『Robert Kuttner on Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics — and What Comes Next』のカバーアート

Robert Kuttner on Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics — and What Comes Next

Robert Kuttner on Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics — and What Comes Next

無料で聴く

ポッドキャストの詳細を見る
In a wide-ranging conversation with Micah Sifry, longtime political columnist Kuttner takes stock of what went wrong, why the guardrails may be holding, and what it will actually take to rebuild democracy from what he sees as the wreckage of the neoliberal era. There's a particular kind of intellectual honesty in someone who has spent decades arguing for a position, been vindicated by history, and still asks himself: So why did we lose? That's the animating question of Bob Kuttner's new book, Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America, and it's the question that drives the latest episode of This Old Democracy. Kuttner — co-founder of The American Prospect magazine, professor at Brandeis University, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute, and author of 14 books — brings to this conversation the perspective of someone who has watched American politics from the inside and the outside for more than half a century. Host Micah Sifry gives him room to roam, and Kuttner takes full advantage. The through-line of Kuttner's memoir is captured in the title of one of its chapters: "Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics." As he tells Micah, he has long believed that the Democratic Party's embrace of neoliberal, market-first economics in the 1980s and 1990s was not just wrong on the merits — it was a political catastrophe. "The turn to neoliberalism basically set the stage for Trump because it meant that the Democrats gave up on the white working class, which made interracial coalition much more arduous. And the claims of neoliberalism that this would energize the economy turned out to be completely bogus. The only thing neoliberalism did was it made the rich richer and the middle class [and] the working class more vulnerable." When he and Paul Starr and Robert Reich launched The American Prospect in 1990, they were swimming hard against the tide. The conventional wisdom, personified by the rise of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, was that the Democratic Party was too pro-union, too pro-Black, just too liberal. The Prospect said: no, liberals need to become better New Dealers. Two years later, Bill Clinton was in the White House, quoting them — and then, largely ignoring them Kuttner knew better, in part because of his experience in midwifing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Kuttner was chief investigator for Senator William Proxmire's Banking Committee in the mid-1970s, and the story of how the CRA came to be is, well, thrilling (in a nerdy way). This profoundly useful piece of legislation did nothing more than consider poor people as legitimate actors in our society, deserving of respect when they too sought to obtain a mortgage and purchase a home. Kuttner describes how the CRA emerged: grassroots multiracial neighborhood coalitions, a sympathetic US Senator who did not accept any campaign contributions, investigative staff tasked with developing tough hearings, and a press that covered them seriously. The result was landmark legislation that created immensely powerful tools against redlining if the citizenry used them (which they did). Kuttner calls it his graduate education in how the financial system — and the political system — actually function. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the conversation, for listeners expecting gloom, is Kuttner's relatively buoyant short-term read on where things stand. "I think contrary to what a lot of people felt six months ago, I think the guardrails are holding more than we dared hope. Trump is just really on the skids. Republicans are giving themselves permission to criticize him. Democrats are feeling bolder and more feisty. He's lost the courts — which is just amazing." He notes that the recent defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary — by a candidate who broke from the authoritarian's own party and organized a movement from scratch — is a meaningful data point: even entrenched authoritarians can lose when they lose the people. Unsurprisingly, he thinks it likely that control of Congress and then the presidency is likely to flip back once again to the opposition party. But then he pauses. Full stop. Because that's when he gets worried. Short-term optimism gives way to a much harder question. Kuttner frames it plainly: "I think democracy will survive. The question is whether it will deliver." For Kuttner, the social contract that his generation inherited — affordable college, decent wages for blue-collar workers, employer-provided pensions and health insurance, attainable home ownership — has been systematically dismantled. Restoring something like it will require a political agenda every bit as ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's. If Democrats return to power without that kind of courage and that kind of mandate, he warns, they will only incubate the next wave of authoritarian populism. The anxieties and resentments that produced Trump don't go away just because Trump loses. This is ...
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません