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  • What role should emotion play in the fraught politics of immigration?
    The politics of immigration has returned in recent months — and returned with a depth of feeling that suggests it never truly went away. It’s always there, lingering just beneath the surface of Western societies, waiting to be tapped into by politicians skilful (or brazen) enough to harness its power.So Donald Trump went to the 2024 presidential election excoriating his predecessor’s record on immigration and for “losing control” of the southern border control; by contrast, he promised the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In mid-September, as many as 150,000 people took to the streets in central London as part of the “Unite the Kingdom” rally organised by far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Demonstrators wrapped themselves in the Union Jack, waved St George’s flag and held aloft wooden crosses amid calls for “remigration” and other forms of mass deportation.Closer to home, also in August and September, a series of “March for Australia” demonstrations took place across Australia’s major cities against “mass migration” as the root of any number of social and economic problems: from housing shortages, food prices and traffic congestion to increased levels of social division and a declining sense of national “identity”.And as is invariably the case, there are politicians prepared to make the most of the social ferment. Leaving aside the surge in support for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, we can point to Senator Jacinta Nampijimpa Price’s recent comments about Indian migrants and Liberal MP Andrew Hastie’s blunt identification of post-pandemic immigration levels as “the real reason you can’t afford a home”.Conservative political parties across Western democracies have “won” the debate over “border control”. It has been the clear intention of centre-left parties to neutralise the politics of “irregular arrivals”. What’s left, then, is the debate over multiculturalism and levels of immigration.And yet this is dangerous political terrain. For however much researchers point to the economic benefits of immigration, or the lack of clear connection between international student numbers and rising house prices, or the historic success of Australia’s bipartisan commitment to multiculturalism, “fact-checking” cannot touch the underlying emotions to which anti-immigration rhetoric appeals. Moreover, one of the reasons anti-immigration rhetoric is so successful is the fact it is at once parasitic and opportunistic. As social researcher Rebecca Huntley recently put it, “Whatever the top anxiety people have at any one time, they will graft an anxiety about immigration on it.”Given the affective dimension of both social cohesion and anti-immigration rhetoric, is there a way of appealing to political emotions as a way of addressing these anxieties without giving way to their more insidious expressions?
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  • The ‘fascism’ paradox — with Jason Stanley
    In a remarkable column from 1944, George Orwell bemoaned the sheer range of social and political phenomena to which the label “Fascist” was being applied — to the point that he believed the word itself had become “almost entirely meaningless”. And while it conveyed little more than a term like “bully” would, “Fascist” nonetheless carried an emotional charge, a degree of opprobrium, that such an everyday word did not.For this reason, Orwell concluded, the label should be used both precisely and sparingly: “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”During the first Trump administration, a debate broke out among historians and political philosophers as to whether what the United States was witnessing amounted to “fascism”. For some, the term was an accurate description of a political disposition and form of political expression which at once had deep roots in American history — reaching back even before the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the “America First” phenomenon in the 1930s — and enjoyed certain family resemblances with the European movements with which we ordinarily associate the word. For others, calling the Trump administration “fascist” was either premature, a form of rhetorical overreach or a misdiagnosis.In many respects, that debate now seems quaint. For after the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol and the various forms of executive action taken by Donald Trump in his second administration — including the extortion of universities, law firms and media companies, the use of masked ICE agents to detain and “disappear” people without due process, the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of American cities, and the targeted prosecution of political adversaries — that which was merely feared has now come to pass.But does this mean the description “fascist” should now be used freely as a way of characterising the Trump administration — the way “populism” was after 2016? Not only are there serious questions about the rhetorical efficacy of the term’s use (even if it is historically or politically accurate) or its ability to mobilise an electorate against a common democratic threat. There is also the prospect that the use of the term itself could provide a degree of licence, in the minds of some, to take matters into their own hands and engage in outright political violence.This points to a kind of two-fold paradox involving “fascism”. On the one hand, fascism is itself a paradoxical political phenomenon in the way it holds together seemingly incommensurable impulses. As José Ortega y Gasset famously remarked in 1927:“It asserts authoritarianism and organises rebellion … It seems to pose itself as the forge of a strong State, and uses means most conducive to its dissolution, as if it were a destructive faction or a secret society. Whichever way we approach fascism we find that it is simultaneously one thing and its contrary, it is A and not A …”On the other hand, while the term “fascism” could accurately convey the gravity of the situation facing an advanced democracy, the very use of the term could deepen the democratic dysfunction and thereby exacerbate the political conflict. Would we be well-advised, then, to follow Orwell’s advice and use the term only ever circumspectly and not as a rhetorical weapon against our opponents?Guest: Jason Stanley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he is also the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He is the author of How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and, most recently, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
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  • Mailbag — we answer your questions
    This week is the first ever “Minefield Mailbag”, where Waleed and Scott try to respond to what’s been on our listeners’ minds.The questions they take on cover such diverse topics as society’s obligations to self-professed “sovereign citizens”, whether NATO is to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, why “virtue signalling” may not be such a bad thing after all, and the discrete relationship between philosophy and gardening.If you’d like to submit a question for a future mailbag, or propose a topic for a future episode, you can send an email to [email protected].
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  • Why Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a test for democracy — and of our decency
    It would be hard to overstate the significance of Charlie Kirk within the conservative movement and in the Trump administration. By some reckoning, his influence and social media prominence were second only to Donald Trump himself.As the founder and face of Turning Point USA, Kirk was pivotal in driving Trump’s appeal among younger voters — particularly young men. And, indeed, his singular appeal was to have made a muscular, self-assured brand of conservative Christian nationalism appealing in a hyper-online age. Hence his podcast would come to enjoy the kind of online saturation reserved for few other “content creators”. The social media algorithm was Charlie Kirk’s vernacular.It would not be right, however, to call Kirk an “online influencer”. Instead, he was a MAGA evangelist, a charismatic figure in the full sense of the word. And like all charismatic figures, while he tried to instil belief in young people, he also came to be the object of their belief — they could derive confidence from his confidence, from his self-assertiveness, from his ability to answer his detractors. Which is why his willingness to engage with his opponents in front of large crowds at colleges and on university campuses was integral to his persona.It is certainly to Kirk’s credit that he engaged in frank debate with those who were offended by his strident political convictions. But the performative logic of these “debates” was not to convince so much as it was to “own”. The true audience were not those physically present. Which is to say, point of the debates was to be turned into “content”.This begins to approach the significance of Charlie Kirk for those who have been left devastated by his assassination. Quite apart from the inherent indecency and immorality of taking the life of a young husband and father, killing Kirk has been received as an attack on a belief system — with its intertwined religious, racial and political elements — that sees itself as already threatened by “enemies within”.Assisted by how increasingly prominent his own Christianity became in recent years, Kirk represents what “America” will look like when it is made “great again”. It is no wonder, then, that he is quickly becoming canonised as a MAGA martyr.Finding smug satisfaction in the death of Charlie Kirk is to allow oneself to fall outside the bounds of fundamental decency. Wishing to “right the record” of his immoderate, frequently bigoted rhetoric, after his death, in such a way that it makes it sound as though Kirk “had it coming”, is also utterly indecent. And while there is no virtue in performing grief that one does not feel, being contemptuous of those who are grief-stricken over Kirk’s murder is itself democratically corrosive.Indeed, one of the predicates of political violence is the inability to recognise the humanity in one’s fellow citizens, and to see them only ever as bearers of a particular ideology — as “abstractions”. And that’s what is worrying about this particular political moment. Once citizens are turned into ideological abstractions — whether they’re called “fascists” or members of the “radical left” — they can be sacrificed in the service of a greater cause. In this way, contempt or the abandonment of basic decency are the conditions of possibility of “categorical” violence.If contempt and indecency are the kindling, then an event like the assassination of Charlie Kirk could provide the spark that turns the United States’ current “cold” civil war into a theatre of political violence.
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  • Bonus episode: Jane Austen’s enduring charm
    In August, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh from The Bookshelf on Radio National, teamed up with the indomitable Sophie Gee — Professor of English at Princeton University, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Sydney, and co-host of the podcast The Secret Life of Books — and Scott Stephens from The Minefield, to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen (1775–1817).In front of a live audience at the State Library of New South Wales, the quartet discussed Austen’s innovative approach to fiction, why her novels are of such abiding interest to moral philosophy, the importance of “a room of her own” when writing, and her subtle critique of patriarchy, gender norms, slavery and religion.Finally, they reflect on three exemplary moments in Austen’s last three novels — Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816) and Persuasion (1818).This episode was originally broadcast on The Bookshelf on Thursday, 11 September 2025.
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In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.
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