Current Affairs

Editors of Current Affairs recently took Hillary Clinton's "MasterClass" and had a deeply unpleasant time. But Bill Clinton, too, has a MasterClass, and as public interest journalists committed to understanding and explaining the political world, we felt obligated to take this one, too. To save you the $180 MasterClass fee, we tell you everything you'll learn from Bill Clinton's "Inclusive Leadership" lessons, including:- How to associate yourself with the legacy of Nelson Mandela and other great civil rights leaders - How to discuss your record as a politician without mentioning anything you actually did, like gutting welfare and speeding up the death penalty - How to charm people while saying absolutely nothing- How to champion "inclusivity" without advocating anything that could fundamentally challenge the existing social hierarchy - How to produce a glossy course syllabus containing very little other than photos of yourself and your pets Bill Clinton is genuinely a master of the art of bullshitting people, a skilled and charismatic manipulator. In this episode we discuss how he does it and why the kind of politics he exemplifies need to be rejected and destroyed.To give you your own "coursepack" for this MasterClass, we're offering our Patrons a FREE digital copy of Nathan's book Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America, which gives an extremely thorough examination of his record and exposes all of the awful policies he continues to conceal and/or lie about. (See attached.) Print copies of Superpredator can be purchased on Amazon.  Superpredator - Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America.pdf      

Today, in our last episode of the year, we present a hopeful discussion about what leftists can accomplish in power. Sam Bell is a Rhode Island state senator and Democratic Socialists of America member. The Boston Globe has called him "the most outspoken member" of the RI state senate, and he has tried to use his position to advance left policies in a state historically dominated by extremely conservative Democrats and a powerful political machine. In this episode, we have what is hopefully an uplifting and exciting conversation about what it's like to take on "machine politics" and why some victories are more within reach than you might think. This episode is a useful primer not only on Rhode Island politics, but on the way that leftists can win office and then use that office effectively to change the politics of their state. We talk about: - How his state became dominated by extremely right-wing Democrats out of step with the progressive inclinations of the electorate- Why state legislators are more powerful than you might assume, and how to use that power - How many bills are passed without anyone scrutinizing them or exposing what they do, and why just putting in the effort to study and raise questions about bad legislation can thwart it- How machine politicians want you to think they're more powerful than they actually are- Why taking on the Democratic leadership can make you more popular with constituents, even if the leadership hates your guts- Why power doesn't always work the way you think it does, and how a seemingly weak left might able to do more than it assumes "When you do stand up and fight, sometimes you win. And when you lose, you gain power. You show that the machine is not as strong as it always was. When you have the dissent, you make it easier for the next person to stand up and dissent. And you weaken [the machine's] power. You push them to the left. When they're more afraid of the left than the right, then they move to the left." — Sam Bell We hope that this episode can offer encouragement and inspiration to those who want to take on the establishment and build the progressive left. In 2022, we will need to work harder than ever before. If you don't think you can change things, remember that those who hold power always want to make sure the powerless do not think they can successfully challenge the status quo. But often they're weaker than they seem and you have a greater capacity than you know. And if we don't do it, who will? 

Today Nathan is joined by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, author of The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe. Under pressure from progressive Democrats, Joe Biden recently agreed to continue a pause on student loan payments. There has been a great deal of debate over whether Biden should consider canceling large amounts of student debt outright. Mitchell has spent years studying every aspect of the student loan crisis. On this episode, he helps us better understand what the crisis is and how we got here. We discuss:- What makes student loans a "catastrophe" to begin with, and why there needs to be some public policy solution - The mountain of human misery beneath the statistics, what life is actually like for people who can't pay their debts- Why Josh thinks the establishment of Sallie Mae was one of the most disastrous trainwrecks in the history of Congressional legislation - How college financial advisers have misled students into thinking their degrees are more valuable than they actually are - The cases of people with over a million dollars in student debt, or those so old their Social Security checks are being garnished to pay their student loans- How much of the crisis was created by Wall Street greed versus well-intentioned but disastrous public policy- Whether a solution is just to make public colleges free, like public high schools Josh's Wall Street Journal article on borrowers who have crossed a million dollars in student debt is here. Read some Current Affairs coverage of student debt and the financing of higher education in these articles:- Is Student Debt Cancellation Regressive? NO.- Cancelling Student Debt Reduces The Racial Wealth Gap- If You Want To Enact Free College, Cancel Student Debt Immediately- The Taxonomy of Student Debt Arguments  - Student Debt Forgiveness: Let's Do Some Math- How Student Debt Is Worsening Gender and Racial Injustice- The Case for Free College  - What a Better Biden Would Say About Student Loan Debt

Kristin Henning directs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She has worked as a public defender for juveniles in Washington, D.C. and is the author of the book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth.  In the book, Prof. Henning "explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and details the long-term consequences of racism and trauma Black youth experience at the hands of police and their vigilante surrogates." In this episode, we talk about why over-policing destroys the ability of many Black children to have normal childhoods and why it's so essential to respond to the transgressions of kids with empathy and compassion rather than brutality. It's not that difficult: it just means treating all young people, regardless of race, with the kind of mercy and generous due process that some (e.g. Kyle Rittenhouse) are already given. 

A UK court recently ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States. Assange faces serious charges over violating the Espionage Act, based on WikiLeaks' publication of classified United States government documents and video related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The prosecution has been condemned by a number of press freedom and human rights organizations, but there are those who argue that Assange is a criminal or even a "terrorist."To discuss the case, Nathan is joined by one of the leading experts on it, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. Prof. Melzer is a specialist in human rights law who has served as a legal adviser to the Red Cross, and is currently Human Rights Chair of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and Professor of International Law at the University of Glasgow. His book The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution is forthcoming from Verso.

Hillary Clinton has just released an online course on "The Power of Resilience" through the website MasterClass, where celebrities teach their skills. The course has made the news because in it, she delivers the speech she would have given had she won the presidency in 2016, which she did not. We were curious what else is in Hillary Clinton's MasterClass, so Current Affairs editors Yasmin Nair, Nathan J. Robinson, and Lily Sánchez paid the fee and took the class. In this episode, we reveal all of the class's secrets, so that you can take Hillary's MasterClass without actually taking Hillary's MasterClass. Her useful lessons on resilience, negotiation, and more are helpfully summarized in this delightful conversation. We discuss:- Why the class seems to be more about helping Clinton process her loss to Donald Trump than a good faith attempt to teach anyone anything- How the class rewrites history and leaves out all of the horrible things the Clintons have done over the course of their political careers- How Clinton presents politics as the struggle of ambitious people to achieve personal goals and fulfillment rather than as a collective struggle that necessitates social movements- Why it's necessary that nobody ever take the lessons of this class seriously, since the last thing we need is a new generation of vacuous Clintonian politicians- Why it's strange to get lessons on political success from someone whose decisions led to a catastrophic political failure (campaign in Wisconsin is not one of the class lessons) Yasmin's Baffler article on Clinton's dystopian elite feminism is here. Her article "Dynasties of Neoliberalism" also discusses Clinton. Nathan's book on Bill Clinton, Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America, is available here. His article dissecting the Clinton campaign is here. The quote from Bill Clinton about Obama is from a 2012 New Yorker article. 

Prof. Aya Gruber teaches criminal law at the University of Colorado Law School. Her book The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration makes the case that many feminists have been too quick to push for more severe criminal punishments for crimes against women, and have as a result ended up legitimizing or even contributing to the expansion of mass incarceration. Prof. Gruber makes a strong argument against "carceral feminism," claiming that it sees "putting offenders in prison" as the solution to harms women face, but that this remedy at best only imperfectly guarantees justice, and at worst reproduces cruel racist state violence. In this provocative conversation, we discuss:- How Prof. Gruber's experience in a public defender's office helped her see that some of the legal changes mainstream feminists pushed for ultimately ended up unfairly punishing poor men of color without helping women who were the victims of crimes- Why courts, police, and prisons are not good at delivering anything resembling justice to the victims of sex crimes- How trying to use prisons to punish people after offenses gets in the way of thinking about how to prevent the offenses from happening in the first place - The Brock Turner case, in which a judge was recalled and removed from office after being perceived as lenient on a sex offender, and why Prof. Gruber thinks it was misguided to push for increased mandatory sentences for defendants like Turner- Why feminism should abandon new calls for criminalization and instead see criminal law as an absolute last resort, addressing harms at their root causes

Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy has been known for decades as a critic of Critical Race Theory, which was developed in part by his late colleague Derrick Bell. But Kennedy's critiques come from a position of intellectual respect, and over the years he has become more sympathetic to some of the central claims CRT makes about the pervasive and intractable nature of American racism. His new book Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture collects his essays from the past several decades, many of which deal with the question of how American racism has functioned historically, how it has morphed over time, and what a rational way to think about it is. In this wide-ranging conversation, he and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson discuss:- The way Black intellectual thought has long had "optimistic" and "pessimistic" camps, and CRT fits squarely in with a long tradition of Black pessimism about racial progress- Why Prof. Kennedy thinks there are ample factual grounds for holding that pessimistic perspective, even as someone born in the Jim Crow South who has witnessed certain kinds of major progress during his lifetime- Why Donald Trump's birtherism was a sign of a deep ugly undercurrent of lingering racism that Kennedy does not expect to see disappear, and the disturbing ways that Republicans are rolling back important democratic gains- How law professors foolishly pretend the Supreme Court is politically independent and why we need to acknowledge that it is a powerful unaccountable institution seized by reactionaries- Why Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer have had completely delusional views of the role of politics on the court- The greatness of Thurgood Marshall, for whom Prof. Kennedy once clerked, and why Marshall was no more "political" than other justices - Why Prof. Kennedy has developed a deep respect for CRT scholar Derrick Bell in the years since Bell's death and why Bell was an impressive example of someone who mixed great scholarship with uncompromising activism Say It Loud! is available from Pantheon Books. Kennedy's essay on Derrick Bell is available on SSRN.  Nathan's essay on Ginsburg's decision not to retire and the illusion of the apolitical court is here, and his essay on critical race theory is here. The Manhattan Institute panel on CRT that Prof. Kennedy was on is here.

Today Nathan is joined by Edward Niedermeyer, an investigative journalist whose book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors remains the definitive critical account of the rise of Elon Musk and Tesla. Edward is an auto industry expert whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg View, and elsewhere, and he currently hosts the Autonocast podcast about the development of autonomous cars. We discuss how Tesla motors has been built into a powerhouse in the automotive industry, and Edward argues that it has required a LOT of deception. We discuss:- Why Tesla has been so successful—is it mostly branding and hype or are there real innovations underneath it all?- Whether luxury electric cars are actually important in the fight against climate change- How government subsidies have played a role in making Musk's unprofitable venture survive- How dependent Tesla is on a constant hype machine that is not matched by its actual output- The strategies the company has used to discredit critics- The way economic value can be built on perceptions rather than reality- The parallels between Tesla's brazen violation of norms/standards and the similar behavior oof Donald Trump- The "culture of impunity" that lets corporate wrongdoers off the hook for ignoring laws and basic principles of safety and good design - How the lies of Elon Musk have now had deadly consequences: Tesla users have died in car accidents by taking the company's hyped-up claims about self-driving capabilities seriously - How the company is fine taking insane careless new risks like letting drivers play video games while they driveThe New York Times report Nathan refers to is here. Nathan's article on Elon Musk is here. 

In this contentious conversation, Nathan speaks to Prof. John McWhorter about his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Prof. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, regular New York Times contributor, and host of the Lexicon Valley podcast. His book argues that anti-racist social justice ideology is properly described as a "religion" and that its practitioners are beyond reasoning with. It's a thesis Nathan takes serious issue with and the conversation illuminates deep points of disagreement on questions like:- Whether something having "religious" qualities makes it irrational- Whether the people Prof. McWhorter describes are really "beyond reason" - Whether Prof. McWhorter's characterization of several incidents of excesses by "woke religion" are presented fairly and accurately - If the California Education Department's new mathematics teaching framework really does, as Prof. McWhorter argues, constitute an abandonment of standards of rigor - Whether it's right to say that certain questions are "off limits" - Whether Eminem disproves the idea that there is a prohibition on white people participating in Black culture - Whether Prof. McWhorter has tried hard enough to engage empathetically with those he disagrees with The conversation is brief, as Prof. McWhorter had a limited amount of time available, but touches on many of Prof. McWhorter's most provocative theses.