New Books in Politics and Polemics

Journalists, scholars, politicians, and citizens often assume that calls for secession are political or historical aberrations. Our founding myth is that the Civil War divided an otherwise united nation and we soon reconstructed the United States to form a more perfect union. But Richard Kreitner’s provocative new book,Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union (Little Brown, 2020), argues that “disunion” is the hidden thread in the history of the United States. Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation who has also published in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, Raritan, and The Baffler.American politics from colonial times to the present, Break it Up argues, has always included “forces that have conspired to divide it” and Kreitner insists that we get a more nuanced and comprehensive “understanding of both our contentious past and our uncertain future” if we confront that history. Drawing on rich scholarship from multiple disciplines Break It Up argues that the United States has “always been riven by race and religion, cleaved by class and culture, sundered by section, and fragmented by geography.” The United States was always a “tentative proposition” – an “experiment that might fail at any time.” The book insists that asking questions about unity is the “prerequisite for serious discussion about what we Americans want the future to hold for ourselves and this perennially divided union.” Moreover, facing disunion assists in the work of building an inclusive, multiracial democracy capable of combating climate change or racial equality. As the book starkly puts it, the U.S. should either finish the work of Reconstruction or give up on the idea of the “united” states as currently conceived.Break It Up uses four eras to trace the theme of disunion. “A Vast, Unwieldy Machine” deals with the colonial and Revolutionary periods with Kreitner arguing that resisting a common enemy in the British should not be mistaken for unity. For example, the process of unification was characterized by bitter disagreements over representation and the protection of enslavement in the proposed Constitution. Here, Kreitner reviews some of what is well known in the literature but also smaller (and heated) controversies that may surprise those who think they know the period well. The second era highlights the disagreements in the early Republic over the increase in land (e.g., the Louisiana Purchase) and Aaron Burr’s attempt to break off parts of the country to form an independent Empire. For Hamilton: An American Musical buffs, Kreitner challenges some of Chernow’s assumptions to create a more nuanced understanding of the first Secretary of the Treasury. Kreitner’s third era documents the increasing appetite for disunion in the years before the American Civil War – and the ultimate schism. The fourth period is less defined by chronology. “Return of the Repressed” ranges from Reconstruction to 21st century plans for secession. Kreitner argues that Reconstruction’s failure to resolve fundamental conflicts leave us with a nation perpetually split over race and class.Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

George Orwell once said that “the word ‘fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. The word ‘neoliberalism’ knows exactly how it feels.How did a term coined by a group of anti-authoritarian German economists in the 1930s to label a philosophy that stressed the role of the state in ensuring efficient competition turn into more of an insult than a description 50 years later? Has the nationalist tide that swept through Washington, London, Rome, Brasília, and Budapest brought the neoliberal era to end or helped relaunch its “third wave”? What differentiates neo- from ordo- from classical liberalism?In this second edition of Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021), Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy seek to answer these questions, and retell the history of an idea, its mutations and its future.Manfred Steger is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Ravi Roy is Associate Professor of Political Science and W. Edwards Deming Fellow in Public Affairs at Southern Utah University.*The authors’ book recommendations are Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay (Profile Books, 2016) and Imperium by Robert Harris (Arrow, 2009).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Being a great power almost seems to invite discussion of decline: whether you are declining, what can be done to prevent or arrest it, and what the consequences of decline might ultimately be. The United States has not managed to escape from any of this analysis, but understanding how imperial and hegemonic decline has played out historically often does not inform these discussions. Is the United States an empire, or it better described as a hegemon? What’s the meaningful difference, especially in the current content of the United States’ global position?Richard Lachmann’s First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020) explores these questions. Lachmann examines prior explanations of great power decline and finds them wanting for a variety of different reasons. Lachmann instead focuses on a series of factors that first of all enable hegemony, but also the factors that ultimately cause its collapse. Lachmann examines the cause of the Netherlands and the British Empire before examining how these factor are currently at play in the United States.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

How can we create a more equal media industry? In Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond, Marcus Ryder and Sir Lenny Henry, both founder members of the The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University, tell the story of their work to transform British television and set out an eight point manifesto for change. The book lays out the diversity crisis in the media industry, setting out the numerous barriers confronting those who are labelled as minorities (despite being the majority of the population!) and showing why previous efforts to address the problems have failed. By doing so, the book sets up its alternatives that will create a more just, and thus more diverse, television industry. The book, along with Marcus’ blog, is essential reading for academics and the public, both in the UK and beyond. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Diana Taylor's ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Duke University Press, 2020) examines what it means to be presente in the context of protest, theatre, and everyday life. Taylor pays particular attention to the performativity of protest politics and the politics of performance art in the Americas, including case studies of the Zapatistas, post-dictatorship historical memory in Chile and Argentina, and the leftist pranksters The Yes Men. ¡Presente! is a wide-ranging and entertaining work of scholarship that looks at how performance and performance studies can become useful tools in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism and in the creation of new modes of living.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke UP, 2019), speaks with Pierre d'Alancaisez about what she calls decommodified labor — the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which artists relate to work, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own precarity and why the increasing presence of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor.Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She's the author of Scandals and Abstraction (about which she spoke on an earlier episode), and co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism. She's currently working on expanding her project Marx for Cats, initiated with Caroline Woolard and Or Zubalsky.La Berge's discusses the proliferation of animals in contemporary art starting 45 minutes in the episode. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

