Current Affairs

Historian Thomas Frank, renowned for his insightful analyses of American politics, dives into why Democrats have strayed from their populist roots. He critiques the party's alignment with the elite and the impact of faux-populism from Trump. Frank addresses the disconnection with the working class and argues for genuine left-wing populism as a solution to neoliberal failures. He draws parallels between past leaders and modern figures, emphasizing the need for authentic political voices to truly represent the public.

This episode originally aired on December 4, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Zohran Mamdani represents the 36th District in the New York State Assembly. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he is currently running for mayor of New York City, hoping to unseat the controversial Eric Adams, who is facing federal corruption charges. Mamdani is running on a platform of lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers. He joins today to discuss his city and his campaign."This is also a moment of political uncertainty as well as political possibility. People feel failed by the answers they have been told for many decades. And while there is not a majority of socialist or progressive thinking across New York City, I would say there is a majority who feel left behind by this economic system and the policies of this current administration, and that is an ingredient that could give rise to an entirely new coalition of people who feel left behind and are ready to get behind a leftist in order to turn the page." — Zohran Mamdani

This episode originally aired on November 26, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Brian Kateman is the head of the Reduceitarian Foundation and the author of the book Meat Me Halfway: How Changing the Way We Eat Can Improve Our Lives and Save Our Planet, which has an accompanying documentary. Brian has thought a lot about how to persuade people to help improve animal welfare in ways that actually get them on board and don't alienate them. Today he joins to discuss what's wrong with the food system, why animal rights matter, and how to get people to take steps in their lives that help animals.

This episode originally aired on November 18, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Garrison Lovely wrote the cover story for Jacobin magazine's special issue on AI, which explained how leftists should think about the risks posed by the new technologies. He also recently wrote for the New York Times about AI safety, and has written for Current Affairs about psychedelic drugs and McKinsey. Garrison joins today to discuss what the real harms that AI could do are, why Big Tech can't be trusted to self-regulate, and how we can avoid a nightmarish future.Listeners might also be interested in Nathan's recent article on the California legislation.The United States’ current arrangement of managing A.I. risks through voluntary commitments places enormous trust in the companies developing this potentially dangerous technology. Unfortunately, the industryingeneral — and OpenAI in particular — has shown itself to be unworthy of that trust, time and again. — Garrison Lovely, The New York Times

This episode originally aired on November 15, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Is our “child welfare” system successfully helping protect kids from neglect and abuse? Or is it inflicting widespread trauma through unnecessary, unjustifiable family separation? Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has long been one of the country’s most deeply-informed critics of “child protective services,” which she argues systematically target poor Black mothers whose only parenting error is to be poor. Roberts is the author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, which sums up over 25 years of her research into the subject. Roberts is also a 2024 winner of the MacArthur fellowship, commonly known as the Genius Grant. Today, she joins to discuss her work. 

This episode originally aired on November 4, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon who has served in conflict zones around the world. He authored a recent New York Times op-ed that surveyed dozens of medical professionals who had served in Gaza about their observations, including the targeting of children. He is also the organizer of the Gaza Healthcare Letters to the Biden administration. He joins today to discuss the level of harm that has been inflicted on Gaza civilians and why he and other professionals have concluded the Biden administration is supporting a major crime against humanity.Warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.A video of this episode can be found here."It's a disaster, and it's going to be multigenerational, with absolutely no question. Not only are these children traumatized, but they've been malnourished for a year. Their brains are not going to develop normally. And people often talked about the Palestinians just being serial killers and psychopaths and stuff. But if you wanted to make sure that there are people with serious problems, with serious difficulties concentrating, with serious difficulties understanding peaceful resolution of problems, now you've guaranteed it for an entire generation, in fact." - Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

This episode originally aired on October 29, 2024. Get new podcasts early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairsRight!Richard Seymour is one of the most learned and provocative leftist writers in the world. He has written books on subjects ranging from social media (The Twittering Machine) to British Labour politics (Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics) to liberal apologists for imperialism (The Liberal Defense of Murder) to the career of Christopher Hitchens (Unhitched). On whatever he writes about, Seymour is well-read and thoughtful, posing challenging ideas in elegantly-crafted prose. Today he joins to talk to us about "disaster nationalism," the apocalyptic brand of right-wing politics that Seymour says is on the ascent, and threatens to destroy liberal civilization as we know it. It's not necessarily an encouraging conversation, but Seymour encourages us to look honestly at the dark trends in right-wing politics in our time, and to be cognizant of the extent of the threat we face. Helping us understand what the right believes and what it might be capable of, Seymour's warnings could not be more timely as we get closer and closer to an election that might see Donald Trump returned to power."Reaction always thrives on the prospect of annihilation. ‘American carnage’, ‘white genocide’, ‘death panels’, ‘invasion’, ‘great replacement’, ‘Islamisation’, ‘treason’, ‘cultural marxists’, ‘scum’, ‘communism’. The erosion and  threatened destruction of worlds of power resembling, from its ideological purview, civilisational collapse, defeat, devastation. With which it is both appalled and enthralled... Amid the decomposition of the old party system, the legacy media, and associated forms of public authority, political forces organising around the nation and its enemies have won the major battles of the last decade. What is more, incumbency has been incredibly forgiving of their failures, their political gains proving far less fragile than those of the Left... The phrase ‘disaster nationalism’ implies something disastrous, or exploitative of disaster, or in elective affinity with disaster, or opaquely drawn to, or hurtling toward, or yearning for disaster. It is all of this." — Richard Seymour

