Jacobin Radio Folgen

Dan interviews Melinda Cooper about her book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which makes the case that neoliberalism and social conservatism have been consistent collaborators in creating an economy that redistributed wealth ruthlessly upwards with a risk-absorbing family at its privatized center.Thanks to Verso Books, which has a huge collection of excellent left-wing titles at www.versobooks.comSupport this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Suzi talks to scholar activist Richard Walker about his new book, Pictures of a Gone City, an urban geography of the San Francisco Bay Area, America’s richest and fastest changing metropolis. Walker explains both the miracle of Silicon Valley — including the sometimes delusional ideas behind this new tech boom, and the heavy price being paid for it in terms of affordability, traffic paralysis, environmental disruption, as well as the political challenges and movements it has spawned. We then speak to Jacobin’s Matt Karp, who evaluates the importance of the midterm elections and the politics of the Democratic Party, who went after suburban voters in this election. The Democrats are about to control the house, but Matt says their professional-class politics are a cul de sac, when what is needed is a political revolution driven by the needs and aspirations of the multiracial working class.

Trump and fossil-fueled conservatives have pit working-class prosperity against environmentalism. This, of course, is incredibly dangerous. It's also premised on a misreading of environmental politics as having nothing to do with human well-being. But climate change, of course, threatens not only non-human nature but also the entirety of human life that is fundamentally dependent on it. Right now, coastal homes and cities, agriculture, wildfire-prone forests, and the water supply are all under threat. And so an ecologically sustainable response to this crisis must definitionally also be a socially and economically just one: something like a Green New Deal, a broad vision that climate activists and left insurgent politicians are uniting behind. Dan's guest today, climate reporter Kate Aronoff, is going to tell us all about it — as well as about the general state of domestic and global climate politics.