The tradition of political liberalism has a long and complicated history, filled with twists, turns, critiques and responses that have filled books, essays and lectures for several centuries now. Questions of the importance and limitations of individual rights and how to balance different interests have produced no shortage of theoretical conflict as different figures have attempted to make sense of the importance and limits of individuals and their rights. Diving right into this debate is Matt McManus, returning again to the New Books Network to discuss his recent book A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights (Palgrave, 2020). Going back as far as Burke, Hobbes, Kant and Locke, and then through critiques of liberalism from both radically progressive and reactionary orientations, the book traces the various ideas of liberalism up to the present in figures such as Habermas, Rawls and MacIntyre. It also posits it’s own understanding of liberalism, which emphasizes every individual's right to self-authorship as a central pillar for developing the liberal project. Crossing the fields of history, philosophy, political theory and law, the book offers a number of interventions across an array of fields, and will be of immense use to those seeking to understand some of the most pressing concerns of our time.Matt McManus is a professor of politics at Whitman College. He is the author of a number of books, including The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism, and is also one of the coauthors of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, both of which we discussed in previous episodes of this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

We’ve all been there – the family dinners turned full-fledged political debates, the awkward chat in the kitchen at work, the difficulty of discussing politics on a first date or even at dinner with a long-time partner. Today’s divisive climate – and the seemingly neverending circus of Brexit – has made discussion of current events uncomfortable and often uncivil. So, how exactly do we find ways to reach across the aisle to those whose views we find unpalatable?Psychotherapist and lifetime liberal Jeanne Safer hopes to shed some light on the situation. Combining her professional expertise with personal experience gleaned from over forty years of happy marriage to her stalwart conservative husband Richard Brookhiser, as well as a wealth of interviews with politically mixed couples, Safer offers frank advice for salvaging and strengthening relationships strained by political differences.Part relationship guide, part anthropological study, I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics: How to Protect Your Intimate Relationships in a Poisonous Partisan World (Bitback, 2019) is a helpful and entertaining how-to for anyone who has felt they are walking on eggshells in these increasingly uncertain times.Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

High drama at the high court. Grandstanding at Senate hearings. Distrust on all sides. Nominations made by presidents and ignored or voted down by the Senate or withdrawn due to scandal, calumny or nominee intellectual nullity or professional capacity issues. The personal character of nominees assailed. Questions asked of nominees; detailed answers politely refused. Cries of illegitimacy and calls for reform.All of this and more is on offer in Ilya Shapiro’s 2020 book, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court (Gateway, 2020)Everyone who cares about the law and the history and the future of the United States should read this book. It offers something to every sort of reader.First, it is a serious work of scholarship that examines such questions as:Is the Court, as progressives claim, really in some sort of crisis and merely a tool of a cabal involving the rather unlikely combination of corporate America and the supposedly evil religious right?Or, as many on the right argue, has the legislative branch, for expediency’s sake and in a cowardly and self-serving fashion, abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, thereby ceding far too much power to both the administrative state and the courts?Shapiro parses these questions with authority, weighing the pros and cons of the various reform measures of recent years with shrewdness, fairness and wit.Second, for general readers it is an entertaining yet substantive tour of the American political and legal landscape since the Founding Era and abounds in fascinating facts (e.g., when the first public Senate hearings on a Supreme Court nominee were held, the first time such a nominee testified in person before the Senate, the first time such hearings were televised).We learn about everything from the famous “Midnight Judges” to the fiascos of the nomination of Harriet Miers and those of Haysworth and Carswell. The book provides succinct profiles of such people that present them as distinct individuals and not as punchlines.The book is perfectly timed given that it was published just before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Senate hearings on the confirmation of now Justice Amy Coney Barrett.This is the book to turn to in coming years for solid analysis as the left pushes for “reform” of not only the Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary—which Shapiro also discusses in depth.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

It is often assumed that American politics is dominated by financial elites and the 1%, who use their massive wealth to gain power and influence, pushing for legislation that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. The actual mechanics of how this works, however, are often difficult to see and understand, obscured by distortion via the media, politicians, and the stories we often tell ourselves about how political change happens. These narratives often tell us about noble figures who come forward with powerful speeches and pieces of legislation that pushes us forward, as well as figures who sell out and cave to the powers that be. What these narratives often leave out is the broader context that those leaders were in the middle of, not only shaping but being shaped by the organizing that was happening around them. Filling in this gap are my guests today, Kevin Young and Michael Schwartz (cowriter Tarun Banerjee was unable to join us), here to discuss their book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (Verso, 2020). A work of political theory, sociology and history, this book covers a lot of different areas, but underlying it all is a belief in the importance of mass organizing to resist the power of capital. The first half of the book delivers an insightful and critical look at the Obama presidency, looking at his failures and limitations when it came to healthcare reform, Wall Street regulation and environmental protection, looking to understand the underlying mechanics of his political orientation and how they were insufficient for the tasks at hand. The later chapters of the book then look at various political successes, such as the labor movements during the depression of the 1930's and the struggles for civil rights in the 1960's, analyzing the ways massive organizing efforts were made to apply political and financial pressure and force capital to the bargaining table.Written with a brilliant combination of academic rigor and accessibility, this is a how-to guide for how to organize movements and challenge power, and will be of interest not just to people who want to understand the world, but who want to change it as well.Kevin Young is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also the author of Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017). Michael Schwartz is a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology at Stony Brook University, and is also the author of The War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (2008). Tarun Banerjee is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics