End of the Myth with Greg Grandin

The Dig

Daniel Denvir

News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2019

⏱️ 135 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

American liberty has since its foundation relied upon the dispossession of indigenous people and Mexicans, upon African enslavement and, ultimately, upon the constant fleeing outward that created an empire that none dare call by its name. As historian Greg Grandin writes in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, this expansionist project has finally lost its ideological and material vitality, no longer able to neatly reconcile centuries of mounting contradictions. And so politics returned to the border as American expansion hit a wall—figuratively and, as Trump has demanded, very literally. "Trumpism," Grandin writes, "is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring. There is no 'divine, messianic' crusade that can harness and redirect passions outward. Expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy interests, reconcile contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger."
Thanks to University of California Press. Check out No Go WorldL How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics by Ruben Andersson ucpress.edu/book/9780520294608/no-go-world
And thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com
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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters on Patreon and by University of California Press,
0:07.1	which has loads of great titles, perfect for dig listeners like you.
0:12.7	One that you might like is No Go World, How Fear is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics by Ruben Anderson. War-torn deserts,
0:23.7	jihadist killings, trucks waded down with contraband and migrants. From the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands
0:30.6	to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Anderson traverses this
0:39.8	terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote danger zones.
0:46.5	Instead of buying into apocalyptic visions, Anderson takes aim at how Western states and international
0:52.9	organizations conduct military, aid, and
0:56.6	border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world's rich
1:02.7	and the world's poor. Using drones, proxy forces, border reinforcement, and outsourced
1:09.7	aid, risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world
1:13.6	into zones of insecurity and danger. The result is a vision of chaos crashing into fortified
1:20.8	borders, with national and global politics driven by fear. Anderson contends that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral,
1:31.1	which affects us whether we live in Texas or Timbuktu. Only by developing a new cartography of hope
1:39.3	can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us. No-go world. How fear is redrawing
1:48.5	our maps and infecting our politics by Ruben Anderson. Out now from University of California
1:55.6	Press. Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm
2:11.5	temporarily broadcasting from Santiago de Chile. For Thomas Jefferson, American white people's liberty had its origins
2:20.4	in a free people in Saxon, Germany, who then fled to Britain and then on to the new world.
2:26.9	American expansion was for Benjamin Franklin and so many who followed, a solution to Europe's
2:32.3	labor market pressures, a theory later formalized
2:35.4	by Malthus and ideas about the frontier as an escape valve for class conflict.
	...

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