Podcast Archives - The Dig

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 Trumpism—when it fact it is that very national security state and its rampant abuses that are deeply implicated in Trump’s rise. The elevation of police as a model of duty and leadership contrasted against Trump’s vulgar monstrosities renders invisible not only why Trump won but why he is so dangerous. Here’s Patrick’s review: thebaffler.com/latest/prig-and-pig-blanchfield Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum versobooks.com/books/2707-revolution-in-the-air And Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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 largely-white suburbs. The human and infrastructural needs are enormous, and the tax base is thin. This is precisely why so many on the left have found what’s going on in Jackson to be so interesting, and why Dan was eager to invite the mayor onto the show. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite. And Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 left is on the move. But does the fact that a onetime business-aligned Democrat like Gavin Newsom is getting away with posing as the progressive in the California race for governor indicate that the left hasn’t yet built the institutional capacity to control the leftward surge amongst voters? Dan thinks so. These are amongst the topics that he discusses with Dave Weigel, a political reporter at the Washington Post and one of the few mainstream political reporters who really gets the left. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And Work: The Last 1,000 Years by Andrea Komlosy versobooks.com/books/2608-work. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 much in the way of serious forces. One of the major reasons the organization’s membership rolls blew up, of course, was because of Bernie Sanders’ historic 2016 run for president, which not only electrified huge swaths of the country but reminded the radical left that the point is to win power and to govern—and that, after years on the margins, we could do so. This was in part because many Americans were no longer afraid of the s-word: socialism. Yet there is still, for many good reasons, a lot of skepticism about electoral politics in general and the Democratic Party very much in particular, inside DSA and across the socialist left. That’s the needle that the new DSA electoral strategy document tries to thread. Dan’s guests are Renée Paradis, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer (@ReneeParadis). She has frequently worked for electoral campaigns, including most recently as the National Voter Protection Director for Bernie 2016. Michael Kinnucan is a writer, researcher and activist in New York City. You should also follow him on Facebook, where he has a lively and incisive presence. Both are members of DSA’s National Electoral Committee and the organizing committee for NYC-DSA’s Brooklyn Electoral Working Group. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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, we discuss imperialist assaults on worker struggles in Iraq and Iran, the cooptation of those struggles by nationalist elites, and how those imperialist attacks facilitated the rise of the Baathist security state. We’ll also look at how the true history of the 70s oil shock undermines the conventional account, how the protection of minorities was used to legitimate imperialism, how petro-dollars fueled the global arms trade, in what sense the Iraq War has been a war for oil, and the US strategy to seek advantage through the continuation of conflict and instability across the Middle East. Finally, we’ll address petro-imperialism’s bedrock alliance with right-wing Islamists against democratic movements of the left in Saudi Arabia and beyond, and why we must fight to ensure that the coming energy transition is a just one. That review of Yascha Mounk’s book that Dan wrote with Thea Riofrancos https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/zombie-liberalism/ 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 and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig, where you can also check out the first edition of our new weekly newsletter.

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 more, including how oil companies and Western governments made autocratic governments and conservative Islamists key partners in creating the very global order that we now find in such profound crisis. Thanks to Verso Books. and The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig, where you can also check out the first edition of our new weekly newsletter.

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 the two. But for decades, a bipartisan consensus has governed foreign policy, to disastrous ends. Why, Rana asks, is there no foreign policy equivalent to the new left-wing domestic policy litmus test on single-payer healthcare? Check out Aziz’s n+1 article here: nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-lefts-missing-foreign-policy. Thanks to our supporters at 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 Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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 versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo and The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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 Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing and Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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 politicking that have intertwined the United States systems of mass incarceration and immigrant enforcement—facilitating the growth of both. To fight both mass deportation and mass incarceration, localities and states must move beyond what’s currently defined as sanctuary, as a new report by Kade Crockford from the Century Foundation and ACLU of Massachusetts argues. tcf.org/content/report/beyond-sanctuary Also: Check out Dan’s essay on Trump’s proposal to execute drug dealers slate.com/technology/2018/03/trumps-call-to-execute-drug-dealers-is-a-natural-progression-of-american-policy.html And thanks to Verso Books. Check out the FREE e-book Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo and also Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art

