WFHB

For this 90-minute special, our guest is Nancy MacLean, Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

James M. Buchanan

This book has the Koch cadre at the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, and George Mason University's Mercatus Center up in arms over its characterization of one of their patron saints, the Nobel laureate economist of “public choice” theory, James McGill Buchanan and the way his work offers the clearest path to putting Democracy, the “We the people” aspect of our government, in chains.

In other words, Nancy MacLean, gives us a history of the anti-democratic ethos at the heart of supremacy politics. From the slave-era constitutional constructions of John C. Calhoun to the complementary project of Nobel Laureate and “Southern Gentleman” Jim Buchanan, MacLean charts the course of the ideas that have served to unchain the power of right wing oligarchs

like Charles and David Koch, and put “we the people” in tightening shackles.

Charles Koch

Our music throughout is by Alabama, a Country music juggernaut. Alabama's biggest success came in the Reagan-era, where the band had over 27 number one hits, seven multi-platinum albums and received numerous awards. The band has over 30 number one country records on the Billboard charts to their credit and have sold over 75 million records, making them one of the world's best-selling bands of all time.[Wikipedia] Their music embodies the mythologies of the glorious white South and the valorization of the hard-working individual in opposition to government and a "hand-out."

GUEST

Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. She's an award-winning scholar of the twentieth-century U.S., whose new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, has been described by Publishers Weekly as “a thoroughly researched and gripping narrative… [and] a feat of American intellectual and political history.” Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The author of four other books, including Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006) called by the Chicago Tribune "contemporary history at its best,” and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, named a New York Times "noteworthy" book of 1994.

RELATED

James M. Buchanan: The Architect of the Radical Right - The Atlantic

Nancy MacLean Responds to Her Critics

Reagan - Radio Address to the Nation on Tax Reform. June 1, 1985

Dark Money (excerpt) by Jane Mayer

Unfounded America: Taking Out the Myth with the Trash (Nancy Isenberg)

MUSIC

All songs by Alabama

"Dixieland Delight"

"Song of the South"

"Mountain Music"

"High Cotton"

"Southern Star"

"Tennessee River"

"40-Hour Week (For a Livin')"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Today’s show, "Farewell Transmission: The Live and Music of Jason Molina" opens with "Not Just a Ghost's Heart" from Songs: Ohia’s album Ghost Tropic released in November of 2000.

Jim Manion

Jason Molina was a prolific songwriter and bandleader who released music under the names Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Company from 1997 through 2009. A Secretly Canadian recording artist, Molina periodically lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and toured with a Bloomington-based band - throughout the United States as well as England, Ireland, Europe, and Australia. After a long struggle with alcoholism, Molina died in 2013 - leaving behind a large body of work and a complicated legacy to sort out. Author Erin Osmon does just that in her new Jason Molina biography, Riding With the Ghost. WFHB Music Director Jim Manion talks with Erin Osmon, and presents some rare WFHB archival interviews and live performances.

I'm one of those guys that wants to build the wall a little further and make the bat a little bit more old-timey, so you gotta be that much better each next time.

Archival material originally recorded at WFHB by Shane Young and and at Russian Recording by Mike Bridavsky. The segment featuring Glen Hansard was originally broadcast on WFHB in February 2012. The interview was hosted by Katie Moulton and engineered by Jim Lang and Dan Withered.

The Life and Times of Jason Molina: Erin Osmon Author Talk

Friday, August 04, 2017 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Author Erin Osmon discusses her new book Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost, chronicling the life of world-renowned songwriter—and former Bloomington resident—Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Elec. Co.). The talk is followed by a Q & A featuring the author and special guests who knew Molina.

Erin Osmon

GUEST

Erin Osmon is a writer and editor who covers music and culture. Her work has appeared in the Pitchfork Review, SPIN, Chicago Reader, FLOOD, among many other print and web publications.

RELATED

Jason Molina website

Hold On Magnolia by Erin Osmon

Jason Molina's long dark blues by By Max Blau (Chicago Reader)

Erin Osmon’s Jason Molina: Riding With the Ghost follows the rise and fall of the beloved singer-songwriter

MUSIC

Introductory and Breaks: "Not Just a Ghost's Heart"

"Shiloh" The Magnolia Electric Co. - Live on WFHB 2007

"Rider. Shadow. Wolf" The Magnolia Electric Co. - Live on WFHB from Russian Recording 2009

"Hold On Magnolia" performed by Glen Hansard - Live on WFHB 2015

Outro: "Farewell Transmission"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Episode Producer and Editor: Jim Manion

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Cynthia Wolfe joins us to discuss her "Platinum" ranked audio program “Nuclear Nightingales” which consists of readings from the oral history Voices from Chernobyl by 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. With the troupe of local readers, Cricket’s Bone Caravan, Wolfe and company produce stories, literary and historical with national, global, and collective significance.

