Jacobin Radio Folgen

Suzi talks to Joel Jordan and then Alissa Quart, who in different ways are both looking at our squeezed post-recession lives and the fight to win or win back a decent standard of living. Longtime teacher and teacher-union strategist Joel Jordan joins us to talk about the spectacular mass strikes of the red-state teachers — and draw comparisons with the worsening conditions for teachers in California. Then, Suzi seapks with Alissa Quart about her new book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,which tells the stories of the financial instability — and downward mobility — of what she calls the "middle precariat": highly educated but insecure, so-called middle-class Americans who can barely afford to raise children and meet expenses.

Stephen Wertheim, a Lecturer in American and international history at Birkbeck, University of London, breaks cuts through the suffocating foreign policy debate that shapes American Empire under Trump.Peace has broken out across the Korean Peninsula—or, at least, the odds that Donald Trump will blow the world up have gone down a just a bit—at least temporarily. Yes, Trump is the one who pushed us way too close to the brink of nuclear war. And yes, he likely sought peace with Kim Jong-Un because he loves wins, whatever their political or ideological content. But wow, has the liberal reaction been revealing. According to the mindset that pervades the liberal media and political elite, a move toward peace with North Korea is bad because Trump is bad. Or perhaps worse yet, it's bad because the national security state conventional wisdom that has governed Washington under both parties for so long—purveyed by the very people who have brought us endless war almost everywhere—says that it's bad. It's clearer than ever that the task of the left to find a way out of this ideological closed circuit of the liberal vs. Trump foreign policy debate—and, if we win power, to shut down its warmongering for good.Thanks to Verso. Check out Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identityAnd register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.orgSupport this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig

Everyone wants to know what's wrong with Appalachia. But beginning in the 1960s, it was "white ethics"—Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews and other non-WASPs—who broke from the New Deal coalition, embracing their Ellis Island immigrant roots in reaction to the Black Freedom struggle and, ultimately, Latin American migration. Dan’s guest today is Matthew Frye Jacobson, an historian at Yale and the author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America, from Harvard University Press.Thanks to Verso. Check out Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot, now out in paperback versobooks.com/books/2732-out-of-the-wreckage George did a Dig interview too blubrry.com/thedig/34202825/telling-a-new-story-with-george-monbiot/And register for the Socialism 2018 conference (July 5-8, Chicago!) at socialismconference.orgSupport this podcast with $ and access our weekly newsletter at patreon.com/TheDig