The Tower and the Square
This Week: Global Chaos with Arthur Goldhammer, Vanessa Bee, Julian Bourg and Alan Rusbridger. Listen today at 2pm or anytime on our website.
Another great roundup on what’s ailing us, globally, at the end of 2018, with three strong talkers. Short of answers or solutions, how about a name for it Chris wondered — a label or slogan for the fear, anger, resentment and disruption that’s spreading like a virus around the world?
We borrowed one from the historian no one around here seems to care for much, Niall Ferguson, whose new book is called The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. We’re entering the age when the people in the square are seizing back the narrative and some control from the elites in the towers.
Art Goldhammer had another good one, borrowed from the British journalist David Goodhart, who divides the fault lines around Brexit between the Somewheres (people rooted in a community or place, usually a small town or countryside, often more conservative and less educated) and the Anywheres (footloose, urban, educated liberals).
Art had two other fun facts for us (he’s a decorated French translator and père of former OS producer Zach Goldhammer): he traced the origins of the Gilets Jaunes movement to May, 2018 when a woman named Priscilla Lozovsky, a commuter and owner of an online cosmetics business on the outskirts of Paris, demanded a reduction in the price of gasoline after figuring out that taxes accounted for more than half the price. Then Eric Drouet, a truck driver, shared his post calling for “national movement against tax increases” on his facebook page in November, and the rest is history.
(And not just French history according to Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: there have been yellow vests in Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and vesters marching in Alberta, Canada (these seem more right-wing and anti-immigration), and also in Basra and Baghdad, where protests are directed at poor living conditions. Egypt banned the sale of yellow vests to stem protests against the al-Sisi dictatorship.)
Fun fact #2, the yellow vesters have been protesting in the roundabouts and motorway tollbooths around the country; did you know that France has more than half the world’s traffic circles with 35,000?
The young French novelist Édouard Louis learned about the protests from Rhode Island and headed across the Atlantic to take part. In a New Yorker interview, he explains that he saw the mobilization of the bourgeoisie to try to silence the movement. “The biggest argument to delegitimize the movement was to say, ‘Oh, this movement is racist, it’s homophobic, it’s anti-climate because people were protesting the gas tax,” he says. But Louis, who was raised in poverty, understands how the vocabulary of homophobia, racism, and xenophobia easily be substituted for the vocabulary of class conflict:
When I was a child — and I don’t say it in order to talk about me but just because it’s the reality that I know the best, and I have the impression that I am more honest in talking about my own past — people like my father, my mother, people around me in the village, very often hesitated, when it was time to vote, between voting for the far right or voting for the left. Never for the mainstream right-wing parties, because they were the symbol of the dominant bourgeoisie. But they were always hesitating between the far right and the left, which was a way of saying, “Who is going to support me? Who is going to make me visible? Who is going to fight for me?” And so, which vocabulary am I going to use? Am I going to say, “I am suffering because of migrants, or because of social inequalities and classism”?
Next Week: Lenny at 100
We’re working hard on our last show of the year — a tribute to Boston’s own. We’ll be back in action in January. Tell us what you want to hear next year!
Support Open Source
It’s pledge week on public radio, and that means your favorite stations and indie shows are asking for support. Open Source is a lean and mean labor of love by a small staff of talented and dedicated producers led by our amazing host. Please think of us at the end of yet another wild and wacky year and chip in to keep us coming at you and confronting all the evil forces in our midst. Our patreon community is growing, and we offer exclusive content to this club. Please join us!
What we’re reading:
The Unabomber has a fan club. Ariel Levy on Julia Louis-Dreyfus. An “elegy for capitalism.” More hype for the Green New Deal. Emily Nussbaum takes down Mrs. Maisel (and so does Marissa Brostoff). When the rich don’t want to plan for climate disaster…An epic investigation by the WSJ on how GE lost it’s power (doesn’t seem to be behind a paywall).
From our friend in Switzerland: the comments on this are priceless. The Brits take the piss right out of the question from the old Gray Lady!
That’s all for this week! Like, tweet, and subscribe.
❤ the os team
