Historiansplaining is a godawful name but it looks like it might be good, the becoming modern series looks up my alley.
Basically I like either very big picture - broad sociocultural and economic forces, trying to understand what shapes societies in the long term - or very small picture, you know, what was it like to be a peasant or a soldier at some time and place. The times I got bored in Revolutions was when it descended into a blow-by-blow of military campaigns, like this guy took this army here and they fought this battle, blah blah.
If anyone else is thinking of listening to some Revolutions, I’d recommend the entire French history through-line. That encompasses the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution (which was concurrent with the later French Revolution and heavily influenced by it as it was a French colony, of course), the July Revolution of 1830, the revolutions of 1848 (you can skip all the non-French episodes, it will work fine) and the Paris Commune. France was on the leading edge of all the social upheavals in Europe during this entire period. You can see the way people in France tried to learn from earlier revolutions and generally wound up making brand new mistakes.
Revolutions on French Revolutions was great. I bought the audiobook of his Lafayette book.
For big picture history I’m finishing the audiobooks of Francis Fujiyama 2 volume Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Decay, and it’s the most impressive analysis of social and political history across the world I’ve seen. He digs hard into, eg, the social structure and history of Ottoman, Chinese, Indian, Hungarian and other societies to try understand commonalities in social organization.
If you’re up for some read along, Matt christman has done a book club twitch stream reading of dawn of everything which has been quite good I can help you find the relevant EPs if you’re interested. He’s moved onto the making of global capitalism now which is also good.
Ezra Klein is a good interviewer and I repect him for reaching out to get opinions from all over the spectrum, but his interviews with right wingers who aren’t in academia so don’t have to play the liberal game inevitably goes in either one of two directions
Either the guy will know the score when when Ezra asks him to state his position he’ll say something much more reasonable. Something like “Democrats aren’t fostering the correct policy choices to strengthen the family. There are lot of variables but I think marriage counseling and helping stay at home mothers would help. Democrats should put that on the table”
And Ezra will say “Well in your book you say Democrats are Satanists whose only desire is to destroy the Christian nuclear family so that they can drink the blood of the orphans left behind.”
and the guy will sheepishly say something about politics and hyperbole.
Or the guy will just start out with “Democratic policies are destroying the family and they just don’t care”
And Ezra will be like “The Democratic Party that passed a child allowance and would love to have free lunches and a permeant child credit is willfully destorying the family? (In typical Era fashion) I can understand that Democrats, like Republicans haven’t done enough but you can’t accuse them of willfully trying to destroy the family”
In evitably the guy will agree with Erza. Of course just getting to the reality that every one who isn’t operating in pure bad faith takes about 3/4ths of the show so it doesn’t get much further than that.
Klein also treated Paul Ryan like a Serious Thinker for a long time even when it was obvious that he is not.
I don’t hate Klein but he is very representative of some of the worst faults in the American “left”, i.e. the basically sane. The right weaponizes the best instincts of normal people all the time, and Klein has shown enough thoughtfulness and insight that he almost certainly understands that. I wonder if he sees it happening to him, but thinks that the best course is to just soldier on anyway (what else is he going to do?). Or possibly he has a legit blind spot and doesn’t see that the right uses people like him to normalize ethnofascism as a debatable point of view.
Normalizing “the Republicans must have some decent points” bullshit is super harmful because it forestalls the adoption of an appropriately hostile political response. eDem beltway types fucking love listening to people like Ezra Klein and these assholes have gotten really good at going on shows like this and making themselves seem somewhat reasonable. Having them on is a big mistake.
he’s explicitly said several times that he knows exactly what they’re doing, he just pretends like they’re all acting in good faith when he has them on his show for unknown reasons
I don’t think he pretends, and he does do a good job of not letting them off the hook as opposed to the more bland shows like Left, Right, and Center or Meet the Press where there’s no pushback at all. It’s just the pushback process to get to where the where the discussion should have started takes so long
Klein deserves every bit of scorn one could throw at him. He’s either a drooling moron or he’s spent his career playing dumb as an appeal to self-congratulatory centrist media sickos and liberals who respect David Brooks.
I’m getting back into podcasts; I don’t know Ezra too well but I’ve heard good episodes of his so I just tried another one, guest was Erika Bachiochi, a dimbulb legal scholar psychopath who calmly advocated for her vision of a hideous Handmaid’s Tale nighmare because, you know, it’s for our own good. I was jogging while listening and she made me so mad that I started angry galloping four or five times and it screwed up the whole run. I kept waiting for the humiliation/incineration phase of the episode but it never happened. I respect Ezra but I guess this show is not that show. Too bad because to me he seems capable of it.
Yeah, Klein does a good job of being prepared for most of the idiotic/badfaith arguments his guests will bring and in the overwhelming majority of times he effectively rebuts the claims. He doesn’t do it in a way that’s snarky or hostile to the guest, though, so it’s probably not going to appeal to a lot of people. And you’re right he often takes a while to build to the rebuttal. He just lets people try to state their claims without cutting them off.
Tried listening to Red Scare. I could only make it about 5 minutes. I get that they want to be the opposites of liberal try hards but there needs to be some effort.
I’m catching up on You’re Wrong About and listened to a fairly recent ep about prisons and learnt about how in the Reagan era there was a “prison sweepstakes” thing where towns would compete to try to have a prison built there, for employment purposes. Do you guys know about this? I did not. It was fucking insane. I felt like I was being pitched on a Verhoeven movie.
I can definitely see the appeal of local prisons for small towns with economies failing because of, you know, Reaganomics. Imagine you are an unemployed former factory worker is Klansburg, USA and you’ve got nothing to do with your time but harass black people. No imagine that you could get paid to do that.
