Our winter break rebroadcasts continue this week with Wendy Brown from May 2019. Wendy's work on neoliberalism and democracy is worth revisiting as we consider how much the Biden administration will adhere to the neoliberal order established by previous administrations, and how those dynamics might change in the post-Trump era.
Neoliberalism is one of those fuzzy words that can mean something different to everyone. Wendy Brown is one of the world’s leading scholars on neoliberalism and argue that a generation of neoliberal worldview among political, business, and intellectual leaders led to the populism we’re seeing throughout the world today. But is it mutually exclusive to democracy? Not necessarily.
Brown joins us this week to help make sense of what neoliberalism is, and where things stand today. We were lucky enough to get an advance copy of her book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, which will be released in July. It’s a follow up to her 2015 book, Undoing the Demos, and you’ll hear her talk about how her thinking has changed since then.
Brown is the Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches political theory.
Wendy’s books: In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, Undoing the Demos
The relationship between capitalism and democracy is complex and never quite settled. We dive into it headfirst this week with a guest who has worked in the corporate world and now trains a new generation of investors and entrepreneurs to think differently about the common good.
Dawn Carpenter is the creator and host of What Does It Profit? - a podcast that explores how we can reconcile capitalism’s demand for profit with the long term well-being of people and the planet, She is a former investment banker who had a mid-career pivot to studying applied ethics, the nature work, and the responsibilities of wealth.
Dawn and Jenna discuss the rights and responsibilities corporations have to both shareholders and stakeholders, and how those dynamics have evolved from the postwar Keynsian period through the neoliberal era to the crossroads we seem to be at today.
We'll be back with a full episode next week. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving from our team to yours and we hope you enjoy this interview.
What neoliberalism left behind
When business bleeds into politics
While we take a holiday break, we are rebroadcasting a few episodes from our back catalog — starting with one that we teased at the end of last week's episode. This book and the broader concept of epistemic polarization is one that we've returned to time and time again. Many of the trends we discuss have become even more pronounced since this episode first aired in August 2019.
From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pages of supermarket tabloids is now all over our media landscape. Unlike the 9/11 truthers or those who questioned the moon landing, these conspiracies are designed solely to delegitimize a political opponent — rather than in service of finding the truth. As you might imagine, this is problematic for democracy.
Democracy scholars Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum call it “conspiracy without the theory” and unpack the concept in their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Russell is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth. Nancy is the Senator Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics at Harvard.
As you’ll hear, the new conspiricism is a symptom of a larger epistemic polarization that’s happening throughout the U.S. When people no longer agree on a shared set of facts, conspiracies run wild and knowledge-producing institutions like the government, universities, and the media are trusted less than ever.
A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
This week, we're bringing you an episode from another podcast we think you might enjoy, Broken Ground from the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Broken Ground digs up environmental stories in the South that don’t always get the attention they deserve, and giving voice to the people bringing those stories to light. While the show focuses on the South, the conversations — including the one in this episode — resonate far beyond the region's confines.
In the latest season, the podcast explores how Southerners living along the coast are navigating sea level rise as they race against the clock. How will people on the front lines protect themselves from the immediate and impending threats of rising tides?
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Robert Bullard, widely considered the father of environmental justice. He talks with Broken Ground host about the inequality of pollution and climate change. Bullard was scheduled to visit Penn State in April and organizers are hopeful that he'll be able to make the trip in April 2021.
If you enjoy this episode, check out Broken Ground wherever you listen to podcasts.
Southern Environmental Law Center
Michael Mann's journey through the climate wars
Changing the climate conversation
The ongoing struggle for civil rights
This week, we're excited to bring you an episode from She Votes!, a new podcast from the Wonder Media Network about the fight for women's suffrage as we approach the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
This episode examines the arrest, trial, and conviction of suffragist Susan B. Anthony for the crime of "voting while female." Rather than sitting on her heels, Anthony launched a campaign to raise awareness about voting rights for women that would set the stage for the next 50 years of work through the passage of the 19th Amendment.
You might be familiar with parts of this story, but you've never heard it quite like this — Anthony is voiced by actress Christine Braranski in this episode.
She Votes! is hosted by Ellen Goodman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Boston Globe and founder of The Conversation Project, and Lynn Sherr, a longtime correspondent for ABC News and author of "Failure is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words."
The 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment is coming up at the end of August and we're planning an episode of Democracy Works on a century women's voting on August 24.
You can find more episodes of She Votes at shevotespodcast.com or in any podcast app. Thank you to the Wonder Media Network for sharing this episode with us.
We are part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.