The Dig

Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, won an overwhelming victory in Mexico’s presidential election, shattering a corrupt, old party system that brought ordinary Mexicans rampant violence and economic immiseration. But AMLO faces powerful political and economic constraints once in office—including some of his own making. Dan’s guest is Christy Thornton, a professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins. During the last week, she was an election observer for the Scholar and Citizen Network for Democracy in Mexico. Thanks to Verso. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot, now out in paperback versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage George did a Dig interview too blubrry.com/thedig/34202825/telling-a-new-story-with-george-monbiot/ And Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity You can find lots of great left Latin America news in English at nacla.org Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig  

Today, we’re talking about Italy, where a so-called “populist” alliance of the Five Star Movement and right-wing League just took over the government with anti-migrant and Euro-skeptic agenda. Dan’s guest is David Broder, a historian of French and Italian communism and frequent contributor to Jacobin. The Five Star Movement was for a time welcomed by some on the left. But it’s not of the left; rather, it is a product of the Italian left’s collapse.   Thanks to Verso. Check out Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies   And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org   And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig  

Stephen Wertheim, a Lecturer in American and international history at Birkbeck, University of London, breaks cuts through the suffocating foreign policy debate that shapes American Empire under Trump.   Peace has broken out across the Korean Peninsula—or, at least, the odds that Donald Trump will blow the world up have gone down a just a bit—at least temporarily. Yes, Trump is the one who pushed us way too close to the brink of nuclear war. And yes, he likely sought peace with Kim Jong-Un because he loves wins, whatever their political or ideological content. But wow, has the liberal reaction been revealing. According to the mindset that pervades the liberal media and political elite, a move toward peace with North Korea is bad because Trump is bad. Or perhaps worse yet, it’s bad because the national security state conventional wisdom that has governed Washington under both parties for so long—purveyed by the very people who have brought us endless war almost everywhere—says that it’s bad. It’s clearer than ever that the task of the left to find a way out of this ideological closed circuit of the liberal vs. Trump foreign policy debate—and, if we win power, to shut down its warmongering for good.   Thanks to Verso. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity   And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org   Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig  

Everyone wants to know what’s wrong with Appalachia. But beginning in the 1960s, it was “white ethics”—Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews and other non-WASPs—who broke from the New Deal coalition, embracing their Ellis Island immigrant roots in reaction to the Black Freedom struggle and, ultimately, Latin American migration. Dan’s guest today is Matthew Frye Jacobson, an historian at Yale and the author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America, from Harvard University Press. Thanks to Verso. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot, now out in paperback versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage George did a Dig interview too blubrry.com/thedig/34202825/telling-a-new-story-with-george-monbiot/ And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org Support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind, one very bright spot in an often disappointing landscape of mainstream immigration journalism, discusses the historical, political and legal context of Trump’s family separation policy. Dan also just wrote a lengthy piece on this for Jacobin, which you can read at jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-immigration-child-family-separation-policy Thanks to Verso Books. Check out the new paperback edition of China Miéville’s October: The Story of the Russian Revolution versobooks.com/books/2731-october And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org And support this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

View Transcript David Harvey has taught Capital to huge numbers of people everywhere. Dan interviews him about his latest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. Harvey explains why he thinks all three volumes are of Capital are key, why we’re still living under neoliberalism at least unless and until ethnonationalist autarchy pushes it aside, how capitalism might survive climate change via mass immiseration, and linking struggles over production and consumption in the fight to transform society toward socialism. And more.   Thanks to Verso. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity   Register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.org   And support this podcast with $$ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig    

View Transcript The US colony of Puerto Rico has been repeatedly shocked and Puerto Ricans are traumatized. That is precisely what successful shock doctrines like this one—which wants to remake the island into a utopia for rich Americans and crypto-bros and a dystopia for everyone else—depend upon. This is is the subject of Naomi Klein’s new book from Haymarket, The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. Today, Klein returns to The Dig, and is joined by Mercedes Martínez, president of the Puerto Rican Teachers Federation. Thanks to Verso Books. Check out A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx with Sven-Eric Liedman versobooks.com/events/1785-a-world-to-win-the-life-and-works-of-karl-marx-with-sven-eric-liedman Also, register for the upcoming Socialism 2018 conference at SocialismConference.org Support this podcast with $ and get our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Last week, we posted an interview Dan recorded in Barcelona on Spanish politics—specifically the question of Catalan independence, and also the municipalist movement governing cities like Barcelona. What we didn’t really talk much about was the fact that the conservative Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy was about to fall—which it did, just a few days later. So, Dan brought sociologist Carlos Delclós back for a follow-up interview. Production note: Dan sounds like he’s speaking in an aquarium or calling into his own show because he fucked up the recording. So don’t blame Alex Lewis. Thanks to Verso. Check out Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties by Tariq Ali versobooks.com/books/2666-street-fighting-years Also, register for the upcoming Socialism 2018 conference at SocialismConference.org And support this podcast with $ and get access to our stellar weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

For libertarians, liberty means something different. It’s about liberty for property owners. And in their quest to preserve that absolute freedom for the ownership class—whether their assets be human slaves, factories or extractive industries—democracy must be curtailed and the power of the people must be checked and repressed. This is the argument put forward by Dan’s guest, historian Nancy MacLean, in her book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. The book makes a powerful argument for the anti-democratic origins and trajectory of free-market fundamentalist Koch-Brothers-aligned economists who have come to profoundly shape and warp American politics to fit their dystopian vision. The book has also been controversial. Thank you to Verso Books. Check out Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism by Nisha Kapoor versobooks.com/books/2551-deport-deprive-extradite. Thank you to the Socialism 2018 conference. Register now at socialismconference.org Want to get access to our stellar weekly newsletter? You can do so by making a contribution to the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

Fifty years ago, a mainstream group of high-profile Americans declared the following: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.” The Kerner Commission, established by President Johnson, embodied left liberalism at its most bold and idealistic. But that vision of radical reform was eviscerated by the American war on Vietnam, the rise of neoliberalism and the modern conservative movement, and liberal triangulation that reached its apotheosis under Bill Clinton. Dan talks to Vanessa A. Bee, a consumer protection lawyer in D.C. and a social media editor for Current Affairs magazine, about her New York magazine essay on the subject nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/how-we-can-get-a-more-equal-union.html Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig and access our new weekly newsletter.