America’s founding contradiction — freedom built on slavery — still defines our politics.
Trump didn’t invent backlash; he perfected its open language and turned denial into loyalty.
The hollowing of labor and media paved the way for oligarchic capture and public distrust.
Lincoln Square Executive Editor Susan Demas and Princeton professor and author Paul Starr push past nostalgia to confront the roots of America’s recurring fracture — how a nation born of liberty and bondage keeps reliving that tension through race, class, and power. Starr’s new book, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now, reframes the backlash story: an unbroken thread between civil rights revolutions and economic abandonment.
Democrats “sleepwalked” through the neoliberal ’90s, mistaking stability for progress, while deregulation and free trade hollowed out the working class and weakened labor itself. The same blindness is now repeating in the media, where corporate consolidation and tech oligarchs have captured the press as efficiently as Hungary or Turkey’s regimes. What began as a contradiction has become a system, one that rewards cynicism and punishes accountability.
Tune in to this urgent historical conversation with Susan Demas and Paul Starr.
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