Podcast • November 12, 2020

Election Disconnection

Call it a four-year try-out we’ve just been through of strong-man, one-man politics.  The election put it to a vote, and the country said: enough for now, but not quite No. The USA didn’t so much ...

Call it a four-year try-out we’ve just been through of strong-man, one-man politics.  The election put it to a vote, and the country said: enough for now, but not quite No. The USA didn’t so much split down the middle as declare itself two states, of mind and geography, red and blue, or maybe three: Atlantic, Pacific and Farmland, with the next round in doubt. We feel saved, in some sense, but not cured or redeemed.

So we do what you do: enlist the soundest of our friends and keep talking. With people like Citizen Ralph Nader; Masha Gessen with a Russian twist, Green New Dealer Saikat Chakrabarti; historian Rick Perlstein; letter-writer Heather Cox Richardson, the noisy Scotsman Mark Blyth; Chris Hedges, preaching doom; and the only pundit we truly love, the cranky Caribbean-American patriot Amber.

You thought a presidential election could be an exit ramp out of polluted stuck traffic and already you know we’re in the same old breakdown lane — with ingenious fresh touches of absurdity. President Trump lost the popular vote and the electoral college, prompting his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to assure us this week that we are in a peaceful transition to a second Trump administration. What can you do in the breakdown lane but call out for help or at least for company, or judgment with a jolt? And that’s what we’re doing this hour with the Open Source family of historians, preachers, politicians old and young, foreign and domestic.

Podcast • April 8, 2009

The Obama Effect: a Rebirth of Global Politics

We are hanging out here at an improvised Clubhouse of Candid Social Democratic Statesmen. The drift of the conversation is that the global crisis is a mix of comeuppance and liberation. The crisis is surely ...

We are hanging out here at an improvised Clubhouse of Candid Social Democratic Statesmen.

The drift of the conversation is that the global crisis is a mix of comeuppance and liberation. The crisis is surely an end of something, reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall; it marks perhaps equally a rebirth of citizenship as a relief from consumership. The game here — with the retired chieftains of Chile and Italy, both professors-at-large at Brown University — is to see ourselves in the world “as others see us.”

It is very bad. What I think is that the origin of the crisis is Americans in the United States living beyond their standard of living; and the fact that there is a tremendous deficit now that has to be financed. Someone else has been financing the deficit and that has mainly been China… Alan Greenspan has to recognize that he was wrong when he thought the financial system could be self-regulated… Because of the crisis it is necessary to think in a different way. Very similar to what happened here in this country 80 years ago with Roosevelt, there are going to be new regulations to solve the crisis, and this is what we are in the middle of.

Ricardo Lagos in a Watson Institute conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, April 7, 2009.

Romano Prodi put the repair — the reconception, really — of the US – Russia relationship on the top of his priority list. The point, he suggested, is to bury not just the Cold War but the polarizing, triumphalist mindset that grew up around it and lived beyond it. When I asked if he could imagine Barack Hussein Obama changing the world’s view of Islam, Prodi said: he’s already half-way there:

You know, the relationship to the Islamic world vis-à-vis the American president today has nothing to do with [the relationship that existed] a few months ago… He was, in my opinion, very brave vis-à-vis the American public opinion to open the dialogue with Iran… So, I think that if the dialogue goes on, the relations with the Islamic countries will change completely. Certainly not with the terrorists who are out of any control—you will need time, generations. But I think that with the Islamic world as a general entity he has already changed the situation. Already he has changed expectations. You listen. This is already a great change. I am confident that some results may come. For the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you need to create an atmosphere before, but even for that conflict, if you create the atmosphere, you have chances to solve the problem.

Romano Prodi in a Watson Institute conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, April 7, 2009.

