Think Again Podcast #53 – Sean Wilentz – The Culture Strikes Back

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In this episode: Sean Wilentz is a Princeton professor and the Bancroft-Prize-Winning Author of The Rise of American Democracy. He’s also a major music historian and the author of Bob Dylan in America, and the official historian of Bob Dylan’s website. His new book The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politicsargues that there are two keys to understanding American politics––the theme of party politics and outsider resistance to it, and the theme of economic and social egalitarianism. He argues that all positive change in American political history has happened within the system of party politics.

On this week’s episode of Think Again – a Big Think Podcast, Wilentz and host Jason Gots discuss identity politics, human life on Mars, and the culture war that began when the counterculture “won” the battle in the late ’60s, and which Wilentz argues is reaching a final cataclysm with the election of 2016.

Surprise discussion clips in this episode: Comedian Lewis Black on political correctness, Bill Nye on colonizing Mars.

About Think Again – A Big Think Podcast: You’ve got 10 minutes with Einstein. What do you talk about? Black holes? Time travel? Why not gambling? The Art of War? Contemporary parenting? Some of the best conversations happen when we’re pushed outside of our comfort zones. Each week on Think Again, we surprise smart people you may have heard of with short clips from Big Think’s interview archives on every imaginable subject. These conversations could, and do, go anywhere.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people