The actual West is on fire. The mythologized West is burning to the ground. Millions of acres are being laid to waste as a result of climate change. It's less American exceptionalism. That American exemptionism -- the idea that America was exempt from limits, exempt from social obligations, exempt even from death itself.

Chuck is out of action this week COVID, so we are featuring past interviews with upcoming guests who all have new books coming out on the days we are scheduled to interview them in upcoming weeks. Today's episode features two listener-favorite historians. First up is Quinn Slobodian on his 2023 book, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Greg Grandin follows with a discussion of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2020 book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

A classic Moment of Truth with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.

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Guest

Greg Grandin

@GregGrandin

Greg Grandin is an historian, author and professor of history at New York University.

greggrandin.com

Guest

Quinn Slobodian

@zeithistoriker

Quinn Slobodian is the author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. He also wrote the award-winning Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism which has been translated into six languages. Quinn is a professor of the history of ideas at Wellesley College.

quinnslobodian.com

Chuck has Covid pt. 2: Technoauthoritarian Frontiers / Quinn Slobodian & Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin

Quinn Slobodian

The whole world is border: On the wall at the end of American expansion.

Wars abroad for battles at home: Henry Kissinger's imperial architecture.

Listener Picks: Peter Thiel's Dream of Capitalism without Democracy / Quinn Slobodian

Peter Thiel's Dream of Capitalism without Democracy / Quinn Slobodian