Podcasts you like

[crazy canuck]

Couldn't agree more 

[Sheilbh]

I think some people here, like me, really liked the Talking Politics podcast - so delighted that David Runciman is back hosting a new podcast for the LRB:
https://shows.acast.com/londonreviewpodcasts/episodes/introducing-past-present-future

(And he will have Helen Thompson on soon )

[Sheilbh]

And he just did an episode with Helen Thompson on how Dallas explains everything which was very, very good

[FunkMonk]

I think some people here, like me, really liked the Talking Politics podcast - so delighted that David Runciman is back hosting a new podcast for the LRB:
https://shows.acast.com/londonreviewpodcasts/episodes/introducing-past-present-future

(And he will have Helen Thompson on soon )

[mongers]

This was quite interesting:

Marvel vs DC: Contest of the Champions

download/listen here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001mbmw

Marvel and DC, the two titans of America superhero comics, have been locked in cosmic battle for over six decades - raging across publishing, radio, TV, movies, gaming and animation.

It's one of the greatest rivalries in the history of pop culture, ferociously debated by generations of readers, fans and industry creatives alike.

While both companies are now worth billions, this wasn't always the case.

This feature goes back to their early comic book roots, where DC comics and young upstart Marvel both had offices in 1960s Manhattan - and yet differed widely in their approach to the genre, posing very distinct ideas of what our superheroes should be – and as a result, what it means to be human. Do we want to look up to the skies or do we really want to see a reflection of ourselves? Are our heroes other, outsiders like gods – or are they basically people like us, who gain strange powers but keep their flaws? Readers had a choice.

The creative rivalry between Marvel and DC comics has always been more than a question of sales or market share. It is a fascinating culture clash of ideals, morals and even politics. It has constituted one of the greatest post-war, pop-culture wars of our times.

For years DC Comics dominated the super-hero genre with its pulp tales of super-powered crime fighting, bright costumes and capes, shiny headquarters, secret identities and primary colours. Their heroes - Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, the Flash, the Green Lantern – have a kind of mythic grandeur. But dig deeper, and there's another story. DC's creative department had its own secret identity, driven mostly by writers and artists who felt themselves to be at the margins of mainstream American society.

Marvel Comics in its modern form arrived later, in the early 1960s, a totally different cultural era. In every way the precocious new kid on the block, Marvel offered a widely different set of ideas about what superheroes ought to be - they would be like us. The tone was less authoritarian than the opposition, politically liberal under the stewardship of Stan Lee, tapping into the emerging counter-culture and creating a web of integrated characters (the 'Marvel Universe'). Marvel heroes - Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four - lived in our world and suffered as we do. They had financial difficulties, dead-end jobs, romantic heartache, teenage angst, even drug addiction, suffered blindness, breakdown and divorce. They encountered street protest and the counter-culture, gang violence and organised racism. .

Each company watched the other. Each company tried to outdo the other, either on their own terms or – sometimes brilliantly - their opponents'. This is the comic-book bedrock upon which the blockbuster superhero movie franchises are currently fighting tooth and nail.

Talking to industry legends from both companies, artists, writers, experts and diehard fans, this Archive on 4, presented by documentary maker and lifelong Marvel and DC comics fan Simon Hollis, tells the story of the Greatest Battle on Earth.

[crazy canuck]

This one is tailor made for Languish.

Its got the ACW (do you need more) and an examination of the history of the US from Lincoln to present in the context of the Republican party.

Interested to see what our resident American history buffs think of the observations made by the American scholar who is being interviewed.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/from-lincoln-to-trump-what-happened-to-the-republican-party/id1682047968?i=1000621730069

[mongers]

Just in time for Halloween there's a new bbc Lovecraft series/podcast:

The Lovecraft Investigations
The Haunter of the Dark:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gkgh5m




They've also done:
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

which are available to download here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06spb8w/episodes/downloads

[garbon]

Just in time for Halloween there's a new bbc Lovecraft series/podcast:

The Lovecraft Investigations
The Haunter of the Dark:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gkgh5m




They've also done:
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

which are available to download here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06spb8w/episodes/downloads

I had just stumbled on this the other day. Interesting at least with Charles Dexter Ward, they have modernized it.

[Sheilbh]

This sounds very up my street - possibly also of interest to Jos:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vcdr

[Josquius]

This sounds very up my street - possibly also of interest to Jos:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vcdr

That does seem interesting. There's been a book on the topic on my "some day" list for a while

[grumbler]

This one is tailor made for Languish.

Its got the ACW (do you need more) and an examination of the history of the US from Lincoln to present in the context of the Republican party.

Interested to see what our resident American history buffs think of the observations made by the American scholar who is being interviewed.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/from-lincoln-to-trump-what-happened-to-the-republican-party/id1682047968?i=1000621730069

I didn't see this the last time this thread bubbled to the surface, but listened to it now.  You are correct that it seems tailor-made for Languish.  I'd never viewed this history through the lens of the forces shaping political parties (in this case, the republican Party) in quite this narrow sense, but the podcast does pose an interesting question:  how did the Republican Party, founded in large part on anti-Catholic politics (the "Know Nothings" being a major component of the first Republican coalition) end up being the party that championed Catholic values on the Supreme Court?

Gary Gerstle proposes that the reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants that emerged in the 1960s through the 1970s challenged some major assumptions of both parties. Both had eschewed religion in politics before that, as religion divided the parties and so was kept low-key. Once religion was no longer so divisive, though, the Republicans began to promote explicitly religious values.  The Democrats could not do the same, as they still had a substantial Jewish base that wouldn't take kindly to such a program.  The Democrats couldn't follow the Republicans into that arena, but also couldn't effectively counter the Republican use of it.  The Republican shift from an ideological movement to a moral movement led them to where they are.

