RESTORING GLOBAL WHITE PRIVILEGE
THE KEEN ON FIVE: 1) Davos Man, 2) Communist Albania, 3) Trump, 4) Ubiquitous Sickness & 5) Global White Privilege
How are Davos Man, Communist Albania, Trump, ubiquitous sickness & global white privilege connected? All were discussed last week on KEEN ON, my daily Lithub radio show featuring some of the world’s most interesting writers & thinkers. If you’re not already a subscriber, then please subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. You can even watch my daily interviews live on Twitter, LinkedIn or on Lithub’s Facebook page.
KEEN ON 1: My conversation with Peter S. Goodman, the New York Times global economics correspondent, was particularly revealing. Goodman’s new book, DAVOS MAN: How The Billionaires Devoured the World, attempts to blame everything on Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Jamie Dimon et al. I have to admit that I find Goodman’s standard critique unconvincing, particularly his argument that the simple fix is to reconstruct a post WW2 society of high taxes and extensive public services. Goodman’s nostalgia for a world that cannot and will not be recreated in 2022 is emblematic of the echo-chamber wishful-thinking of most America progressives. We need innovative thinking. Not just calls to dig up FDR, tax the rich & transform America into Denmark.
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KEEN ON 2: FREE: A Child and a Country at the End of History, Lea Ypi’s autobiography of her Albanian childhood, is a brilliantly evocative description of what it was like growing up in Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Ypi is a professor of political philosophy at the LSE and, as she told me last week, FREE is also an attempt to made out her vision of a socialism for the 21st century. Unlike Peter Goodman, Lea Ypi isn’t nostalgic for a simplistic top down fix to the inequities of capitalism.
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KEEN ON 3: Late last year, I interviewed the Princeton historian, Julian Zelizer, about THE PRESIDENCY OF DONALD J. TRUMP, his anthology on the historical significance of Trump regime. One of the essays in Zelizer collection is by the tech historian, Margaret O’Mara, on Donald Trump’s relationship with Silicon Valley. Talking with O’Mara last week further convinced me of the orthodoxy of the Trump presidency. Yeah yeah, he might be the Social Media President, but there’s not much else else about him that wasn’t predicted by Neil Postman or Alvin Toeffler. No, Biden - the American Brezhnev - is a much more interesting historical figure than Trump. And i’ll be curious what Zelizer’s THE PRESIDENCY OF JOSEPH ROBINETTE BIDEN JR will say in 2024.
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KEEN ON 4: Since COVID, we’ve done a number of shows about the crisis of the American medical-industrial complex. In our cult of the amateur epoch, many of us believe that we know more than professional doctors or scientists. We live in an age of of just not self-medication but also of a culture of imaginary sickness. The political paranoia around COVID is a reflection of this. This was particularly underlined when I spoke last week to Mikhaila Peterson, a popular YouTuber and social media personality. Peterson, unfairly dismissed, I think, as simply the daughter of Jordan Peterson, is a millennial specimen of this surreal convergence of paranoia, (anti)politics & the body in our (anti) social media age.
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KEEN ON 5: In my conversation with Peter Goodman, I described Xi Jingping, the Chinese leader and a keynote speaker at Davos this year, as “the butcher of Beijing”. I was referring to China’s slave-labor capitalism described to me last month by the Ugyhur-Chinese journalist Amelia Pang. And I was curious when I spoke later last week to the Malaysian businessman Chandran Nair and the author of DISMANTLING GLOBAL WHITE PRIVILEGE, whether my criticism of Xi Jingping might, in fact, be a manifestation of “global white privilege”. Yes, Nair - whose attack on western representative democracy sometimes sounds like it could have been cooked up in Beijing - confirmed. But I confess that I wear Nair’s critique with honor. I might even entitle my next book: RESTORING GLOBAL WHITE PRIVILEGE.
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