The Chatterbox

 To find the most reliably conservative area of the United States, look no further than West Texas. Jeff Roche, professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Ohio, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how “cowboy conservativism” spread across the nation, its origins in Christian settlers to the region, and how the towns located in the rural plains influence the rest of the nation. His book is “The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right.” 

The post Geomythology, Folklore, & the Environment appeared first on KPFA.

With their pleated skirts and bowler hats the “cholita” women are a common sight in Bolivia’s administrative capital La Paz. They’re often from indigenous Aymara and Quechua cultures. Until recently cholita was used as a derogatory term to talk about their distinctive traditional clothing and they were discriminated against.

Jane Chambers travels to Bolivia to find out how these women are reclaiming their cultural heritage and going from outcasts to icons and what it says about society. Join her to meet the cholita wrestlers, fashion designers and mountaineers changing public opinion.

This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.

Paris Marx is joined by Jacob Silverman to discuss Jacob’s new book Gilded Rage, which explores the radicalization of Silicon Valley leaders, who are exerting their growing influence to shape our society for the worse.

Jacob Silverman is an independent journalist and the author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Jacob recently wrote about Musk’s latest dodgy business dealings.

The world continues to wonder at Trump’s ability to get away with corruption and scandal.

Saudi Arabia has been involved in Silicon Valley more than folks may have realized (prior to the EA buyout, anyway).

Who’s going to clean up the mess?

Dangerous amounts of carbon have been dumped in the atmosphere - so someone has to clean up the mess. Enter the dream - or delusion - of sucking carbon out of the sky. We trace how a backup plan for tackling climate change became plan A, why fossil fuel companies love it, and the staggering scale of the carbon sucking that must now be done - and whether it can even work.

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OVERSHOOT is a new four-part audio documentary hosted by climate researcher and policy advisor Laurie Laybourn. OVERSHOOT is produced by Planet B Productions and the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative.

Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. For essays and bonus content, sign up at overshootpod.com or follow @overshootpod on social media.

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Writer and presenter: Laurie Laybourn

Researcher: Ben Shread-Hewitt

Production coordination: Daniel Norman

Script consulting: Daniel Trilling

Sound design and mix: Ben Heyderman and James Fox

Original music by Haniell

With special thanks to Aaron Thierry, Mirte Boot, James Dyke, Henry Throp, Stephen Backhouse, Sophia Lennon

In conjunction with Dissent magazine, I spoke to UC Berkeley sociologist Dylan Riley, author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe, about civil society, democracy, and fascism today. You can continue reading the abridged and much-cleaned-up version of the interview below on the Dissent site, or you can listen to Dylan and my full discussion, which goes into more detail and goes on to cover broader issues in American politics like the actual power of academia and the progressive left, as well as the electoral dilemmas facing both Republicans and Democrats.

Over the past decade, there’s been an intense, often bitter debate on the left over whether fascism is the correct framework to understand Donald Trump and his movement. I’ve been a fervent partisan for the position that Trumpism is a variant of fascism. Dylan J. Riley, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, has been a skeptic, writing that Trump differs in several important ways from the classic European examples of fascism. But I always found his work, drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, and Antonio Gramsci, to be rigorous and historically specific, and read it with great interest. I also believed that if interpreted differently, it supported my side of the debate.

Over the past several months, Riley and I have corresponded and discussed collaborating. In this conversation, we decided to compare notes on the state of American democracy and civil society.

John Ganz: I want to start with your book The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe. Political sociologists, especially those drawing on the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, traditionally argue fascist and authoritarian regimes arise in societies without a developed civil society or with a weakened civil society. The idea is that people are atomized, lonely, and vulnerable to mass movements that can take advantage of this atomization and loneliness, and, without all these intermediary institutions, a nation can easily be taken over by the state.

Your book, using the work of Antonio Gramsci, argues the opposite: fascism arose in societies with highly developed and rapidly developing civil societies, with a proliferation of associations, clubs, and organizations—but without hegemonic political parties that could effectively channel the democratic demands that came from this overflowing civil society. When such demands arose, people rejected the old institutions as unrepresentative and sought something more direct, less mediated through parliament and traditional party structures. Fascist movements took advantage of that crisis and offered a solution you called “authoritarian democracy.” Am I getting this right? And was it this understanding that made you hesitant to label Trump a fascist?

Dylan J. Riley: Yes, that’s the argument. Fascist parties required strong civil societies. They had memberships and secretaries and local branches and people marching in the streets and engaging in paramilitary activities against the left. They modeled themselves on socialist and communist parties, especially the socialist parties. That was the struggle out of which fascist parties emerged. I didn’t see the analog to that in Trump’s first term.

I also pointed out other differences. The social basis of Trumpism seemed distinct from interwar fascism. The international context was also very different. Fascism emerged in second-tier powers trying to assert themselves against British global hegemony (now I’m using “hegemony” in its geopolitical sense). Trump’s foreign policy, by contrast, was erratic and timid. It wasn’t directed toward revision in the fascist sense. American isolationism is a peculiar tradition and has become more so. That was my position in the first term.

Continue reading in Dissent.

If you work at a so-called laptop job, there are moments every day when your work feels silly, pointless, absurd, even fake.

What if you wrote an entire book that tried to inhabit and analyze that very feeling? Leigh Claire LaBerge's new book—which is part memoir, part history, with a heavy dash of dark comedy and a sprinkling of Marx—attempts to do exactly that.

Drawing on her time working inside of a corporate conglomerate, LaBerge alternatively revels in and eviscerates the inanity of day-to-day white collar life. Late capitalism, she shows, might just be one long joke. The question is: who's the joke on? Workers? Consumers? The planet? Listen to this month's episode to find out.

When there's nothing left to eat, the French begin eating each other: a special episode on cannibalism by Amanda Coate.

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Women in Dark Times (Fitzcarraldo) begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century – revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream – and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Extending her argument into the present, Rose turns her focus to ‘honour’ killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world. Jacqueline Rose was in conversation about her work with Yasmin El-Rifae, co-producer of The Palestine Festival of Literature and author of Radius.

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