The Dig

We’re taking a quick break halfway into our four-part series of interviews on Latin America because this week is a big week for the American left: Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, is holding its first national convention since the organization has undergone a massive explosion in size. This episode is long as hell and we apologize that some of the audio quality is a little crappier than normal. But the debate and discussion are great.

Hugo Chávez’s rise to power inspired leftists around the world. But today, Venezuela is in a profound economic and political crisis. A huge decline in oil prices gutted the revenue stream that Venezuela depended on to bankroll its social spending. The government led by Chavez’s successor Nicolás Maduro is increasingly turning to repression in response to constant, and often violent, protests from the opposition. NYU historian and NACLA Executive Editor Alejandro Velasco explains what’s happening in Venezuela, how it happened—and how the promise of the Bolivarian Revolution might still be salvaged. Thanks to our supporters at nacla.org, an unrivaled source for left-wing news on Latin America.

In Ecuador, the left won reelection this year, after Alianza PAÍS candidate Lenin Moreno, former President Rafael Correa’s vice president, narrowly won election this year. It was a major victory given the crisis hitting the pink tide of left governments throughout the region. But it was perilously close to a loss. Correa accomplished a lot for the country’s poor majority but did so thanks to a commodity boom that has since gone bust, a strategy that put the left government in conflict with indigenous and environmental movements. Dan’s guest today is Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College. Thanks to our supporters at nacla.org, the best source for left-wing analysis on Latin America.

What Trump has accomplished is spread fear through immigrant communities and, with the Muslim and refugee travel bans, made bigotry the explicit cornerstone of immigration policy. But on immigration, as on other matters, Trump does not emerge from a vacuum. Mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians have for decades built a giant deportation machine. Dan talks to Dara Lind, the immigration reporter at Vox and one of the smartest reporters on the beat to put Trump’s deportation campaign and nativist agenda in context.

Workers have for years faced a neoliberal onslaught administered by a bipartisan establishment of technocratic elites who have ensured the redistribution of wealth into the hands of the rich. This is an elite that has abetted the decimation of labor unions and whose primary disagreement are over how severely those expelled from the labor market should be allowed to suffer. My guest today is journalist Sarah Jaffe. We’re going to talk about the state of work, particularly the manufacturing and retail workers she writes about in recent pieces at The Nation and racked.com. Thanks to our sponsors at Verso and University of North Carolina Press.

Donald Trump appears to many in the guise of a terrifying aberration. But in reality, he is the outcome of trends that are far too normal. We need movements to come together to not only defeat Trump but to take on the system that made him possible. Naomi Klein takes on Trump’s brand, and offers some thoughts as to how to tarnish it, in her new book “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.” Thanks to our sponsors at versobooks.com and at FSG, promoting the excellent new book “Locking Up Our Own” by James Forman Jr.

Mass incarceration controls poor people and populations that have been excluded from the labor market. Politically, tough-on-crime rhetoric has for decades been a tool for politicians to appeal to white voters’ racism. But what’s less discussed is the complicated history of criminal justice politics within black communities and amongst black politicians. Yale Law professor James Forman talks about his new book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Thanks to sponsors at thenation.com and https://www.versobooks.com

Bernie would have won. And in the UK, he sort of did last week. The Labour Party, under left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn (full name: Jeremy Bernard Corbyn) came far from behind and stripped Prime Minister Theresa May of her majority in parliament — after the punditocracy had confidently predicted that radicals had doomed Labour to electoral oblivion. Dan speaks to Richard Seymour, the author most recently of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical politics, and a founding editor of Salvage.

Nothing that so exposes Donald Trump as a snake oil salesman as the fact that he ran a campaign pitched at white working-class anger toward so-called globalism and then stacked his administration with representatives from Big Finance. A decade after Wall Street blew up the global economy, it is now very much in the drivers seat, sucking up as much wealth as possible from regular people and redistributing it upward to the super rich. Thanks to our advertisers at The Nation! Get a deal on magazine subscription at thenation.com/dig and find their podcast at https://www.thenation.com/authors/start-making-sense/

Donald Trump won the presidency in significant part by pledging to do something that his predecessors had already mostly accomplished: building a big, beautiful wall on the border with Mexico. For liberals and centrists, the wall now shares a toxic association with Trump. But until recently, militarizing the border with Mexico was accepted as a core piece of the commonsense, bipartisan establishment immigration and drug policy agenda. Today, my guest is Peter Andreas, a professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown and the author of seminal book Border Games: Policing the US-Mexico Divide. Thanks to our supporters at University of California Press: http://www.ucpress.edu/