Ricardo Lagos of Chile and Romano Prodi of Italy are the statesmen on hand: progressives, hatched as oppositionists, both famous for candor and then some. Ex-president Lagos was a spearpoint of the “No” movement in Chile, the man who pointed his finger at Augusto Pinochet in 1989 and said: you will not give us “another eight years of tortures, murders and human-rights violations” — and lived to tell about it. Romano Prodi, leading the not-Berlusconi alliance in Italy, won the prime minister’s office in 1996 and again in 2006.

In a crazy-quilt of talk that touched on the Armenian question in Turkey; cocaine-and-gun tunnels on the US-Mexico border; the expansion of the G-8 to the G-20 in what may be in truth a G-2 boardroom of the US and China; the US opening to Iran; and the chance of burying the Cold War mindset along with the Cold War — the thread through it all was the “Obama Effect” on global reality. And the consensus between the two professors-at-large before a full house at Brown was that the arrival of Barack Obama on the world stage is very like a miracle, a late vindication of resiliency and openness in American society, a new start for politics, a world-historical opportunity.

Podcast • January 8, 2008

Anthony Barnett on What’s Changed

Credit Anthony Barnett with making the link between the Barack Obama campaign and Will Smith’s box-office smash, “I Am Legend.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Barnett here (28 minutes, 13 MB MP3) ...

Credit Anthony Barnett with making the link between the Barack Obama campaign and Will Smith’s box-office smash, “I Am Legend.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Barnett here (28 minutes, 13 MB MP3)

anthony barnettopenDemocracy’s Anthony Barnett

In the movie it’s the lean and gorgeous family-minded, brown-eyed man (the scientist Robert Neville, played by Smith) who’s “the last human” in New York and maybe on earth. He’s immune from the virus that has turned the rest of us into zombies, and he’s in a mad dash to share whatever it is that’s protecting him with a colony of survivors. “I can help you,” he shouts in the last self-sacrificing moments of the film. “Let me save you.”

On our polluted political playing field it’s the Hollywood-handsome Senator from Illinois who stands alone — the slim, still mysterious stranger who’s come to rescue us, who said in his Iowa victory speech “in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.” See Gary Kamiya‘s fine piece today in Salon.

In the film we’re told that the killer virus was a human accident, the work of a dotty, donnish English lady who thought she’d compounded a universal cure for cancer. Anthony Barnett’s distillation of the filmic-political parable is: “In short, the world is saved from Mrs Thatcher by Barack Obama.”

There are church-state resonances here: “God didn’t do this, we did,” says Dr. Neville, in the weedy ruins of Manhattan. And there’s a gender riddle: how is that in both versions the plausible savior is a youngish African-American man, while his fumbling foil is a very smart woman contriving to do good?

Suffice it to say we have one of those delicious convergences or “visual rhymes” to remind us that no event, and surely no trend, stands alone in this mediated world. And further that there are depths and resonances of the Obama boom that haven’t been measured yet. Anthony Barnett’s reading after Iowa and a family night at the movies was: “He is not just a potential president, he alone has the combination of skills to save mankind. Every single seat sold for “I Am Legend” makes Obama more electable and puts Hilary on the wrong side of the great plague.”

I’ll engage Anthony Barnett in conversation tomorrow (Wednesday) not as a film critic and not as an expert particularly on American politics, but as an off-shore wiseman — “a torchlight procession of one,” as a friend describes him — on most of the grander question we care about. I hope we’ll get this chance often again. Anthony Barnett is a model of thinking and doing: writer, editor, reformer and entrepreneurial radical from the Labour Club at Cambridge in the Sixties and the New Left Review in the Eighties, a hold-out from Tony Blair’s New Labor movement in the Nineties, and then founding editor (months before 9.11) of the compendious site openDemocracy. Here’s the bouquet that friends tossed at him on his 65th birthday last November. When I met Anthony Barnett in Greece last July, I noted here that he speaks with that experienced, curious, post-imperial English voice that we waited for and never heard on the way to Iraq.

I want to ask him for the Big Picture — at least a big picture frame — for 2008.