New Books in Politics and Polemics

From one of its keenest observers, The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (Penguin Press) is a brilliant, witty journey through the "Special Relationship" between Britain and America that has done so much to shape the world, from World War II to Brexit.It's impossible to understand the last 75 years of American history, through to Trump and Brexit, without understanding the Anglo-American relationship, and specifically the bonds between presidents and prime ministers. FDR of course had Churchill; JFK famously had Macmillan, his consigliere during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan found his ideological soul mate in Thatcher, and George W. Bush found his fellow believer, in religion and in war, in Tony Blair. And now, of course, it is impossible to understand the populist uprising in either country, from 2016 to the present, without reference to Trump and Boris Johnson, though ironically, they are also the key to understanding the special relationship's demise.There are few things more certain in politics than that at some point, facing a threat to national security, a leader will evoke Winston Churchill to stand for brave leadership (and Neville Chamberlain to represent craven weakness). As Ian Buruma shows, in his dazzling short tour de force of storytelling and analysis, the mantle has in fact only grown more oppressive as nuanced historical understanding fades and is replaced by shallow myth. Absurd as it is to presume to say what Churchill would have thought about any current event, it's relatively certain he would have been horrified by the Iraq War and Brexit, to name two episodes dense with "Finest Hour" analogizing.But The Churchill Complex is much more than a reflection on the weight of Churchill's legacy and its misuses. At its heart is a series of shrewd and absorbing character studies of the president-prime minster dyads, which in Ian Buruma's gifted hands serve as a master class in politics, diplomacy and abnormal psychology. It's never been a relationship of equals: from Churchill's desperate cajoling and conniving to keep FDR on side in the war on, British prime ministers have put much more stock in the relationship than their US counterparts did.For England, resigned to the loss of its once-great empire and the diminishment of its power, its close kinship to the world's greatest superpower would give it continued relevance, and serve as leverage to keep continental Europe in its place. As Buruma shows, this was almost always fool's gold. And now, even as the links between the Brexit vote and the 2016 US election are coming into sharper focus, the Anglo-American alliance has floundered on the rocks of the isolationism that is one of 2016's signal legacies.The Churchill Complex may not have a happy ending, but as with Ian Buruma's other works, piercing lucidity and elegant prose is its own form of lasting comfort.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.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

Francis Buckley, who is Foundation Professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, has written a fast-moving and provocative new book about the opportunities and possibilities of a second American secession. The publication of this book couldn't be more timely, as the conclusion of an election cycle highlights both the diversity and the tribalisation of American voters. What holds the nation together? To what extent is the Constitution the source of the nation's historic and current difficulties? If small is beautiful, and smaller nations tend to be happier, why shouldn't a state like California secede and put its savings from national defence into a scheme for national health? Tune in to hear how Professor Buckley explores these and other ideas in his new book, American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Break-Up (Encounter Books, 2020)Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of Survival and Resistance in evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

"Few freedoms in the United States are as cherished as freedom of the press." So begins Chapter One of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020).The book by Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication makes it clear, however, that mainstream American news media are not really free at all, but have been pressed into service over more than a century to generate profits for a few rich owners bent on selling eyeballs and ears to advertisers.Dr. Pickard points out that this system of "toxic commercialism” is in crisis as advertisers flee to cheaper social media outfits like Facebook. In this NBN interview, he says the old TV news adage, "If it bleeds it leads," has been supplemented by a new one, "If it's outrageous, it's contagious" as internet platforms profit from misinformation and even outright lies that engage (and enrage) their readers and keep them coming back for more.Democracy Without Journalism? argues that the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election is symptomatic of three core failures that are baked into the structure of American news media: the excessive commercialism that made giving billions of dollars of free publicity to Trump "damn good for CBS"; the tidal waves of misinformation circulating so profitably on social media and, the sharp decline in the number of working journalists. The book points out, for example, that in the last 20 years, print newsrooms have shed more than half of their workers and that local news “deserts” have spread into more and more American communities.Victor Pickard argues that journalism is as essential to democracy as other social goods such as education, libraries and national healthcare. He writes therefore, that journalism should receive substantial public funding just as it does in other western democracies.Dr. Pickard contends that the current crisis in American journalism is an opportunity that "allows us to reimagine what journalism could be."Bruce Wark is a freelance journalist and retired journalism professor based in the Sackville, New Brunswick. Laura Landon is a librarian at Mount Allison 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

John Yoo, the Emanual S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, has written what he terms a surprising defense of the actions of Donald Trump as president. In his new book Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power (All Points Book, 2020), Yoo, who did not support Trump in 2016, argues that Trump has performed in a manner that the Constitution’s Framers would applaud. Trump has defended the constitutional functions of the Executive from congressional interference or encroachment, including in his use of the appointment power to the federal judiciary and his role as commander-in-chief of the military. He also defends President Trump’s actions regarding the statutory powers used to designate and fund a wall along the U.S. southern border, the administration’s efforts to reverse Obama’s immigration orders, popularly known as DACA and DAPA, and Trump’s exercising of the removal power for Executive branch officials. However, this work is more than a defense of Trump; it is a historical inquiry into the powers of the Executive as intended by the Founders and how that power has been used and threatened by other branches over the course of American history.Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state, and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read, “You ain’t the boss of me.”Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century—in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. In Liberty From All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People (St. Martin's Press, 2020), Barry C. Lynn argues that the result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want.The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon—designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions—is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think.Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

On November 3, 1969 Richard M. Nixon addressed the nation in what would come to be known as “The Silent Majority Speech”. In 32 minutes, the president promoted his plan for a “Vietnamization” of the war and called upon “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” to support his plan “to end the war in a way that we could win the peace”. Arguing against the immediate cessation of hostilities, Nixon warned of a Communist bloodbath should American troops leave too quickly. Hypocritically, he spoke of peace as he made plans for a massive expansion of the murderous American air campaigns, which would include the criminal bombardment of neutral Cambodia.While he asked for unity, the term “silent majority” stood in sharp contrast to Nixon calling anti-war activists on campus “bums” and the range of racist terms he used for African Americans, Jews, and the LatinX community. In The 'Silent Majority' Speech: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right (Routledge, 2019), Scott Laderman argues that this speech was part of Nixon’s rhetorical strategy of using divisive “dog whistle” terms such as “law and order” to cover up his racist appeals to the white working class. According to Laderman the speech was a historical turning point in American political history, opening the way for the Lee Atwaters and Donald Trumps to come. While he shows how this foreign policy speech can work as a prism to understand the later years of the American War in Vietnam, aka the Second Indochina War, Laderman further demonstrate that this speech was an important moment in American domestic politics as it signaled the creation of the New Right.Scott Laderman is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth – home of the best surfing in the upper Midwest.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. In Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale UP, 2020), Richard L. Hasen uses riveting stories illustrating four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old‑fashioned and new‑fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans.Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—Hasen offers concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined. This is an indispensable analysis, from the nation’s leading election-law expert, of the key threats to the 2020 American presidential election.Professor Hasen’s election law blog can be found here.Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her at arya.hariharan@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost less than $1,000, she won! But tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines—a place accessible from the nearest city, Juneau, only by boat or plane—isn’t the sleepy town that it appears to be: from a bitter debate about the expansion of the fishing boat harbor to the matter of how to stop bears from rifling through garbage on Main Street to the recall campaign that targeted three assembly members, including Lende, we witness the nitty-gritty of passing legislation, the lofty ideals of our republic, and how the polarizing national politics of our era play out in one small town. With an entertaining cast of offbeat but relatable characters, Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics (Algonquin Books, 2020) is an inspirational tale about what living in a community really means, and what we owe one another.Heather Lende has contributed essays and commentary to NPR, the New York Times, and National Geographic Traveler, among other newspapers and magazines, and is a former contributing editor at Woman’s Day. A columnist for the Alaska Dispatch News, she is the obituary writer for the Chilkat Valley News in Haines and the recipient of the Suzan Nightingale McKay Best Columnist Award from the Alaska Press Club. Her previous bestselling books are Find the Good, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, and If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name. Lende was voted Citizen of the Year, Haines Chamber of Commerce, in 2004. Her website is heatherlende.com.Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in 19th-century New England. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler also writes poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

With Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy (University of California Press, 2020), Robert Bartlett provides a stirring argument for the relevance of comic playwright Aristophanes as a serious political and philosophical thinker. In his translations of two lesser-known plays, The Acharnians and The Knights, Bartlett presents an Aristophanes who is equally a thinker of his times and a prescient voice warning about the fragility of democracy. Equally noteworthy are the essays that accompany the translations, which provide necessary political and philosophical context for understanding these plays.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@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

In my old age, I try to argue more quietly, though I still believe that sharp disagreement is a sign of political seriousness. What engaged citizens think and say matters; we should aim to get it right and to defeat those who get it wrong. I understand the very limited impact of what I write, but I continue to believe that the stakes are high.– Michael Walzer (2018)These thoughts, from the preface of A Foreign Policy for the Left (Yale University Press, 2018), reflect the understated wisdom of a highly regarded 85-year old political theorist, Michael Walzer. His many books include the influential Just and Unjust Wars, and others mentioned in this interview including: Thick and Thin – Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, Spheres of Justice – A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, and Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship – the last one being published in 1970 at the height of the divisive Vietnam War era when Walzer was teaching at Harvard.Much of the material for Michael’s books derives from his long affiliation with Dissent magazine – he apprenticed as a young leftist partisan under the prolific Irving Howe whose writing, social role and politics helped shape the young Walzer. Evidence of Michael’s current and ongoing political engagement, as well as the clarity of his thought and seriousness of his message can be seen here: ‘A Note on Racial Capitalism’ from Dissent in July 2020. In his note Michael references K. Sabeel Rahman’s Dissent article ‘Dismantle Racial Capitalism’ in his first paragraph; a month later two scholars write ‘A Reply to Michael Walzer’ from which comes: ‘A Reply to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright’.Professor Walzer published his first Dissent article in 1956 which provides some timeline context for one of the first questions in this interview about whether the Hiss-Chambers testimonies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (1948) might represent the opening confrontation of our polarizing culture wars. As you will hear, Michael thinks it could date back further; and shares a few thoughts on teaching at Harvard in the sixties, and pivotal moments in his career as a young leftist partisan. He comments about scholars like Rawls, Nozick and Geertz; and offers opinions related to our current polarization including a recent Rolling Stone article, the origins of resentment, engaged citizenship and voting, 9/11 and its aftermath, justice, ‘complex equality’, ‘formative’ books and a poet.An overview of Michael’s life and work, Justice is Steady Work – A Conversation on Political Theory (Polity Press 2020) with Astrid von Busekist at SciencesPo (originally published in French) out soon.Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and editor emeritus at Dissent magazine. Professor Walzer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge and completed his PhD in government at Harvard University.Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics