Current Affairs

Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing religious faith in the world—by one estimate it obtains around 35,000 new converts per day globally. It now has over 600,000,000 adherents. Elle Hardy is a journalist who has contributed previously to Current Affairs and has traveled the world to speak with Pentecostals from South Korea to London to Nigeria to South Africa. Her book Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over The World (Oxford University Press) documents the rise of this faith and what it means for the rest of us. The Sunday Times says of Beyond Belief: "Hardy is a first-class reporter. [...] Beyond Belief makes for an often gripping story, full of twists and turns."In this conversation, we discuss what Pentecostalism is, why it's attracting so many people, and the political changes that are likely to result from its continuing growth. Elle shows that many of the working poor around the world are attracted to Pentecostalism because it offers both meaning and material gains—but it also pushes a reactionary social agenda that attacks LGBT people and is linked to the rise of far-right "populists" like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Duterte. To understand how to stop the far right, it may well help to understand the sources of Pentecostalism's appeal. We discuss:- Why "speaking in tongues" is part of the Pentecostal tradition—and what people think they are doing when they do it- Why some preachers in Appalachia still perform "snake handling"—and frequently get bitten- Where Pentecostalism came from (spoiler: Los Angeles) - Why Pentecostalism is spreading like wildfire across the entire world- The link between Pentecostalism and Donald Trump - What the "seven mountains" are and why certain Christian Dominionists want to conquer them 

Across the United States, over the last few years, democratic socialists have been running for office in numbers not seen for a century. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns may not have been victorious, but socialists have run for city councils, state legislatures, and even judgeships and won. In this special 90-minute audio documentary, Current Affairs talks to members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who have reached elected office about how they campaigned, why they won, and how they have been able to use the power of their office to advance a progressive agenda.This presentation is meant to inspire those who wonder how you can effectively change things without compromising your principles. It touches on questions like: What kind of backgrounds do socialists who make it to office come from? How do they pitch their political views to voters? How do you assuage the fears of constituents who are, for example, worried about violent crime? What are the first things that happen to you when you become a state legislator? How can coalitions function effectively? How does corporate lobbying actually work? What do you do if you're in the minority and can't pass legislation? What kind of opposition will you encounter from the "party establishment"? Can you actually succeed at meaningfully changing public policy? Local and state offices are extremely important, and more within reach than federal office, but their activities are often unknown to the average person. This program peels back the curtain and shows how the "sausage" is made in state government and how leftists can be effective there.Elected officials featured in the program:Sara Innamorato (Pennsylvania State Representative)Nikil Saval (Pennsylvania State Senator)Vaughn Stewart (Maryland State Delegate)Emily Gallagher (New York State Representative)Robert Peters (Illinois State Senator)Franklin Bynum (Houston Criminal Court Judge)A transcript of the full interview with Robert Peters was published in Current Affairs here.Edited by Tim Gray.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine, as well as a columnist for the Washington Post. She is also the president of the American Committee For U.S.-Russia Accord and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Katrina has been studying, working in, and writing about Russia for decades. In columns leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Katrina was warning that failures of diplomacy were leading toward disaster. In this conversation, we discuss what she believes those failures were. Katrina is no defender of Putin's regime, but she does believe that opportunities were missed to de-escalate the crisis, and that Western policy choices stretching back to the 1990s have made Russia's present aggression more likely. We also discuss the terrifying threat of nuclear weapons and the prospects for getting rid of them, and why it's critical to avoid further militarizing the world. Katrina's writings on Russia are both deeply-informed and uncompromisingly progressive, and she shows how those of us on the left can combine solidarity with the victims of Putin's war with strong critiques of American foreign policy. Katrina's recent columns on Russia and Ukraine:What A Sensible Ukraine Policy Would Look Like (Jan. 4, Washington Post)Stop The Stumble Toward War With Russia (Jan. 18, Washington Post)The Exist From The Ukraine Crisis That's Hiding In Plain Sight (Feb. 1, Washington Post)A Path Out of the Ukraine Crisis (Feb. 15, Washington Post)Putin's Invasion (Feb. 24, The Nation)We Must End The War on Ukraine—and Put an End To Perpetual Wars (March 1, Washington Post)War and Peace in Ukraine (March 3, The Nation)Some of the people and writings referred to in the conversation:An excellent Behind the News interview with Anatol Lieven, whose work Katrina cites, can be read here.Stephen F. Cohen's book War With Russia? can be bought here.Voices of Glasnost can be bought here.John Mearsheimer's 2015 prediction that Ukraine would get "wrecked" as a result of the West leading it down the "primrose path" is here. His article expanding on his thesis is here.An article by Jack F. Matlock, the last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on how NATO expansion worsened tensions with Russia, can be found here.Patrick Cockburn's column on why Putin's war is a disastrous blunder is here. The Current Affairs conversation with him is here.Nathan's article on prospects for World War III is here."There's a history to everything and the history right now is very hard to speak about, as blood flows, with images of bombardment and barbarism. But I think history will be important for what emerges, and what is possible to mediate and lead to a cease-fire."  — Katrina vanden Heuvel      

Carolyn Chen's book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion In Silicon Valley is about how something disturbing is happening in Silicon Valley: people are becoming so totally devoted to their work that their relationship to their companies is a kind of religious devotion. Prof. Chen interviewed scores of employees at tech companies and found that traditional ties of family, church, and community are disappearing in favor of ties to the company. Corporations are providing a site where people find meaning, some even saying that they became their "true selves" on the job, or describing a "conversion" experience. In this interview, we discuss the implications of this kind of extreme devotion to for-profit companies. A certain class of high-paid workers who might once have viewed a job as something you did to earn a living, so that you could go and enjoy your life, view serving the company as the very purpose of life itself, the source of meaning and joy. It is a far cry from Marx's description of "alienated" workers who must sacrifice a piece of themselves to get their daily bread. These workers think that life on the clock is better than life off it—and so they aren't particularly interested in civic participation.       

Ryan Cooper is the managing editor of The American Prospect and co-host of the Left Anchor podcast. He is the author of the new book How Are You Going to Pay For That: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics (St. Martin's Press), which exposes the faulty economic assumptions that are used to convince Americans that they can't afford generous social democratic programs. In the book—and in this episode—Ryan shows how to argue with libertarians and neoliberals who believe that the private sector drives the economy and that government is necessarily wasteful, inefficient, and parasitic. Ryan exposes the fallacious ideas underlying the prioritization of private property rights over the common good, and provides a blueprint for sensible policies on climate, labor, health care, and welfare. He shows that when it comes to funding collective social needs, we can absolutely "pay for that." Ryan's book is insightful and thorough and demolishes many of the bad ideas that prevent us from solving urgent problems. (It is also blurbed by Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson," who calls Cooper "one of the most reliably well-informed and thoughtful political commentators in the country.") An episode should have come out Tuesday but it was Mardi Gras and Current Affairs is based in New Orleans. As is well-known, all attempts to do work on Mardi Gras are destined to fail. We apologize for letting the debauchery of Carnival interfere with the regular production of quality podcasts. A previous episode with Ryan Cooper in which he talked about huge deadly trucks is here. The article Nathan wrote about climate change as a giant act of theft and pillage is here.  

Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent for The Independent for over 30 years and has become known for his combination of a deep knowledge of the region and a healthy skepticism toward the propaganda of governments. His books The Age of Jihad (Verso) and War In The Age of Trump (OR Books) collect his extraordinary on-the-ground dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the decades since 9/11 and provide a rich understanding of the devastating wars of the last years, filled with the perspectives of the ordinary people trying to survive these conflicts. When Foreign Affairs awarded Cockburn its Journalist of the Year award, the contest judges said of his work:“Patrick Cockburn spotted the emergence of ISIS much earlier than anybody else and wrote about it with a depth of understanding that was just in a league of its own. Nobody else was writing that stuff at that time, and the judges wondered whether the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead. The breadth of his knowledge and his ability make connections is phenomenal.”In this episode, we discuss what Cockburn has learned during his decades as a foreign correspondent about how to sift through competing narratives and arrive at something approximating the truth. We talk about how propaganda works, what Americans still don't understand about the Middle East, and why the quality of reporting on regional conflicts has declined over the last decades as news organizations have stopped providing necessary support for deep critical journalism. We also discuss the reissue of Cockburn's memoir The Broken Boy (OR Books), about his childhood during the Cork polio epidemic of 1956, which like his other work is a story of everyday people who find themselves caught up in the tides of history and having to struggle through as best they can. (The title of this episode refers to a 1976 essay by Cockburn's late brother Alexander, "How To Be a Foreign Correspondent," which skewered the kinds of hack war reporters that Patrick Cockburn has spent a career trying to be different from.) 

Bill Gates has long cultivated a reputation as the Good Billionaire, giving away vast sums of money toward global health and education initiatives through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For many years, the Gates Foundation was rarely criticized at all in the mainstream press, its work considered unambiguously good. The shine has come off Gates a bit recently, thanks to the negative publicity surrounding both his divorce and his staunch defense of corporate intellectual property rights over vaccines during the pandemic. Prof. Linsey McGoey of the University of Essex was one of the earliest major critics of the Gates Foundation's work, and her 2015 book No Such Thing As A Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy is a stinging criticism of "philanthrocapitalism." McGoey's book goes through the history of business tycoons trying to save the world through charity, beginning with Andrew Carnegie in the 19th century. McGoey explains clearly why charitable giving, though it may look like an unambiguous positive, has a number of major downsides including:- The lack of democratic accountability for what private foundations choose to fund (see the Gates foundation's funding of school privatization schemes)- The refusal to consider solutions that threaten the sources of the foundation's wealth or call into question the broader hierarchy of wealth and power- The funding of things that look good on paper and flatter the billionaire donor but aren't actually what people in need are asking forThese criticisms have been made by the left since the time of Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," but McGoey brings them up to date by showing clearly how even an organization like the Gates Foundation, that presents itself as having a benign commitment to health and education, is actually insidious.In this conversation, Prof. McGoey and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson discuss the career of Gates, the problems with billionaire charity, and the reasons philanthrocapitalists often escape serious criticism. They also discuss Prof. McGoey's work in the field of "ignorance studies." In The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules The World, Prof. McGoey studies the way institutions carefully exclude ideologically inconvenient information, creating a kind of useful ignorance. The article that Nathan and Rob Larson wrote about Bill Gates is here. The piece on billionaires' memoirs is here."Charity creates a multitude of sins." — Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" 

Yanis Varoufakis is the former Finance Minister of Greece, professor of economics at the University of Athens, co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement, and member of the Greek Parliament. The Guardian describes him as "a motorcycling, leather jacketed former academic and self-styled rebel who took pleasure in winding up the besuited political class." He calls himself an "erratic Marxist," and has written economics textbooks, a memoir, and popular explainers of economic ideas. But now he has produced a novel: Another Now: Dispatches From an Alternative Present. Another Now is not a typical work of fiction. It is a novel of ideas, more like one of Plato's dialogues than an airport potboiler. Varoufakis draws on the tradition of leftist utopian fiction seen in 19th century works like William Morris' News From Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Those books tried to show readers a plausible depiction of what a socialist society might look like. In Another Now, Varoufakis is doing something similar: he shows us what our existing 21st century world might look like if the economy operated very differently and capitalism was done away with. He imagines a different timeline in which Occupy Wall Street had won and Wall Street itself had been consigned to the dustbin of history.But it's not quite right to describe this work as "utopian." Varoufakis is trying to do something extremely pragmatic: to show, using his academic training in finance and economics, that things that seem impossible are actually quite technically feasible. The attack on socialists generally is that their schemes are unworkable, and that without big banks and a class of wealthy capitalists, there could not be a dynamic, innovative economy. Varoufakis uses this story to show that this isn't true, and to explain in detail the concrete workings of a possible post-capitalist economy.If you're not used to novels that contain long descriptions of alternative banking systems, Another Now may be a challenging read. But it's exciting because it tries to seriously answer the question: "What would a realistic alternative to the capitalist economy look like?" In Varoufakis' "other now," the fruits of society's labor are not owned by capitalists, but by the people who do the work. There is some inequality, but there is a "democratic economy" in which corporate tyranny has been eradicated. Banks are public, not private, and poverty is eliminated. It is said that these days, the cramping of our imaginations has meant that it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Varoufakis invites us to imagine the end of capitalism in our own time. The medium of fiction has allowed Varoufakis to include characters who are highly skeptical about whether this economy is possible, and who have to be convinced over time to believe in it. Another Now wants to speak to critics of the socialist project, and to show that the seemingly most insurmountable obstacles to eliminating capitalism (maintaining innovation and incentives, financing new projects, etc.) are actually easily solved problems. The most substantial difficulty is the creation of a political movement with the power to bring the necessary changes about.Another Now poses a serious challenge to capitalist dogma and offers an inspiring vision that should energize the left. In this conversation, Varoufakis and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson discuss the novel and why a well-functioning socialist economy is more feasible than people assume. Warning: it gets a little bit heavy on the economics and it may be useful to read up on the history of the socialist calculation debate before diving in. The phrase "Astonishingly, There Is An Alternative!" is taken from Another Now, where it is a counterpoint to Margaret Thatcher's infamous dictum "There Is No Alternative."The interview Nathan did with the authors of People's Republic of Walmart is available here. 

Victor Pickard is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. His book Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society is about the problem of misinformation: people not knowing what's going on in the world, or thinking they know what's going on but actually believing in propaganda or bullshit (see, e.g., Joe Rogan). There has been a lot of chatter about the problem of "fake news" and how it can be stopped, with many proposing that social media companies need to do more regulation of the internet and "content moderation." Victor thinks that this conversation misses something crucial: the need for well-funded public interest journalism. He believes that we cannot escape the "misinformation society" without changing the way that journalism is produced, since (regulated or not) the private market is incapable of fulfilling the public need for truthful information about topics that matter. In a democracy, where the citizens themselves are in charge of making important decisions, it's vital that we find a way to fund the production and dissemination of quality journalism.In this conversation, we discuss:- The catastrophic collapse of public interest journalism, and the "news deserts" across the country where there is no local journalism - Why, even as we recognize the effects of that collapse, we shouldn't romanticize the newspapers of old, because the profit motive has always corrupted journalism- How the need for for-profit media organizations to constantly and obsessively "chase clicks" makes it impossible for them to produce quality work - The alarming consequences of having news organizations that ignore climate and international news in favor of cheap, entertaining political "horse race" coverage- The distortions in public understanding that result from a situation where the truth is paywalled but the lies are free- Why Victor thinks we're "doomed" if we rely on commercial media for the news, and why you don't need to be a "conspiracy theorist" to see how the profit motive makes corporate media less likely to accurately depict the state of the world- What a public model for journalism might look like, and why city governments should fund publicly owned municipal newspapers

Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City, named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post. The book chronicles Prof. Brooks' experiences as a reserve police officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. As an academic raised in a socialist household (her mother is a former Current Affairs podcast guest), Prof. Brooks wanted to get a better understanding of how police saw themselves and the sources of dysfunction in the system. In this episode we discuss:- How police officers are trained to fear the populations they police- The limits of police training: what police are taught (e.g., how to handcuff suspects) and what they're not (e.g., anything about racism)- How police officers are often called on to perform "social work" responsibilities that they are ill-equipped to handle, and why arresting and jailing people becomes an all-purpose tool- What it means to say that the problems with policing are "systemic" and why individual good-hearted officers cannot hope to change the fundamental nature of the institutions they work within- Explanations of polling that indicates that poor communities want more policing: they're offered a false binary where the only choice is more police or nothing- How many problems do not necessarily originate within the institution of policing itself but with lawmakers and with the United States itself- The problem of militarized institutions more broadly, which Prof. Brooks has explored in her previous book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything- Why it's going to be more difficult than just "defunding" police: we need institutions that actually care for people properly, and we haven't built them yet"Much of what the average patrol officer does [every day] doesn't need to be done—and really should not be done—by a person with a gun and a badge and a uniform."  — Rosa Brooks