New Books in Politics and Polemics

There’s lot of talk these days, at least in some circles on the left, of a Universal Basic Income. There’s also talk in many of the same circles of a jobs guarantee. Join us as we speak with Steven Attewell, author of People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). He tells us the history of direct job creation by government in the U.S. and the lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of such efforts throughout the 20th century. It's a fascinating, surprising, and essential history.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). 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 his new book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Van Jackson succinctly explains the major issues facing U.S.-North Korea relations since the Korean Armistice Agreement. Jackson argues that the 2017 nuclear crisis was a product of a gradual hardening of U.S. policy towards North Korea, as well as the particular characteristics of the current leadership of both countries. The book provides an excellent overview of U.S. policy towards North Korea and provides new, contemporary scholarship on the Obama and Trump administrations.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. 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 did a Wall Street executive and “foreclosure king” like Steve Mnuchin become the Treasury Secretary for a populist like Donald Trump, and what is he doing to the country now that he’s there? David Dayen and Rebecca Burns tackle those questions in their book Fat Cat: The Steve Mnuchin Story(Strong Arm Press, 2018). They trace Mnuchin not-so-humble origins and his recurring presence in companies impacted by the 2008 market crash, which prompted Sen. Elizabeth Warren to call him “the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis.” They argue that as Treasury Secretary, he has pursued policies that betray Trump’s claim to the populist mantle, rolling back bank regulations and performing lax enforcement. And they criticize the tax reform bill that Mnuchin championed, asserting that it helped the wealthy at the expense of the middle-class.Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Think that today's debates about the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, financial regulation, "too big to fail", etc. are new?  Think again. Who should control banks, who should regulate banks, what should banks even do--these questions have been debated since the founding of the Republic.  Replace CNBC's David Faber with Alexander Hamilton, and Joe Kernan with Thomas Jefferson (or James Madison) and the arguments about banking, moral hazard, and regulation would be largely the same, though the attire would be quite different.Kathleen Day's new book Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street (Yale University Press, 2019) provides a detailed two-century history of the give and take between government authority and financial institutions (and the individuals caught between them).  The challenges over time have changed--the absence of a single currency in the early 19th century, insufficient credit in the late 19th century, the roaring and patently stupid 1920s, and then the whole range of financial innovations in the postwar period--but the key issues recur over and over again. Day sides in the end with the need for consistent regulation from impartial and empowered bureaucrats, but alas, the last two centuries have shown that they are hard to come by.  Not everyone will agree with her take on banks and regulation, but there can be no doubt about the underlying "capitalism is messy" theme running through our history and this book.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.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

