The Dig Folgen

Fighting for Black Lives Under Trump The Movement for Black Lives’ insistence that black lives matter is deceptively straightforward and minimal. But it has transformed black politics, and American politics as a whole. From the tension and contradiction of the Obama years, in which a black man became the most powerful person on earth but conditions continued to worsen for black people as a whole, the Movement for Black Lives erupted and made radical demands for social and economic justice, and to an end to police violence and mass incarceration. The movement now has to find a way forward in the time of Trump’s law-and-order backlash.

Mass incarceration should be central to any analysis of American political economy. It’s also a moral monstrosity. But before The New Jim Crow and anti-mass incarceration activists across the country loudly insisted this was the case, it received little attention. Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, and The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. She talks with The Dig about prisons in American life.

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 strike down laws and actions that violate the law or the Constitution. Recent rulings by a federal district judge in Washington and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made this clear after they blocked Trump’s Muslim and refugee bans. But the judiciary, despite pretenses to the contrary, is fundamentally political. It can shred civil rights and economic protections as efficiently as it can protect them. Ultimately, major judicial conflicts get decided by the Supreme Court, which has been split 4-4 since Republicans blocked President Obama’s effort to nominate Merrick Garland to take the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat. Today, Dan Denvir speaks to Jed Purdy about the judiciary and other matters. Purdy is a professor at Duke Law and the author of three books on American political identity including The Meaning of Property. His most recent book is After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene and he has published articles in many, many publications.