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 recently of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical politics, and a founding editor of Salvage.
Jun 13, 2017
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 redistributing it upward to the super rich. Thanks to our advertisers at The Nation! Get a deal on magazine...
Jun 07, 2017
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 establishment immigration and drug policy agenda. Today, my guest is Peter Andreas, a professor at the Watson I...
May 31, 2017
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 director of Harm Reduction International, lays out what an alternative to the drug war should look like.
May 24, 2017
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 struggles has now been devastated by coal company greed, automation, shifts in global commodity markets...
May 16, 2017•59 min
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.
May 09, 2017
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.
May 04, 2017
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 Accuracy in Reporting, breaks it down.
May 02, 2017
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 at Jacobin, and a member of the editorial board at Historical Materialism, tells explains what's up...
Apr 27, 2017
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 #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, from Haymarket Books.
Apr 25, 2017
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 harsh light on America’s prison archipelago without ever taking a peek inside. is a scholar of the ...
Apr 18, 2017
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 Aschoff argues in the most recent issue of Jacobin, it has radically changed. Today, my guest is Nicole ...
Apr 11, 2017
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 fact conservatives know and fear thanks to Medicare and Social Security but that many liberals don't. ...
Apr 04, 2017
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.
Mar 28, 2017
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 far larger numbers than in decades past — especially young people. Today, my guests are DSA National...
Mar 21, 2017
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 and then the presidency, and Bernie Sanders mounted a dead serious challenge to the Democratic Party’...
Mar 14, 2017
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, the Movement for Black Lives erupted and made radical demands for social and economic justice, and t...
Mar 07, 2017
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 of American Politics, and The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. ...
Mar 01, 2017
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 they blocked Trump’s Muslim and refugee bans. But the judiciary, despite pretenses to the contrary, ...
Feb 21, 2017
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 crisis has produced horrific peril, as the Trump administration's first weeks have made clear. But for t...
Feb 14, 2017
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 the response from Drexel Administration, which almost immediately released a statement calling his ...
Feb 07, 2017
Today, we bring you two interviews. The first is with Nicholas Espíritu from the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups mounting legal challenges against the ban, who will explain the legal and constitutional challenge to the Muslim and refugee ban. The second is with Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, a leading supporter of Bernie Sanders’ primary bid, and co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington....
Jan 31, 2017
Donald Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos, a free-market, far-right Christian billionaire dedicated to privatizing public schools, to be his Secretary of Education. In her confirmation hearing, DeVos made it painfully clear that she has little understanding of public education aside from her dedication to destroying it. She is the heir to an auto parts fortune and her husband, Dick, is the heir to a fortune derived from the direct sales company Amway, which the FTC at one point decided was not a py...
Jan 29, 2017
This week we re-broadcast Jacobin Magazine (https://www.jacobinmag.com), Verso (https://www.versobooks.com/), and Haymarket Books (https://www.haymarketbooks.org/)' anti-inauguration event from The Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. featuring Naomi Klein, Anand Gopal, Jeremy Scahill, Owen Jones, & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Start times: Naomi Klein (6:03) Anand Gopal (26:14) Jeremy Scahill (46:19) Owen Jones (1:05:00) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (1:23:18) Please consider supporting The Dig! Even a...
Jan 21, 2017
What is to be done? How can I get involved? Those are questions that a lot of people are asking now that Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States. Today, I speak to Nijmie Dzurinko, a Black woman who grew up poor in the deindustrialized Western Pennsylvania steel town of Monessen. Nijmie is one of the smartest and most experienced organizers we know. In the past, she has been Executive Director and organizer with the Philadelphia Student Union, was a co-founder of the Media...
Jan 17, 2017
Presidents Bush and Obama both presided over an expansive War on Terror and a national security state with a lethal and global reach. Permanent war and warrantless snooping have become the bipartisan consensus backdrop of American politics—an immutable feature of everyday life rather than outrageous abuses to be resisted or, at least, debated. Soon, Donald Trump will become president, meaning that a man brazenly indifferent to the rule of law will be in charge of a killing and surveillance machi...
Jan 10, 2017
Donald Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and pledged to build a “a big, fat, beautiful wall” on the southern border that, of course, Mexico is going to pay for. It's no surprise that Trump's message struck a chord: right-wing nativism has been rising for decades and hardcore xenophobes had long since taken over the Republican Party. Worse yet, so-called immigration moderates on both sides of the aisle—including Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama—have sought to p...
Dec 21, 2016
Journalist Sarah Jaffe's new book Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt chronicles the movements for economic and racial justice that will be at the forefront of the fight against Trump. Daniel interviewed Sarah before a live audience at AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island.
Dec 13, 2016
Donald Trump's election was shocking, if actually not so surprising, and has prompted widespread protests against a cresting right-wing reaction taking shape as a strange and potent combination of white nationalism, make-believe economic populism, libertarian orthodoxy, America-first isolationism and War on Terror extremism. It has also prompted us to relaunch this podcast. Today, we'll be discussing why Trump won and what that says about the political moment in the United States. Many apologies...
Dec 06, 2016
This was the pilot episode for The Dig, a podcast exploring the politics of American class warfare. This month features a discussion about ending the drug war with Sharda Sekaran of the Drug Policy Alliance and Jacob Sullum from Reason magazine. Drug legalization looks a lot different depending on where you stand politically. But socialists and libertarians mostly agree that to end the drug war we must put a complete end to drug prohibition. We relaunched in November 2016. Subscribe and tune in ...
Sep 24, 2015
