It seems safe to say, at this point, that the retrospectively rather quaint debate over whether Trumpism, as a political movement and a politics in itself, could or should be described as "fascist" has been settled. The bad news is in how we got to that answer, and in the bad news that every day brings. And with that colossally dispiriting answer come a whole bunch of new questions about what is to be done, and where we actually are, and how to get from here to the other side of things. This week, we were joined by Jason Steinhauer, the historian behind the History Club newsletter and the bestseller History, Disrupted, to discuss those questions, and the historical and cultural forces that created them, and to start working toward some answers. Also, hilariously, we discussed the NBA playoffs at the end.
But before we successfully landed The Distraction's version of a Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables, we talked about some serious stuff in a serious way. Steinhauer, who is a popular historian both in terms of how many people read his newsletter and in his choice to work outside the academy, is a fluent and confident and highly knowledgeable speaker, and while we relied on his knowledge of how fascism has historically worked and successfully been resisted, our conversation kept returning to the present.
The question of what has historically defined successful anti-fascist or anti-authoritarian movements, for instance, is relevant because that work itself is very urgent. The rotten synthesis between corporation and state that has long been a hallmark of fascism, too, is everywhere you look and following you around from within your phone. And the challenge that technology poses to a democratic future, and how contemporary technologies—which, Jason argued, "are themselves authoritarian in nature"—have contributed to the low moment in which we find ourselves. This was the most interesting part of the chat to me, but it also fit well into the broader thrust of the conversation, which kept returning to the work of staying human, and building movements that keep humanity at the center of things, in whatever lies ahead.
And then, after a passionate defense of the humanities from Jason, we were suddenly talking about the damn NBA playoffs during the same podcast episode in which we were talking about all that other stuff. There is no real segue to be made from one thing to the other, and to his credit Drew didn't really try for one, but the conversation that makes up the back fifth of the show was as delightful as the stuff that came before it was heady. Given that some of it involved our guest confessing to having had the letter J shaved into his haircut in tribute to Anthony Mason, I guess this part was a little bit heady as well.
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