2016 marked the 30th Anniversary of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. Cynthia Wolfe of Loose Lit Media marked the occasion producing two episodes for the WFIU program Anthology. “Nuclear Nightingales” pairs two literary responses to the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of 1986 which Wolfe describes as "a work of meticulously researched historical fiction, and an oral history compiled with consummate verbal artistry."

Today we'll hear a 22-minute edit from part two, readings from the oral history Voices from Chernobyl by 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. Alexievich interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators (members of the cleanup team), politicians, physicians, physicists and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years. The American translation was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction.

This edit was Wolfe's entry into a competition at HEAR Now: The Audio Fiction & Arts Festival which is part of the The National Audio Theatre Festivals. The program won a "Platinum" award.

GUEST

Cynthia Wolfe is a writer, producer, and editor of audio arts.

RELATED

Anthology: Nuclear Nightingales, Part Two

The HEAR Now PODCAST PALOOZA 2017!

Voices from Chernobyl (Paris Review)

Liu Xiaobo (PEN America)

Books Unbound – Storytellers of Immortality: World Poetry for Day of the Imprisoned Writer

Books Unbound – Killing Voltaire: An Observance for Charlie Hebdo

Books Unbound – The Wild Pigeon: Rejection of a Caged Life

MUSIC

"Less" by the composer and violist Lev Zhurbin, from the album Mnemosyne, performed by his ensemble Ljova and the Kontraband

"Songs of the Mouse People, IV “A Thousand Shoulders Tremble (Under a Burden Actually Meant for One),” from the album Martin Bresnick: My Twentieth Century. Performed by cellist Maya Beiser and percussionist Steven Schick

"Songs of the Mouse People, III "Every Disturbance Is an Opportunity," from the album Martin Bresnick: My Twentieth Century. Performed by cellist Maya Beiser and percussionist Steven Schick

“Szeki” by Lev Zhurbin, from the album Mnemosyne

"Kong" by Cyro Baptista off of Bluefly

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Walden at sunrise (Doug Storm photo)

July 12th marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau. We like anniversaries and birthdays in particular...we like to mark time, to celebrate occasions. And in fact, like most words, “occasion”* holds an etymological tension within it by meaning both a downfall and a falling together--which seems only right for a term that is communal, civic, and religious in nature.

On this occasion of the birth of Thoreau we are forced to confront the vexed nature of our reception of his genius. So many of us hate Thoreau, while so many of us love him. He is one of the country's polarizing figures. But it seems to me he is such only as caricature. Here is a recent one from McSweeney’s--a satire called “8 Male Authors to Read Before You Die," from which comes this snippet "view" of Walden. Thoreau "concludes that the key to a contented life is profound simplicity, which only requires enough money to buy land, build a house, not work, and have enough solitude to really listen to your own brilliance."

This suggests the writing is at odds with the life and generally Thoreau is thought of as a “crank” and his “dropping out” gesture one of irresponsible selfishness. Well, being a crank seems okay to me, and Thoreau is our greatest critic of the effects of the “property economy,” i.e., Capitalism, and of slavery as well. His family’s home was used as part of the underground railroad to assist the enslaved in escape from bondage.

But all of Thoreau’s writing speaks to a deep belief in the communal--both with your fellow humans and with nature--and with the past. And I can’t help but wonder if any of the folks who seek to belittle him have ever actually read his work.

So for this program we'll offer segments out of two programs about Thoreau's work we produced on Interchange.

PART ONE

We’ll begin with "Thoreau as crank." Christoph Irmscher discusses Thoreau’s masterwork essay on resistance to civil government written while at Walden Pond. It may surprise you that a shoe might hold the key to Henry’s idea of living. Also, Thoreau anticipates how his future readers will complain about him. Finally Irmscher identifies the aim of Thoreau to reach us at the the point before we decide to do or not do something.

PART TWO

Branka Arsic proposes that Thoreau means, literally, every word he writes. In her book Bird Relics, Arsic seeks to center Thoreau’s work in his profound grief over his brother John’s death. We begin with Arsic’s strong defense against the condemnation of Thoreau of as an egoist, asocial, apolitical, at best a libertarian, and a misanthrope; then we turn to his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. We close with why Henry hated museums so much.

