Why my politics are bad with Bhaskar Sunkara

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founder and publisher of Jacobin, a journal of “socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” He launched the publication in 2011 when he was an undergraduate at George Washington University. Today, its print edition has 40,000 subscribers and a million readers monthly online. Jacobin is at the vanguard of a resurgent American left that judges traditional liberalism as too weak and feckless for the times we live in and sees politics as fundamentally about class struggle. And Sunkara has been an able and interesting articulator of that view, as well as a longtime critic of mine. I wanted to have Sunkara on the podcast to talk through what his form of socialism means in America and elsewhere today, what’s wrong with my politics, and what separates traditional forms of liberalism from democratic socialism. If you want to understand what the new American left is thinking, where it’s going, and what challenges it’s facing, his answers are worth listening to. Enjoy! Books: The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher The Other America by Michael Harrington The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century by Eric Hobsbawm Further Reading: Bhaskar Sunkara's piece that he and Ezra discuss

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