Jacobin Radio Folgen

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.

Christine Blasey Ford and other women have revealed that our political-economic elite is pervaded by profound intimate violence, forms of brutal interpersonal domination that are the everyday and microcosmic connective tissue of systems of domination as a whole. Lisa Duggan offers her thoughts on how to link these individual stories that playing out at economic, political and celebrity peaks to the systems that order the world that the rest of us live in. Duggan also addresses carceral feminism and how "believe women" obscures the way that gender and sexuality are embedded in political and economic structures. Plus, she rethinks her controversial blog post about Avital Ronell in response to grad student critics.Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing books at versobooks.comAnd please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Sociologist Shamus Khan on the culture of elite schools and the sense of entitlement they breed. Then, political scientist Thea Riofrancos on the delegitimation of our ruling class and the political possibilities inhering in that.