Interview — Corey Robin (Video)
Added 2025-02-11 03:03:53 +0000 UTCCorey Robin is a political science professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY, as well as the author of The Reactionary Mind, which you might remember from the end of my most recent Jon Stewart video.
I called him to ask him about an article he wrote in Dissent Magazine titled "The Obamanauts," to talk about the ideology of the Obama Administration and its similarities to vision of liberalism that is put forth in The West Wing.
It was a really enlightening conversation about the history of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party, deliberative democracy, and what Robin calls the "moral minimalism" of Obama's presidency.
Some of the works we referenced:
The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey (The Atlantic, 2021)
Barack Obama's Speech on Race (2008)
Good-bye, Pamela Paul by Andrea Long Chu (New York Magazine, 2025)
NOTE: The video version of this conversation will be up later today (which includes an adorable cat). Going forward I'm going to upload interviews in both audio and video formats.
Comments
I'll share anecdotally as a person who is smart in many ways and has a master's degree but also has a memory disorder and is unable to spout off trivia, yes, people think you are smart if you can do that and dumb if you can't.
C.J. Penning
2025-02-12 15:47:48 +0000 UTCWow.....
RedX2099
2025-02-11 20:53:59 +0000 UTChere's a sorkin quote i found in my research: "By and large, I write about people who are considerably smarter than I am. I was raised that way. My family members and friends growing up were all smarter than I. I really fell in love with the phonetic sound of intelligence and the sound of a really good argument."
Skip Intro
2025-02-11 20:32:57 +0000 UTCI just realized....in the west wing they show the supposed "intelligence" of characters by having them drop trivia about US history and government. They have Nicholas Cage do the same thing in National Treasure. Except, one is a corny adventure movie from the early 2000's and the other is a show that is held in high esteem by the democratic party. Is most of our cultural perception of "intelligence" based off of an individual's ability to spout of historical trivia and sound "informed" while doing it?
RedX2099
2025-02-11 04:48:39 +0000 UTC
