Featuring Melinda Cooper on Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. Balanced budget conservatism and supply side populism engineered a politics of austerity and budget deficits. Deep cuts to the social wage like welfare reform disciplined labor so severely that Fed chair Alan Greenspan opened the floodgates of easy money confident it would juice the price of assets alone. Assets like homes, the value of which spiraled ever upward until the global financial crisis. The crash made the politics of revolutionary conservatism that dominate us today with MAGA. But the crisis also revealed powerful monetary tools that we could wield to make socialism—if only we organize the power necessary to seize them.

The second in a two-part series.

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The Dig goes deep into politics everywhere, from labor struggles and political economy to imperialism and immigration. Hosted by Daniel Denvir.