Catholics and Lumpen-billionaires

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2020

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Adam Shatz talks to Mike Davis about some of the underlying and long-term political shifts at play in next week’s US elections. They discuss both traditional and emerging swing voters, the obstacles to majority rule, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett as the latest move in an ongoing civil war within the Catholic Church in the United States, the critical failure of the left to challenge the philosophy of the Reagan revolution, the death cult at the core of today’s Republican base, the importance of Bernie Sanders’s presidential run and the Black Lives Matter movement, and why, fifteen years ago, Davis predicted an age of pandemics. Find LRB pieces related to this episode here: https://lrb.me/mikedavispod Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you enjoy listening to the LRB podcast, then you'll probably enjoy reading the LRB.
0:06.1	You can subscribe to the LRB from just one pound per issue.
0:10.7	To find out more, go to LRB.combe.
0:14.0	Forward slash listen.
0:16.1	That's LRB.m.m.
0:18.8	Forward slash listen.
0:20.5	Or click on the link in the description below this episode.
0:24.5	Welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Adam Shatz, and my guest today is Mike Davis.
0:31.4	Mike, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, is one of America's most original
0:36.9	social critics and writers.
0:39.0	He's written on labor, policing, architecture, and public health, on the history of famines,
0:45.5	forest fires, slums, and car bombs. His many books include a science fiction novel for children,
0:52.0	a classic study of Los Angeles, City of quartz, and a prophetic book about
0:56.4	the avian flu, The Monster at Our Door, recently reissued as the monster enters. It's safe to say
1:03.3	that no historian has so successfully integrated the study of social class with the study of science
1:09.7	and the environment, or for that matter, scholarship
1:12.2	and activism.
1:14.1	Mike is also a former truck driver and revolutionary activist, experiences that have allowed
1:19.9	him to fuse the abstract and the concrete with unusual flair.
1:24.0	Most recently, in a new history of the Los Angeles left in the 1960s set the night on fire,
1:30.5	co-written with John Wiener. In 1997, I profiled Mike for the now defunct magazine Lingufranca.
1:38.9	It was abundantly clear that he was already preparing for the worst. I'd never heard someone speak so eloquently
	...

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