Stop, Look, and Listen #15
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts (and occasionally programmes and films) that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also maintain a regular record of all these via Substack’s ‘Notes’ feature; you can also read these via the Notes section of my site.
This week’s recommended reading and listening are on the areas of:
Institutionalising the American right.
Conflict and state failure in East Africa.
Popular culture and economics.
Enlightenment thought.
Pacific island states in global contexts.
Institutionalising the American right
American right-wing organisations are paving the way for a right-counterrevolution across the US legislature and executive, with particular implications for a possible second Trump presidency. Some superb (though disturbing) analysis of this phenomenon.
Recommendations:
Rhiannon Hamam, Peter Shamishiri, and Michael Liroff host the second part of the 5-4 podcast’s mini-series on the Federalist Society, looking this time at the society’s tripartite membership of students, academics, and legal practitioners, and how it creates space for expression of right-wing grievance and ideas more widely seen as abhorrent. They discuss how the Society provides law school students with opportunities for socialisation and career progression, and hosts glamorous events with high-profile speakers that appeal to libertarians and centrists as well as conservatives; opportunities through PhD programmes and publications for the rise of conservative legal academics who provide right-wing ideas with a degree of intellectual legitimacy; and a ‘counter-elite’ of conservative judges and lawyers who serve to deter sitting judges from drifting in a more liberal direction. Finally, the hosts look in particular at the role of the Society’s chair Leonard Leo at the intersection of multiple shell organisations and dark money networks.
- writes for his Drezner’s World newsletter about the likely significance of right-wing think tanks in providing administrative ballast to a potential second Trump administration in the US. He emphasises the increasingly radical right ideology and pronouncements of organisations like the Claremont Institute and Heritage Foundation, and the potential threat of their acquiring political power.
On the Know Your Enemy podcast,
and discuss the efforts of conservative think tanks to prepare for a more effective second Trump administration. They discuss competition between organisations like the America First Policy Institute, established by former Trump staffers in 2021, and the older, formerly Reaganite but now far more paleoconservative Heritage Foundation in seeking to provide a ready cadre of policy officials with suitable ideological credentials to implement a far more populist right-wing agenda. They also look at the tensions between this ambition and the nature of Trump himself, with his lack of deep ideological and policy convictions and preference for sycophancy and patrimony in his appointment choices.On their Is This Democracy podcast,
and Lily Mason examine the latest report put out by Project 2025, the right-wing initiative headed up by the Heritage Foundation to prepare the administrative ground for a second Trump presidency. They discuss how the report conflates a drive to dismantle federal government and implement a right-wing culture war, and conspiracy theories around Chinese communist subversion and globalism, to justify detailed plans to expand the executive power of the President, replace key civil servants with ideologically loyal political appointees, and weaponise different government departments to pursue goals such as reducing women’s bodily autonomy, marketising education, rescinding environmental regulations and equality laws, and militarising the border. They also explore the uneasy alliance of libertarians and traditionalists underpinning Project 2025, and the way its deeply unpopular agenda is likely to fuel discontent and require further institutionalisation of minority rule.
Conflict and state failure in East Africa
On the sources of civil and international tensions within and between states in East Africa, including Ethiopia, Sudan, and South Sudan.
Recommendations:
Christopher Clapham joins Alan Boswell on the International Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast, to discuss the regional implications of the shifting political situation in Ethiopia. They examine the destabilising effects of prime minister Abiy Ahmed’s short-termist approach to diplomacy, as typified by Ethiopia’s current push for sea access through a deal with the unrecognised state of Somaliland. They also discuss the rising tensions over Ethiopia’s Amhara region within a longer term history of local fragmentation and recentralisation in the country.
Thomas Jones is joined by Tom Stevenson on the London Review of Books podcast, to discuss the Tigray War that was waged from 2020 and 2022 between the Ethiopian Federal Government and Eritrea on the one side and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on the other. Stevenson argues that the conflict was the outcome both of a premeditated provocation by Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed, and of wider wrangling for autonomy within and dominance of the country by its different regions. They also discuss the devastating humanitarian impact of the conflict in Tigray, and the ongoing challenges of post-war reconstruction there.
Writing for his An Africanist Perspective newsletter,
provides an extensive account of the roots of the ongoing civil war in Sudan. He highlights the brutality and inextricability of the conflict, owing to both the severity of the country’s social and economic fragmentation, and the interference of external actors. Opalo also locates the war within its historical contexts of Sudan’s riverain core’s long efforts to impose Arabisation and Islamisation on more peripheral population centres, and of former president Omar al-Bashir’s building up of the renegade Rapid Support Forces as a counterweight to the power of the Sudanese Armed Forces.South Sudanese scholar and peace activist Peter Biar Ajak writes in Time magazine about how his country’s hopes for the future have been dashed since it gained independence from Sudan in 2011. Ajak highlights South Sudan’s poor record on corruption, political freedom, and living standards, and the need for the US and other Western states to take steps to pressurise its President Salva Kiir Mayardit to hold free and fair elections.
Popular culture and economics
On the connections between popular culture and economics, and the way the former is shaped by and represents (and alters attitudes to) the latter, in the realms of publishing, television, and philanthropy.
