Inward Empire

In the 2020s, centrists who had controlled the Democratic Party for thirty years found themselves under siege from insurgents led by an unlikely group: the Democratic Socialists of America, a nonprofit organization which had been an insignificant speck in the political landscape just a few years earlier. This episode covers the Democrats' founding in the 1820s, their spectacular power in the early 1960s, and their almost complete collapse in 1968. In the years that followed, factions gathered around two men who tried to redefine the Party: liberal Senator George McGovern, and party insider Alvin From. McGovern led a grassroots movement of idealistic liberals who believed in transparency, diversity, and reform. From led a group of powerful insiders who believed the only way for the Party to win was to turn its back on everything it had fought for.

 Something strange happened in America at the turn of the 20th century: a society based on individualism began to celebrate identical, replicable people. This episode tells the story of two men who drove this profound change in American culture. One was a business consultant named Frederick Winslow Taylor. The other was an artist named Charles Dana Gibson. Each created an identical human being, a replicant who would serve the needs of the economy. Taylor's replicant was Schmidt, a worker who could be "scientifically managed" for limitless productivity. Gibson's was the Gibson Girl, a woman who would be liberated by consuming products. Together, the replicants would change forever the way Americans thought about their place in a society based on limitless consumption. 

 In 1968, Jerry Rubin was sure that the baby boomers were the vanguard of a second American Revolution. A leader of the countercultural Yippies, he pioneered a new kind of absurdist political theater aimed at turning the young against the establishment: exorcising evil spirits from the Pentagon, throwing blood at ambassadors, and nominating a pig for president. But by 1980, Rubin had morphed into a New Age yuppie who believed that health foods, inner well-being, and the power of money would save America. In this episode, we'll explore Rubin's transformation - and what his story reveals about the demise of '60s idealism. 

In November 1963, a faction of South Vietnamese generals overthrew and assassinated Ngo Dinh Diem with the support of the Kennedy administration. In the final part of this series, we'll explore how infighting, ambition, and miscommunication sealed the fate of the Diem Experiment and set South Vietnam on the path to disaster.

After destroying his rivals in the Battle of Saigon, President Diem sets out to build a new nation in South Vietnam. On the one hand he offers land reform and a glittering new middle class, built on a tide of American aid. On the other hand is a ruthless anti-communist campaign of denunciations, torture, and re-education camps. A sprawling cast of characters comes together in this complex chapter: Saigon oligarchs, French philosophers, American New Dealers, landlords, peasants, Viet Cong guerillas, communist double agents, and rebellious paratroopers all help to shape the fate of the Diem experiment in its tumultuous early years.