This episode originally aired on October 22, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Carolyn Dupont, a professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University, is one of the country's leading experts on the Electoral College. She is the author of the book Distorting Democracy The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why It Matters Today, which debunks defenses of the Electoral College and shows why it's harmful to democracy. She joins us today to help us better understand this peculiar system and to go through the arguments in favor of it. Prof. Dupont notes in particular that the "Electoral College" we have today bears little resemblance to the system the Founding Fathers actually set up, which means that we can't appeal to their "intent" in order to defend it. She explains how this system came into being, how it changed over the years, and how it fails at achieving its supposed purposes, like giving small states a voice.Listeners may be interested in the Current Affairs article by Alex Skopic on the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is one possible way to neutralize the Electoral College for good."This system increasingly returns results that threaten to undo the expressed wishes of a majority of voters, and these “misfires” profoundly damage the body politic... From its inception, Americans have disliked the Electoral College. In recent decades this dissatisfaction has shown up in polling, but it has manifested over the life of our nation in other ways. In the earliest days of our republic, even the men who helped create the Electoral College recommended key changes. Since then, more than 700 proposals to alter or abolish it have been introduced into Congress—more than on any other topic." - Carolyn Dupont, Distorting Democracy

This episode originally aired on October 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Osamah Khalil of Syracuse University is the author of A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden, a vital history of the wars of the last 50 years. Prof. Khalil shows how, from the Vietnam war to the present day, American leaders (and American pop culture) conjured a "world of enemies" in which force was preferable to diplomacy. A cast of rotating villains (from Ho Chi Minh to Saddam Hussein to Hamas) are treated as existential threats to freedom and democracy, and because they are monstrous they cannot be negotiated with and can only be destroyed. Prof. Khalil joins today to discuss his work, which argues that our militaristic attitude toward the rest of the world has also come to characterize domestic political discourse."American militarism has not been limited to foreign battlefields. Politicians and policymakers have insisted that Americans are engaged in an existential struggle against foes seen and unseen, foreign and domestic. Thus, militarism has seeped into everyday American life as the United States has not settled for defeat or victory but for war as a permanent state." - Osamah F. KhalilThose who value this conversation will also probably want to check out The Myth of American Idealism, out now from Penguin Random House.

This episode originally aired on October 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Recently, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul made an argument for aggressively policing subway fare evasion. To explain why a major new crackdown is necessary, she cited "broken windows theory," which she said that progressives refuse to admit "works." She explained that allowing minor crimes "invites graver forms of crime," which is why we need to make sure laws against seemingly minor crimes are enforced. This is the core of the argument made in The Atlantic in 1982 by two political scientists, who argued that when a community allows small offenses (like broken windows) to go unpunished, soon the whole place is going to hell in a handbasket.But the broken windows theory was a fraud. The writers of the original article did not produce evidence that it was true, and indeed there hasn't been evidence produced since to show that it's true. Joining us today is Bernard Harcourt of Columbia Law School, who wrote the first book critical of broken windows policing, The Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing(2004). At the time the book was written, "broken windows" was credited with having produced major crime reductions across the country. Today Prof. Harcourt joins to explain how this theory became so popular. One reason, he says, is that it appealed to both liberals and conservatives: liberals because policing "order" was seen as an attractive alternative to mass incarceration, conservatives because it advocated aggressively keeping unruly poor people in check. But the evidence for the theory just wasn't there, and Prof. Harcourt explains that it ended up serving as the intellectual foundation for outrages like the mass stopping and frisking of young Black men."The broken windows theory and order-maintenance policing continue to receive extremely favorable reviews in policy circles, academia, and the press. Ironically the continued popularity of order-maintenance policing is due, in large part, to the dramatic rise in incarceration. Broken windows policing presents itself as the only viable alternative to three- strikes and mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Order-maintenance proponents affirmatively promote youth curfews, anti-gang loitering ordinances, and order-maintenance crackdowns as milder alternatives to the theory of incapacitation and increased incarceration. ... [But] decades after its first articulation in the Atlantic Monthly, the famous broken windows theory has never been verified. Despite repeated claims that the theory has in fact been "empirically verified" , there is no reliable evidence that the broken windows theory works."The evidentiary problems with broken windows are also discussed in Nathan's recent essay about The Atlantic.