View Transcript 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 King’s theory of nonviolence (more complicated than you might think), his debate with the Black Power movement, and his thinking on gender, hope, political economy, Beloved Community and more. 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 Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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 neoliberalism discussed last week is here splinternews.com/the-market-cant-solve-a-massacre-1823745509 Thanks to Verso Books. Check out the free e-book Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo and Police: A Field Guide versobooks.com/books/2530-police Support us with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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 are Sarah Jaffe, Nation Institute fellow and author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and labor historian Gabriel Winant. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out The Right to Have Rights by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn and Astra Taylor versobooks.com/books/2424-the-right-to-have-rights and Greece and the Reinvention of Politics by Alain Badiou versobooks.com/books/2560-greece-and-the-reinvention-of-politics. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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 Books. Check out Greece and the Reinvention of Politics by Alain Badiou versobooks.com/books/2560-greece-and-the-reinvention-of-politics And support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn and Astra Taylor versobooks.com/books/2424-the-right-to-have-rights and Greece and the Reinvention of Politics by Alain Badiou versobooks.com/books/2560-greece-and-the-reinvention-of-politics. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

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 Greece and the Reinvention of Politics by Alain Badiou versobooks.com/books/2560-greece-and-the-reinvention-of-politics and The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm versobooks.com/books/2575-the-progress-of-this-storm. And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript 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 Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn, and Astra Taylor and The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm at versobooks.com Check out Miller’s Children: Why Giving Teenage Killers a Second Chance Matters for All of Us by James Garbarino at ucpress.edu Support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig!

Dan talks to Randy Bryce (@IronStache), the Berniecrat ironworker taking on Paul Ryan, about how he plans to knockout the House Speaker, Scott Walker’s decimation of unions and Foxconn’s con against the people of Wisconsin. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright versobooks.com/books/2545-climate-leviathan and Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520292635 Support us with your cash at patreon.com/TheDig

What if the Cold War only just ended in November 2016, as Donald Trump grotesquely encircled and then captured the presidency, finding it, to his surprise, unguarded? The Cold War proper, of course, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Aziz Rana, making his second Dig appearance, argues that it was a lot more than the conflict with the Evil Empire. It was a domestic order that, he writes in the latest issue of n+1, “concerned everything from the genius of America’s domestic institutions to the indispensability of its global role. These judgments gave coherence to the country’s national identity—allowing both Barack Obama and Bill Kristol to wax poetic about America’s special destiny as a global hegemon—and legitimacy to its economic policy. But with the 2016 election, the cold-war paradigm finally shattered.” Check out Aziz’s article here https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/politics/goodbye-cold-war/. Thanks to our supporters at Verso and University of California Press Check out The New Spirit of Capitalism versobooks.com/books/2513-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism andAmerican Islamophobia ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520297791!

Four decades ago, Frances Fox Piven and her husband Richard Cloward published Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, a classic, clear-eyed analysis of just what the title suggests. Piven, a legendary scholar and activist, talks to Dan about her life, Occupy, Bernie, the Democratic Party, anti-war movements, black bloc, mass incarceration and more. (Also: Dan’s voice sounds a little different because he had to record in a different room.) Thanks to Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike and Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City by Andrew J. Diamond ucpress.edu/ebook.php?isbn=9780520961715

The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As is often the case, however, the focus shifted elsewhere soon after disturbances in the street came to end. Political scientist @LesterSpence recently wrote an article about why children were freezing in Baltimore public schools: the heating didn’t work, something that can only be made sense of when viewed in the longer history of capital flight, racial and class segregation, and the rise of a service-economy carceral state jacobinmag.com/2018/01/baltimore-freezing-schools-children-racism-austerity Thanks to Verso for their support. Check out The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello versobooks.com/books/2513-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism Support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

We are living on land from which indigenous people, over hundreds of years, were violently removed. On some level, everyone knows this—yet it’s mostly nowhere to be found in stories that Americans tell themselves about who we are as a country, and how we got here. Dan’s guest is Paul Frymer (@pfrymer), a professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. In his recent book, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion, he provides a close study of the empire America built in the late 18th and 19th century, a project of geographic expansion facilitated and also limited by the demands of racial engineering. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause versobooks.com/books/2592-the-great-cowboy-strike And from University of California Press: Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World by Isa Blumi ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520296145

Excitement that Democrats had developed a spine in the fight for Dreamers reverted to familiar despondency and fury when they capitulated and voted to reopen the government on Monday. @JStein_WaPo offers his analysis of the role that the media and the Democratic Party’s right flank played in pushing senators to fold. This interview was recorded Tuesday and posted early because things are moving crazy fast. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right by Liz Fekete versobooks.com/books/2555-europe-s-fault-lines And please support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Everyone agrees that the 1970s was the beginning of the end of capitalism as we had known it since the New Deal. But historian Lane Windham makes it clear that it wasn’t for a lack of worker struggle in her new book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. In case studies of union fights in department stores, shipyards, offices and textile mills, Windham explains that women and workers of color seized the civil rights victories of the 1960s to fight for economic rights in the 70s. Thank you to Verso and University of California Press. Check out The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East by Patrick Cockburn versobooks.com/books/2518-the-age-of-jihad and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520295711 Support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Student workers at Rutgers University are fighting for $15 an hour. Undergraduate history major and dining-hall worker Danny Taylor of @RutgersUSAS talks about their struggle. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert versobooks.com/books/2535-alt-america, and support this podcast with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig! Also: Jacobin has published a transcription of Dan’s interview with the Fields sisters jacobinmag.com/2018/01/racecraft-racism-barbara-karen-fields

Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People’s Campaign alongside other organizers shortly before he was assassinated 50 years ago. Today, organizers nationwide are relaunching that movement as The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, tackling the evil quadruplet of poverty, systemic racism, militarism, and environmental devastation. Dan’s guest is rock star organizer Nijmie Dzurinko, making her second appearance on the show. Check out Dan’s recent work slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/the-opioid-crisis-is-blurring-the-legal-lines-between-victim-and-perpetrator.html & injusticetoday.com/philadelphia-media-slam-newly-elected-da-krasner-for-firings-but-house-cleaning-advances-his-f2da076ffb06 Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism

Your first Diglet of the new year, and we’re talking about that Trump book. At n+1 Patrick Blanchfield makes the case that Fire and Fury is not, as some might think, a bunch of meaningless palace-intrigue that has distracted us from what Trump is doing to destroy the environment and wage relentless class war against the poor. Rather, the book in one fell swoop exposes the Trump administration for the dangerously hot mess that we all knew it was but were entirely unable to understand clearly because the deluge of drama and weird tweets had rendered it all banal wallpaper. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out How Will Capitalism End versobooks.com/books/2519-how-will-capitalism-end Like our show music? Check out Brodsky’s commercial and artistic work at Jeffreybrodsky.com and painterly.bandcamp.com

Chattel slavery made black women’s reproduction the source of private property—and in doing so invented race and American racism. Ever since, the denigration and regulation of black women’s childbearing has been central to the construction of white supremacy and the exploitative economic order that it protects, as scholar Dorothy Roberts explained in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, a pivotal book first published in 1997. In this episode, @DorothyERoberts talks about the book and what lessons it holds today as Trump and Republicans seek to destroy yet more of the social safety net and use racism as a smokescreen to distract white Americans from their class war against working people. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art And please support The Dig with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

The protest movement against the onset of the Iraq War was countered by a call to “support our troops” from militarists on the right. Venerating American soldiers, of course, is not about supporting actual American soldiers but is rather a rhetorical device to preclude questioning or criticism of the wars they are sent to fight. In a face-to-face interview at Brown University’s Watson Institute, anthropologist Catherine Lutz discusses John Kelly’s recent diatribe, Khizr Khan, Trump’s attack on protesting NFL players and the roots of it all in the Nixon Administration’s response to GI rebellion against the Vietnam War. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System by Wolfgang Streeck versobooks.com/books/2519-how-will-capitalism-end And support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

At the close of the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara discusses his new article on the Bolsheviks and what we can learn from and blame on them—and also what might be forgiven and moved beyond. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl and Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal at versobooks.com.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor returns to The Dig to discuss her new book How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Forty years ago, a group of black feminists coined the term “identity politics” in the Combahee River Collective Statement. For them, it was a way to identify the various ways that capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia created a set of interlocking oppressions. And the point of identifying how those systems operated together was not to create an itemized politics of particularity, as is too often the case today, but rather to create a framework for solidarity. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism and support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig.

View Transcript A lengthy interview with historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields on their seminal essay collection Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Dan talks to the sister scholars about the book; how Ta-Nehisi Coates’ primordialist view of white racism spells defeat; that racism serves the interest of capitalist class war, and endless debates over Rachel Dolezal distract us from that fact; and a whole ton more. This is over two hours, so you might want to bite it off on a few chunks, or on a long drive. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso. Check out Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum versobooks.com/books/2109-tear-gas And support your (favorite?) left-wing podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig 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}

Journalist @ryanlcooper talks about the new paper he wrote with @MattBruenig, founder of the @PplPolicyProj, a new left-wing think tank founded by Bruenig and funded by the people. Foreclosed: Destruction of Black Wealth During the Obama Presidency details how the Wall Street-induced foreclosure epidemic wiped out huge swaths of black wealth—and how Obama, the first black president, could have taken multiple actions to save most homes but did not. Check out the report http://peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Foreclosed.pdf and this article about it jacobinmag.com/2017/12/obama-foreclosure-crisis-wealth-inequality. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal versobooks.com/books/2576-radical-happiness Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript The prospect of nuclear war with North Korea sits near the top of the list of things that have been unthinkably bad about Donald Trump’s presidency. But the conflict with North Korea didn’t begin with Trump. It’s critical that we understand the Koreas and their historical context right now. Journalist @TimothyS breaks it all down—North Korea, South Korea, the role of the US and others—from World War II to the present. And he argues that peace is possible, but it can only achieved through engagement between North and South, not through bellicose US intervention. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum versobooks.com/books/2109-tear-gas. And please support us with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig

Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, explains one of Clintonism’s most dreadful results: President Trump. The new film Saving Capitalism, available on Netflix, is Reich’s quasi-autobiographical documentary about the origins of contemporary political-economic inequality. The premise that capitalism ought to be saved notwithstanding, Reich offers firsthand insight into Clinton’s rightward rush into the arms of Corporate America. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy by Lynne Segal versobooks.com/books/2576-radical-happiness And support us with your $ at Patreon.com/TheDig. We can’t do it without you.

The drug war is a cause of, not solution to, the overdose crisis. Law and public health scholar @LeoBeletsky explains the origins of the opioid overdose crisis and how drug prohibition, policing, interdiction and incarceration are at its root—and continue to help make opioid use so deadly. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2571-out-of-the-wreckage Support us with your $ at Patreon.com/TheDig We can’t do this without our listeners.

We’ve got a bonus episode for you today, which is audio from a debate between Alex Vitale—a recent guest on this show, sociologist and author of The End of Policing—and Heather Mac Donald, one of the leading intellectual champions of urban neoconservativism, overpolicing and mass incarceration at the Manhattan Institute. In a short intro, Dan explains why he’s rooting for one of these two indviduals and why that person decisively wins. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. We work really hard and don’t paywall a thing: support this podcast with $ at Patreon.com/TheDig

The GOP tax plan is a monstrous giveaway to corporate America but it might not pass thanks to the same contradictions within the Republican coalition that repeatedly sunk efforts to repeal Obamacare, as journalist @ArthurDelaneyHP explains. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change by Ashley Dawson versobooks.com/books/2558-extreme-cities Support us with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Trump’s demagogic rhetoric on MS-13 is designed to obscure the truth about the reality and origins of mass Central American migration: the roots of migration from Central America lie in significant part in the violence unleashed by US-backed dirty wars and deportations of alleged gang members. The demonization of Central American gangs functions to distract the public from US complicity and legitimate a cruel deportation machine. Dan’s guest, political scientist Noelle Brigden, has spent years researching on the migrant trail. For more background, check out Dan’s Washington Post op-ed washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/07/20/deporting-people-made-central-americas-gangs-more-deportation-wont-help Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones. And please hook us up with some $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Last week was a bad week for Republicans and a good week for Democrats—and for Democratic Socialists. It’s now pretty clear that Republicans will pay a price for the fact that large numbers of Americans detest our dotard-in-chief. But last week’s election once again fails to offer any sort of definitive answer to the long-running debate between the left and the corporate Democratic establishment over who is best poised to beat Republicans. The coming anti-Republican wave is an opportunity that the left must seize. Dan’s guests are DSA member Lee Carter, who took out the Republican whip to win Virginia’s 50th House District, and David Duhalde, DSA’s Deputy Director. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy by Lewis H. Lapham versobooks.com/books/2517-age-of-folly Also, support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández tells the story of human caging in Los Angeles, from the Spanish Conquest to the mid-twentieth century, in her new book City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. It’s a story of indigenous exploitation and elimination, immigrant detention and deportation, and the suppression of cross-border revolutionary movements. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2571-out-of-the-wreckage Support us with your $ at patreon.com/TheDig.