What Gerstle mentions in passing but does not explain is the death of the Republican "establishment."  I've never quite understood how the party of GHW Bush became the party of Donald Trump and why the Republican establishment folded when confronted with all the MAGA nonsense.  Thoughts?

[Sheilbh]

What Gerstle mentions in passing but does not explain is the death of the Republican "establishment."  I've never quite understood how the party of GHW Bush became the party of Donald Trump and why the Republican establishment folded when confronted with all the MAGA nonsense.  Thoughts?

I also enoyed it - and generally like that podcast. Helen Thompson's also moved to a new podcast (These Times) and between them they just about fill the hole from the end of Talking Politics, but they're really best working together

On this question though - three thoughts and I've no idea which if any are right (not least as they're a little contradictory).

Could the same not be said of GHW Bush in 1980? Actually the party is taken over by these Goldwater inspired crazies who want to dismantle the New Deal state, are very aggressive in foreign policy and openly appealing to evangelicals in a way that's a little uncomfortable. Looking at the American right from the New Deal you have Taft, the politics of the 50s (and reading the Hoover biography has shifted my view of Ike), Goldwater, Nixon's rat fuckers, the Reagan Revolution, Contract with America, W, the Tea Party, Trump. Is the real question not why the Republican establishment folded, but why does it have such a hold on our imagination that we think it exists at all? Its heroes are the incidental Presidents and all it really is is a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"?

Another thought is tied to something I've said before about how key Mitch is in Trump's first term - but in substantive terms weren't the major political accomplishments of Trump's first term tax cuts and judges? Which is exactly the same as what an establishment Republican would have tried to achieve? He couldn't pull troops out of Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria, he didn't blow up NATO etc - but he did deliver what the establishment Republicans have been pushing as their main agenda for 40+ years. I think a second Trump term is a very significant risk - but is it crazy of them to think they can do the same again?

[Barrister]

On this question though - three thoughts and I've no idea which if any are right (not least as they're a little contradictory).

Could the same not be said of GHW Bush in 1980? Actually the party is taken over by these Goldwater inspired crazies who want to dismantle the New Deal state, are very aggressive in foreign policy and openly appealing to evangelicals in a way that's a little uncomfortable. Looking at the American right from the New Deal you have Taft, the politics of the 50s (and reading the Hoover biography has shifted my view of Ike), Goldwater, Nixon's rat fuckers, the Reagan Revolution, Contract with America, W, the Tea Party, Trump. Is the real question not why the Republican establishment folded, but why does it have such a hold on our imagination that we think it exists at all? Its heroes are the incidental Presidents and all it really is is a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"?

Another thought is tied to something I've said before about how key Mitch is in Trump's first term - but in substantive terms weren't the major political accomplishments of Trump's first term tax cuts and judges? Which is exactly the same as what an establishment Republican would have tried to achieve? He couldn't pull troops out of Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria, he didn't blow up NATO etc - but he did deliver what the establishment Republicans have been pushing as their main agenda for 40+ years. I think a second Trump term is a very significant risk - but is it crazy of them to think they can do the same again?

So there's no question that the GOP has evolved over time.

Let's talk about the "Reagan Revolution".  It really was revolutionary.  The pre-Reagan GOP establishment was very much the country club Rockefeller GOP.  Under Reagan however you had the creation of conservative "fusionism" - it combined what would otherwise be somewhat disparate groups of economic conservatives (the old country-club types), social conservatives (including more and more evangelicals), and anti-communist foreign policy hard-liners.  Reagan and the GOP managed to convince these otherwise separate groups that they were better off together, rather than separate.

That conservative fusionist orthodoxy held for decades.  It was challenged at times - Pat Buchanan ran as an isolationist, GWB wasn't much for fiscal prudence / Tea Party held fiscal prudence above all - but generally the fusionist orthodoxy held.

Until Trump.  You can kind of see how at the beginning the "establishment" felt like this too could get absorbed into the GOP mainstream, but really Trump didn't believe in any of the three legs of the GOP triad - he was a big believer in debt and trade barriers, the thrice-divorced "grab 'em by the pussy" guy was no social conservative, and he loved China and Russia.

Turned out though that if the GOP base ever believed in those things in the past, they no longer did by 2016.

[The Minsky Moment]

What Gerstle mentions in passing but does not explain is the death of the Republican "establishment."  I've never quite understood how the party of GHW Bush became the party of Donald Trump and why the Republican establishment folded when confronted with all the MAGA nonsense.  Thoughts?

I think you pinpointed it in the prior paragraphs; the composition of the party base changed.

The original GOP drew strength from "mechanics," professionals, industrialists, free hold farmers, mainline Protestants, and African Americans.  The Democrats from southerners, northern white immigrants, evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, urban laborers.  The first transition was that African Americans moved over to the Democrats, which prompted conservative white southerners to move to the GOP; that process completed by the early 90s, when the last of the Gramms and Shelbys affiliated GOP.  The second transition was the postwar movement of evangelicals to the GOP. And the third was the movement of some working class white and Catholics moving the GOP in response to Nixon/Reagan culture war appeals.  At the same time, educated professionals and mainline Protestants who supported the Eisenhower/Rockefeller wings of the GOP, drifted to the Democrats.  That latter group, along with Wall Streeters and haute bourgeois industrialists, was the core support for the GOP establishment.

I.e. the problem that the GOP establishment has is that they've lost much of their voting base, which has been replaced by a different demographic hostile to them.  Within the GOP, the establishment still has the support of the industrialists and Wall Street, but while that group controls lots of resources and power, they are an insignificant voting bloc. Hence why we see that any credible candidate with establishment credentials and support can quickly raise tons of $$ but struggles to gather votes in primary elections.

[Sheilbh]

The current LRB Past Present Future series on freedom is outstanding.