American Elections: 1980

Today it’s the first episode in a new series asking why contemporary political philosophy struggles to make sense of the deepest problems of politics and exploring how the history of ideas might help. David talks to political theorist Paul Sagar about why looking for justice migh ...  Show more

Today’s episode is the second part of David’s conversation with Helen Thompson about what makes living in a world dominated by the United States so strange. What has changed about American power in the twenty-first century? Is Trump a deviation from the norm or is he simply an ex ...  Show more

Warmonger or nuclear disarmer? Ronald Reagan’s presidency survived an assassination attempt, the AIDS epidemic and the Iranian hostage crisis. He powered through the 1980s, creating his own truth and narrative, in a series of events that read like a Hollywood screenplay.  Tom an ...  Show more

Presidential elections have taken place in America every four years since 1788, but the 2020 election was unlike anything we had experienced before. Amid a pandemic, an economic crisis, and a long overdue reckoning with systemic racism, Americans made their votes and voices heard ...  Show more

His Hollywood career drying up, Ronald Reagan works both for the Screen Actors Guild and General Electric in the 1950s. Building connections with the Californian elite, and having gained national attention with a speech for the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, he become ...  Show more

Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to put our present politics into historical context. The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to ...  Show more