#1500 America, A Beginner's Guide
Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy
Jay Tomlinson
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 July 2022
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Air Date 7/4/2022
Today, for this milestone episode, I attempted to squeeze in as many clever and interesting ideas as I could and ended up writing a starter guide to understand the United States. Plus, there are jingles!
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SHOW NOTES
Ch. 1: Political Structures of Our Country
Tracking the political eras that proceeded our current situation and looking at what may come next.
Jingle 1: Strawman
Ch. 2: Progressives and Progress
Looking at a progressive perspective of the last 20 years and the process of progress itself
Jingle 2: Defer to Authority
Ch. 3: Understanding Race, Gender, Privilege and Power
Understanding why our understanding of the world is often insufficiently complicated
Jingle 3: Just Asking Questions
Ch. 4: Progressives in Politics
Tracing the fissures on the political left from Bush to Biden
Jingle 4: Manipulating Data
Ch. 5: Republican Transformation
Tracing conservatism from mid-century Republicans to 21st-century insurrectionists
Jingle 5: Appeal to Emotion
Ch. 6: Foreign/Power
Looking at various forms of power and how they play out on the international stage
Jingle 6: Passive Voice
Ch. 7: The Progress Trap
The progress traps of new technology and why we're not defending against them
Jingle 7: Clickbait
Ch. 8: Structural Thinking and the Alternative
What happens when an individualist thinker is faced with problems that only structural thinking can handle?
Jingle 8: Conspiracy Theories
FINAL COMMENTS
Ch. 9: Conclusion
MUSIC (Blue Dot Sessions)
Jingles: Concept and Some Lyrics by Jay Tomlinson, Music and Most Lyrics by Jonathan Mann
- Opening Theme: Loving Acoustic Instrumental by John Douglas Orr
- Closing Music: Upbeat Laid Back Indie Rock by Alex Stinnent
Produced by Jay! Tomlinson
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to episode 1500 of the award-winning Best of Left Podcast. |
| 0:07.9 | I'm going to do something different today instead of curating brilliant things said by |
| 0:12.2 | other people as I have been since 2006. |
| 0:15.4 | I've attempted to curate the very best of the ideas I've either heard or had myself |
| 0:22.1 | over that time. |
| 0:23.6 | I don't think I've managed to include every good thought I've ever heard, but I got closer |
| 0:29.0 | than you might imagine. |
| 0:30.4 | Let's start. |
| 0:31.4 | I want to start with the big picture first, or at least the medium picture because I'm |
| 0:41.4 | not going to go back to Columbus who kicked off the genocide of the Native peoples with |
| 0:45.1 | the Americas and the clearing of the land on which we now reside, although that would |
| 0:49.0 | also be a good place to start. |
| 0:51.3 | For today, to understand modern politics, let's begin by touching briefly on the fallout |
| 0:56.7 | of the Civil War. |
| 0:58.6 | The fallout of the Civil War in one sentence is the North won the war, but the South won |
| 1:04.0 | the peace, and we are still living with those consequences today. |
| 1:08.6 | Reconstruction, the period just after the war, is one of the parts of American history that |
| 1:12.6 | we generally skip right over. |
| 1:14.6 | It's that period when the Union occupied and managed the affairs of the former Confederacy. |
| 1:20.5 | Without making a direct comparison between the Confederacy and Nazis, although the latter |
| 1:26.9 | took a lot of inspiration from the former, think about the end of World War II and how |
| 1:31.4 | the Allied forces needed to occupy Germany for a good long while until basically the next |
... |
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