Photo credit: Jim Vallee/Shutterstock
Today’s theme music is Ni Aarin, by Cast of Characters; the show begins with State Senator Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention in Boston, MA on July 27, 2004.
In the news:
* Journalist Jonathan Capehart has left the Washington Post, and showed up on Substack. For those of you who, like me, look forward to seeing Jonathan on the PBS NewsHour each week, it’s no surprise that this principled liberal journalist has departed a once glorious institution that seems to aspire to become Pravda Trump. But what’s next?
* Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer has gotten more people holding government appointments scuttled: April Falcon Doss, the general counsel of the National Security Agency, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Vinay Prasad, and most recently, cybersecurity expert and Army veteran Jen Easterly has had a teaching position at West Point, due to begin this fall, withdrawn.
* The latest YouGov numbers show that President Donald Trump’s popularity has dipped to 37%, and he is disliked by 49% of the population. None of this is astonishing, except for one thing: Vice President JD Vance is marginally more popular, at 38%, and less disliked (44%). Trump is also less popular than Barack and Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and wild chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall.
Today’s guest is Kevin Schultz, professor of history at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Kevin is a historian of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States, and he specializes in religion, intellectual and cultural history. But he also has a lot to say about politics, and he is here today to talk about his new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), out a few weeks ago from the University of Chicago Press. Earlier this summer, I had a chance to sit down with Kevin, and talk about why the left and the right both excoriate liberals—and why that hatred has been so effective, even as liberalism has created social change that most of its haters accept, and often value.
Become an annual paid subscriber to Political Junkie, and get a free copy of Kevin’s book—or mine—as a welcome gift!
Show notes:
* Kevin begins by discussing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s adoption of the term “liberal” to describe the future of the Democratic Party: for example, in his 1932 acceptance speech he declared that “Ours must be a party of liberal thought,” an alternative to Republican disarray and the radicalism on the other.
* “Liberal” has a long and important history in the European intellectual past as well. Listeners may wish to follow up with Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism:
The Life of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018).
* In response to Claire’s question about how whiteness becomes associated with liberalism, Kevin points out the embrace of a Black civil rights movement by anti-racist whites who consider themselves to be mainstream Democrats, such as John F. Kennedy. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. explored the larger agenda at stake for the Democratic Party in The Politics of Hope (1963).
* But Kevin also notes that liberalism also frustrated activists who wanted to accelerate economic justice and political change: Anthony J. Badger addresses this as a specific, structural flaw in liberalism: see Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2022).
* Claire asks whether modern American liberalism was constrained at birth because liberal Democrats had to negotiate with conservatives in their own party, and seek alliances with Republican liberals. Listeners can learn more about this in Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win:A History of the Democratic Party (Picador, 2022).
* Hubert Humphrey was one white liberal who sought to tie the Democratic Party more firmly to racial justice: his 1948 convention speech promoting a civil rights plank in the platform caused racist Southern whites to walk out of the convention and form the States Rights Party.
* Claire mentions the “Four Freedoms” speech (1941), in which FDR imagines a liberal world order, as well as Schlesinger’s The Vital Center (Houghton, Mifflin, 1962), which imagines liberalism as the politics of moderation—not necessarily social justice. Kevin points out that the contradictions of this philosophy blossom in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency: see Robert Dallek,Flawed Giant:Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-1973 (Oxford University Press, 1998).
* Kevin notes a critique of white liberals from the Black Left, citing the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks: listeners who want to delve into Brooks’s social commentary may wish to begin with Elizabeth Alexander, Ed., The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Library of America, 2005).
* Fast forward fifty years, and hatred of white liberals is simultaneously one of the few things that that simultaneously unifies the MAGA right and defines the 21st century left.
* Claire gives a nod to Tom Wolfe’s classic takedown of liberals, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970).
* To make things more complicated, Claire and Kevin dig into the rise of neoliberalism after the late 1970s: listeners who want to learn more may wish to read Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order:America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022).
* Claire mentions David Dinkins, mayor of New York in the 1990s, and the morphing of liberalism into a form of Democratic Party politics called “progressivism,” a term that has hung on to describe the left wing of the party.
* Kevin and Claire discuss whether liberalism can be recuperated: for one perspective, see Adam Gopnick’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (Basic Books, 2019).
Short takes:
* The deal Columbia cut with the Trump administration, which included adopting commitment to act as an administration surrogate in policing hiring, admissions, and teaching, as well as special scrutiny of Middle East Studies, has caused emeritus Professor of History Rashid Khalidi to cancel a course he was scheduled to teach in the fall. Noting that simply teaching discussion sections put his teaching assistants in jeopardy, instead, Khalidi will “offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing,” he wrote in an open letter published today in The Guardian. “Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.” (August 1, 2025)
* At Mother Jones, Samantha Michaels reports on the Trump administration’s push to build more “soft-sided” concentration camps migrant detention facilities, a hasty and “startlingly low-tech” solution for a problem it has created be demanding thousands of arrests every day. “Tent cities may seem cheap—they’re certainly less expensive to build than brick-and-mortar jails—but they’re very pricy to operate, largely because more staff are needed to deal with the logistical challenges,” Michaels writes. “In 2018, Vox found that it cost $775 per day to house an immigrant in a tent city vs. $133 to $319 to house them in a traditional detention center—and just $4.50 per day to let them stay in the community with an ankle monitor. Alligator Alcatraz will cost taxpayers a whopping $450 million annually.” Tents are also an inhumane way to house people long-term—but as Michaels points out, Donald Trump loves to threaten people. (August 1, 2025)
* Trump apologists love to say that things that are being outlawed are on the fringe of what Americans approve of, and will leave more mainstream rights intact: in fact, we have seen the outrage about abortion bans dim in the past two years. But what happens when conservatives ban contraception, Jessica Valenti asks at Abortion, Every Day. How? By labeling contraception as an abortifacient. “Republicans don’t need to pass a law that says contraception is illegal, they just need to make it impossible to get—whether it’s keeping some kinds of contraception out of family planning programs, allowing pharmacists to deny patients their prescriptions, exempting employers from requirements to cover contraception, or stripping minors of their ability to access birth control. Is contraception really legal if you can’t get your hands on any?” (July 31, 2025)
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