self-sacrifice are the most noble qualities. But Rands philosophy has sustained its following long after her death in 1982. In 2009, in the aftermath of a financial crisis many blamed on the selfishness of Wall Street, her novel Atlas Shrugged, which preaches the virtues of the self interested titans of industry, surged to a bestseller position on Amazon.com.

What makes Rand so popular? And is there any merit to her praise of selfishness as a virtue? To discuss that question we have two guests with us on this episode. Onkar Ghate is the chief philosophy officer at the Ayn Rand Institute and a leading Objectivist. He believes this philosophy is not only relevant but ultimately a guide for living a moral life. Austin Hayden Smidt is a political philosopher who cohosts the philosophy podcast Owls At Dawn. He's skeptical of Objectivism's claims, and believes that altruism is worth fighting for. On this episode we will discuss core philosophical issues that help drive our approach to politics, life, the universe, and everything. 

With more and more Americans going to college every year, there are increasing demands that the federal government step in and make higher education more affordable and tackle burgeoning student debt.

But some on the conservative side argue that increasing federal aid will only make the problem worse by contributing to runaway inflation of tuition and other costs related to going to college. 

Daniel Friedman, a novelist based in New York City, takes that point of view. He has argued in his Quillette columns that making college free would risk subsidizing a system that is already failing many of its students.

That's something Charlie Eaton, a higher education researcher at the University of California-Merced, is very familiar with. His work focuses on the financialization of higher education, and he agrees that there is a systemic cost problem that goes far beyond the amount of aid the government offers to students. But he believes that some sort of free college plan is wise.

On this episode we'll talk about higher education: who should go, whether it's worth it, how we should finance it, and what its future should be in the United States. 

We live in an increasingly diverse country, and history shows that diversity often introduces challenges that are difficult to overcome, ranging from increased social tensions all the way up to violence. 

But it has long been argued that diversity is our strength and that with meaningful contact between heterogeneous groups we can break down barriers and learn from each other. 

One of the responses to increased racial and cultural diversification is to embrace multiculturalism, where we can both acknowledge and respect differences that are inevitable in a complex society. Jesse Singal, a journalist with New York Magazine, takes that point of view. 

Others have argued that we need to emphasize assimilation, and perhaps even be more selective in the way we do immigration in order to ensure social comity and cohesion. Andy Ngo, a journalist and editor at Quillette, takes that point of view.

On this episode, we'll discuss how we should address issues like increased cultural diversification in America and greater Muslim immigration to the European Union.

During the 2016 Democratic primaries, political strategist Peter Daou was one of Hillary Clinton’s most vocal and prominent boosters, especially on social media. In addition to his relentless advocacy on Twitter, Peter was the co-founder of “Hillary Men,” a website that purported to serve as a “safe space” for male feminists who supported Hillary Clinton — and, by implication, to fend off her sexist rivals in the Bernie camp. To Clinton supporters, Daou was a diehard on the front lines of the digital battlefield of the 2016 race. To Sanders supporters, he was a walking caricature of the movement behind Hillary: zealous, earnest to a fault, and bent on weaponizing identity to attack Clinton’s political opponents.

Nomiki Konst was on the opposite side of that battle. Nomi was, and is, a fierce Bernie Sanders supporter, regularly appearing on cable news shows to make the case for his “political revolution.” Since then, she has worked for The Young Turks and was a candidate for the office of New York City Public Advocate.

Back in 2016, Nomi and Peter routinely mixed it up on Twitter. But a rare thing happened last year: Peter changed his mind. As he recently wrote in The Nation, he is now convinced that the threat of a Trump re-election is too grave to risk on the squabbles and rivalries from 2016 that continue to divide the Democratic Party. He is now counseling his fellow Clinton supporters that it is time to abandon their grievances and to prepare to unite behind whoever emerges at the front of the pack — even if it’s their hated rival, Bernie Sanders, a candidate Daou has even come to admire. Social media being what it is, of course, Daou has been greeted with invective and contempt by many of his erstwhile followers.

This is the first time Nomi and Peter have ever spoken to each other directly, outside of the social media platforms that have come to define our politics. We’re excited to host this discussion, because this is exactly what we set up our podcast to do: to take these performative online beefs and turn them into real conversations.

Contrary to popular belief, Islam has been present in the United States since its founding days. Thomas Jefferson even owned a copy of the Quran, Islam's holy text, which Congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, used during his swearing-in ceremony.

The reality is, we live on an increasingly Muslim planet, as the pace of the growth of the religion means that it may very well be the most common religion on Earth by the end of the century. 

To many Muslims, this growth in the religion is a source of pride and joy. But like any other religion, the way it is practiced is what matters. 

There is fierce debate among Muslims, and those who choose to leave the faith, about the sort of religion it should be, and how it should relate to law, politics, and wider society. 

Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution argues that we should come to terms with Islam's growing role in the world and in politics. He believes that Islam is exceptionally resistant to secularization.

Sarah Haider, the director of Ex-Muslims of North America, disagrees. Her organization actively promotes the secularization of Muslims as a path to a better life.

We know that talking about religion in general and Islam in particular can be extremely polarizing and contentious, but we hope this episode's conversation makes you feel more comfortable diving into a topic that many people consider to be taboo.

This episode began with a spat on Twitter. Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept, is famous for his deep, long-standing skepticism of Russiagate. After Attorney General Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report came out, announcing to the world that the special prosecutor had found no basis for bringing charges against the President for collusion in Russia’s 2016 election interference, Glenn was not shy in pointing out that for two years, the media had hyped what amounted to, in his words, a “conspiracy theory,” while maligning its skeptics, including himself.

David Klion, a freelance journalist, took issue with Glenn’s pronouncements. In Mother Jones, he admonished what he referred to as “a clutch of noisy Russiagate skeptics in the media,” focusing on Greenwald and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi in particular. Glenn and David mixed it up a little bit on Twitter, before Glenn invited David to discuss it in a more productive venue — our podcast. David graciously accepted, and here we are.

What none of us could have anticipated was that 18 minutes in, the website we use to record our podcasts, Zencastr, would let us down. The better part of an hour of David’s audio was never recorded, thanks to some technical failure by Zencastr. On every other episode of this show, we’ve had our guests make backup recordings of their audio locally. But for complicated reasons that are entirely the fault of Zaid and me, this was the one episode where that didn’t happen. So, 18 minutes in, Zaid and I take the baton and continue the conversation on Russiagate. We’re very, very sorry to disappoint our listeners, but we hope you enjoy the episode nonetheless.