Robin Marie Averbeck is a writer, activist and teacher at California State University, Chico. Liberalism is not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018) is a historical examination of postwar liberalism that powerfully shows how racist capitalism is at the heart of liberal thought. Through ideological laden invocation of pluralism, the “culture of poverty,” and faith in the workings of democratic institutions, liberals shared with conservatives support for an individualistic and racist social order. Demonstrating concern for poverty embodied in the vision of the Great Society, liberals attempted to effectively deny the issue of race for African Americans. Attention to poverty turned to finding an explanation in the pathological makeup of poor blacks and in the overarching “culture of poverty” that became identified with urban environments. After supporting Civil Rights legislation and Community Action Programs funded by the federal government, liberal thinkers were able to deny structural racism and capitalist inequality setting fire to radical resistance. The liberal ideology of white supremacy continues to manifest itself in mass incarceration of African Americans and the weakening of the welfare state. Averbeck demonstrates how the failure to confront the political and social structures that produce inequality stand in the way of true liberation for all Americans.This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2008). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Costa Rica is the only full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarized. Its military was abolished in 1948, with the keys to the armory handed to the Department of Education. Socially, Costa Rica is a success story. Although 94th in the world for GDP, it is in the top 10 on various measurements of health and well-being. Citizens enjoy high standards of living that include universal access to healthcare, education, and pensions. In addition, the country practices sustainable resource management, such as reforestation and the development of solar and wind power, and it expects to be carbon neutral by 2020. Hunting is illegal. 25% of the landmass is parks and reserves. The government supports universal health care, especially maternal and child health. Costa Rica even has a Blue Zone, an area where people live extraordinarily long, healthy lives.To some extent, Costa Rica is simply lucky: it was largely inaccessible, and it had virtually no precious minerals, therefore it was mostly spared the ravages of predatory colonialism. The Costa Rican people made very good social decisions, ranging from an avowed commitment to social democracy at the national level, to local land distribution to develop stable middle class farmers. But Costa Rica's neighbors have not enjoyed nearly as much peace and prosperity. As Judith Eve Lipton and David P. Barash argue in Strength through Peace: How Demilitarization Led to Peace and Happiness in Costa Rica, and What the Rest of the World Can Learn from a Tiny Tropical Nation (Oxford University Press, 2019), is unlikely that Costa Rica's demilitarization and its remarkable social success are coincidental; clearly, something special is going on. Through good luck, good leadership, and good decisions, Costa Rica has become arguably the sanest and most progressive country on earth. This book examines how and why Costa Rica is safe and independent without any military at all, and what the rest of us can learn from its success.Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Traditionally Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign is remembered mainly for being the first time a Catholic was nominated as the candidate for a major political party. As Robert Chiles demonstrates in his book The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal(Cornell University Press, 2018), this focus obscures Smith’s efforts to promote a progressive reform agenda during the election and the role this played in forming the “New Deal coalition” in the 1930s. Chiles traces the emergence of Smith’s progressivism to his association with the women of the settlement house movement in the 1910s, through whom he gained a greater understanding of the problems facing urban workers. As both a state legislator and as governor Smith sought to promote reforms designed to improve the lives of New Yorkers on a range of issues, from workplace safety to environmental conservation. As the nominee Smith promoted a strong progressive agenda, one that appealed to many ethnic working-class voters in the Northeast and Midwest. These voters became an important source of electoral support for Smith’s successor as the Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would realize much of Smith’s proposals after winning the White House in 1932. 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 is it that “liberalism” is a word so ubiquitous and yet we can hardly seem to agree on its meaning? In her book The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Helena Rosenblatt traces the history of the words “liberal” and “liberalism” in order to understand how liberals defined themselves, and what they meant when they spoke about liberalism. In recovering liberalism’s roots in the French Revolution, as well as highlighting the centrality of the German thinkers who transformed it, Rosenblatt debunks the myth of liberalism as an Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights.Emily K. Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. 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 Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the great animating foreign policy issues of the twenty-first century, one that provokes fierce divisions across the world. In the United States, the issue has become increasingly politicized in recent decades. While the conflict is not a strict binary issue, varying degrees and kinds of support for the Palestinians has become increasingly normalized among certain groups in the United States. One group that tends to profess sympathy with and support for Palestinians far more commonly than the average is African Americans. Links between the two groups are strong. For example, in 2016 Black Lives Matter released a statement critical of Israel; perhaps unsurprisingly, its use of the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” triggered a backlash among other progressive and Jewish-American groups.Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color(Stanford University Press, 2018) examines the history of African American ties to Palestine. Fischbach begins with Malcolm X’s interactions with Palestinians and his criticism of Zionism in the early 1960s. The writing of Frantz Fanon and others drew Black Power activists to Palestine, beginning with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s public statements on Israel. Fischbach uses the furor over that to illuminate the position of moderate groups such as the NAACP, supporters of Israel such as Bayard Rustin, and more radical groups such as the Black Panthers. Fischbach shows that despite pushback from Jewish-American groups, a consensus emerged that drew links between African Americans and Palestinians as people of color facing similar problems.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about 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

Today I spoke with Flavia di Mario, a young scholar of political economy and industrial relations. She coauthored a very provocative book with Andrea Micocci, The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2017). Flavia is doctoral student at London Middlesex University, Andrea Micocci was professor of Economics at Link University, Rome, Italy.In their words, they claim that capitalism is based on a false logic in which all facts and ideas are reduced to a consideration of their ‘feasibility’ within the capitalist system. Thus, all mainstream economic and political theories, including those such as Marxism which are supposed to offer an alternative vision, have been stunted and utopian ideas are completely side-lined. "In order to constantly work out the feasible, you have to hang on to pseudo-factual concepts: nationalism; a constant drive for efficiency; the idea of nation/state; corporatism; managed markets; business ethics; governance etc. Capitalism is reduced to the management of the economy by states that fight each other and marvel at the independence of finance. All this, the book argues, is akin, intellectually, economically, politically, and unfortunately individually, to fascism."We started our conversation with a 1925 quote from Benito Mussolini. In his inaugural speech as prime minister, he argues for the importance of finance and budget stability. A good starting point to discuss the relationship between fascism and capitalism. We then moved on to neoliberalism.The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism offers a brief, provocative analysis of this issue with special reference to the most visible executioners of its will: the managerial class. "This group simply happens to hold power, and hence visibility, but they do what everybody else does, and would do, all the time. This is because capitalism is an intellectual outlook that thoroughly directs individual actions through fascist and non-fascist repression."The book argues that the only way to escape capitalism is to recover individual intellectual and sentimental emancipation from capitalism itself in order to produce radical solutions. A very interesting book that many might find worth reading: those who study and are interested in political economy, economic theory and philosophy, as well as fascism and neoliberalism.Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics