Dissent: Recent Episodes
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Matt and Sam talk to Damon Linker about the George W. Bush administration and the conservative religious publication First Things, his own Straussian-tinged skeptical politics, and how today's Right became so deranged. Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ September 20, 2022
Damon Linker is an idiosyncratic figure among political writers—trained by Straussians as a political philosopher, he's a former editor of First Things, the flagship publication for intellectual religious conservatives, who broke with that publication over the Iraq War (among other things) and is now a self-described centrist. He's also a longtime friend of the podcast, who recently started his own attempt to grapple with what's happening in the GOP and among conservatives, a Substack newsletter he titled Eyes on the Right.
In this conversation, Matt and Sam talk with Linker about what his own trajectory can teach us about the Right: his experiences working at First Things while the Bush administration was gearing up to invade Iraq; why thinks Sarah Palin marked a turning point on the Right; and his case for understanding Donald Trump as a political, rather than legal, problem.
First posted on on Dissent's Know Your Enemy.
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Public Goods, Private Harms with Donald Cohen
Over the past several decades, the shift of public goods and services into the control of corporations has taken a toll on their quality, increased inequality, undermined labor and civil rights, and made government less accountable. How can we restore our ownership of the commons? Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen ▪ February 11, 2022
Over the past several decades, we have witnessed an extraordinary transfer of wealth and power from public ownership into private hands. The shift of public goods—such as public lands, transportation and utility infrastructure, healthcare services, prisons, and schools—into the control of corporations has paralleled a conservative turn in American politics, in which “free markets” are championed as the most efficient and effective means of managing social services and distributing public resources.
But privatization has taken a toll on both the quality of the goods and services on which the public relies, and on democracy as a whole. We talk to Donald Cohen, co-author of The Privatization of Everything and executive director of In the Public Interest, about how the privatization of public services and institutions has undermined civil rights, deepened inequality, and made government less accountable—and how the public can restore its ownership of the commons.
In other news, we look at Starbucks workers organizing across the country (with Owen Burnham), rideshare and delivery workers organizing in New York, a Brazilian labor caravan mobilizing to protect the Amazon (with Claudia Horn), and congressional staff talking union. With recommended reading on the cost of unsustainable containers and surveillance capitalism of the pandemic era.
First podcast on Dissent/Belabored.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License