For Episode 22 of the Progress Pondcast, Brendan and I brought back Bill Hangley Jr., who was the guest on two of our most popular podcasts (Episode 13 and Episode 14) back in July and August 2024. This time, he was keen to discuss his new article in The Philadelphia Hall Monitor about his investigation into what Donald Trump’s “funding freeze” will mean for Philadelphia’s parks, and what it means for the country as a whole.

Hangley spent the early 1990’s in what was then called Czechoslovakia reporting on that country’s nascent efforts to throw off decades of Soviet domination and embrace a democratic system, and he sees all kinds of parallels between the chaos and paralysis being created by Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the grim cynicism, learned helplessness and dysfunction he encountered there. What does it mean when no one can make a decision or keep a promise that can’t be broken by some unaccountable, capricious undemocratic elites that are higher up in the food chain? What happens when politicians lose their power to broker deals or make solid commitments? How do local governments contend with a system where the federal government is simply unreliable? He saw first hand how these things are utterly corrosive to supposedly democratic systems, and he lets us know what to expect.

Going back a few more decades in time, we discuss the 1939 partition of Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and look at how it parallels the meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia between Russian and American officials where Ukraine and its natural resources were divided. It riffs off my recent article Trump and Putin Pursue a Deal On Ukraine. What does it mean for the U.S. to ally with Russia against Western democracies? One clue is that the reason the Nazis succeeded in convincing Stalin to sign a non-aggression pact was their pitch that Western democracies were their shared enemies.

If you like European history, you’ll really enjoy the show. You can listen on YouTube, Apple, Prime, I Heart Radio, or Spotify.

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We would also really appreciate any support you can give us on Patreon. All subscriptions there are shared equally with Brendan who does the tireless and often frustrating editing for these podcasts, and to be sustainable we really need this to be worth his while. There are a lot of costs besides time to putting these things out, and we’ll work hard to keep finding interesting guests and topics that will interest you.

I hope you’re holding up under this assault on our country. Remember, things won’t get better until the fascist regime is defeated.