WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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As a follow-up to last week’s program, “The Elected Coup,” tonight we confront The Authoritarian Creep.
I should note that I spoke with both of our guests last Thursday (2/2) and as mindless speed seems to be the name of Donald Trump’s game (a la Italian Futurism), this show may already be behind the times!
SEGMENT ONE: Lessons from Local 10
We’ll try to learn from the past in order to affect our present moment–I spoke with Peter Cole, a labor historian at Western Illinois University about his recent In These Times article titled “Want to Stop Trump? Take a Page From These Dockworkers, and Stop Work”. Last Wednesday (2/1), Republican Representatives Steve King (IA) and Joe Wilson (SC) re-introduced a so-called right-to-work bill that would significantly hamper unions across the country and likely lower wages for all Americans. There’s nothing new about this of course, as Cole gives us an account of the decades-long concerted effort to weaken and destroy organized labor. And despite his appeal to blue collar Midwesterners, forged by opposing Trans-Pacific Partnership, DT has said he is “100 percent” in favor of right-to-work laws–and both House and Senate are controlled by Republicans.
SEGMENT TWO: The Bluster (and tweets) of Weak Leaders
We’re joined by a scholar of authoritarian regimes, Tom Pepinsky, professor of government at Cornell University. With the White House’s illiberal disposition so obvious that it grounds new standard operating procedures, Pepinsky leads us down a fine line of interpreting the breakneck chaos of the new administration — cautioning us against basing our understanding in terms of obsolete totalitarianisms past, but also over-extrapolating the chaos and bluster into fearful, un-falsifiable fantasies… in the process, getting suckered into our own ‘alt’ reality.
GUESTS
Peter Cole is a historian of the twentieth-century United States and South Africa. He researches the history of social movements, especially how workers and labor unions organize in ethnically and racially diverse societies. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and Ben Fletcher: The Life & Writings of a Black Wobbly (Charles H. Kerr, 2007).
Tom Pepinsky is Associate Professor in the Government Department at Cornell University. He studies the interaction of political and economic systems, mostly in emerging market economies. He is the author of Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Indonesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
RELATED
Want to Stop Trump? Take a Page From These Dockworkers, and Stop Work by Peter Cole
Covering Trump the Reuters Way
Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable by Tom Pepinsky
Weak and Incompetent Leaders act like Strong Leaders by Tom Pepinsky
House Republicans push forward anti-union ‘right-to-work’ bill
The Elected Coup (Interchange with Jeffrey Isaac and Samuel Moyn)
MUSIC
“Poor Millionaire Blues” by Peetie Wheatstraw
“The Ballad of Harry Bridges” by Sarah Lee Guthrie
“All You Fascists Bound to Lose (Blokes Version)” by Billie Bragg
“Blame it on the Boers” by Johnny Dyani
NEXT UP
We Heart The Second Sex
For Valentine’s Day Jamie Warren joins us to discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 masterpiece, The Second Sex, often cited as the seminal text of modern feminist theory. It offers both a sweeping history of women’s subjugation, and a compelling theoretical statement on the nature of being a woman. Women, de Beauvoir argues, are Other. “Humanity,” she writes, “is male and man defines woman not as herself but as relative to him…He is the Subject, the Absolute—she is the Other.”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer & Editor: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford
