The Dig

Nikhil Pal Singh on the unfortunate obsession shared by certain pundits, journalists and social scientists: definitively proving that Trump won because of racism, and racism alone. What drives so many people to dedicate so much time to arguing that either class or race or gender or whatever matters the most—or worse yet, matters exclusively? And what does "matter more" even mean? Plus, a lengthy D...

Dan speaks to Elizabeth Rush, the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a lyrical, mournful but ultimately hopeful account of people dealing with amongst the most tangible effects of global warming right now: the rising seas that are threatening poor and working-class people with dislocation, community destruction and compounded destitution. It's a beautifully-written guide to...

Today's episode is a long one. It's the first of two this week on climate politics: a live event that I hosted at Verso Books in New York a couple weeks ago. Or, at least part of it is. The event livestream, which we grabbed the audio from, malfunctioned for the first half hour or so of the episode. And so, dear listeners, we made lemonade out of audiovisual lemons and re-did the first part of the...

Josie Duffy Rice on Justice in America, her new podcast from The Appeal that she co-hosts with with Clint Smith, media coverage of criminal justice, carceral feminism and domestic violence, and the disturbing liberal affection for federal law enforcement under Trump. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out For a Left Populism by Chantal Mouffe versobooks.com/books/2748-for-a-left-populism Support this po...

Russia: the more your average American thinks about it, the less they seem to know. National security-state enthused liberals blame Putin and for creating what is an obviously-if-incomprehensibly made-in-America monster. Trump, in turn, cannot seem to contain his giddy enthusiasm for Putin's brand of hyper-masculine authoritarianism. Meanwhile, Russia, an actual country where roughly 144 million p...

Part two of a two-part interview with Aslı Bâli on the Syrian civil war and the larger geopolitical conflicts that shape the Middle East—with an emphasis on the role played the United States. During part one, which you should definitely listen to first, Bâli discussed the various powers sacrificing the lives of Syrian people in the pursuit of their perceived geopolitical and sectarian interests. I...

Aslı Ü. Bâli joins Daniel for part one of a two-part interview on the Syrian Civil War and the murderously instrumentalized geopolitics that fuel it. Syrians continue to suffer and to die while various actors treat the conflict as a proxy for their own geopolitical ends; meanwhile, huge numbers of Syrian refugees languish in neighboring countries, and the much smaller number who have made their wa...

That right-wing people in the US and Europe have made George Soros the answer to so many troubling questions is not very surprising: he's a billionaire, he's Jewish and, unlike most of his cohort, he is an actual intellectual who spends much of his money on substantively progressive causes. Daniel Bessner's essay on him in n+1 (https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-globalist/), howev...

Sorry to Bother You is a hilarious film about the dead serious shitiness of life under neoliberalism's flexibilized and precarious labor regime, a system teetering upon a thin line between free labor exploitation and a form of expropriation reminiscent of full-on slave labor—all at the mercy of the thinly-veiled barbarity of Palo Alto-style techno-utopianism. It's about how capitalist society divi...

If Kerri Evelyn Harris wins in Delaware, she will have knocked out an incumbent US Senator. And that would be a really big deal. Harris, a left candidate backed by Justice Democrats, is Dan's guest today. She is the latest candidate putting forward the bold proposition that in a democracy ordinary people should govern themselves—particularly since well-credentialed incumbents like her opponent, Se...

The SESTA/FOSTA law purportedly aims to curb sex trafficking. But as my guest Melissa Gira Grant explains, it actually denies sex workers access to online platforms to more safely conduct their business. It received just two "no" votes in the Senate: from Rand Paul and Ron Wyden. It's a problem of hegemony: prohibition has long been plain common sense. So, it's our job to change that. The first st...

Kaniela Ing (kanielaing.com) is a DSA member running in Hawaii's 1st Congressional District, calling for an end to imperialism and rule by the wealthy, and for housing rights, a green New Deal, Medicare for All, and free college. And he's Dan’s guest. Ocasio-Cortez became an overnight celebrity when she defeated Joe Crowely. But what's most important is that you know who these candidates are befor...

