Brexit | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

June 15, 2017

Something’s Happening Here

In the first summer of Trump, 2017, there’s something happening and it feels bigger than the Comey hearings, even Russia-gate. Who knew that a British election with an inconclusive photo finish could re-channel the anger that drives the global mood? The unheralded Jeremy Corbyn at the left end of the Labor Party is the mouse that roared, and turned the ‘age of anger’ in a different direction.

Corbyn didn’t play the bellowing populist, but he spoke the part. How about a government “for the many, not the few,” Corbyn asked. And millions of new UK voters said, “Yes!” In the face of terrorist outrages in Manchester, then London, just before the voting, Corbyn said: “we must be brave enough to admit the war on terror is simply not working.” It is now Corbyn’s moment to be the standard of unconventional talk that resonates far and wide.

Our show begins with Naomi Klein. Among book-writers on the left, from Michelle Alexander to Bill McKibben to Michael Moore, the line on Naomi Klein is that nobody faster is better, and nobody better is faster. No Is Not Enough is her quick handbook for the Trump era. Her line since No Logo has been that corporate and consumer culture are both hazardous for people and the planet. And Donald Trump? He’s to be seen not as cause of the problem but as evidence of it:

“I am not interested in looking at Trump as just like an aberrant personality and psychoanalyzing of him. He is a symptom. I see him as dystopian fiction come to life, you know, and you read dystopian fiction–whether it’s 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale or whether you go see a film like The Hunger Games or Elysium–and inevitably we see a story of a bubble of ultra-rich big winners and hordes of locked out losers. What this entire genre is doing and has always done is take the trends and the culture and follows them to their logical conclusion. They hold up a mirror and say: Do you like what you see? I mean, this is not supposed to be a system that’s telling us to go to this dangerous future. It’s telling us to get off that road. That’s the idea. It’s supposed to be holding up a mirror and telling society to swerve. So, you know, I want to look at the roads that lead to Trump much more than I want to look at Trump himself.”

David Graeber, a Yale-trained cultural anthropologist, emerged as something of a cult writer behind the Occupy movement of six years ago — meaning, in his case, a tracker of the invisible stitching around matters of debt and wealth from ancient times.

He has prophesied at different times a standard 15-hour work week and the dissolution of the US empire. In the matter of Tory rule in England, David Graeber has been writing since before the Brexit vote about an “efflorescence of resistance” breaking through — he says — ‘a culture of despair.’

Finally, the Indian-born writer Pankaj Mishra, now London based and widely published in the most respected British and American press, is acutely aware that he embodies a contradiction. His argument in his contentious new book, Age of Anger, is that the European Enlightenment from the 18th Century, modernity itself and globalization have been critical to his success and, at the same time, responsible for the shilling of so many false promises — prosperity, equality, and security — to the great masses of have-nots. (For more Mishra, listen to our 2012 interview with Pankaj on foreign policy)

November 22, 2016

Swingin’ with Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is the writer who likes to say she learns more from dancers – Fred Astaire to Michael Jackson, Baryshnikov, Beyoncé – than from writers and a young lifetime of reading. Author of the world-sensational White Teeth at the age of 24, she is tap-tapping again in Swing Time, as in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie from 1936, which syncopates the novel’s soundtrack.

Zadie Smith is more than ever the free, unshaken voice of fluid, hybrid identities in a place she has called “Dream City.” It’s a real-enough address, could be London, New York, any big town where lots of people grow up with parents of two complexions, two accents, from two countries, where the appropriate pronoun, starting with oneself, is “we” – not the singular “I.” Dream City is where the Kansan-Kenyan mind of Barack Obama was formed. Zadie herself was born in Dream City, to a Jamaican mother married to a working-class English man on the North side of London. She meets the high anxiety of cosmopolitans today with a fine taste for changes in the music, changes in the dance, but with humanity and laughter, closer to joy than panic.

Top Hat (1935)

Before her book event at the First Church in Cambridge, we’re “trading fours” and a few eights on any handy theme, starting on links and breaks between Elena Ferrante’s four-book saga of Fifties-girls in the darkest corners of Naples, and Zadie’s own story of brown and bi-racial daughters of Jamaican and English parents in London of the Nineties. Ferrante’s zone is the fire of intimacy, Zadie seems to say; her own is the mystery of power: how children are led to navigate the critical currents of class more than color. She reminds you she’s always rebelled against classifications of identity: your self is not something you start with, it’s something you come to know patiently in search and struggle.

We keep touching back on her remarkable hindsight on England’s Brexit vote, prelude to our Trump astonishment: the people’s choice had both rampant stupidity and touches of genius about it, but it was driven over 30 years by a merciless economic regime, ‘neo-liberalism,’ which degraded our language as much as our communities, and made people feel ‘you can do nothing to change it,’ until they did. She dreads the vacant, childish Trump, as she worries about the Brexit mood everywhere, but she sees lots of silver-linings especially in the organizational talents of her New York University. Spoiled liberals in London are still sobbing in their pillows; Americans seem to be roused for an overdue battle.

Illustrations by Susan Coyne

First and last, Zadie Smith riffs about black and white swing music — the cultural legacy of two great migrations, African-Americans from the Jim Crow South and Jews from Eastern Europe, that fused in a treasury of genius that still inspires. Nobody tells the story with more zest than Zadie Smith.

Zadie’s List of Happy-Making Musical Numbers: Top Hat, Begin the Beguine, Stormy Weather

This Week's Show •

Yanis Varoufakis’s Greek Tragedy

Before Brexit, of course, there was Grexit: the possibility, one year ago, that Greeks defying the will of E.U. bureaucrats bankers would fall right out of Europe. Yanis Varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece’s radical left government ...

Before Brexit, of course, there was Grexit: the possibility, one year ago, that Greeks defying the will of E.U. bureaucrats bankers would fall right out of Europe.

Yanis Varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece’s radical left government during that heady summer of 2015. He got famous first for his flair: open shirt, shaved head, and motorcycle jacket — but then really famous for playing chicken with his nations’ creditors in Brussels and Berlin.

His line was that Greece could not and should not be forced to take on huge new loans to pay off bad old ones as a price of staying in the European Union. “Fiscal waterboarding” he called it: periods of intense austerity that crippled the Greek economy in exchange for bailout money that went to big banks.

See Varoufakis and Tsipras in Paul Mason‘s film about the Greek crisis:

Greek voters loved him, but his prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, rolled over in the crunch. Varoufakis lost his battle and gave up his ministry, but the third phase of his fame had just begun — as the exceptional political figure who could articulate in principled defeat the brutal logic of finance for finance’s sake. He is more visible than ever in politics this summer as the leading figure of the pan-European democracy movement known as “DiEM 25.”

He’s at it in the US in book form, his title drawn from the inhuman code of Athens’ ancient warfare with Sparta: “the strong do what they want,” meaning today the banks and the rich; “and the weak suffer what they must.” On the cover of his book, he adds a question mark. In the book, Varoufakis argues that the fight for the glorious European project — England’s Brexit vote against union is part of it, he says — between the spirit of democracy and the power of wealth.

June 30, 2016

The Great British Break-Off

This week, we’re catching up on the split heard round the world. People laughed at Tory historian Niall Ferguson for warning that Brexit—Britain’s proposed exit from Europe—would be like his own divorce: a nasty and desolating affair that ...

This week, we’re catching up on the split heard round the world.

People laughed at Tory historian Niall Ferguson for warning that Brexit—Britain’s proposed exit from Europe—would be like his own divorce: a nasty and desolating affair that left him alone with his problems.

And yet! A week since it’s happened—52% out, 48% in—what we’re watched does resemble the bitterest of family fractures. The adults are checked out: prime minister David Cameron abruptly resigned, while Jeremy Corbyn, his Labour adversary, is himself embattled. And few of the victorious “Leave” leaders seem prepared to step in and help the process along.

Sparkling London, with its skyscrapers and trillions of dollars of daily business, was a spot of deep “Remain” yellow on the popular map. But it has been indicted by the towns and villages, even Labour strongholds, that no longer recognize themselves in the capital. Scotland and even Northern Ireland—decidedly for remaining—are threatening to go their own way. Everywhere, racial and xenophobic rhetoric—directed at Poles and Pakistanis—is, painfully, on the rise.

Our guests—many of them intelligent, cosmopolitan Brits—had nothing but distaste for the “Leave” campaign led by Nigel Farage, with his Hitlerian posters, and Boris Johnson (he of the misleading megabus). But they’d disagree on the nature of the case for remaining in a European Union: how to sell it, or whether the U.K. should do it at all.

We thought the best thing to do would be to convene our favorite Brits and Anglophiles to discuss just where this came from—and what’s next.