On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Matt Duss on moving on beyond war.
An Israeli soldier walks past a destroyed house in Kibbutz Be’eri, near the border with Gaza, on October 11, 2023.(Menahem Kahana / Getty)
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Matt Duss and Jeet Heer on moving on beyond war.
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This week, I talked with Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, about the recent death of Henry Kissinger and how the violence in Israel and Palestine could realistically give way to diplomatic solutions.
We take up two pieces Matt has written. One is a New Republic essay on how Henry Kissinger trafficked his public service into a lucrative private career. Kissinger was a actually a pioneer in this type of self-enrichment through influence peddling.
With Nancy Okail, president of the Center for International Policy, Matt wrote an important essay in Foreign Affairs laying out a road map for a better future for Israelis and Palestinians. This path would require the United States to seriously push for a political settlement. We talk about the political obstacles to such a plan, including Joe Biden’s long held ideological convictions. But we also take note of the changing politics of this issue, particularly among progressive voters.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann documented in a recent column.
Chris and Jeet Heer talk about Trump’s mobilization of Christian nationalist ideologues in the service of a making the state subservient to big business. We also take up the remarkable supine Democratic Party response, and also possible sources of resistance in the courts, the federal government and, most crucially, from outraged public opinion mobilized into protest.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.