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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood, the usual two guests today.

Joseph Dardo will talk about the role of the Vietnam veteran in consolidating an aspect of white identity.

And Joshua Adams will talk about what's at stake in the critical race theory debate

and what the world might look like if the haters got their way.

First, veterans. White men are often considered exempt from practicing identity politics.

It's the concern of all those other people.

We're the norm, they're the exception.

But there's a lot of identity politics around the white working class man.

An identity that my first guest argues was crystallized in the 1970s and 80s around the image of the white and the Vietnam veteran.

It was a no small part of reaction to the black and feminist movements of the 1960s,

which challenged the status of a demographic that once saw itself as the very embodiment of Americanism.

Musicians like Bruce Springsteen and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese did a lot of this ideological work.

How and why this happened is the subject of Joseph Dardo's new book,

How White Men Won the Culture Wars, a history of veteran America, just out from the University of California Press.

Dardo is an associate professor of English at Texas Christian University.

His previous book is Empire of Defense, Race in the Cultural Politics of Permanent War.

About four and a half minutes into the interview,

Dardo stumbled over the name of the historian Matthew Fry Jacobson,

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