Electoral Politics
08 May 2023
Featuring Stacy Davis Gates, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Alex Han on how Chicago’s labor left took over City Hall. Brandon Johnson’s mayoral victory, the product of a decade-plus of social movement union struggle, is a model...
05 May 2023
Featuring Nikil Saval and Helen Gym on how the history of Philadelphia social movements brought Nikil into the state senate and has made Helen, a long-time public education organizer, a frontrunner in the mayoral race....
03 Feb 2021
Dan interviews sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo on his book The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy. How does the promise of direct digital democracy obscure how leaders are made more powerful and less accountable? Examples...
13 Nov 2020
Dan interviews Mike Davis on what the election reveals about this US political moment and the way forward for the Left.
06 Nov 2020
Dan interviews Cornel West on how to think about and act upon the world that this week presented to us.
06 Nov 2020
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30 Oct 2020
What else to talk about right now other than everything about right now? Election, pandemic, BLM, climate, and how the left should think about and struggle with it all. Dan interviews Naomi Klein and Nikhil...
18 Mar 2020
Dan interviews NYC DSA down-ballot candidates. Samelys López is running for a US House seat in the Bronx. Jabari Brisport, Marcela Mitaynes, and Phara Souffrant Forrest are running for seats in the state legislature. All...
14 Mar 2020
An interview on how the Democratic Party got here today with Ryan Grim.
02 Mar 2020
A special pod ep from Sunday’s live Boston canvass kickoff with Michael Brooks and Natalie Shure.
26 Feb 2020
Live show with Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara and Alex Press in Cambridge, MA for Bernie 2020. Recorded the night of Nevada caucuses.
28 Dec 2019
We need Bernie but a lot more too. Dan does three interviews with down-ballot left insurgent candidates: Jessica Cisneros, a Justice Democrat running against incumbent conservative Democrat Henry Cuellar in Texas’s 28th congressional district; Stephen...
30 May 2019
Dan has in-depth discussion on Bernie’s approach to race and what he must do to win over Black voters with Malaika Jabali and Wendi Muse. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Sanders isn’t unpopular with Black voters....
23 Mar 2019
Four of the five candidates endorsed by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or advanced to the runoff election on April 2, leading to talk of a Socialist Caucus on the city...
16 Feb 2019
Dan talks to Eric Levitz—who at New York magazine provides the sort of consistently thoughtful and deeply contextualized analysis that is often quite hard to find on mainstream new sites—about the increasingly-impossible to reconcile immanent contradictions...
13 Feb 2019
What might Bernie 2020 look like, particularly now that almost everyone claims to be for Medicare for All (whatever they might mean by that)? Will Harris’ track record as a law-and-order prosecutor doom her, or...
28 Oct 2018
Recently, Dan spoke to Nikhil Pal Singh about the unfortunate and never-ending debate over whether it was economics or racism that got Trump elected. This is a sequel to that discussion: because what Malaika Jabali...
26 Oct 2018
Jacobin Managing Editor Micah Uetricht pulls Dave-Davies-duty for Dan and interviews Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez, a DSA member running for alderwoman in Chicago. Rodríguez-Sanchez moved to Chicago from Puerto Rico, where the brutal austerity imposed on the...
03 Oct 2018
An interview with three members of Reclaim Philadelphia, which emerged from the Bernie 2016 campaign in Philly and has since—in a remarkably short amount of time—played a key role in getting Larry Krasner elected District...
03 Aug 2018
If Kerri Evelyn Harris wins in Delaware, she will have knocked out an incumbent US Senator. And that would be a really big deal. Harris, a left candidate backed by Justice Democrats, is Dan’s guest...
27 Jul 2018
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15 Jul 2018
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12 Jul 2018
This week’s super series on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory and the future of left politics continues with Julia Salazar, a DSA member running for a Brooklyn state Senate in New York’s District 18. Salazar’s campaign worked...
11 Jul 2018
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10 Jul 2018
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09 Jul 2018
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01 Jul 2018
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09 Jun 2018
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...
30 May 2018
Spanish politics are complicated. Dan speaks to Carlos Delclós, Kate Shea Baird and Bécquer Seguín to help clarify the Catalan independence movement, the radical municipalist governments that now govern major Spanish cities including Barcelona, and...
23 May 2018
A laundry list of modest policy solutions is not enough, it turns out. It’s not just that technocratic fixes-around-the-edges spectacularly fail to meet people’s needs; in failing to articulate a big picture vision of how...
05 May 2018
Dan just moderated a discussion in Philadelphia with Senator Sanders, along with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, scholar and frequent Dig guest Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and veteran defense lawyer and advocate Premal Dharia. Bernie came to...
