On this episode of "The Remix," Dr. James Peterson talks with Dr. Adolph Reed, outspoken professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a scholar and writer on politics, race and the changing role of progressive American politics. Reed says that online media is contributing to the creation of an American "idiocracy." And the two discuss a better "payback" plan than reparations and whether or not the ongoing protests over police conduct are a movement with staying power, or just a reaction.

Peterson weighs in on the still frosty relationship between the NYPD and Mayor de Blasio, the trending hashtags of 2014, and what it means when Azealia Banks takes up the call for reparations. And he gives big props to director Ava DuVernay for a more nuanced look at the civil rights movement in the movie "Selma."

A transcript of Peterson's interview with Reed appears below:

James Peterson: I wonder if we can start off by talking about the year of 2014 in politics. I’m interested in your sense of politics and political movements, and also in some of your specific reactions to the anti-police brutality movement that we’ve seen emerge. And then maybe we can talk a little about presidential politics as we think through the year. 

Adolph Reed: On the domestic front, I guess I’d say, it was the best of years, it was the worst of years — except for the “best” part. 

JP: What was the best of the year and what was the worst of the year? 

AR: I’m trying to think of what the best was, to tell you the truth. I’m not even sure what the worst was. The thing that strikes me most about this past year is the extent to which … it just seems like we’ve taken a qualitatively greater step towards idiocracy. 

JP: What do you mean by “idiocracy”?

AR: It’s actually the name of an extraordinary movie that came out a number of years ago that projects 400 or 500 years into the future, where the whole population has become stupid. So people are buying law degrees at Costco and all that kind of stuff. It’s been a kind of dumbing down and a conflation of domains. For instance, in popular culture, manufactured controversy between Iggy Azalea and Azealia Banks. 

JP: You think that’s manufactured? 

AR: I think it’s part of the culture industry. But what happens is that following popular culture has come to be considered a political act. And debates within popular culture have come to be seen much more as carrying a political significance of their own that has never been the case previously. And it’s happened at the time that the economic conditions and the conditions of everyday life, of more and more of the population, are becoming more and more vulnerable. It just feels like a classic form of bread and circuses, basically. 

JP: Meaning that the discourses that we’re seeing around popular culture are displacing or obscuring some of the more important conversations we need to be having in reality?

AR: Yes. The job insecurity, wage insecurity, the continuing crisis of affordable housing, the complete destruction of public education — like in many cities, with New Orleans being one, and Philly following close behind. This is the kind of stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into sound bites… 

JP: …Or tweets.

AR: Or tweets — tweets especially. And in a funny way, I think that the continuing expanse of the blogosphere has undermined both political perspective and focus and just kind of fills the airwaves and the time with controversies that are ephemeral and don’t add up to very much. And what passes for commentary is this axis of Fox on the one side and MSNBC on the other. 

There’s a term of art in pro wrestling that I stumbled across: “kayfabe.”

JP: Which means what?

AR: It captures the phenomenon of a participating audience coming together around what everyone knows on some level is the fictional quality of the sport, but coming together around a shared commitment to treat it as though it were real, because it feels so good to the fans to do so. 

When you think about it, in a way, that’s the tea party, that’s the birthers, that’s all the rest of it. But I suspect there’s also a variant of that on what calls itself the Left or progressive politics. 

JP: I have so many questions about this. I will concede the point that news has become more news-entertainment than just pure news, and obviously the proliferation of networks reflects that, and the quality of news that we’re able to get access to reflects that. I’m a pop culture scholar, so I’m a firm believer in the value of pop culture to help shape conversations. 

So Azealia Banks has made this pivot. Now she’s talking about reparations. And I wonder, based on your critique — is her talking about reparations emptying out the value of our capacity to have that conversation? Because from my perspective it’s giving us an opportunity to talk about it. But the way I’m seeing you interpret that is that, somehow, it empties the value of the conversation, once pop culture icons engage in it.  

AR: I think my position may even be worse than you think, because I don’t think there’s any value in having the reparations. 

JP: Wow.

AR: The key question for me about reparations has nothing to do with whether the demand is justified in some way. I think there’s even a complicated or complex discussion to have around that question — about what justification means. But the crucial question for me has always been: OK, how can you imagine forming a political alliance that can prevail on this issue? 

And I’ve never gotten anything at all like a satisfactory answer. So my response was: Well, so, why do we want to talk about it then? What’s the point? 

JP: That’s interesting, because I think particularly on the Left, there are all kinds of ideas and ideologies, goals and practices that don’t seem necessarily realizable, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t talk about them though. 

AR: Well, yeah, but there are things you talk about in the bar, things you talk about among your buddies, things you talk about in a classroom. But if you want to talk about the pursuit of reparations as a political program, part of the discussion has to be a strategic one. And I don’t see where the strategic discussion has been had. 

Now, some of my friends and comrades, who are very much identified with the Left, have made an argument going back to the beginning of the century that pushing the reparations discussion in public can be a way to strengthen affirmative action. I’ve been skeptical of that. It seems like it’s as likely to have the opposite effect.  

JP: Because the anti-affirmative action movement is looking for all sorts of racialized discourses to try to overturn it. 

AR: Exactly. 

JP: There are some folk who have said, “Why not trace back the genealogy of enslaved Africans, find out who their descendants are, and try to find some kind of way — either through tuition credits or through different sorts of social policies — to make the reparations adjustment?” You don’t think that’s realistic, thinking about inroads and strategies for the reparations movement?

