The Dig Folgen

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 truly freaked out in New York. There are major primary fights underway in California—most everywhere, it seems, some variant of the left is on the move. But does the fact that a onetime business-aligned Democrat like Gavin Newsom is getting away with posing as the progressive in the California race for governor indicate that the left hasn’t yet built the institutional capacity to control the leftward surge amongst voters? Dan thinks so. These are amongst the topics that he discusses with Dave Weigel, a political reporter at the Washington Post and one of the few mainstream political reporters who really gets the left.   Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And Work: The Last 1,000 Years by Andrea Komlosy versobooks.com/books/2608-work. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

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 socialist left that has for decades lacked much in the way of serious forces. One of the major reasons the organization’s membership rolls blew up, of course, was because of Bernie Sanders’ historic 2016 run for president, which not only electrified huge swaths of the country but reminded the radical left that the point is to win power and to govern—and that, after years on the margins, we could do so. This was in part because many Americans were no longer afraid of the s-word: socialism. Yet there is still, for many good reasons, a lot of skepticism about electoral politics in general and the Democratic Party very much in particular, inside DSA and across the socialist left. That’s the needle that the new DSA electoral strategy document tries to thread.   Dan’s guests are Renée Paradis, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer (@ReneeParadis). She has frequently worked for electoral campaigns, including most recently as the National Voter Protection Director for Bernie 2016. Michael Kinnucan is a writer, researcher and activist in New York City. You should also follow him on Facebook, where he has a lively and incisive presence. Both are members of DSA’s National Electoral Committee and the organizing committee for NYC-DSA’s Brooklyn Electoral Working Group.   Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo versobooks.com/blogs/3635-where-freedom-starts-sex-power-violence-metoo And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig  

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, we talked about a lot of things, including how the rise of coal made both industrial capitalism and newly powerful worker resistance possible; and how the shift to oil then facilitated the persistence of imperialism in a decolonizing world while thwarting worker organizing. In this installment, we discuss imperialist assaults on worker struggles in Iraq and Iran, the cooptation of those struggles by nationalist elites, and how those imperialist attacks facilitated the rise of the Baathist security state. We’ll also look at how the true history of the 70s oil shock undermines the conventional account, how the protection of minorities was used to legitimate imperialism, how petro-dollars fueled the global arms trade, in what sense the Iraq War has been a war for oil, and the US strategy to seek advantage through the continuation of conflict and instability across the Middle East. Finally, we’ll address petro-imperialism’s bedrock alliance with right-wing Islamists against democratic movements of the left in Saudi Arabia and beyond, and why we must fight to ensure that the coming energy transition is a just one. That review of Yascha Mounk’s book that Dan wrote with Thea Riofrancos https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/zombie-liberalism/ Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War by Hito Steyerl versobooks.com/books/2553-duty-free-art and and Police: A Field Guide by David Correia and Tyler Wall versobooks.com/books/2530-police And support this podcast with $ at patreon.com/TheDig, where you can also check out the first edition of our new weekly newsletter.