Author: Paul Matzko

Sean asks whether the true epochal dividing line has nothing to do with politics but the end of high and mass culture in the 00s. (They sound just as cheugy as you’d expect of two geriatric millennials talking about the past.) Paul chips in with a little complaining about the CDC’s magic eightball approach to public health recommendations.

Sean and Paul talk about the current and historic sex trafficking moral panics, whether or not Foucault is overrated or underrated, and why the conviction of Derek Chauvin falls short of the kind of systemic change needed in American policing.

As you can imagine, Paul and Sean have rather different responses to the outcome of the labor unionization vote in Bessemer, Alabama, though maybe not quite as different in the end as one might think…

Also, is everyone a libertarian in a pandemic?

Better late than never, but Sean and Paul discuss the $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package and why, despite its size, it’s the product of thinking too small.

Look, when a member of Congress gets paranoid about Jewish-controlled, forest fire-starting space lasers, the Impolitic crew is going to talk about it. Sean and Paul situate Marjorie Taylor Green’s lunacy in a long history of American conspiracy theories, discuss the odds of QAnon dissipating, and what role social media played in its rise.

Trumpists stormed the US capitol this week in the worst national insurrection since 1877. That’s it. That’s the episode.

This week, Paul and Sean discuss why they are optimistic about the 2020s given innovations in mRNA vaccines and battery technology. They also tease a special Patreon episode about the classic Christmas (?) movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Look, it’s not really that hard to figure out what this episode is about from the title, but listen in and you’ll also find out the secret for why Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion can’t win the Great British Baking Show and suss out the difference between Prodigal Son George W. Bush and Fail Son _______ [insert various and sundry Trumps].

Sean and Paul discuss a little pandemic reading, including Elena Ferrante’s novels about post-WW2 Italy and the work of the recently deceased historian of American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn. That leads into a discussion of whether Bailyn’s liberal legacy will endure new/old challenges from the New York Times’s 1619 Project and other more radical histories. Oh, and the two rhapsodize about how great SimCity is and whether it is the most or least neo-liberal video game ever created.