I agree with your intro - best show yet. In typical WoC fashion, you gave us a lot to reflect on, for sure. I especially appreciated your discussion about the struggle to find the correct vocabulary to describe Trump and the forces on the right in the US. Naszism and fascism have never felt quite right to me, not because they aren’t the right labels - maybe there are, maybe they are not - but mainly because Americans in the post 20th century don’t know deep in their souls what they mean. As Ivan said, they are not useful as mobilizing forces for our society to act “against”. My husband, who is from Poland, is perplexed by this, but then, he was shaped by the nightmares of his country. Nazis, fascists, Russian dictators haunt his very being. I’d love to see Ivan come back to your show in 6-12 months - which I believe translates to centuries in Lenin-time!
I thought Ivan Krastev was just next level in his understanding of European and US politics, thank you so much for this!
I realized, as I listened, that the crisis of democracy is really about how to manage/control social media. I am sure there was propaganda in the past from foreign countries to influence an election, but now it is much easier, cheaper and can be executed at a much larger scale than before.
The idea that we can trust voters to make a good judgment when voting is no longer true, given how social media can influence voters. Then, isn't it a good idea to take away voting privileges? (just a thought experiment, not advocating for authoritarianism). This really is a conundrum for liberal democracies.
Thanks for this :) I really enjoyed it and from memory it mirrors some of the claims made in his co-authored book 'the light that failed'. I think the question of meaning and ideology today is especially important. I was recently re-reading Nietzsche's 'uses and abuses of history' and found it to be pretty on point for our current moment in a few ways. Being held back by historical notions and focusing on presenting the past ensures we cannot act in the present. This is arguably what is limiting the democratic party.
I am not sure I agree with Shadi when he says they have no vision. They do. Their defence of institutions and the status quo is itself a vision and a prescriptive toolkit for how government should be run and what it should be doing. It's just that it is out of whack for today's world and is a conservative vision as opposed to Trump's revolutionary ambiance. Although in the long run, conservatives generally outlast revolutionaries in the short term they have to fight and claw their way to political (or sometimes physical) survival.
Now, we are a world run on vibes, not processes. This is why Trump won and the Dems didn't.
Naturally, as a political theorist this scares me a little. I don't believe relying upon aesthetics to be a particularly useful way of managing politics but if we want to change that the Dems have got to be more radical in how we source our information and navigate our world. It isn't that democracy has run out of fashion but that its defenders are out of touch.
The part about demonizing the right not working is key for the center-left to learn. Most of them will always view anything the least bit Trump-ite as abhorrent, but if enough of them learn that to defeat Vance (or whoever follows him on the right) they'll need to moderate their cultural stances, it can be done.
I remember the talk about Old and New Europe during the Bush years, the idea that America and New Europe would liberate and vivify the world while Old Europe contented itself with social democratic stagnation. People around Bush (whose off-putting accent was Texan rather than New York) had their own revolutionary visions that scared Europeans. The neocons and the Christian right thought Clinton had made America weak and decadent.
Maybe what we're seeing now is a more existential version of that divide, Revolutionary Europe and Revolutionary America versus Institutional Europe and Institutional America.
I agree with your intro - best show yet. In typical WoC fashion, you gave us a lot to reflect on, for sure. I especially appreciated your discussion about the struggle to find the correct vocabulary to describe Trump and the forces on the right in the US. Naszism and fascism have never felt quite right to me, not because they aren’t the right labels - maybe there are, maybe they are not - but mainly because Americans in the post 20th century don’t know deep in their souls what they mean. As Ivan said, they are not useful as mobilizing forces for our society to act “against”. My husband, who is from Poland, is perplexed by this, but then, he was shaped by the nightmares of his country. Nazis, fascists, Russian dictators haunt his very being. I’d love to see Ivan come back to your show in 6-12 months - which I believe translates to centuries in Lenin-time!
I thought Ivan Krastev was just next level in his understanding of European and US politics, thank you so much for this!
I realized, as I listened, that the crisis of democracy is really about how to manage/control social media. I am sure there was propaganda in the past from foreign countries to influence an election, but now it is much easier, cheaper and can be executed at a much larger scale than before.
The idea that we can trust voters to make a good judgment when voting is no longer true, given how social media can influence voters. Then, isn't it a good idea to take away voting privileges? (just a thought experiment, not advocating for authoritarianism). This really is a conundrum for liberal democracies.
Thanks for this :) I really enjoyed it and from memory it mirrors some of the claims made in his co-authored book 'the light that failed'. I think the question of meaning and ideology today is especially important. I was recently re-reading Nietzsche's 'uses and abuses of history' and found it to be pretty on point for our current moment in a few ways. Being held back by historical notions and focusing on presenting the past ensures we cannot act in the present. This is arguably what is limiting the democratic party.
I am not sure I agree with Shadi when he says they have no vision. They do. Their defence of institutions and the status quo is itself a vision and a prescriptive toolkit for how government should be run and what it should be doing. It's just that it is out of whack for today's world and is a conservative vision as opposed to Trump's revolutionary ambiance. Although in the long run, conservatives generally outlast revolutionaries in the short term they have to fight and claw their way to political (or sometimes physical) survival.
Now, we are a world run on vibes, not processes. This is why Trump won and the Dems didn't.
Naturally, as a political theorist this scares me a little. I don't believe relying upon aesthetics to be a particularly useful way of managing politics but if we want to change that the Dems have got to be more radical in how we source our information and navigate our world. It isn't that democracy has run out of fashion but that its defenders are out of touch.
The Microsoft Outlook noise in the background was unpalatable
Thanks for the feedback! We will try to do a better job at editing next time!
The part about demonizing the right not working is key for the center-left to learn. Most of them will always view anything the least bit Trump-ite as abhorrent, but if enough of them learn that to defeat Vance (or whoever follows him on the right) they'll need to moderate their cultural stances, it can be done.
I remember the talk about Old and New Europe during the Bush years, the idea that America and New Europe would liberate and vivify the world while Old Europe contented itself with social democratic stagnation. People around Bush (whose off-putting accent was Texan rather than New York) had their own revolutionary visions that scared Europeans. The neocons and the Christian right thought Clinton had made America weak and decadent.
Maybe what we're seeing now is a more existential version of that divide, Revolutionary Europe and Revolutionary America versus Institutional Europe and Institutional America.