Jacobin Radio Folgen

Today, we’re addressing one of the most obnoxious corners of the identity politics debate. And that is the corner occupied by Right Liberals who believe that any desire to change the world is a divisive symptom of maladjusted affluenza emanating from pampered college students. Moira Weigel discusses her Guardian review of The Coddling of the American Mind, which makes its case by way of pragmatic folk aphorisms like: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing books at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with you money at patreon.com/TheDig

Let’s ensure that the history of American socialism doesn’t repeat as farce. That’s one reason that Max Elbaum wrote Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, an account of the little-remembered New Communist Movement that defined the American anti-capitalist Left of the 1970s. Their internationalism, anti-racism and cadre organization were in many ways admirable. Their dogmatism and sectarianism proved disastrous. Elbaum relates this history, and the lessons that the New Left failed to learn from the Old Left—lessons that today's resurgent left would be wise to study.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing titles, including Revolution in the Air, at www.versobooks.comPlease support this podcast with MONEY at patreon.com/TheDig

Meagan Day, Natalie Shure, and Alissa Quart reflect with Suzi Weissman on the toxicity — and banality — of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation to the Supreme Court. We look at the way the contentious, emotional hearings exposed the fault lines between gender, privilege, class, and politics in the US — and ask why the Democrats have been so meek, diffident, and ineffective in the face of the Republican Party’s disciplined march to impose the future, violating every norm to get an extreme right-wing bloc on the Supreme Court. We also look at what that means for the fightback. Natalie Shure looks at the Federalist Society and their influence and politics that go beyond gender justice to the very defining characteristics of Kavanaugh’s ideology and the political movement that groomed him. Alissa Quart, author of Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America writes about class privilege and the women who are invisible to Kavanaugh and his class. Christine Blasey Ford is heard, but betrays her class by stepping forward, whereas the testimony of Debbie Ramirez, Julie Swetnick, and thousands of other women workers are disregarded.