New Books in Politics and Polemics

How do we defeat woke ideology and the threat it poses to free speech? Senator Ted Cruz '92 joins Madison's Notes to discuss his latest book, Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America (Regnery Publishing, 2023). Here, Ted discusses how universities, businesses, and other organs of cultural and political life cause woke ideology, what can conservatives do, and some Ted's favorite memories at Princeton studying under the Madison Program's Director, Professor Robert P. George.In addition to his recent book, you can also listen to Senator Cruz on his podcast, Verdict.Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. 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 Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal era started the retreat of the state. Privatisation and deregulation meant power was handed over to corporations and markets. Now that neoliberalism has run its course, will there be a return of the state? Listen to Owen Bennett Jones in conversation Graeme Garrard. Garrard is the author of The Return of the State: And Why It Is Essential for Our Health, Wealth and Happiness (Yale UP, 2022).Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. 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 the tradition of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce’s Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World (The New Press, 2023) offers winning strategies, history, and theory for a new generation of activists. Based on interviews with leading organizers, this groundbreaking book describes seven strategies to bring about transformative change. It incorporates stories of organizations and movements that have won, including Make the Road NY, the St. Paul Federation of Educators, the welfare rights movement, the Working Families Party, New Georgia Project, Occupy Wall Street, 350.org, the Fight for 15, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Two overarching case studies anchor the book: the brilliant techniques used by enslaved people and their allies to end slavery, and the sinister but effective ways elites imposed our current system. Practical Radicals offers insights on strategy used by business, military, and political elites, addresses the challenges of overcoming conflict within organizations and movements, and concludes with a discussion of how our movements must adapt to meet new challenges in the twenty-first century. A book for activists, organizers, and anyone hoping to win the fight for a better society, Practical Radicals is a deeply informed resource designed to help us win on the big issues of our time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto (Yale UP, 2023) puts forward an account of contemporary art’s political ambitions and potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems.Simoniti systematises the perspectives of contemporary art as a force for political and social change. At its best, he argues, contemporary art allows us to imagine utopias and presents us with hard truths, which mainstream political discourse cannot yet articulate. Covering subjects such as climate change, social justice, and global inequality, Artists Remake the World offers a philosophy of contemporary art as an experimental branch of politics.Vid Simoniti is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the University of Liverpool. He is the co-editor, with James Fox, of Art and knowledge after 1900. Ryan Trecartin, P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009. My conversation with Fuller and Weizman on Forensic Architecture and Investigative Aesthetics. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary 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

These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on?In The Age of Insecurity (House of Anansi Press, 2023), author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises—rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism—originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us.Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society—while illuminating a path toward meaningful change.Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@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

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State (Floating Opera Press, 2023) expands an earlier online essay from The Point by historian Samuel Huneke to offer a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew political engagement with democratic theorizing, Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.Lea Greenberg is an editor, translator, and scholar of German and Jewish 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

In A Brief History of History (Indiana UP, 2023), acclaimed historian Jeremy Black seeks to reinvigorate and redefine our ideas about history. The stories we tell about the past are a crucial aspect of all cultures. However, while the traditional storytelling process—what we think of as "history" in the proper sense—is useful, it is also misleading, not least because it leads to the repetition of bias and misinformation.Black suggests that the conventional idea of history and historians is constructed too narrowly, as it fails to engage with the broad nature of lived experience. By focusing on a singular idea or story within the history being explored, we fail to understand the interconnectivity of the everyday experience.A Brief History of History challenges accepted norms of the historical perspective and offers a view of human history that will surprise many and (perhaps) infuriate some. But above all, it is a history of historians written for this moment in time, a time when the traditional Eurocentric approach to history now appears wholly inappropriate.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. 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 today’s episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Jodi Rudoren, editor-in-chief of the Forward magazine, about the situation in Israel and Gaza. She notes that Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, shattered the paradigm of how Israel and even the Arab world understood what Hamas was all about. The result has been a deep sense of shock and mourning among Israelis for those who have lost loved ones or had them taken hostage. At the same time, some Jews reject the massive Israeli response and are protesting against it. Meanwhile, many progressive Jews in the United States have found that their allies in social justice efforts have proven not to be on the same team when Israelis are the targets of violence. Despite all the violence and heartache, it nonetheless appears that the conflict might lead to a political solution – the only one that will allow Israel and the Palestinians to live together on the small strip of the Middle East that they inhabit.International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Old friends--one a Jew, the other a Christian--Leonard (Lenny) Grob and John K. Roth are philosophers who have long studied the Holocaust. That experience makes us anxious about democracy, because we are also Americans living in perilous times. The 2020s remind us of the 1930s when Nazis destroyed democracy in Germany. Carnage followed. In the 2020s, Donald Trump and his followers endanger democracy in the United States. With Vladimir Putin's ruthless assault against Ukraine compounding the difficulties, democracy must not be taken for granted. Americans love democracy--except when we don't. That division and conflict mean that democracy will be on the ballot in the 2024 American elections. Probing the prospects, Warnings: The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy (Cascade Books, 2023) features exchanges between us that underscore the most urgent threats to democracy in the United States and show how to resist them. What's most needed is ethical patriotism that urges us Americans to be our best selves. Our best selves defend liberal democracy; they strive for inclusive pluralism. Our best selves resist decisions and policies like those that led to the Holocaust or genocidal war in Ukraine or conspiracies to overturn fair and free elections in the United States. Our best selves reject antisemitism and racism; they oppose hypocrisy and autocracy. Our best selves hold lying leaders accountable. Our best selves believe that, against all odds, democracy can win out if we never give up trying to be our best.Jeff Bachman is an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. 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 The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions: 2006-2022 (Sublation Media, 2023), Chris Cutrone investigates how and why the Millennial Left did not take up the task of socialism for the their time and relegated themselves to the shadows of the GenX Left and the New Left before them.The Millennial Left, facing the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the Presidencies of Obama and Trump and the political discontents expressed by them and by Bernie Sanders, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, SYRIZA, et al, was tasked with the struggle for socialism in the core of global capital. It failed to even attempt this task. In the essays collected here, spanning the Millennial generation's many agonies, Chris Cutrone cuts through the accumulated legacy of failures that the Millennials inherited from the Left of the 20th century and that blocked their view of the socialist politics needed to turn the crisis of neoliberal capitalism into a struggle to overcome capitalism. A critique of the history of the recent and current Left, the book is also a lesson in politics: the politics marking the 21st century and the absence of Marxism informing the Left as much as the Right. It is essential reading for anybody interested in a socialist politics of freedom. Chris Cutrone teaches Critical Theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute for Clinical Social Work. He completed his PhD on Adorno's Marxism at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years in the Social Sciences Core Curriculum, and is the original lead organizer and chief pedagogue of the Platypus Affiliated Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics