Jacobin

Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reads, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name is Daniel Finn, I'm the features editor here at Jacobin, and I'll be presenting the show.

The US Federal Reserve appointed a new chair earlier this year.

Kevin Warsh replaced Jerome Powell, who had been under constant fire from the Trump administration Democratic members of Congress wanted to know if Warsh would be willing to defy the White House.

But with the discussion we're having today, I think the cautionary element here is if the fighting becomes the point, it can become very damaging and lead you to some dark places.

Jacobin Magazine ran a piece on your book with a big photo of Bernie Sanders, of course, who isn't a Democrat, but very influential within the party, asking how the left can win a supermajority.

The talk on the street, Adam, outside D.C., certainly here, is that the left now is unwilling to compromise, that They gave in with Harris.

They gave in with Biden.

The Socialism Conference has been held in Chicago annually since 2002.

It was founded by the International Socialist Organization, ISO, and passed when the ISO dissolved itself in 2019 to Haymarket Books, which had been the ISO's publishing arm, with the DSA and Jacobin Magazine as partners.

This year's program was endorsed by more than 90 organizations, among them the DSA, the Tempest Collective, Solidarity New Politics, the Ukraine Solidarity Network, and the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign.

The first of the foreign policy panels came on Saturday when Ashley Smith spoke on The U.S. and China, Imperial Rivalry in a Multipolar World.

And I don't know that she wanted it.

This article in Jacobin, which is, you know, I think a DSA-aligned journal, it's called A Blueprint for a New Party.

And it said the goal is not to immediately form a third party, which is seen as suicidal in America's two-party tyranny, but to, quote, mount the electoral equivalent of guerrilla insurgency, unquote, by using the Democratic Party line.

We do love to talk like that, don't we?

Then we ran the Megan Romer New Yorker interview.

Workplace democracy basically means everyone gets a union, which we tied to Starbucks actually unionising over 700 US stores, she dodged whether Google and Apple count as necessary industries needing public ownership, and her working class equals anyone who earns a paycheck line technically makes LeBron James working class, which cracked us all up.

We covered DSA snubbing Hillary in 2016 and Harris in 2024, the Jacobin guerrilla insurgency quote, her mushy non-answers on open borders and tax the millionaires with zero actual numbers, unlike Mamdani, who's got a specific million-dollar bracket.

Then the Israel bit, where she dodged the can Israel defend itself question, and landed on a one-state free Palestine line, which is when Henry brought up that Haaretz piece alleging the UAE and Egypt warned Netanyahu about October 7th beforehand.

I made it, you know, the introduction to my last book, Blood and Progress, A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.

Something surprised me in a good way, like Bernie Sanders and Jacobin Magazine, who had just 10 months earlier reveled in the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Yeah, murder is bad, but, but, but, they all said.

And Sanders goes, well, this is a little too much.

And Jacobin says, you know, not insignificant number of people reacted with a competitive lack of empathy.

Boy, was that saying, putting it mildly, dozens of people came out and said, said directly or implied that the man had been such a bigoted espouser of violence, instigator of violence, that he just brought violence upon himself.

There were people who were, you know, former Today Show anchors who were saying the U.S. is an effed up place with effed up values, no thoughts, no prayers.

you know,

how many fucking, you know, 800 word Jacobin articles are written about her fucking book charity before she died?

We need Paul Prescott to do a hit piece on Dolly.

Hmm.

It becomes, you know, it's like it

becomes this def jam shit, right? Why did any politics work like this? I hate blacks.

Jacobin politics is like this.

Class, class, class.

as well as a monograph called Prometheus and Gaia, Technology, Ecology, and Anti-Humanism from Anthem Press in 2022.

He and Harrison have published several articles in Jacobin, The New Republic, Inside Higher Ed, Against Professional Philosophy, The Verso Blog, On a wide range of subjects, including questions of anti-Semitism and the rise of the alt-right, the need for a more systematic philosophical framework for the political left, criticisms of futurist and acceleration thought, even movie reviews.

They did a humorous review of the Trotsky miniseries on Netflix.

He's also the editor of a very useful textbook of ethical thought experiments called The Moral Labyrinth, and he's currently completing a book on Spinoza and toleration.

Fetterman had previously endorsed Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, and during the 2022 Senate campaign, Sanders returned the favor by actively soliciting contributions for Fetterman.

Jacobin, the unofficial mouthpiece of the Democratic Socialists of America, published multiple favourable articles portraying him as a left populist candidate and, in one headline, quote, the kind of political communicator the left needs, end quote.

Four years later, Fetterman was appearing at Trump's Republican convention to introduce a Republican senator and denounce socialism.

His message from the Republican convention was not a call for opposition to the administration, but a declaration that Democrats and Republicans could work together around Trump's trade war agenda.