24 Apr 2018
It’s yet the latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics. Dan’s guest is Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Last year, Mayor Lumumba pledged to make Jackson “the...
21 Apr 2018
It’s the latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics. Dennis Kucinich is running a viable race for governor of Ohio. Cynthia Nixon, running with Working Families Party backing, has Cuomo...
17 Apr 2018
The latest installment in our ongoing series on the left and electoral politics and we’re talking about Democratic Socialists of America’s new electoral strategy. DSA has almost overnight become a serious force on an American...
17 Mar 2018
Democrat Conor Lamb’s victory is a stunning rebuke of Republicans. But Lamb is far from an ideal candidate, and so the race also raises a perennial debate between the left and liberal center over what...
02 Mar 2018
Nomiki Konst, a correspondent for The Young Turks and Sanders appointee to the DNC’s Unity Reform Commission, talks about the Berniecrat struggle against a corrupt neoliberal establishment to democratize the Democratic Party. This is the...
27 Feb 2018
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20 Feb 2018
Dan talks to Randy Bryce (@IronStache), the Berniecrat ironworker taking on Paul Ryan, about how he plans to knockout the House Speaker, Scott Walker’s decimation of unions and Foxconn’s con against the people of Wisconsin....
14 Feb 2018
What if the Cold War only just ended in November 2016, as Donald Trump grotesquely encircled and then captured the presidency, finding it, to his surprise, unguarded? The Cold War proper, of course, ended with...
01 Dec 2017
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, explains one of Clintonism’s most dreadful results: President Trump. The new film available on Netflix, is Reich’s quasi-autobiographical documentary about the origins of contemporary political-economic inequality. The premise that...
17 Nov 2017
Last week was a bad week for Republicans and a good week for Democrats—and for Democratic Socialists. It’s now pretty clear that Republicans will pay a price for the fact that large numbers of Americans...
07 Nov 2017
Centrist business elites believe in an America that doesn’t exist. Two guests this episode: first, @mollyesque talks about her piece ”On Safari in Trump’s America” for her article follows the centrist organization Third Way on a...
20 Oct 2017
Since Bernie Sanders’s success in the 2016 Democratic primary, much of the Left, from progressive Democrats to socialists, has had its sights set on something we had long at least implicitly assumed was impossible: state...
06 Oct 2017
Former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner talks about being horrified by Trump, why single-payer is suddenly hot among likely 2020 Democratic contenders, and the work that Our Revolution is doing nationwide to fight the Democratic...
06 Oct 2017
Prevailing debate obscures the fact that we already have a form of gun control in the United States. As legal scholar Ben Levin explains, the problem is that it’s a form of gun control that...
04 Oct 2017
Here’s Dan’s full interview with civil rights attorney and Democratic nominee for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. You heard some of it yesterdayon the first in a four-part series on mass incarceration that we are...
03 Oct 2017
In the late 1960s, criminologists like Todd Clear predicted America would soon start closing its prisons. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Interviews with Clear, formerly incarcerated poet and legal scholar Dwayne Betts, and civil...
29 Sep 2017
Today’s Diglet is not really diminutive at all. Dan has two interviews with two separate guests because too much has happened over the past few weeks and there are too many smart people to analyze...
22 Sep 2017
For this Diglet, Dan and Eve discuss Hillary Clinton’s new book What Happened. Eve also talks about spending time with Jill Stein recently, and argues that it’s wrongheaded to blame Stein for Trump. Thanks to...
25 Aug 2017
Dan talks to Splinter Politics Editor Alex Pareene about his recent piece “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party” and about why Phoenix is Trump’s happy place. This second weekly episode...
18 Aug 2017
New Republic writer Sarah Jones joins Dan to talk about Trump’s invocation of the “alt-left” and to explain the term’s unseemly centrist history. And more. We’re gonna try doing two episodes each week now: the...
11 Jul 2017
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...
13 Jun 2017
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...
27 Apr 2017
The Dig normally serves up ice cold, well-digested takes. Sometimes, however, something important happens and Dan finds someone who can help us understand it quickly. Last weekend’s election in France, which advanced the far-right National...
14 Mar 2017
On the Left, few forms of mainstream journalism are more detested than political reporting. It often substitutes the horse race for substance, dresses up conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom as real analysis, and resorts to the false...
21 Jan 2017
This week we re-broadcast
Jacobin Magazine,
Verso, and
Haymarket Books’ anti-inauguration event from The Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. featuring Naomi Klein, Anand Gopal, Jeremy Scahill, Owen Jones, & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
06 Dec 2016
Donald Trump’s election was shocking, if actually not so surprising, and has prompted widespread protests against a cresting right-wing reaction taking shape as a strange and potent combination of white nationalism, make-believe economic populism, libertarian...