Recommendations:
Clayton Childress interviews Dan Sinykin about the impact of conglomerisation on publishing and fiction for Public Books magazine. They discuss the way trends in fiction, including increasingly autobiographical tendencies, serve to over-emphasise the significance of the individual author and minimise the roles of other actors such as agents and editors, and mask the increasing dominance of a smaller set of larger publishers. They also look at the rise of smaller, nonprofit publishers, their significance in ensuring fiction that deviate from mainstream tendencies can find an audience, their reliance on patronage, and the fallacy of drawing overly sharp boundaries between the ways they and conglomerate publishers operate and in the types of fiction they publish.
On this episode of the Money on the Left podcast’s ‘Modern Movie Theory’ series, Will Beaman is joined by Robyn Ollett and Rob Hawkes to discuss the vampire sitcom series What We Do in the Shadows. They explore its place within the history of using vampirism as a metaphor for capitalism and as a vehicle for exploring themes of queerness. They also consider the way it moves beyond the postmodern by combining pastiche with sincerity, and its emphasis on an economy of care.
- , , and are joined by James Choi to discuss the relationship between mainstream economic theory and popular personal finance guidance. Choi highlights that whereas economic theory stresses maintaining steady spending levels and varying saving according to income, popular personal finance guides advise the opposite. They also discuss other aspects of popular wisdom and empirical evidence in personal finance, including regarding investing in stocks, saving versus paying off debt, and which debts to pay off first.
- and guest Amy Schiller examine the world of celebrity philanthropy, and the way it can function as a means of reputation laundering and tax avoidance for the rich and famous. They also look at how philanthropic activity more generally often serves as an extension of neoliberal logics, centring on ‘perfect’ victims and making donors feel better without disrupting existing hierarchies, and address how charitable activity might be able to circumnavigate these shortcomings.
Enlightenment thought
Three podcast episodes examining intellectual histories of Europe and North America at the end of the eighteenth century, and the way leading thinkers influenced and responded to political changes in this turbulent period.
Recommendations:
David Runciman talks to Richard Whatmore and Lea Ypi about the end of the Enlightenment on the Past Present Future podcast. They address the question as to whether Enlightenment thought and optimism around it was ultimately undone at the end of the eighteenth century by its internal contradictions, or whether Enlightenment thinkers rather saw political and economic developments as rather deviations from their ideas. They also explore how the continuing rise of Britain as an imperial power, despite its contradictions and failings, contributed to this disillusionment, and examine parallels with the contemporary US’s place in the world.
Alycia Asai talks to Katlyn Carter about her book, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions, on the Civics and Coffee podcast. Carter explains how American revolutionaries went during the War of Independence from critiquing the lack of transparency in British rule to themselves coming to believe in the need to shield representative democracy from some of the pressures of public opinion, culminating in the highly controversial behind-closed-doors nature of the American Constitutional Convention. She compares this with the example of the French Revolution, in which the drafting of a new constitution was a much more open and contested affair, but likewise was followed by a more insulated approach to governing following the rise of the Jacobins.
On the National Constitution Center’s We the People podcast, Jeffrey Rosen moderates a discussion between Angela Coventry, Dennis Rasmussen, and Aaron Alexander Zubia about the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and his posthumous influence on the drafting of the American constitution. They discuss how Hume’s combination of faith in progress and scepticism made his politics hard to pin down and have allowed his ideas to be appropriated from different perspectives. They also talk about the influence of his ideas on faction and how these might be tempered within a large republic on James Madison, of his positive attitudes towards commerce and executive power on Alexander Hamilton, and why Thomas Jefferson was much more hostile to Hume’s views on the need for strong central authority, which he saw as Toryism.
Pacific island states in their global contexts
Three pieces of writing about Pacific island states, and their relationships with their former colonisers, and global politics more broadly.
Recommendations:
Jon Piccini considers what it means to decolonise the archive, with reference to the national archive of Papua New Guinea, in this post for the History Workshop blog. As the case of Britain’s infamous migrated archive demonstrated, colonial powers frequently extracted the potentially controversial administrative records of their territorial possessions back to the metropole before they attained independence. Piccini explores how an alliance between Australian professionals and the independence movement in Papua New Guinea successfully pressurised the Australian government to cede colonial records in their totality to the country upon its gaining independence from Australia in the 1970s.
Jess Marinaccio and Graeme Smith write for Inside Story about Tuvalu’s potential decision to break diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favour of China. They explain how the dynamics of the situation are shaped by the absence of party politics in Tuvalu and therefore owe much more to the predilections of individual parliamentarians. They also highlight the importance of economic aid to the decision-making process, as Tuvalu seeks to leverage more economic support from both the US and China, as well as the influence of its relationship with Australia.
Fraser Macdonald explores the reasons for the strength of Pacific states’ support for Israel, which places them rather at odds with the remainder of the Global South, in this piece for The Conversation. He argues that while the strength of Christian observance in these countries, and the elevated position this gives to Jews as God’s chosen people, is a major contributing factor, this alone is not enough as an explanation in itself. Rather, McDonald argues we also need to consider the emphases on kinship in Pacific cultures , and the way these imagined kinship networks extend globally to include other peoples.
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