Episode 185: WTN Destabilizing Our Collective Understanding

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I’m worried. To me, America may be suffering enough social anger—technically called "political sectarianism"—to lead to upcoming upheaval, perhaps in the near future. I'll discuss this in today's Episode 185: Destabilizing Our Collective Understanding.

In this episode, I read from: My computer's Quickie Dictionary; Karen Kaplan, "Fed up with the election? Science explains how politics got so awful" (LA Times, October 29, 2020); Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); William Straus & Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (William Morrow & Company, 1991); Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Random House, 2016); Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2019); Charles Peters, "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto," The Washington Post, September 5, 1982; Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books, 2016); Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning On The American Right (The New Press, 2016); and Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2020).

I play: quotes from both KMO from the C-Realm Podcast and listener Kevin W., who were gracious enough to record their opinions for me (my many thanks to both of them); Lance Strate, a guest on the Hermitix Podcast, "Amusing Ourselves to Death with Lance Strate"; "Those Were the Days", the opening song for the long-running CBS show, All In The Family; a Bill Clinton campaign speech (at National Education Association); a Barack Obama speech (Remarks by the President on Investing in America's Future, 10/25/2013); a Michael Gove and Faisal Islam debate; two On The Media episodes, first "Constitutionally Speaking", and then "Aftershocks".

Oh, and quick note: as they say, I shot my wad with this one (meaning in this case my monthly bandwidth allotment). Since I am, as they say, cheap, look for the next episode in early November.