Author photograph: Lucy Battersby

GUESTS

Christoph Irmscher is the Provost Professor of English and the George F. Getz Jr. Professor in the Wells Scholars Program. Widely recognized as the leading authority on Audubon, he is the editor of the Library of America edition of Audubon’s Writings and Drawings. His new biography of the 19th-century scientist Louis Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, was Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review in February 2013. He has just published a biography of Max Eastman published by Yale University Press.

GUEST

Branka Arsić is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Professor Arsić specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical and religious contexts. She is the author, most recently, of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016); On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard UP, 2010); and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (Stanford UP, 2007).

Our opening song is "Lagi" by Aziza Brahim, and she provides all the music for the program. Lagi is Arabic and means Refugee--the song's opening line is “Ever since I arrived in this world I have lived as a refugee.”

In our show today with Sara Farris we’ll ask, what’s behind the right-wing demand for women’s rights in the context of immigration (hint, it’s the neoliberal economy, stupid), and why do racist nationalist parties mobilize behind the rhetoric of feminism when discussing the current “other” the Right loves to hate, the Muslim male? The answer just may be found Marx’s 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question” which reveals an ideological racism exemplified in the US in Ann Coulter’s statement that Muslim countries ought to be invaded, their leaders killed, and the people converted to Christianity.

Farris begins by telling us that it IS important that there is a public legitimacy of women’s rights but that the policies of governments do not actually realize these rights. And further, that right wing politics in the US, the Netherlands, France, and Italy, make use of feminist rhetoric in order to demonize Muslim society as uniquely oppressive to women.

GUEST

Sara Farris is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmith's, University of London. Her work examines theories of racism and nationalism; the specific gendered forms of Orientalist/Westocentric representations of women in the Western public discourse; the mobilization of women’s rights by right-wing nationalist parties within xenophobic campaigns (‘Femonationalism"); the multiple forms of exploitation and domination that characterize female migrant labor in the care and domestic sector in particular; the commodification of care and social reproduction and its links to processes of racialization; the dialogue between intersectionality theory and Marxist feminisms. She's the author of

In the Name of Women's Rights. The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press) and Max Weber’s Theory of Personality: Individuation, Politics and Orientalism in the Sociology of Religion

(Brill).

RELATED by Sara Farris

Racialising Sexism

Dispossessing the Private Sphere? Civic Integration Policies and Colonial Legacies

On anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe

Right wing parties are pretending to care about women to cover up their Islamophobia

"On the Jewish Question" by Karl Marx

MUSIC

by Aziza Brahim

"Lagi" (Refugee)

"Invasores" (Invaders)

"Manos Enemigas" (Enemy Hands)

"Los Muros" (The Walls)

"Regresso" (Return)

IMAGE

Africa is a Country

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Today on Independence Day, your independent, community radio station in Bloomington, Indiana presents "Pete Seeger: Plain and Complicated."

It’s hard to know where to begin but let’s start with one of the most popular songs of the mid-20th century, The Weavers rendition of "Goodnight Irene" by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. This is a song which seems a kind of simple artifact of pop music, but how we understand the tradition of folk songs which are nearly always “covers” or appropriations of music often borne of deep suffering is deeply complicated. That’s for you to chew though as that particular critique is beyond the scope of this program.

Pete Seeger died in 2014 at the age of 94, a cultural icon, and a so-called a “consensus hero”--but the hero was once also a pariah.

Seeger’s was a long life of constant work and activism. He is for many the quintessential “folk singer” and his left politics goes hand in hand with that reputation. And it is because of those politics that Seeger has perhaps been as widely vilified as praised. I am tempted to offer a sketch of this life at the outset, but even a sketch would take up too much of our program and our guests will cover some of this territory for us.

And those GUESTS are, in this order:

* Ron Cohen, co-editor of The Pete Seeger Reader

* Rob Rosenthal, co-editor, along with his son, Sam, of Pete Seeger: In His Own Words

* Leda Schubert, author of a new children’s book about Seeger called Listen: How Pete Seeger Got America Singing

* Robbie Lieberman, author of My Song Is My Weapon

* Ernie Lieberman, a singer-songwriter who played now and again with Pete Seeger and produced a landmark album of songs for peace in 1954 called Goodbye, Mr. War

* Gary Fine, author of Sticky Reputations: The Politics of Collective Memory in Midcentury America.