AR: I think what would make a lot more sense and be more effective and have broader coverage among people who are descendants of slaves in North America would be to fight for universal wealth. Now I don’t even want to use that terminology, because of the way it got loaded in the bogus debate, like in the ’80s. But the fight for social democratic reforms like one I’ve been associated with — free public higher education for everybody — that gives you both a broader constituency, it eliminates the version of means testing. 

And, to be honest, I hadn’t heard about this other wrinkle that you mentioned, of tracing back to genealogy. Because on one hand, I can see it as a response to objections that it’s too difficult to determine who exactly would qualify. But on the other hand, it just seems to me to rehearse all of the problems of means testing, and it creates two constituencies: one constituency that would benefit from the reform and another constituency that would not benefit from the reform, — and the latter constituency would be there just like with affirmative action and with means tested anti-poverty programs. 

JP: Tell me what you think about the re-emergence of the anti-police brutality movement in 2014. 

AR: I don’t want to be a complete curmudgeon about this, but I don’t think it’s a movement. I don’t think it’s quite accurate to call it a movement. What we’ve had is what we’ve had going back to Eleanor Bumpurs in the 1980s.  

JP: And Eleanor Bumpers was the elderly woman in New York City who was unfortunately murdered by police who were making a sort of home-entry situation. 

AR: Exactly. She was a mentally disturbed woman, 65 years old. The first question was: Why do we send the police and not the EMS in the first place? She had a butcher knife in her kitchen. The first shotgun blasts blew off the hand with the knife in it, and then they went on and killed her. This has been a long pattern, obviously. When the stream of public consciousness turned to these outrages and began to challenge them, we saw a couple of things. One was activists who firmly believe in what I have taken to calling lately the “myth of the spark,” that outrage is going to…

JP: Spark a movement. 

AR: Right. And that’s just not the way movements are built. And the problem with these cases is that they are outrages. Quite straightforwardly, they are a chaotic extremes. 

JP: They’re exceptional. 

AR: Yes. So the exceptional outrage provokes an appropriate and predictable protest, but because they’re exceptional, because they are fundamentally episodic extremes that call for episodic responses, there is actually no practical reason to assume that any one of them, or any collection of them, will condense into a movement. 

JP: But that’s the point. I think that if you talk to young activists from Ferguson or you talk to Dream Defenders in Florida or the Justice League in New York, these are all younger groups. These are not civil rights generation activists. These are all hip-hop generation activists. What they’re saying is that the collection of these events makes them less exceptional. And I think they would take some issue with you and I talking about the fact that this is not a movement. Because I think for young people who are organizing, who have borrowed tactics from the civil rights movements but are trying to make this into a movement of their own, they feel as if they are at the forefront of it — that they are doing it their own way. 

What do you say to those young people and those different organizations who are working together to try and address some of these issues across the nation? 

AR: Well, I guess I would say that, while getting old is not a lot of fun, being old confers some advantages. And one of them is having been around the track enough times to be able to make some generalizations. And among the things that I’ve noticed is that, for all of this kind of stuff — this is, like, Occupy, the Million Man March, all of this stuff — the principle defense is a call for what these actions and lines of endeavor will produce. So you can’t really say anything bad except that, well, it hasn’t happened yet. We’ve done this kind of thing before, and it hasn’t produced the outcome that you’re insisting this one is going to do. 

So the argument basically depends on a call for faith in things as yet unseen. There’s not much you can say to that. All I can say is, well, we’ll see if they’re right. 

JP: Can you talk a little about your forthcoming work, When Compromises Come Home to Roost? Of course when it comes out I would love to have you back on, Professor Reed. This has been an incredible conversation. But talk to us a little about what the themes are from When Compromises Come Home to Roost. 

AR: This is what happened. I was approached by Verso to do a book on Obama right around the time of the election. And I said that I’m not going to do an Obama book, but I might do an Obama-mania book, which I then agreed to do. And it was anchored to the question, “Why do so many people, who should have know better” — that is, people who are seasoned political analysts, operatives, or whatever, and not just good-hearted folks who vote — “why did so many people who should have known better get swept up in the irrationally exuberant hype about this guy who was always nothing other than an ordinary Clinton Democrat?” 

JP: A centrist.

AR: Yes. And I had the fortuitous experience of being in a position to watch the birth of his political career. I was in the birthing room, basically, so I’ve seen the act form the very beginning.

[Reed was a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago around the time Obama first emerged as a public figure in Chicago. In 1996, Reed famously wrote a scathing piece of criticism of the then-state senator.]

JP: When he emerged, yes. 

AR: So I started to try and write the thing. And I had been carrying this project, When Compromises Come Home to Roost, around in the back of my head that I conceptualized in a slightly different way. Then I realized that, to give the proper answer to that question about the sources of Obama-mania, depended on giving an account of the decline and transformation of the left in American politics since WWII. And that’s what the book is, basically, and I’m a few pages more than one chapter away from completing it.

(Transcript courtesy of In These Times magazine.)

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"The Remix with Dr. James Peterson," is a new weekly podcast from WHYY that takes a fresh look at how race, culture and politics intersect. Peterson, director of Africana Studies and associate professor of English at Lehigh University, talks to people who are not necessarily in the mainstream news cycle, but who are driving opinions, news and movements through media platforms new and old.

Peterson is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, Inc., an association of hip hop generational scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of hip hop, urban, and youth cultures.

James Peterson's new book is The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture: Beneath the Surface.

Adolph Reed's work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Harper's Magazine and The Nation.  His media appearances include Fox News and "Moyers and Company." He is the author of "Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene" and is currently working on a book that examines the political reaction around Barack Obama's presidency.