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Something went haywire with American politics not long into the social-media age.  Report after report told us that America was sick and tired of the two major factions, yet the only avenue for someone to disrupt those factions seemed to be securing the faction’s nod to run for president in the name of the faction.  In the meantime, “safe, legal and rare” gave way, some time around the summer of 2016, to shouting one’s abortion, and because the GOP didn’t want to get left behind in the race to madness, the GOP, former home of the Moral Majority and Religious Right, nominated a professional-wrestling promoter who posed for the cover of Playboy and, as we found out later, paid off some of its models to keep affairs quiet.

And while all this was going on, Charlie Camosy wrote us a book proposing a different sort of politics, one rooted not in red-blue tribalism but in an ethic that receives life as a gift in all arenas of public matter and invites the so-called exhausted middle to start telling the parties what to do instead of the other way around.  That sounds so good right now that I’m especially glad to have Charlie on the show to talk about his new book Resisting Throwaway Culture from New City Press.