Recorded at the Battle of Ideas 2016
Trump’s nationalist revival has an angry and defensive tone. It stands in stark contrast to the vision of John Winthrop’s Puritan evangelicals who, sought to build in Massachusetts Bay a ‘city on a hill’, an ideal society in the New World as an example to the Old. As the late Benedict Anderson observed, the spirit of nationalism forged in the American Revolution, based on ‘an imagined political community’ of creole pioneers, provided a model for nationalist movements – first in Europe, and subsequently throughout the colonial world. But, whereas the nationalist spirit of the founding fathers had a unifying and democratic character, that of Trump, with its anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim tropes, seems divisive and reactionary.
Can America’s overwhelming military might continue to compensate for its chronic economic stagnation? Can the USA’s global cultural influence help it to hold off the competition of the rising powers of East Asia? Can any political alternative overcome the exhaustion and paralysis that appears to have overtaken the American system under the presidency of Barack Obama?
Professor Sarah Churchwell
chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities; Professor of American literature, School of Advanced study, University of London
Dolan Cummings
associate fellow, Institute of Ideas; author, That Existential Leap: a crime story (forthcoming from Zero Books)
Alex Deane
managing director, FTI Consulting; Sky News regular; BBC Dateline London panellist; author Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in modern Britain
Michael Goldfarb
journalist and historian, FRDH Podcast
Dr Kwasi Kwarteng
Conservative member of parliament for Spelthorne; historian; author, Ghosts of Empire and War & Gold
Dr Cheryl Hudson
lecturer in American history, University of Liverpool
#BattleFest2019: The Life of Brian at 40 - are we more easily offended today?
#BattleFest2019: Titania McGrath - satire in the age of social justice
#BattleFest2019: Interrogating anti-Semitism with Deborah Lipstadt and Frank Furedi
#BattleFest2019: Are the old political parties dying?
#BattleFest2019: Education culture wars - what should be the role of schools today?
#BattleFest2018: Tearing up the rule book - the end of the new world order?
#BattleFest2018: The moral case for abortion
#BattleFest2018: The crisis of diplomacy in the era of Trump
#BattleFest2018: Feminism - in conversation with Camille Paglia
#BattleFest2018: Can we revive Britain’s ’Rust Belt’?
#EconomyForum: How can we revive UK economic growth?
#BattleFest2018: Culture - who pays?
#BattleFest2018: From robots to UBI - is capitalism digging its own grave?
#BattleFest2018: Do the right thing? The moral responsibility of the artist
#BattleFest2018: From anti-vaxers to Alfie’s army - have we lost faith in medical science?
#BattleFest2018: Understanding anti-Semitism today
#BattleFest2018: How fear works
#BattleFest2018: Automatic lovers - should we be worried about sex robots?
#BattleFest2018: Does our DNA define us?
#BattleFest2018: Democracy under siege?
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free