Rachel Himes is an organizer with NYC-DSA who coordinated the chapter's Bernie campaign, worked on its recent, successful campaigns for state senate and assembly, and is active in the chapter's Defund NYPD campaign. Himes is beginning a PhD program in Columbia's Department of Art History and Archeology. Himes assesses the state of the movement in the city, differences between this summer’s protests against the police and earlier ones, and the role socialists should play in this struggle.
Doug McAdam is emeritus professor of Sociology at Stanford University and author or co-author of 18 books and articles on race in the U.S., American politics, and the study of social movements. These include the 2014 book Deeply Divided: Social Movements and Racial Politics in Post-War America, co-authored with Karina Kloos. McAdam places this summer’s protests in the context of the regional shifts since the 1950s within and between the Democratic and Republican parties. Race is the fault line of these movements. The Cold War also makes an appearance, as it did in the earlier conversations with Cedric Johnson. We talk also about the possible role of political polarization in the U.S. in the country’s growing income inequality. ...
The 2020 Presidential election in the U.S. shows that the country’s electoral politics has entered a period of open “regime contention” between the two major political parties. One of these parties is coalescing around a nakedly anti democratic and racist resolve to subvert the electoral process by any means necessary. Neither of them is interested in actually deepening mass political involvement. I discuss these developments with Amel Ahmed, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is author of “Democracy and the Politics of Electoral System Choice: Engineering Electoral Dominance” (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In a new book-length project, entitled Conflict and Cooperation: Institutional Sequencing and Regime Stability in Early Democratizers, she examines the long-term impact of institutions on democratic stability. Capitol Siege panel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT9D8Z7q0Co Capital Siege footage: https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/a-reporters-footage-from-inside-the-capitol-siege ...
The second of three political-biographical episodes this week with Rafi Ash, who at the age of 16 may be the youngest member of our local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA. Rafi is organizing a chapter of the DSA at his high school. https://y.dsausa.org/ ...