Janus was an entirely expected and atrocious decision. The conservative business interests that successfully obliterated private sector unions hope it will do the same to their public-sector counterparts. Chris Maisano, a contributing editor at Jacobin, argues that labor has no choice but to return to its militant roots if it hopes to survive. In other words, to survive, labor has to fight for a l...

Checking your privilege. Invisible knapsacks. Intersectionality. In his new book from Verso, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity), Asad Haider questions the terms and concepts that underpin much liberal and left conversation about race and racism, exploring critiques advanced by the black radical tradition to mount a thorou...

The last episode in this week's Ocasio-Cortez super series. First, an interview with Seth Ackerman on his essay "A Blueprint for a New Party," which lays out a strategy for building independent socialist power effectively, which means opportunistically seizing the Democratic Party ballot line when necessary. jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-labor-party-ackerman/ Then, Kate Aronoff...

This week's super series on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory and the future of left politics continues with Julia Salazar, a DSA member running for a Brooklyn state Senate in New York's District 18. Salazar's campaign worked hard for Ocasio-Cortez; now, Ocasio-Cortez's team is returning the favor. Recently, The New York Daily News wondered if Salazar might be the new Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez...

Capitol Hill used to be a lonely place for a leftist. And, frankly, it still is. But now that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appears to be headed to Washington, Senator Bernie Sanders will likely have some powerful company. Today, Sanders is Dan's guest, and they're talking about the impact of Ocasio-Cortez's victory and where the left goes from here. This is the latest interview in this week's Ocasio-C...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory should make New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a larger-than-life bully and ideologically-chameleon Democrat, very afraid. He faces a challenge from Dan's guest today, Cynthia Nixon, who has spent the years after her time on Sex in the City organizing for public education. After what happened to Joe Crowley, the left is more energized than ever. And what once appeared t...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a 28-year old Latina working-class champion committed to social transformation who beat one of the most powerful men in Congress: the King of Queens. Dan had an extended conversation with her about how organized people won her election, how she’ll stay accountable to those movements now that she’s a rock star, establishment myopia and denial, The Congressional Progressi...

Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, won an overwhelming victory in Mexico's presidential election, shattering a corrupt, old party system that brought ordinary Mexicans rampant violence and economic immiseration. But AMLO faces powerful political and economic constraints once in office—including some of his own making. Dan's guest is Christy Thornton, a professor of sociology and Latin A...

Today, we're talking about Italy, where a so-called "populist" alliance of the Five Star Movement and right-wing League just took over the government with anti-migrant and Euro-skeptic agenda. Dan's guest is David Broder, a historian of French and Italian communism and frequent contributor to Jacobin. The Five Star Movement was for a time welcomed by some on the left. But it’s not of the left; rat...

Stephen Wertheim, a Lecturer in American and international history at Birkbeck, University of London, breaks cuts through the suffocating foreign policy debate that shapes American Empire under Trump.   Peace has broken out across the Korean Peninsula—or, at least, the odds that Donald Trump will blow the world up have gone down a just a bit—at least temporarily. Yes, Trump is the one who pushed u...

Everyone wants to know what's wrong with Appalachia. But beginning in the 1960s, it was "white ethics"—Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews and other non-WASPs—who broke from the New Deal coalition, embracing their Ellis Island immigrant roots in reaction to the Black Freedom struggle and, ultimately, Latin American migration. Dan’s guest today is Matthew Frye Jacobson, an historian at Yale and the autho...

Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind, one very bright spot in an often disappointing landscape of mainstream immigration journalism, discusses the historical, political and legal context of Trump’s family separation policy. Dan also just wrote a lengthy piece on this for Jacobin, which you can read at jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-immigration-child-family-separation-policy Thanks to Verso Books. Chec...

David Harvey has taught Capital to huge numbers of people everywhere. Dan interviews him about his latest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. Harvey explains why he thinks all three volumes are of Capital are key, why we’re still living under neoliberalism at least unless and until ethnonationalist autarchy pushes it aside, how capitalism might survive climate change via mass i...