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Episode 213: The Shallow, Power-Flattering Appeal of High Status #Resistance Historians

Added 2024-12-04 15:39:08 +0000 UTC

"The Bad Guys Are Winning," wrote Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic in 2021. "The War on History Is a War on Democracy," warned Timothy Snyder in The New York Times, also in 2021. "The GOP has found a Putin-lite to fawn over. That's bad news for democracy," argued Ruth Ben-Ghiat on MSNBC the following year, 2022.

Within the last 10 years or so, and especially since the 2016 election of Trump, these authors — Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in addition to several others — have become liberal-friendly experts on authoritarianism. On a regular basis, they make appearances on cable news and in the pages of legacy newspapers and magazines–in some cases, as staff members–in order to warn of how individual, one-off “strongmen” like Trump, Putin, Orban, and Xi, made up a vague “authoritarian” axis hellbent on destroying Democracy for its own sake.

But what good does this framing do and who does it absolve? Instead of meaningfully contending with US's sprawling imperial power and internal systems of oppression — namely being the largest carceral state in the world — these MSNBC historians reheat decades-old Axis of Evil or cold War good vs evil rhetoric, pinning the horrors of centuries of political violence on individual "mad men." Meanwhile, they selectively invoke the "authoritarian" label, fretting about the need to save some abstract notion of democracy from geopolitical Bad Guys while remaining silent as the US funds, arms and backs the most authoritarian process imaginable — the immiseration and destruction of an entire people — specifically in Gaza.

On this episode, we look at the advent and influence of MSNBC-approved historians, dissecting their selective anti-authoritarian posture and discussing how their work does little more than polish their careers and provide cover for US and US-allied militarism.

Our guest is historian and author Greg Grandin.

Guest

Greg Grandin is the C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and the award-winning author of eight books, including Empire’s Workshop, Fordlandia, The Empire of Necessity, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. His new book, America, América: A New History of the New World, will be published by Penguin in April 2025. His writing has appeared everywhere from The New York Times to Jacobin, The Intercept to The Nation, Boston Review to The Guardian.

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Show Notes

Anne Applebaum’s Dystopia of Rules

Samuel McIlhagga | July 26, 2024 | Jacobin

Ex-Friends: Anne Applebaum and the crisis of centrist politics

David Klion | January 11, 2021 | The Nation

Anne Applebaum is peddling a democracy trope that no one is buying

Daniel Larison | November 19, 2021 | Responsible Statecraft

Royal Society of Literature ignores Anne Applebaum’s support for violence against Palestinian journalists

John Mitchell | August 18, 2021 | Mondoweiss

The Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal

Ivan Krastev | August 15, 2020 | Foreign Policy

Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum: ‘Often, for autocrats, the second time in power is worse’

Tim Adams | July 21, 2024 | The Guardian

Equating the Soviet Union With Nazi Germany Is Terrible History

Adam J. Sacks | January 27, 2023 | Jacobin

Blurring Distinctions

Lee Siegel | July 13, 2021 | City Journal

Methods of Power: Are We Living in an Age of Strongmen?

David A. Bell | April 6, 2021 | The Nation

The United States Has Used Latin America as Its Imperial Laboratory

Greg Grandin and Daniel Denvir | March 23, 2023 | The Dig

A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger

Greg Grandin | January 29, 2023 | The Nation

American Extremism Has Always Flowed from the Border

Greg Grandin | January 9, 2019 | Boston Review

The Empire’s Amnesia

Greg Grandin and Daniel Denvir | May 19, 2017 | The Dig

Why Jon Meacham Earns the Big Bucks

Peter Hart | November 30, 2009 | FAIR

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can also find transcripts of past episodes, live shows, Beg-a-Thons, Interviews and News Briefs here.

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