Tom Hayden RIP

A year ago, on Radio WhoWhatWhy, I spoke with Tom Hayden about his passion and excitement at the opening up of Cuba.  This was the last time we spoke, after many years of conversations.

It has been sixty-two years since the Cuban Revolution began. Fifty-four years since the Bay of Pigs invasion. Fifty-three years since the Cuban missile crisis. Twenty-six years since the end of the Cold War, and fifteen years since the Elian Gonzalez incident. And it is just now that we are beginning a new relationships with our neighbor 90 miles away.

A significant part of our population has come of age with absolutely no knowledge of the history of the US / Cuba relationship, what the revolution was about, or what all the hostility has been about. And yet the history of that relationship with Cuba has been a kind of Rosetta Stone for understating the bias, the mistakes and domestic politics behind so much of American foreign policy from the mid 20th century until today.

Few have had the access to Cuba to provide the kind of clear and present perspective that Tom Hayden has he writes about that in Listen, Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters

My conversation with Tom Hayden:

What's The Matter With Democrats?

When we examine the roots of today’s chaos in the Republican party, we see that much of it has been caused by the party using and manipulating social issues to hold together Red State voters, while ignoring and even acting counter to their real economic concerns. This was the premise of one of the seminal books of our modern political age, What’s the Matter with Kansas, by Thomas Frank.

Today, Frank argues that the Democratic party is facing a similar situation and is ignoring a whole swath of it’s traditional working class base voters.

He argues in his new book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People that the traditional working class Democratic voters, the ones that drove the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson coalitions, have been ignored. That the traditional Democratic Dunkin Donuts/ Walmart voter has been replaced by the Starbucks/Whole Foods voter.  And that o
once again, even in the Democratic party, social issues have been used to transcended the real economic needs and distress of Americans.

To some extent this has given rise to the Bernie Sanders movement. But more specifically it’s left the door open for a populist demagogue like Donald Trump, to take advantage of this openings on both side of the political equation.

My conversation with Thomas Frank: