The New Red Scare

This week: we talk to Anand Giridharadas, Ralph Nader, and Alex Gourevitch about the conversation surrounding Bernie Sanders. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime at our website.

Until the South Carolina primary yesterday, Bernie Sanders had been on a winning streak, and Joe Biden had yet to win a single state. With a socialist triumphing over the candidate of familiarity, you would imagine some degree of surprise, a sense of change, perhaps an unsettled feeling among those who had felt settled for some time.

But if you turned on MSNBC, you would have heard something more like shock, dismay, or fear. Here’s one of the most hyperbolic and terrified responses:

Yet Sanders is, by most measures, a moderate. This week on our show, former presidential candidate Ralph Nader enumerated all the ways in which Sanders’s proposals are broadly popular. And in Europe, the idea that expanding healthcare access would ignite fear like Chris Mathews’s is generally understood to be laughable if it weren’t so frightening.

Also on our show, Anand Giridharadas reflected on Sanders’s campaign in 2016 and now. His successes against the Clinton campaign in 2016 told Giridharadas:

Something’s going on here. And I think the thing that was going on was naming an intuition that a lot of people had but hadn’t articulated, that this country was becoming more than unequal, more than unfair. Anytime there was a fork in the road between what was good for money and what was good for people, it was becoming more and more a country run for what was good for money.

And I think that is a profounder insight than the standard Democratic moaning about inequality or talking about people paying their fair share. This was an insight about power and frankly. To put it very simply, I think the view Sanders articulates in 2016, which now I would say he and Elizabeth Warren both articulate and 2020 is some people. Need to be made less wealthy and less powerful than they are now in order for justice to be done. And true prosperity, broad based prosperity to flourish in America. And to be very clear, I do not think Hillary Clinton believe that. I don’t think Buttigieg or Joe Biden believes that this is a fundamental flaw.

Alex Gourevitch sees an opportunity for socialism in this context, and describes the fear expressed on MSNBC as a mere media event separate from, and not much of a factor in, voting:

Most people don’t have the influence to set the terms of public discourse. They have one form of political power, and that’s voting. And one reason I think this red-baiting might not work that much is: it just seems to be more noise from the media class, and people just want their universal healthcare and their free college tuition, and they seem to be happy to exercise the one kind of political power they have, which is their vote.

Anne Washburn

Not that you can see a production of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns anytime soon—although maybe you can—but while thoughts skew apocalyptically, this is a good time to think about her play about The Simpsons. Really it’s a play about a single Simpsons episode that generates narratives told across generations, after apocalyptic collapse. Here’s the NY Times on the play, from quite a while ago:

Portraits of our fragile little planet laid siege — whether by aliens, zombies or human warmongers — are a dime a dozen in multiplexes and on television screens, occasions for big explosions that light up the sky. “Mr. Burns,” in contrast, is rather quiet. And since the world it portrays has been robbed of electricity, much of it takes place amid shadows or in candlelight.

But, ah, the colors that can be conjured out of the dark by people struggling to forget how scared they are. On one level, “Mr. Burns” is a latter-day relative of “The Decameron,” Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterwork about young Italians swapping narratives in a deserted villa, where they have fled the Black Death.

If we deal with crisis and desolation through storytelling, and our stories are mostly now from TV shows: how might those stories carry us through bad times that most sense are either already here or on the way?

Read: John Kaag on William James

Philosophy and self-help have long overlapped, from at least the Stoics on, maybe because all the things we need help with also connect to the most perplexing metaphysical conundrums.

John Kaag has a new book about one of the minds who best melded philosophy with self-help (by way of psychology): William James, an Open Source hero, and, along with several Simpsons writers, one of the best things to come out of Harvard.

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is a briskly told story of someone struggling through depression toward the most durable insights into truth, belief, and being alive. It’s inspiring. So here’s this newsletter’s list so far of things to get you through bad times: 1) Anne Washburn’s idea of The Simpsons and 2) William James.

Listen: Lee Morgan

Lee Morgan’s music might help, too. It seems like the place to start listening to Morgan is his album Sidewinder and its title song. Here’s a conversation between Murray Horwitz and A.B. Spellman about it:

SPELLMAN: It was actually a hit on the pop charts back in 1964, if you can believe that. . .

HORWITZ: Well, A.B., it’s great that “The Sidewinder” was a hit, and it’s not really all that surprising to me. It’s got this irresistible rhythm, and that’s true for not only for the title tune, but for everything on this album.

[MUSIC]

SPELLMAN: Ooh, that’s a great rhythm section with Bob Cranshaw, the bassist; Billy Higgins, the drummer; and Barry Harris at the piano.

HORWITZ: You bet. And it’s really a great ensemble triumph with the tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson in there too. It’s hard-driving and never boring. It never gets into that tired, kind of… you know A.B…. sometimes even well played jazz can fall into kind of a rut . . . But these musicians are always challenging one another, always developing new ideas. That makes it sound as fresh today as it did 40 years ago.

Remember: Lyle Mays

Our engineer, George Hicks, helps us remember the late Lyle Mays, keyboardist and composer, “the right and left hands” of Pat Metheny across 30 years. He left music to write code, and he made a computer program to play live with his band’s improv.

This week’s ephemeral library

Joe Biden in South Carolina. Andrew Bacevich on war addiction. Faulkner in Hollywood. If you’re thinking of taking a cruise anytime soon, read this first: David Foster Wallace’s Shipping Out: On the Nearly Lethal Comforts of a Luxury Cruise. How Iran Became a New Epicenter of the Coronavirus Outbreak.

That’s all for this week, folks. Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday.

The OS Insurgents.