The Dig

What Trump has accomplished is spread fear through immigrant communities and, with the Muslim and refugee travel bans, made bigotry the explicit cornerstone of immigration policy. But on immigration, as on other matters, Trump does not emerge from a vacuum. Mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians have for decades built a giant deportation machine. Dan talks to Dara Lind, the immigration r...

Workers have for years faced a neoliberal onslaught administered by a bipartisan establishment of technocratic elites who have ensured the redistribution of wealth into the hands of the rich. This is an elite that has abetted the decimation of labor unions and whose primary disagreement are over how severely those expelled from the labor market should be allowed to suffer. My guest today is journa...

Donald Trump appears to many in the guise of a terrifying aberration. But in reality, he is the outcome of trends that are far too normal. We need movements to come together to not only defeat Trump but to take on the system that made him possible. Naomi Klein takes on Trump’s brand, and offers some thoughts as to how to tarnish it, in her new book “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politi...

Mass incarceration controls poor people and populations that have been excluded from the labor market. Politically, tough-on-crime rhetoric has for decades been a tool for politicians to appeal to white voters’ racism. But what’s less discussed is the complicated history of criminal justice politics within black communities and amongst black politicians. Yale Law professor James Forman talks about...

Bernie would have won. And in the UK, he sort of did last week. The Labour Party, under left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn (full name: Jeremy Bernard Corbyn) came far from behind and stripped Prime Minister Theresa May of her majority in parliament — after the punditocracy had confidently predicted that radicals had doomed Labour to electoral oblivion. Dan speaks to Richard Seymour, the author most re...

Nothing that so exposes Donald Trump as a snake oil salesman as the fact that he ran a campaign pitched at white working-class anger toward so-called globalism and then stacked his administration with representatives from Big Finance. A decade after Wall Street blew up the global economy, it is now very much in the drivers seat, sucking up as much wealth as possible from regular people and redistr...

Donald Trump won the presidency in significant part by pledging to do something that his predecessors had already mostly accomplished: building a big, beautiful wall on the border with Mexico. For liberals and centrists, the wall now shares a toxic association with Trump. But until recently, militarizing the border with Mexico was accepted as a core piece of the commonsense, bipartisan establishme...

The drug war is winding down and heating up all at the same time. States are legalizing recreational weed while prosecutors around the country are charging dealers, including small-time ones, with murder when their drugs contribute to someone else’s fatal overdose; attorney Jeff Sessions has instructed US Attorneys to go to the max on severe mandatory minimum sentences. Rick Lines, executive direc...

What’s the matter with Appalachia? Many liberal elites think they know the answer. Since Trump’s campaign first took off, the region has become a symbol of all that is wrong with Red State America: guns, bigotry, a willingness to get swindled by right-wing snake-oil salesmen. There is, indeed, a lot wrong with Appalachia. But what’s most wrong is that a region where people waged militant labor str...

The Women’s March on Washington sent a clear message that women would be at the lead in battling the right in the years to come. But it left unresolved significant divides that pervaded the 2016 primary campaign, as the many signs paying homage to Hillary Clinton made clear. Featherstone throws down Clinton's faux feminism, the Women's Strike, Bill de Blasio and more.

Why do Republicans only seem to care about deficits and debt when they’re trying to cut social welfare programs? Dan's guest for this special episode is Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He discusses Trump’s regressive tax proposal and the GOP's never ending efforts to redistribute wealth the super-rich.

The media has become a part of the story like perhaps never before. Journalist probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable news outlets provided him with wall-to-wall free advertising and, more recently, lauded Trump as “presidential” because he decided to attack Syria. Adam Johnson, a writer at Fairness and Accu...

The Dig normally serves up ice cold, well-digested takes. Sometimes, however, something important happens and Dan finds someone who can help us understand it quickly. Last weekend’s election in France, which advanced the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen and neoliberal centrist Emmanuel Macron to a runoff, is one such event. Sebastian Budgen, an editor for Verso Books, a contributing editor...

Putting “black faces in high places,” scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, has not only failed to benefit the working class and poor black majority; it has actually harmed them by legitimating an individualistic, meritocratic narrative that blames poor black people’s condition on their own personal failings. Taylor is a professor of African-American studies at Princeton and the author of From #...

Prisons don’t just keep inmates in; they keep the public out. Even at a moment when mass incarceration is under unprecedented criticism it is quite hard for people on the outside to empathize with people who they cannot see or speak to. My guests today are Brett Story and Jordan Camp. Story is a filmmaker who has made an incredible new documentary called The Prison in 12 Landscapes, which shines a...

Trump’s oligarchic regime is an extreme version of the imperial and economic vision that has guided presidents of both major parties. But the popularity of Trump’s chauvinist, xenophobic appeal points to a major crisis in the ideological and political-economic regime of the United States and the world for decades. That’s neoliberalism, a system that isn't quite over under Trump. But as Nicole Asch...

Medicaid expansion saved Obamacare from repeal. There’s a lot to hate about Obamacare, but that expansion did something very good on a very large scale — and it made just enough Republicans very nervous about taking it away. It's an important lesson about economic policy generally: the more universal a program is, the greater the number of Americans who become advocates for its preservation — a fa...

What a moment to read, or to re-read, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Corey Robin’s 2011 collection of essays — especially if you need to disabuse friends and family of the notion that Trump is some historic degradation of conservatism's good name rather than a malignant, nasty outgrowth of a long history of violent reaction against left movements for equality.

The Democratic Socialists of America are growing — suddenly and explosively. Last June ahead of the Democratic National Convention, DSA counted 6,500 members. Today, after a presidential bid from a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and Trump’s terrifying election, membership has grown to more than 19,000 and counting. People are considering socialism, long a dirty word in American politics, in...

On the Left, few forms of mainstream journalism are more detested than political reporting. It often substitutes the horse race for substance, dresses up conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom as real analysis, and resorts to the false balance of he-said-she-said instead of establishing what is actually factual. Political reporters took a serious hit after Donald Trump won the Republican primary a...

Fighting for Black Lives Under Trump The Movement for Black Lives’ insistence that black lives matter is deceptively straightforward and minimal. But it has transformed black politics, and American politics as a whole. From the tension and contradiction of the Obama years, in which a black man became the most powerful person on earth but conditions continued to worsen for black people as a whole,...

Mass incarceration should be central to any analysis of American political economy. It's also a moral monstrosity. But before The New Jim Crow and anti-mass incarceration activists across the country loudly insisted this was the case, it received little attention. Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown o...

All eyes have turned to the judiciary. It’s the one potential institutional check on Trump—aside, of course, from the shadowy national security state— at the federal level. The courts have the power to stop and strike down laws and actions that violate the law or the Constitution. Recent rulings by a federal district judge in Washington and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made this clear after...

Mark Blyth wasn't surprised by the rise of Donald Trump, nor Brexit, nor the crises spreading across Europe. He actually predicted them all.  Blyth, the author of "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea," explains how economic crisis has led to upheaval in a political establishment that worked obsessively to eliminate inflation and maximize profits at the expense of general wellbeing. This cri...

George Cicariello-Maher is professor of political science at Drexel University and author of several books, including Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, published by Verso as part of the Jacobin Series. He recently drew the ire of white supremacist, "alt-right" trolls after a mocking tweet about "white genocide," including death threats to his family. Perhaps more concerning was...