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What Rachel Maddow Is Listening To
“There is a part of me that’s still in grad school.”
The pertinent pattern here, of course, is the rise of authoritarianism and its intimate link to systematic attacks on institutions, processes, and squishier aspects of civic culture meant to support a sense of political accountability — a dynamic that’s as present in the period she’s revisiting as the news she covers when she’s in front of the camera on MSNBC. The notion of a political audio docuseries that labors to connect the present with the past has become so much of a trope that it’s now basically a robust genre with its own rich tradition — one encompassing such stalwarts as Slow Burn, Fiasco, Blowback, and, of course, a growing body of podcast work produced by one Rachel Maddow. This week sees the debut of its follow-up, which picks up shortly after the scandal documented at the end of the first season when O. John Rogge, the prosecutor of the failed sedition trial against American fascist conspirators, heads off to Germany and brings back the names of U.S. politicians who were willing Nazi collaborators.
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