/526/ Come On Feel the Paranoise

On US derangement on screen. The OG Bunga boys get togther for the annual end-of-year film episode. We discuss Ari Aster's Eddington, as well as a bit of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another and Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia: the three films that together marked 2025, and which deal with paranoia, conspiracy, disinformation and unmoored political activity. Is this hyperpolitics on screen? Do these films serve any critical purpose? Is Eddington a faithful depiction of the society of immediacy or is it guilty of immediacy itself? Are we all fkin r*****ed? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: /520/ Conspiracy Culture & Paranoid Styles ft. Catherine Liu Hell in Ari Aster, Tara Heffernan & Felix McNamara, Corporate Total Art /458/ The Society of Pure Vibe ft. Anna Kornbluh (on 'immediacy') America’s Unraveling on Screen, Monica Marks, New Lines Magazine

On homoploutia and national market liberalism. Branko Milanovic, Research Professor at City University of New York, talks to Phil and Alex about his most recent book, The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World. What unites the political trajectories of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump? How is global inequality, growth and political conflict evolving in the aftermath of globalisation? How are hierarchies of global income shifting as the world rebalances towards East Asia? What kind of political theories can we use to model the emergence of this new multipolar world – Adam Smith, Lenin, Luxembourg or John Rawls? And what is Homoploutia?  Links: The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World, Branko Milanovic Global Inequality 3.0 and More, Branko's substack An Economist’s Case for Open Borders, Branko Milanovic, Dissent Magazine The ‘homoploutic’ elephant, with Branko Milanović, FT  

On overmedicalisation and the crisis of authority. Amber Trotter, practicing psychologist and an editor at Damage magazine, and George Hoare tell Alex about their co-written article in the print issue of Damage on "the pre-political". What is driving the explosion in mental health diagnoses? Why are people seeking diagnosis? How is it the product of the subjective and the purely scientific? Does capitalism make us ill? Is blaming 'capitalism' abstractly part of the problem? What is the crisis of authority? Whose authority? Can we solve pre-political problems with politics? And political problems with pre-political approaches? Damage, Issue 5: The Pre-Political  

On post-woke strategies. Ryan Z is back on, talking to Alex and George about the US Democrats' attempt to respond to Trump/MAGA. In association with Damage magazine. Can the Democrats escape the shadow of woke? Is Big Woke dying? Everywhere? Who are the groups and think-tanks pushing for a reorientation, and what are they proposing? Will the Dems adapt to Trump’s challenge or pretend nothing is happening?  We then take listener questions and comments on transport infrastructure, left-wing gatekeeping, and the crisis in education everywhere, high and low. For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Can the Democrats Escape the Shadow of Woke?, Ryan Zickgraf, Damage Inside the Democratic identity crisis, Ryan Zickgraf, UnHerd    

On legitimacy and chronic crisis. Benjamin Studebaker talks to Alex and Lee about his book, Legitimacy in Liberal Democracy – and why the absence of the threat of revolution makes the crisis drag on. What's wrong with 20th century accounts of legitimacy crises? What's changed? Why is contemporary politics so stuck? Is it inescapable? How does the breakdown of consensus make the emergence of a social majority so difficult? Is there no common programme we can agree on, focused on bread-and-butter issues? Do we need to stare despair in the face? Is catastrophe the only way out? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Legitimacy in Liberal Democracy, Benjamin Studebaker, Edinburgh UP UNLOCKED: /361/ A Nightmare on the Brains of the Living ft. Benjamin Studebaker Debilitated democracy: When the legs get ripped off, Dirk Jörke and Benjamin Studebaker, European Journal of Social Theory

On the crisis in literacy. Poet, podcaster and teacher, C. Derick Varn – who has taught in Mexico, Korea, Egypt and the US, at various levels – joins Alex and George to interrogate the coming "post-literate society". What do we mean when we say 'post-literate'? This seems a global problem – so is it a problem of the education system? Is it as simple as blaming smartphones? How else has education become degraded? How have progressives and conservatives combined to do this? Are we becoming on oral culture again? What are the consequences? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: Are we becoming a post-literate society?, Sarah O'Connor, FT Have humans passed peak brain power?, John Burn-Murdoch, FT Visible Learning (synthesis of meta analyses), John Hattie Why Knowledge Matters, ED Hirsch, Harvard Seven Myths about Education, Daisy Christodoulou Insensitivity Readers!, Nina Power    

In this special episode, we present talks given by contributing editor Catherine Liu and co-host George Hoare on the paranoid style at a recent conference at UC Irvine, co-hosted by the Palm Springs School for Social Research. 00:01:23 – Catherine Liu: Opening Remarks, on Richard Hofstatder’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” 00:12:18 – George Hoare: The Paranoid Style in British Politics 00:36:06 – Catherine Liu: "Zombies Clowns and Gangsters" For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast

On the middle classes and cultural compression. For the concluding episode of the 2024/25 Reading Club, we discuss C. Wright Mills' White Collar, plus some additional short texts on what mass culture is like today. credit: Ryan Zickgraf, based on The Wilson Quarterly/Russell Lynes 1949   For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Does Mills' account of the “economic psychology” of the White Collar worker still ring true today? What about their "political psychology"? What is the state of White Collar trade unionism today? Is there no possibility of the middle class leading a political movement? Do the distinctions of high- middle- and low-brow still make sense today, in our era of levelling-down and slop? Should we defend democracy in the economy and elitism in culture? Readings: White Collar: The American Middle Classes, C. Wright Mills, 1951 (esp final two chapters) Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, Russell Lynes, Wilson Quarterly, 1976 reprint of 1949 article (pdf attached) Post-Mass Culture, Dylan Riley, Sidecar Unionizing the “Cultural Apparatus”, Nelson Lichtenstein, Jacobin

On technology, transhumanism, and progress. James Hughes (Exec Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) and Eli Sennesh (postdoc, Vanderbilt) present a futurist approach to Alex and contributing editor Leigh Phillips. What is wrong with the acronym TESCREAL? Why is it wrong to worry about future transhumanism when we need to grapple with the technologies of now? What are the limits of bourgeois futurism? What is an alternative futurism? Has AI changed everything? Will it? Are we actually living in an age of rapid technological advance? Links: Conspiracy Theories, Left Futurism, and the Attack on TESCREAL, James Hughes & Eli Sennesh /306/ AI Capitalism: Inhuman Power /335/ AI & the End of the End of History /446/ The Techno-Fantasy of Perfect Freedom ft. Amber Trotter /488/ Homo-Techno, Homo-Solo ...Post-Homo? ft. Alex Gendler The Obama-to-Yarvin Pipeline, Geoff Schullenberger, Compact Substack

On free speech, the tech right, and politicisation. Geoff Shullenberger, managing editor at Compact, joins Alex and George to talk about Peter Thiel, René Girard, victimhood and the antichrist. Does it make sense to talk of "right-wing cancel culture"? Is it different from the left's? Is countercultural trolling in tension with "defending Western civilisation"? What does René Girard argue about mimesis and scapegoating? Why have his theories become popular? Is right-populism still politicising? How does it relate to libertarian anti-politics and hard-right militarisation? How has Silicon Valley libertarianism adapted to the new state-capitalist disposition? For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast Links: René Girard and the Rise of Victim Power, Geoff Shullenberger, Compact The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession, Laura Bullard, Wired The Faith of Nick Land, Geoff Shullenberger, Compact