The Dig

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 wall now shares a toxic association with Trump. But until recently, militarizing the border with Mexico was accepted as a core piece of the commonsense, bipartisan establishment immigration and drug policy agenda. Today, my guest is Peter Andreas, a professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown and the author of seminal book Border Games: Policing the US-Mexico Divide. Thanks to our supporters at University of California Press: http://www.ucpress.edu/

The drug war is winding down and heating up all at the same time. States are legalizing recreational weed while prosecutors around the country are charging dealers, including small-time ones, with murder when their drugs contribute to someone else’s fatal overdose; attorney Jeff Sessions has instructed US Attorneys to go to the max on severe mandatory minimum sentences. Rick Lines, executive director of Harm Reduction International, lays out what an alternative to the drug war should look like.

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, bigotry, a willingness to get swindled by right-wing snake-oil salesmen. There is, indeed, a lot wrong with Appalachia. But what’s most wrong is that a region where people waged militant labor struggles has now been devastated by coal company greed, automation, shifts in global commodity markets and, of course, by Republican reaction and neoliberal malign neglect. Sarah Jones, social media editor at the New Republic, explores the possibilities for left-wing revival in Appalachia.

The Women’s March on Washington sent a clear message that women would be at the lead in battling the right in the years to come. But it left unresolved significant divides that pervaded the 2016 primary campaign, as the many signs paying homage to Hillary Clinton made clear. Featherstone throws down Clinton's faux feminism, the Women's Strike, Bill de Blasio and more.

Why do Republicans only seem to care about deficits and debt when they’re trying to cut social welfare programs? Dan's guest for this special episode is Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He discusses Trump’s regressive tax proposal and the GOP's never ending efforts to redistribute wealth the super-rich.

The media has become a part of the story like perhaps never before. Journalist probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable news outlets provided him with wall-to-wall free advertising and, more recently, lauded Trump as “presidential” because he decided to attack Syria. Adam Johnson, a writer at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, breaks it down.

The Dig normally serves up ice cold, well-digested takes. Sometimes, however, something important happens and Dan finds someone who can help us understand it quickly. Last weekend’s election in France, which advanced the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen and neoliberal centrist Emmanuel Macron to a runoff, is one such event. Sebastian Budgen, an editor for Verso Books, a contributing editor at Jacobin, and a member of the editorial board at Historical Materialism, tells explains what's up.

Putting “black faces in high places,” scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues, has not only failed to benefit the working class and poor black majority; it has actually harmed them by legitimating an individualistic, meritocratic narrative that blames poor black people’s condition on their own personal failings. Taylor is a professor of African-American studies at Princeton and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, from Haymarket Books.

Prisons don’t just keep inmates in; they keep the public out. Even at a moment when mass incarceration is under unprecedented criticism it is quite hard for people on the outside to empathize with people who they cannot see or speak to. My guests today are Brett Story and Jordan Camp. Story is a filmmaker who has made an incredible new documentary called The Prison in 12 Landscapes, which shines a harsh light on America’s prison archipelago without ever taking a peek inside. is a scholar of the carceral state.

Trump’s oligarchic regime is an extreme version of the imperial and economic vision that has guided presidents of both major parties. But the popularity of Trump’s chauvinist, xenophobic appeal points to a major crisis in the ideological and political-economic regime of the United States and the world for decades. That’s neoliberalism, a system that isn't quite over under Trump. But as Nicole Aschoff argues in the most recent issue of Jacobin, it has radically changed. Today, my guest is Nicole Aschoff, managing editor at Jacobin and the author of The New Prophets of Capital, part of Jacobin's Verso Series. You can read her article "The Glory Days Are Over" in the new issue of Jacobin and at jacobinmag.com.

Medicaid expansion saved Obamacare from repeal. There’s a lot to hate about Obamacare, but that expansion did something very good on a very large scale — and it made just enough Republicans very nervous about taking it away. It's an important lesson about economic policy generally: the more universal a program is, the greater the number of Americans who become advocates for its preservation — a fact conservatives know and fear thanks to Medicare and Social Security but that many liberals don't. Today, my guest is Matt Bruenig, a writer who is one of most incisive analysts of poverty, inequality and welfare systems, and the political conflicts that surround them.

What a moment to read, or to re-read, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Corey Robin’s 2011 collection of essays — especially if you need to disabuse friends and family of the notion that Trump is some historic degradation of conservatism's good name rather than a malignant, nasty outgrowth of a long history of violent reaction against left movements for equality.

The Democratic Socialists of America are growing — suddenly and explosively. Last June ahead of the Democratic National Convention, DSA counted 6,500 members. Today, after a presidential bid from a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and Trump’s terrifying election, membership has grown to more than 19,000 and counting. People are considering socialism, long a dirty word in American politics, in far larger numbers than in decades past — especially young people. Today, my guests are DSA National Political Committee member Sean Monahan and National Director Maria Svart to discuss some tough questions about the fight for socialism in the coming months and years, both for DSA members (of which, full disclosure, I am one) and those who aren't.

On the Left, few forms of mainstream journalism are more detested than political reporting. It often substitutes the horse race for substance, dresses up conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom as real analysis, and resorts to the false balance of he-said-she-said instead of establishing what is actually factual. Political reporters took a serious hit after Donald Trump won the Republican primary and then the presidency, and Bernie Sanders mounted a dead serious challenge to the Democratic Party’s anointed candidate. Trump is now using his bully pulpit to wage an assault on empirical reality, clinging to his own “alternative facts” and labeling the media as an opposition party purveying “fake news.” My guest today is Dave Weigel, a reporter at the Washington Post who is amongst the best in the game. Weigel has also worked for Slate and, in his early years, at the libertarian outlet Reason. He doesn’t come from the Left, but he gets us better than any mainstream reporter out there.

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.