US Politics

Morbid Symptoms w/ Amna Akbar, Gabe Winant, Thea Riofrancos

09 Sep 2024
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabe Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the American political conjuncture: the centrality of Palestine, the contradictions of left electoralism, renewed liberal militarism, the return of Obama-ism, the state of the labor and...

Gaza and the US Conjuncture w/ Dylan Saba and Waleed Shahid

31 May 2024
Featuring Dylan Saba and Waleed Shahid on how Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the mass solidarity movement opposing it are transforming US politics. This anti-imperialist internationalist moment marks a profound turning point for the American...

Transcript: J. Edgar Hoover Tried to Destroy the Left — and Liberals Enabled Him

01 Jan 2024
Read the transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2022/11/j-edgar-hoover-g-man-beverly-gage-liberalism-interview

Global Palestine Politics Ep. 2 w/ Richard Seymour

20 Nov 2023
Featuring Richard Seymour on the global politics of the Palestinian struggle and Israel’s war on Gaza. The *second* of a two-part interview.

Global Palestine Politics Ep. 1 w/ Richard Seymour

15 Nov 2023
Featuring Richard Seymour on the global politics of the Palestinian struggle and Israel’s war on Gaza. The first of a two-part interview.

Emergent Terrain w/ Akbar, Winant, & Riofrancos

24 Aug 2023
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the emerging terrain of struggle. Is American liberalism exhausted or revitalized? What are the successes and limits of the new US left electoral strategy? Is there...

Conjuncture w/ Akbar, Winant, & Riofrancos

13 Aug 2023
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the American conjuncture. Did an era that began with Occupy and Ferguson—marked by teachers strikes, two Bernie campaigns, the explosive growth of DSA, Standing Rock, and...

Bidenomics w/ Daniela Gabor, Ted Fertik, & Tim Sahay

21 Jul 2023
Featuring Daniela Gabor, Ted Fertik, and Tim Sahay on Bidenomics. We define and debate the new American industrial policy, the energy transition, the New Cold War with China—and more.

Transcript: New Deal–Era Leftists Tried to Win Beautiful Social Housing for the Masses (w/ Gail Radford)

03 Apr 2023
Read the condensed transcript of our interview with Gail Radford here: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/public-housing-history-new-deal-catherine-bauer-labor-housing-conference

Monetary Politics w/ Tim Barker

22 Dec 2022
Featuring historian Tim Barker on the state of monetary politics amid the current fight over inflation.

Modern Housing w/ Gail Radford

11 Dec 2022
Featuring Gail Radford on her classic book Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Radford tells the story of Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the struggle to make the...

Dead Generations w/ Matt Christman

30 Jul 2022
Featuring Matt Christman on how American history brought us to this awful present.

The American Right w/ Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell

18 Jun 2022
Know Your Enemy hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell on terrifyingly protean right-wing American politics.

Gunpower Death Drive w/ Patrick Blanchfield

10 Jun 2022
Patrick Blanchfield analyzes the long history of US gun violence and the American death drive.

Interregnum w/ Aziz Rana, Nikhil Pal Singh, Wendy Brown

06 Jan 2022
Everyone feels bad right now because conditions are awful and the outlook is bleak. What is going on, and where might things be headed? How might we become unstuck from this interregnum? Dan interviews returning...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Winning Power

09 Jul 2018
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The Trump Doctrine and Its Mandarin Detractors

29 Jun 2018
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.

Whither White Ethnics with Matthew Frye Jacobson

27 Jun 2018
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...

Child Casualties of the Border War

22 Jun 2018
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...

Democracy in Chains with Nancy MacLean

05 Jun 2018
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...

Bernie, Krasner, Keeanga and Premal

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...

Comey Liberal Cop Fetish

27 Apr 2018
James Comey is liberal America’s favorite cop and now, as a result, a bestselling author as well. Patrick Blanchfield returns to talk about his Baffler review of Comey’s new book. It’s awful, of course. But...

Radicalizing Jackson with Chokwe Antar Lumumba

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...

Dave Weigel: These Primary Colors Don’t Run

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...

Petro-Imperialism with Timothy Mitchell Part II

13 Apr 2018
Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the second of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In part 1,...

Aziz Rana: Reviving Resistance to Empire

07 Apr 2018
It’s our 100th episode and the launch of our spring fundraising drive! Aziz Rana returns to The Dig 15 years after the invasion of Iraq to reflect on the paucity of substantive anti-imperialist politics across...

No Human Being Is Illegal with Mae Ngai

27 Mar 2018
Many Americans take the existence of so-called “illegal immigrants” for granted, whatever their opinion of the matter. But illegality isn’t a property of immigrants; rather, it’s a creation of positive law. And we can only...

Real Sanctuary Means Ending Mass Policing with Kade Crockford

25 Mar 2018
Perhaps nothing has more defined the monstrosity of Donald Trump than his racist demonization and targeting of immigrants from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries and those nations he deems to be “shitholes” or, according to another account,...

Lamb Is Not Enough. Three Leftist Women Run in Pennsylvania

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...

West Virginia and Labor after Janus with Sarah Jaffe and Gabriel Winant

13 Mar 2018
In West Virginia, a focal point of Trump-era liberal armchair ethnography, teachers have won a historic statewide strike just as the Supreme Court is poised to rule in Janus, a case that will mark the...

Gun Culture is Neoliberalism with Patrick Blanchfield

09 Mar 2018
Neoliberal culture is one that expects little from government and everything from plucky individuals—including, apparently, the self-sacrificing courage to charge an AR-15 wielding gunman while your classmates cower behind bulletproof backpacks. Writer Patrick Blanchfield returns...

Gun Culture and Masculinity in an Age of Decline with Jennifer Carlson

06 Mar 2018
How does gun culture get built from the ground up? What are the everyday politics of guns? Sociologist Jennifer Carlson does ethnographic fieldwork that provides answers to these questions, showing how men see guns as...

Nomiki Konst on the Fight Inside the Democratic Party

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...

It’s Iron Stache

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....

Aziz Rana: The Cold War’s Late Demise

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...

Baltimore’s Crisis Continues with Lester Spence

03 Feb 2018
The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As...

Why Democrats Fought Then Folded on DACA with Jeff Stein

25 Jan 2018
Excitement that Democrats had developed a spine in the fight for Dreamers reverted to familiar despondency and fury when they capitulated and voted to reopen the government on Monday. @JStein_WaPo offers his analysis of the...

The Origins of the Opioid Crisis with Leo Beletsky

28 Nov 2017
The drug war is a cause of, not solution to, the overdose crisis. Law and public health scholar @LeoBeletsky explains the origins of the opioid overdose crisis and how drug prohibition, policing, interdiction and incarceration...

A Monstrous Tax Plan That Might Fail with Arthur Delaney

24 Nov 2017
The GOP tax plan is a monstrous giveaway to corporate America but it might not pass thanks to the same contradictions within the Republican coalition that repeatedly sunk efforts to repeal Obamacare, as journalist @ArthurDelaneyHP...

The Hollow Center with Molly Ball and Eric Levitz

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...

We must end policing as we know it with Alex Vitale

17 Oct 2017
In his new book The End of Policing Brooklyn College sociologist @avitale makes the case that technocratic reforms won’t fix American policing. In reality, we can only fix policing by ending the carceral state and...

Matt Christman rants, raves, and ruminates

11 Oct 2017
Chapo went on The Dig. Dan talks to @cushbomb about optimism, pessimism, Manitowoc, reptilians, why the internet might be mostly bad, and Dan’s personal connection to the PizzaGate coverup. Toss us some cash love at...

Stephen Wertheim: America Was Never Exceptional But We Used to Think It Was

19 Sep 2017
Trump is normal in more ways than people care to admit, but he is different in that he parts from the bedrock ideology of American exceptionalism that has governed this country from its violent founding....

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández: On DACA

08 Sep 2017
Immigration law scholar @crimmigration breaks down the lies, misdirections and bigoted absurdities conveyed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he announced that the Trump Administration would cruelly make some 800,000 young people who came to...

Kate Aronoff: Populist Revolt Against The Climate Crisis

06 Sep 2017
The devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey has made the denial of climate change all the more dangerous. But @KateAronoff says that mainstream liberals and environmental groups, touting cap-and-trade and business-friendly reforms, have put forward an...

Emily Atkin: Harvey Is Political

01 Sep 2017
New Republic reporter Emily Atkin (@emorwee) talks about why Harvey is already and inherently political thanks to climate change and the potential for petrochemical disaster in Houston. When people criticize “politicizing” the disaster they are...

Andrew Bacevich: This Is the War That Never Ends

22 Aug 2017
This is the war that never ends. The War on Terror’s permanence should be remarkable. It should be an outrage. But it is precisely because the war has become permanent that it has long since...

Dara Lind: Trump's uncomfortable resemblance to Obama on immigration

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...

Peter Andreas: Trump's Wall Is Already Built

31 May 2017
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...

Sarah Jones: What's the Matter with Appalachia? Capitalism

16 May 2017
What’s the matter with Appalachia? Many liberal elites think they know the answer. Since Trump’s campaign first took off, the region has become a symbol of all that is wrong with Red State America: guns,...

Jed Purdy: The courts, Trump and politics in the context of ecological crisis

21 Feb 2017
All eyes have turned to the judiciary. It’s the one potential institutional check on Trump—aside, of course, from the shadowy national security state— at the federal level. The courts have the power to stop and...

Mark Blyth: How Austerity Brought Us Donald Trump​

14 Feb 2017
Mark Blyth wasn’t surprised by the rise of Donald Trump, nor Brexit, nor the crises spreading across Europe. He actually predicted them all.