A Conversation with David Goodner
Sarah Jaffe with David Goodner:
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. In this series we’ll be talking with organizers, troublemakers and thinkers who are working both to challenge the Trump administration and the circumstances that created it.
It’s Already Happened Here
At the center of all this executive-assured destruction, there is Trump, both a hater and a loser. Desperate for applause and enthusiastic about abusing executive power, he is driven by narcissism and need. His paranoia and megalomania is typical in foreign authoritarian leaders, yet Trump is a native archetype: he is the conman, the showman, the “Confidence Man” of Herman Melville, the President Stillson of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone.
Turn On, Tune In, Disrupt Something
There’s a direct line to be drawn between the counterfeit “at one with everything” consciousness revelations of the Golden Gate Park Human Be-In and the phony “disruption” revolutions of Palo Alto today. You can “Turn on, Tune in, Drop” without missing this year’s hottest IPOs.
Freedom for Me, Not Thee
Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump.
Donald Trump’s first hundred days in office may be a disaster for the country, but for that pocket of conservative Christians worried about the ease of religiously motivated discrimination, it’s proving to be a breath of fresh air.
The Philistine Factory
“The life of observation, meditation, cogitation, and speculation pursued as an end in itself is the proper life of man. From reason moreover proceeds the proper control of the lower elements of human nature—the appetites and the active, motor, impulses.”
—John Dewey, Democracy and Education
Our epistemologically challenged, boastfully unlettered new president has, not surprisingly, thrown didactic statesmanship out the window.
Marriage Visas and Travel Bans
It was two years ago, on a Monday in February 2015, that the Supreme Court held arguments in the case of Kerry v. Din. The case had come up from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the same Court now reviewing the appeal on the nationwide stay on President Trump’s Executive Order banning nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
False Idols of the Enlightenment
We have to recognize that the modern world was predicated on the notion of mimicry and imitation. Which makes people more and more alike than different. And it makes them more vulnerable to experiencing the same ressentiment when their particular identities are under threat, when their stability is threatened, when their jobs are taken away.
A Conversation with Judith LeBlanc
We are pleased to share a new, syndicated series of interviews by Sarah Jaffe. INTERVIEWS FOR RESISTANCE will introduce you to some of the key figures in the growing movement(s) against our reactionary new federal government. We hope you will find comfort in knowing the crucial work of fighting back has already begun in many (sometimes unexpected) places, and find tools in these conversations for your own part in the struggle.
The Origins of Anger
Escape from the stultifying dualisms of East and West, religion and reason, requires us to train fresh eyes on the most fateful event of human history: the rise of an industrial and materialist civilization, which, emerging in Britain and France, spread itself over the old world of Asia and Africa and the new world of America and Oceania, creating the original conditions of our current state of negative solidarity.
Daily Bafflements
Mike Pence plans to cast a tie-breaking vote to aid the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as education secretary. As Jennifer Berkshire wrote after her journey to the heart of DeVos-land, the “DeVosian vision of school reform is the anti–New Deal offensive launched by the free-market reactionaries of the American Liberty League, retooled for schools and delivered with evangelical zeal.”
Calls for a general strike have been many; would one be possible yet?
You’re Fired
Only in a society with almost no safety nets, in which few people have the job security afforded by union protections or tenure, could random bullies on the internet terrify us by tagging our bosses. People who do this are not serving any kind of progressive movement; indeed they are working hard at strengthening neoliberalism in all its ruthlessness and anxiety.
Holy Warriors Against the Welfare State
I’d traveled to this western Michigan hub of sanctified commerce to learn more about Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick to be the top education official in the land. DeVos, the name of the family that founded the multi-level marketing behemoth known as Amway, is almost universally recognized in the Mitten state, where Betsy and Dick DeVos, heirs to a $5.1 billion fortune, have increasingly come to dominate state politics.
