President-elect Donald Trump met with retired General David Petraeus Monday, as a senior official with the transition said the former CIA director is being considered for secretary of state amid open infighting among Trump’s advisers about who to pick for the post.
In the aftermath of the election, much has been said about what liberal government, media, businesses failed to do: contextualize his rise to office and connect with his voters to change their minds. In this episode, Laura interviews Adam and Arlie Hochschild, the duo who have each spent their careers documenting the complexities of political behavior.
Arlie Hochschild, with pragmatic energy, undertook the work we’d all like to do: she left the liberal haven of Berkeley, CA to go to the Louisiana Bayou — a stronghold of the conservative right. Hochschild interviews Trump voters about their “deep story,” what drives them and how they feel left behind by the same liberal policies they need the most. Her new book — a National Book Award finalist–, Strangers in their Own Land, hopes to find common ground with Tea Partiers and “alt righters” beyond politics.
Adam Hochschild is a celebrated writer, cofounder of Mother Jones magazine, whose new book Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Hochschild, author of eight books, writes with what the New York Times calls prose “constantly vivid yet emotionally restrained” about the struggle of young Americans who joined Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. In our current politically fraught time, Hochschild speaks to the hallmarks of fascism and how to mark its ascent.
All this, and an F-Word from Laura on the media vs. Trump, why it’s not just about alternative news but about finding an alternative to news.
We’re used to thinking hugely well of democracy. But interestingly, one of the wisest people who ever lived, Socrates, had deep suspicions of it.
We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming. And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end of American democracy.
When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?
Why did we allow the corporate state to strip away the rights of poor people of color and force them to live in terror in mini-police states? Why did we build the world’s largest system of mass incarceration? Did we not see that the rest of us would be next? Why did we agree that those defined by the state as terrorists could not only be deprived of their rights but be assassinated? Did we think the state would restrict itself to persecuting and murdering Muslims? Why did we remain silent as the state arrogated to itself the right to detain and prosecute people not for what they had done, or even for what they were planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deemed seditious? Why did we stand by and permit the state to torture? Did we not see that once rights became privileges the state would one day revoke them?
The failure of our capitalist democracy was collective. It was bred by ignorance, indifference, racism, bigotry and the seduction of mass propaganda. It was bred by elites, especially in the press, the courts and academia, who chose careerism over moral and intellectual courage. Our rights as citizens were taken from us one by one. There was hardly a word of protest.
In the face of a putrid and poisonous election cycle that ended with Trump’s presidential victory, liberals and conservatives are quick to argue that Americans have fallen prey to a culture of incivility.
It’s true that in the run-up to the presidential election, Donald Trump strategically showcased incivility in his public appearances as a mark of solidarity with many of his white male followers. However, it is a mistake to lump the racism, bigotry, misogyny and ultra-nationalism that Trump has played upon under an obscuring and euphemistic notion of “incivility.” And it is simultaneously a mistake to delegitimize the anger that oppressed people feel about racism, sexism or class exploitation by categorizing protests over these injuries as merely “incivility.”
Understanding the ramifications of current discourses of incivility will be one key to understanding the results of the presidential election and Trump’s ascension. Clearly, Trump’s embrace of incivility (in addition to his embrace of racism and xenophobia) was a winning strategy, one that not only signaled the degree to which the politics of extremism has moved from the fringes to the center of American politics, but also one that turned politics into a spectacle that fed the rating machines of the mainstream media.
Pie is shocked at the news. All the News.
Paul Ryan tweeted out that he would help struggling Americans by removing “regulatory red tape.” How can anyone honestly believe that regulatory red tape is hurting them…well, unless you’re a member of the top 1% that owns a Fortune 500 company, that is.
The police in North Dakota are brutalizing protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline to the point where someone’s arm has been blown off.
On a special edition of On Contact, Chris Hedges travels to the Standing Rock encampment in North Dakota to listen to the frontline voices of those fighting to block the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Always Question Authority 