Journalist @melissagira eviscerates a newspaper investigation that conflates sex work with trafficking. She examines how reporters unwittingly fall into a savior complex, which ends up criminalizing workers in the name of defending women’s dignity. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism https://www.versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism. And support us on Patreon.com/TheDig with some cash.

Centrist business elites believe in an America that doesn’t exist. Two guests this episode: first, @mollyesque talks about her piece “On Safari in Trump’s America” for The Atlantic. Her article follows the centrist organization Third Way on a “listening tour” of the real America. Then @EricLevitz (35:52), who just published on op-ed in the New York Times entitled “America is not ‘center-right,” sorts through research to argue that what Americans often mean when they say they are “moderate” is not the combination of superficial social progressivism and neoliberalism that Wall-Street-aligned Third Way types think they mean. Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries versobooks.com/books/2501-grand-hotel-abyss Support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Why have the size of American police departments grown so dramatically in recent decades, even as crime rates have fallen? One factor may have been the growing centrality of real estate for urban economies, according to a new article published in the journal Social Forces by Adam Goldstein, a professor of sociology at Princeton, and Brenden Beck, a PhD student in sociology at CUNY. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out The End of Policing by Alex Vitale versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing Support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig

Aziz Rana discusses his pivotal book, The Two Faces of American Freedom. Rana overturns conventional accounts of American history, from settlement and Revolution to the Populists and the present day. In reality, settler-colonialism, empire, and a brutally exploitative economic system grounded in racial subjugation have always been at the core of the American project. But radical thinkers and movements have consistently stepped forward at critical junctures to propose transformative alternatives that would make American freedom universal. Rana’s most brilliant move is to ultimately make a devastatingly critical account of American history hopeful and optimistic.Thanks to our supporters at Verso Books. Check out Alt-America:The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump versobooks.com/books/2535-alt-america Support us with $ atpatreon.com/TheDig

The exposure of Weinstein’s predations has reignited widespread fury over the longstanding problem of sexual harassment and assault—especially in the workplace. Jacobin editor @alexnpress discusses two new pieces she wrote on how dealing with these problems as individuals only ends up harming individual women and why women must organize to fight back. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Futures of Black Radicalism https://www.versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism And support as on Patreon.com/TheDig with some cash.

@CoreyRobin points to a tension that has defined conservatism from the get-go, between two competing conceptions of virtue and nobility: one defined by political and military distinction and another by entrepreneurial acumen and accumulated wealth. Robin parses how Trump fits into this dynamic history, in part by taking a look back to seminal conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot versobooks.com/books/2571-out-of-the-wreckage And support us with $ at patreon.com/TheDig Listen to Dan’s first interview with Corey blubrry.com/thedig/22226639/corey-robin-on-the-reactionaries-minds-under-trump/

Dan was on a panel last week on ending the war on drug dealers at the Drug Policy Alliance conference in Atlanta. The panel was moderated by asha bandele and included Daryl Atkinson, Constanza Sánchez Avilé, Lyn Ulbrich, Kemba Smith and Dan. Thanks for listening. Support us at patreon.com/TheDig

Since Bernie Sanders’s success in the 2016 Democratic primary, much of the Left, from progressive Democrats to socialists, has had its sights set on something we had long at least implicitly assumed was impossible: state power and governing. The question now is how to take power, and the Left is consumed by debates over how and whether to engage with the Democratic Party or, in a more limited fashion, with the Democratic Party’s ballot line. Joe Dinkin of the Working Families Party talks to Dan about the promise and pitfalls of fighting within the Democratic Party. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso Books. Check out Extreme Cities by Ashley Dawson versobooks.com/books/2558-extreme-cities. Also, support us at Patreon.com/thedig with your money.

In his new book The End of Policing Brooklyn College sociologist @avitale makes the case that technocratic reforms won’t fix American policing. In reality, we can only fix policing by ending the carceral state and defeating neoliberalism. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert versobooks.com/books/2535-alt-america Support us with your $$ at patreon.com/thedig