Welcome to This Is Fine, Episode 1.2: Argumentum ad populum. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. Please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or your favorite app, and share the podcast with your friends and frenemies.

In this week’s podcast, we share our origin story in Southern California; explore what populism is and if it can turn left (verdict: not an ambi-turner); make the case that a Nazi political theorist is not in the best position to diagnose liberalism's faults; and sketch out our visions of protest in the Trump era.

Please send us reader questions for This is Fine, 1.3: the media is the message, where we'll try to take on not only fake news and bullshit coverage, but also the way media outlets shape the meta-conversation: what is permissible to say about politics.

Articles discussed in this episode:

• Jedediah Purdy, "Populism's Two Paths" in The Nation
• Malloy Owen, "Don't Mourn, Repoliticize" in The Point Magazine

Books discussed:

• John Judis, The Populist Explosion
• Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism?

et cetera:

• Judith Shklar, "Liberalism of Fear"
• Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
• John Judis & Ruy Texeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority
• Benjamin McKean, "Toward an Inclusive Populism? On the Role of Race and Difference in Laclau’s Politics"
• Carl Schmitt
• Tim Schenk interviews K. Sabeel Rahman in Dissent, "Booked: The End of Managerial Liberalism"