I enlist the first guest you’ll hear, Ron Cohen, as something like a co-host for the program. Ron stressed that Pete Seeger was a supreme organizer, from rallies, to music journals, to newsletters, to hootenannies, to anti-war protests, to festivals, to river clean-up--an inexhaustible Organizer. So let’s let Ron Cohen organize this show about Pete Seeger, the great organizer--he’ll keep us “up to date” with a kind of activity log of Pete’s life as we move through conversations with our other Pete Seeger experts. Throughout you’ll hear me reading from a four of Pete’s letters published in Ron and Sam Rosenthal’s Pete Seeger: In His Own Words--I have taken liberties with these and compressed them. I don’t feel the elisions alter the meaning of the text, but feel free to check up on me!

MUSIC

"Goodnight Irene" by The Weavers

"Which Side Are You On" by The Almanac Singers

"Talking Union" by The Almanac Singers

"Ballad of October 16" by The Almanac Singers

"Tzena, Tzena, Tzena" by The Weavers

"This Old Man" performed by Pete Seeger

"Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

"My Dirty Stream" by Pete Seeger

"The People Are Scratching" performed by Pete Seeger

"Little Boxes" performed by Pete Seeger

"Mr. War" by Ernie Lieberman

"Spring Song" by Ernie Lieberman

"Waist Deep In the Big Muddy" by Pete Seeger

"We Shall Overcome" performed by Pete Seeger

RELATED

Pete Seeger, Musical Revolutionary (Monthly Review)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Our program today is about the problem of work. In "Life Without Principle" Henry David Thoreau, our great American guide to “getting a life,” wrote of

Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood...are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing worth left living for…. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting a living.

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. Or in other words, Why accept work as a necessary, even primary, element of our social organization? Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation.

GUEST

Kathi Weeks teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at Duke University. She studies feminist theory, political theory, the critical study of work, and utopian thought. Her books are The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011) and Constituting Feminist Subjects (Cornell University, 1998).

RELATED

Beyond the Wage System by Kathi Weeks (Dissent)

Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics by Kathi Weeks (ephemera)

A feminist case for Basic Income: An interview with Kathi Weeks

FINLAND: First Results from Pilot Study? Not Exactly (Basic Income Earth Network)

Selling Me, Inc.: Part Three of The Way of Neoliberalism (Ilana Gershon)

MUSIC

"Work Song" by Duke Ellington ("Black, Brown and Beige")

"Work Song" by The Cannonball Adderley Quintet

"Work Song" by Charles Mingus

"Work Song" by Nat Adderley (ft. Wes Montgomrey)

"Heigh Ho" by The Dave Brubeck Quartet

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

In a piece called “Jazz Democracy,” a Slate review of The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, January 1965-June 1968, Adam Shatz writes:

It's a commonplace that jazz is the musical expression of American democracy. The unfortunate truth is that jazz more often resembles the daytime talk show: Everyone gets his or her say before the floor passes to the next soloist. The Davis quintet was the rare exception, a luminous example of participatory democracy in jazz.

Our music sets the stage: On “Nefertiti,” off of the 1968 album of the same name by the Miles Davis Quintet, the horn section repeats the melody numerous times without individual solos while the rhythm section improvises underneath, reversing the traditional role of a rhythm section. It’s been called a paradox. It ought to seem boringly repetitive, but even though the head is just repeated over and over it's really never played exactly the same twice, especially by the rhythm section. The dynamics and the "attitude" are constantly shifting, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling. The theme is never presented the same way twice.

Democracy, never presented the same way twice, is our topic and joining us live via Skype is Nicholas Xenos.

Our primary task for this 90-minute Interchange, and it seems a kind of irony, is to find a way to define Democracy away from our current conceptions. And in so doing we’ll also try to understand where it is we might come into contact with democracy--how we come to know what it is. To this end we’ll take a look at teaching and political science in theory and practice. We begin with Sheldon Wolin's concepts of "managed democracy," "inverted totalitarianism," and "fugitive democracy."

DISCUSSED (Essays by Nick Xenos)

"Civic nationalism: Oxymoron?"

"Liberalism and the Postulate of Scarcity"

"Individual Character and Political Ethics"

"The Austere Life"

RELATED

Selling Democracy: Part One of The Way of Neoliberalism (Wendy Brown on Undoing the Demos)

GUEST

Nicholas Xenos is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Director of the Amherst Program in Critical Theory. He is author of Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy and Scarcity and Modernity, and has contributed essays and reviews to The Nation, Grand Street, The London Review of Books, and other periodicals. His most recent book is an edited volume of Sheldon Wolin’s essays, Fugitive Democracy, just out from Princeton University Press.

MUSIC

All by The Miles Davis Quintet

"Nefertiti" (Nefertiti)

"Petis machins" (Filles de Kilimanjaro)

"Circle" (Miles Smiles)

"Agitation" (E.S.P.)

"Riot" (Nefertiti)

"Masqualero" (Sorcerer)

"Black Comedy" (Miles in the Sky)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Regardless of your politics, regardless of her politics, it’s hard to argue that Hillary Clinton hasn’t been on the receiving end of a constant and deep misogyny from across the political spectrum, Left, Right, and Center. And when it comes to the media, it’s a frozen narrative--Hillary Clinton’s negative press is nearly always focused on the ways she is the wrong kind of woman no matter how “woman” is defined.

My guest tonight for this 90-minute Interchange is Susan Bordo, author of The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, which, as she’ll take pains to point out, is not a book delighting in the demise of the former 20016 and 2008 presidential candidate, the former Secretary of State, the former Junior Senator from New York, the former First Lady of the United States, the former First Lady of Arkansas...but rather one that details the whirlwind of antagonisms and machinations that led to what must surely be one of the most ignominious defeats in politics at the hands of a reality TV celebrity and real estate mogul and carnival barker whom voters declared more trustworthy than she.

Our music tonight comes from women who played Jazz and were virtuosos on instruments as opposed to being only vocalists: Mary Lou Williams on piano, Melba Liston on trombone, and Vi Redd on saxophone lend their efforts to our program.

Some of what we'll cover in the program:

* The feminist generation gap--one in which many millennial woman may have turned away from a woman that reminded them too much of their mother.

* FBI Director James Comey’s part in "the destruction of Hillary Clinton" via the so-called email scandal which turned out to only prove Hillary Clinton acted appropriately and in a like manner to her predecessor Secretaries of State--and FBI Director James Comey himself said so, and we’ll excerpt a bit of congressional testimony as evidence.

* The way the media has consistently painted candidate Clinton in the most derogatory anti-woman tropes available.

* The notion that Bernie Sanders was a better candidate and a better feminist than Hillary Clinton.

GUEST

Susan Bordo is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of many books including Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (U. of California Press, 1993), The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1999) and The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.) The Destruction of Hillary Clinton was published by Melville House in April.

RELATED

Wellesley Commencement Speech, May 31, 1969 (Youtube)

Susan Bordo's HuffPost Blog

Guardian Excerpt of The Destruction of Hillary Clinton (on Bernie Sanders)

A Millennial Feminist Explains the New Feminism to a Boomer Feminist Philosopher by Katie Halper (Paste)

The real reason Hillary Clinton lost the US election by Marcie Bianco (Quartz)

MUSIC

We'll open with “Tensions” by Charles Mingus, recorded in 1959 and released in 1960 on the album Blues & Roots. About the album Mingus wrote that it’s “unusual” presenting only one aspect of his musical world, the blues.

"Some people, particularly critics, were saying I didn't swing enough. [The record’s producer] wanted to give them a barrage of soul music: churchy, blues, swinging, earthy. I thought it over. I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I've grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But blues can do more than just swing. So I agreed."

And so if we begin with “tensions” and competing perspectives, and at a particular moment in a time, on a particular project, with a project goal in mind, can we moderate toward agreement?

Today we welcome to our studio Aurelian Craiutu, author of the recent book The Faces of Moderation. We'll focus primarily on the art of "trimming" in order to keep the "ship of state" on an even keel; we'll look specifically at one "face" of moderation, the Polish historian, essayist, former dissident, and public intellectual, Adam Michnik. And finally we'll discuss the protest at Indiana University in Bloomington that occurred when Charles Murray (author of the controversial book The Bell Curve, and more recently, Coming Apart) was invited to speak under the auspices of IU's Tocqueville Program, which is directed by Craiutu. The talk was co-sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think-tank. Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of “Losing Ground,” which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. This Act bears the usual Orwellian designation the GOP seems to favor: Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity.

That particular fact of American political "trimming"--a bill authored by Republicans and signed by Bill Clinton, elected to the presidency as a Democrat--may be a fair example of what moderation looks like in American politics.

GUEST

Aurelian Craiutu is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Adjunct Professor in the American Studies Program. He is also affiliated with the Russian and East European Institute, the Institute for European Studies, the Ostrom Workshop, and the Lilly School of Philanthropic Studies. He is the author and editor of several books on modern political thought including Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2003) and A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 (Princeton University Press, 2012)

RELATED

"Letter from the Gdansk Prison" by Adam Michnik, translated by Jerzy B. Warman

MUSIC

"Tensions" by Charles Mingus

"Dollar Brand" by Abdullah Ibrahim

"Hat and Beard" by Eric Dolphy

"Ugly Beauty" by Thelonious Monk

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford