The elected officers, celebration functionaries, staffers and donors descending on Chicago for essentially the most rollicking Democratic nationwide conference in additional than half a century will welcome an unlikely visitor. Daniel Denvir, who as host of the socialist podcast The Dig repeatedly criticizes the Democratic celebration from its left, will attend as an alternate Rhode Island delegate for the “uncommitted” motion, a nationwide effort to strain the Democrats to alter course on the struggle in Gaza.
The motion has shifted its focus to Kamala Harris after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Denvir is a forceful voice on the subject, having spent the final 10 months honing and broadcasting a leftist perspective on the US position within the Center East. The pivot to concentrate on Palestine has culminated in Thawra, a 16-part, 40-hour dialog with the historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti on Arab radical actions that has spanned 5 months of programming.
The hyperlink between on-the-ground organizing and historic evaluation is on the coronary heart of The Dig’s political schooling challenge. “I had lengthy thought that the tutorial left was far too cloistered from the activist left in the US,” Denvir remembers of the present’s founding impetus, “and that activists and organizers exterior of academia would vastly profit from understanding the world higher of their efforts to alter it.”
Within the present’s near-decade of life, it has develop into an important hub of the left media ecosystem, with political friends together with Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders, and the previous Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis joined by Marxist teachers similar to David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Silvia Federici.
Within the aftermath of seven October, listenership has leapt, with October downloads up about 150% from the month prior. That bump got here due to episodes like one on the historical past of Hamas, Germany’s weird relationship with Israel, and historic tensions between Zionism and anti-Zionism throughout the Jewish diaspora, which collectively have been downloaded 1 / 4 of 1,000,000 instances.
The Dig was born right into a second of progress of the American left: the Democratic Socialists of America have been increasing, American attitudes towards capitalism have been cooling, and Trump’s presidency was propelling protests and resistance actions. It has matured alongside surging nationwide assist for unions, rising labor militancy on campuses, and youthful demonstrations in opposition to US assist for Israel’s struggle in Gaza.
The Dig’s listeners are “overwhelmingly sharp, attention-grabbing folks, dedicated to doing necessary work to rework the world, everywhere in the world. What do they should know?” Denvir says, in explaining how he chooses his topics. “I’m making an attempt to map out the terrain.”
Denvir’s go to to Chicago for the DNC will deliver his intensive examine of the historical past of the Center East to bear on the present political second. “We proceed to witness fixed massacres of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli army with American weapons. It’s clear that the administration’s coverage shouldn’t be solely morally abhorrent, but additionally driving away giant numbers of voters who Kamala Harris must defeat Donald Trump,” Denvir says. “Our uncommitted delegation shall be inviting Harris delegates from throughout the nation to hitch us in calling for an arms embargo on Israel. We converse for almost all of Democratic voters who’ve lengthy supported a ceasefire.”
As he reminds listeners on the finish of every episode, in a cheeky nod to Marx: whereas different podcasts intention to know the world, The Dig goals to alter it.
‘It’s empowering to folks’
The Dig has been focusing totally on the struggle in Gaza since final October – particularly on, as Denvir describes it, undoing the “reactionary, colonialist propaganda” fueling US assist for the unfolding disaster.
“This sense that the Arab world is stuffed with backward fundamentalists who irrationally wish to do violence unto us within the US is barely doable if the precise historical past exhibiting that issues are exactly in any other case is totally mystified,” Denvir says. “Thawra is a challenge aimed on the very coronary heart of the mystifications which have sustained a century-plus of colonialism and imperialism within the Center East and that has led to the present genocide in Gaza.”
Early expertise attuned Denvir to narratives rising from exterior Washington. He lower his tooth in media freelancing in Ecuador, the place he lived in 2008 along with his associate, the political scientist Thea Riofrancos. After they returned to the US, he labored as a employees reporter for the Philadelphia Metropolis Paper, and – after shifting in 2015 to Windfall for Riofrancos’s job – cobbled collectively piecemeal writing work in a hollowing-out digital information ecosystem. As an experiment, he made a scuffling effort to kick the podcast off in September of that 12 months, with out discovering a lot path: one of many friends on his first episode was an editor of the libertarian journal Purpose.
Throughout that election season, Denvir campaigned for Bernie Sanders and joined the rising Democratic Socialists of America. The podcast discovered its footing, Denver remembers, amid “Trump’s election within the context of my very own unemployment and lack of a transparent path as a journalist”. It was quickly picked up by Jacobin journal, the place it’s nonetheless hosted.
Denvir’s intention was to “translate the mental and educational left to a broader viewers”, he says, addressing its persistent hole with activists and organizers – a spot he discovered much less pronounced in Latin America. “There shouldn’t be a tough divide between organizing and evaluation or theorization,” Denvir says. “Organizing is a approach to check these theories and see what works and what doesn’t.”
Initially, Denvir invited journalists, students and organizers to debate “American class warfare” within the type of its punitive immigration system, mass incarceration, and social and labor actions. Within the years since, Denvir started doing extra interviews with e book authors, turning into one thing of a communist Terry Gross.
The present has additionally develop into extra worldwide: even earlier than the flip to Palestine, Denvir performed multi-part interviews on the historical past of Iran, China, and the relationship between Cuba and southern Africa. Although he lacks formal graduate schooling, he evinces a professor’s consolation with vital idea and its vocabulary. His voice is schoolboyish and shiny, his supply thought-about, and he often breaks out in small matches of laughter in response to his interlocutors’ – and his personal – just-so factors.
If its themes appear at first blush appear disparate, the present coheres by discovering the connectedness of sundry struggles for liberation. “Labor or housing or immigrant rights or anti-carceral or anti-cop organizing, all of that’s at its finest when it’s systemically aligned with a broader wrestle for socialist transformation, and a broader understanding of the capitalist order,” Denvir says.
“The whole lot he does he brings the identical care to. That itself is a part of his political evaluation that all the pieces issues,” says Riofrancos of Denvir. “Each individual’s necessary, each concern is necessary, all the pieces requires care and a focus, all the pieces has a historical past. The whole lot has a wrestle behind it.”
His urge towards comprehensiveness implies that episodes usually run above the two-hour mark, often approaching three. “I’m pushing the boundaries of what folks assume is feasible, or cheap, on a podcast,” he says. However something much less would imply for a basically totally different podcast. I identified to Denvir that this size places him in league with Joe Rogan. The distinction, he says, is that “I don’t smoke weed till after I get off air”.
The present’s nice success is in attaining a scholarly rigor that’s accessible to the plenty. Riofrancos, who as senior adviser to The Dig consults with Denvir on query lists and the present’s path, says friends repeatedly thank Denvir for his particularly shut reads, usually evaluating the expertise to their dissertation defenses.
But “you may be somebody that doesn’t have educational formation and take heed to his podcast and develop into extra mental and educated. I feel that’s empowering to folks,” says Riofrancos. “Whenever you hear, you are feeling such as you’re getting smarter, you are feeling such as you’re touching one thing that’s new to you.
‘I’ve realized one thing I can use’
Astra Taylor, a film-maker, author and co-founder of the Debt Collective debtors’ union, first appeared on The Dig in 2018 to talk about a e book she’d co-authored on Hannah Arendt. She was received over by Denvir’s shut consideration to the artwork of interviewing, they grew to become mates, and he or she has since come to guest-host the present, together with interviewing Denvir about his personal e book All-American Nativism in 2020. Like Riofrancos, she sees the present as being “not simply sensible” but additionally “empowering”.
“You exit a Dig interview and also you’re like: ‘I’ve realized one thing I can use to be part of this larger socialist motion, that over the course of historical past has modified the world,’” Taylor says. “We could be shedding proper now, we could be in an electoral morass, however after I take this lengthy perspective I see that folks have made it by way of equally sophisticated, fraught durations, that folks have transcended their circumstances, that folks have been unrelenting of their quest to construct energy.”
The Dig’s backlog of episodes reads as an index of how the left interpreted essential political occasions over the past eight years. A two-part episode on greater schooling in disaster and college unionism carefully adopted my very own graduate staff’ union’s six-week strike within the winter of 2022, serving to me to contextualize that charged expertise. The late Mike Davis, whose The Monster at Our Door analyzed the specter of a worldwide virus outbreak, got here on for an episode on the outset of the Covid pandemic to situate the second; when the George Floyd protests broke out three months later, he got here again to debate Prisoners of the American Dream, his therapy of the damaging impact of racism on US socialist and labor politics. Adjoining episodes extra immediately spoke to calls for to defund police and the context of the rebellion.
Because the present has develop into extra widespread, Denvir has himself turned extra immediately towards constructing energy. In 2020, after throwing himself into the Sanders marketing campaign, Denvir argued for retooling that marketing campaign’s infrastructure to combat extra lastingly for social and financial justice. On the state degree, he and different veterans of the marketing campaign co-founded Reclaim RI, which has develop into a car for tenant organizing and pursuing housing justice in Rhode Island.
Joe Shekarchi, speaker of the Rhode Island home of representatives, credit Reclaim RI with taking part in an necessary position in addressing the state’s housing woes, together with authorizing $10m towards launching a first-of-its-kind public housing developer on the state degree. “Dan is a gentleman. He’s well mannered,” says Shekarchi. “I think about myself a average; I’m certain he would think about himself a progressive, however he’s somebody I can sit down and have a productive dialog with, come to an settlement and work collaboratively to get regardless of the concern is over the objective line.”
This summer season, Denvir is taking his productive conversations on the highway. On 26 July, he co-hosted a dwell episode in London interviewing the previous Labour chief Jeremy Corbyn and the political scientist Laleh Khalili, on Palestine and worldwide politics. This month, he’ll journey to the DNC; two weeks later, he’ll tape a dwell episode on the Socialism 2024 convention, additionally in Chicago, on the geopolitics of vitality transition.
Every of those disparate geographies and themes is of a bigger piece. The world as interpreted by The Dig is deeply interrelated, understandable by way of shut examine and changeable insofar as it may be understood. The conference is the subsequent alternative to place that framework into motion.
“We will’t win social democratic reforms on the home entrance with out difficult US energy overseas,” Denvir says. “We’re confronting local weather change, the genocide in Gaza, and more and more violent nice energy rivalries: we want a worldwide program that acts in live performance with progressive forces around the globe.”
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