Last week, we posted an interview Dan recorded in Barcelona on Spanish politics—specifically the question of Catalan independence, and also the municipalist movement governing cities like Barcelona. What we didn't really talk much about was the fact that the conservative Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy was about to fall—which it did, just a few days later. So, Dan brought sociologist Carlos Delclós back for a follow-up interview. Production note: Dan sounds like he’s speaking in an aquarium ...
Jun 09, 2018
For libertarians, liberty means something different. It’s about liberty for property owners. And in their quest to preserve that absolute freedom for the ownership class—whether their assets be human slaves, factories or extractive industries—democracy must be curtailed and the power of the people must be checked and repressed. This is the argument put forward by Dan’s guest, historian Nancy MacLean, in her book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for Americ...
Jun 06, 2018
Fifty years ago, a mainstream group of high-profile Americans declared the following: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our...
Jun 02, 2018
Spanish politics are complicated. Dan speaks to Carlos Delclós, Kate Shea Baird and Bécquer Seguín to help clarify the Catalan independence movement, the radical municipalist governments that now govern major Spanish cities including Barcelona, and the promise and problems of the left-wing party Podemos. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art. And Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State ...
May 30, 2018
The steady pace of school massacres has revived calls to put more cops in school. And so atrocities committed by white students are exploited to make schools more like prisons, and ensure that the former remain a rapid-fire pipeline into the latter. Dan’s guests are Dakota Hall, the Executive Director of Leaders Igniting Transformation, a youth of color led organization fighting the school to prison pipeline in Milwaukee; and Dmitri Holtzman, the Director of Education Justice Campaigns at the Ce...
May 27, 2018
A laundry list of modest policy solutions is not enough, it turns out. It's not just that technocratic fixes-around-the-edges spectacularly fail to meet people's needs; in failing to articulate a big picture vision of how the world ought to be transformed, they fail to move people—either emotionally or, more concretely, to the polls. Dan’s guest George Monbiot argues that the left needs a powerful new story to win power and change lives in his new book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an...
May 23, 2018
Israel is massacring Palestinians daring to approach a fence that occupation forces have built to shore up an ethno-state founded on the principle of apartheid. Nothing could be more clear. But you wouldn't no that from the at best muddied coverage that prevails in mainstream media accounts. Dan’s guest is Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney, professor at George Mason University and a powerful and eloquent voice challenging the anti-Palestine narrative—including, straight into the lion's den o...
May 18, 2018
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” The rule of law: the #resistance has construed it to be a cornerstone of opposition to Trump. It is certainly alarming to live under a president who flirts with operating in a permanent and near-total state of exception. But it's the rule of law as we've known it that has blessed the wide-open floodgates of corporate money into American politics, looked the ...
May 16, 2018
Recent cases of horrific child abuse have elicited widespread media attention. What the media coverage often misses is what these incidents reveal about a two-tiered child protection system that systemically surveils, punishes and destroys poor black families while ignoring abuses perpetrated in affluent white homes. Dan's guest is return guest Dorothy Roberts, who has closely studied the racism and poverty policing that pervades the child protection system. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Revo...
May 12, 2018
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May 09, 2018
Dan just moderated a discussion in Philadelphia with Senator Sanders, along with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, scholar and frequent Dig guest Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and veteran defense lawyer and advocate Premal Dharia. Bernie came to Philly because what's happening here is extraordinarily important: it's a city where for years cops have committed abuses and engaged in corruption with near impunity, and where prosecutors long looked the other way while feeding poor young black a...
May 05, 2018
This is part two of Dan's interview on Hannah Arendt's notion of "the right to have rights." This episode covers a lot, including why we must fight not only to expand the democratic political community but also to deepen its power—all at a time when the nativist right is exploiting the many crises unleashed by neoliberalism and empire to erect walls and punish scapegoats. One upshot is that zombie liberalism can't be the answer, because it is precisely the liberal order that is a key source of t...
May 04, 2018
What are rights worth when government denies people the very right to have rights? Political theorist Hannah Arendt recognized this loss of "the right to have rights" as millions of refugees found themselves without a national home in the wake of world wars. Human rights, it became clear, proved to be an empty promise for those excluded from citizenship—the foundational right to be a member of a political community. Today, this insight remains a critical one as a record number of humans transit ...
May 02, 2018
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} James Comey is liberal America’s favorite cop and now, as a result, a bestselling author as well. Patrick Blanchfield returns to talk about his Baffler review of Comey’s new book. It’s awful, of course. But it’s bad in productively revealing ways. Comey has become an icon of the liberal fetishization of the national security state as a bulwark against ...
Apr 27, 2018
It's yet the latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics. Dan’s guest is Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Last year, Mayor Lumumba pledged to make Jackson "the most radical city on the planet." Lumumba, who comes out of a decades-old revolutionary black nationalist movement, is serious about that. But he also faces serious challenges: Jackson is a majority black city which, like many such cities, has much of its wealth appropriated by its l...
Apr 25, 2018
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} It's the latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics. Dennis Kucinich is running a viable race for governor of Ohio. Cynthia Nixon, running with Working Families Party backing, has Cuomo truly freaked out in New York. There are major primary fights underway in California—most everywhere, it seems, some variant of the lef...
Apr 21, 2018
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 15.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} The latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics and we're talking about Democratic Socialists of America's new electoral strategy. DSA has almost overnight become a serious force on an American socialist left that has for decades lacked m...
Apr 18, 2018
Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the second of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In part 1, we talked about a lot of things, including how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible; and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism in a decolonizing world while thwarting worker organizing. In this installment, w...
Apr 14, 2018
Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the first of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In this first episode, we talk about how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible; and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism in a decolonizing world while thwarting worker organizing. On the next show, we'll discuss a lot mo...
Apr 11, 2018
It’s our 100th episode and the launch of our spring fundraising drive! Aziz Rana returns to The Dig 15 years after the invasion of Iraq to reflect on the paucity of substantive anti-imperialist politics across much of the American left. Socialism isn’t just an internationalist politics on principle: domestic and foreign struggles are inherently linked, just as the forces we struggle against are globally intertwined—and the latter benefit from perpetuating an ideology that artificially divides th...
Apr 07, 2018
It’s obvious that student debt can be an excruciating financial burden. But anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom explains that it has also done a lot to make American families into plunderable financial mines, part of a larger capitalist system that individualizes blame for economic failure and forces families that can to support their children into their twenties while depleting retirement savings. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out the free e-book Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobo...
Apr 04, 2018
Many Americans take the existence of so-called "illegal immigrants" for granted, whatever their opinion of the matter. But illegality isn't a property of immigrants; rather, it's a creation of positive law. And we can only understand how immigrants are declared "illegal" by the government by examining this country's too-often ignored history of racist and exclusionary immigration politics. Dan’s guest today is Mae Ngai, an historian at Columbia and the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Alie...
Mar 28, 2018
Perhaps nothing has more defined the monstrosity of Donald Trump than his racist demonization and targeting of immigrants from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries and those nations he deems to be "shitholes" or, according to another account, "shithouses." But what's seldom reported is that one of the key mechanisms that the Administration has used to target immigrants was rolled out under Barack Obama. It's called Secure Communities, and it's the culmination of decades of policymaking and politick...
Mar 25, 2018
Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry talk about their new book To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. King is often remembered for his soaring oratory. But the commonplace emphasis on his rhetoric in place of his ideas too often allows enemies of King's agenda to domesticate him or, worse, to weaponize his taken-out-of-context words to bolster the very forces of racism and oppression that King had struggled to defeat. Dan asks Shelby and Terry about Kin...
Mar 21, 2018
Democrat Conor Lamb's victory is a stunning rebuke of Republicans. But Lamb is far from an ideal candidate, and so the race also raises a perennial debate between the left and liberal center over what kind of alternative to the Republican Right we need. Dan’s guests are Elizabeth Fiedler, Sara Inammorato, and Summer Lee, three leftist women running for state rep in Pennsylvania—all three DSA members endorsed by their local chapters. Other stuff: Patrick Blanchfield’s article on guns and neoliber...
Mar 17, 2018
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} In West Virginia, a focal point of Trump-era liberal armchair ethnography, teachers have won a historic statewide strike just as the Supreme Court is poised to rule in Janus, a case that will mark the culmination of a long right-wing effort to gut public sector unions. It's a scary time—but maybe, just maybe, also an exciting one. Dan’s guests today ar...
Mar 14, 2018
Neoliberal culture is one that expects little from government and everything from plucky individuals—including, apparently, the self-sacrificing courage to charge an AR-15 wielding gunman while your classmates cower behind bulletproof backpacks. Writer Patrick Blanchfield returns to the show to discuss his recent essays on guns for New York magazine (forthcoming) and The Intercept (theintercept.com/2018/02/28/parkland-florida-school-shootings-arming-teachers). Thanks to our supporters at Verso B...
Mar 09, 2018
How does gun culture get built from the ground up? What are the everyday politics of guns? Sociologist Jennifer Carlson does ethnographic fieldwork that provides answers to these questions, showing how men see guns as a way to be a protector in a time of economic precocity and how the NRA’s massive training operation helps shape the racialized identity of “citizen protectors” defending “sheeple” against the “wolves.” Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out The Right to Have Rights by ...
Mar 07, 2018
Nomiki Konst, a correspondent for The Young Turks and Sanders appointee to the DNC’s Unity Reform Commission, talks about the Berniecrat struggle against a corrupt neoliberal establishment to democratize the Democratic Party. This is the first in a series on electoral politics over the next couple of months that will include conversations about DSA’s electoral strategy, an interview with Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, and more. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out...
Mar 02, 2018
Did the "Woke Blacks" Instagram account really cost Clinton the election? Glenn Greenwald returns to the show to ask basic but rarely asked questions about the troll army’s presumed efficacy, explain his often mischaracterized position on Russiagate, and call out Republicans and Democrats for hypocritically supporting unfettered power for national security state surveillance. Thanks to Verso and University of California Press. Check out The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hu...
Feb 28, 2018
