Month: October 2020

Bonus pre-election episode!

Two weeks ahead of the last judgment, Andy talks with two organizers about the “existential battle” over the soul of the Democratic Party. Brooke Adams, a second-generation Taiwanese Seattleite, worked for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign in Iowa, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania before joining People’s Action this summer. Tobita Chow, a Chinese-Japanese-Canadian-American (not making this up, we swear) Chicagoan, is director of “Justice is Global,” part of the People’s Action network.

0:00 -- Brooke and Toby discuss their respective experiences organizing while Covid hit the US in March, then we speculate why Sanders was so successful among Asian and Latino groups. Andy has dark fantasies of seeing Trump win again and discrediting the Democratic leadership, while Brooke and Toby think more productively about how progressives might shape a (potential!) Biden-Harris presidency. A WWII analogy.

37:20 -- Toby expounds on moving politics in a more internationalist direction, i.e., don’t do a trade war with China. Also, how Toby and others pushed back on Biden’s bad China ad this spring.

59:20 -- We look ahead to the election. If (!) Biden-Harris win, how will progressives and centrists square off over the future of the party? Over climate? Covid relief? Electoral strategy?

More links and plugs

* Brooke and Toby talked “deep canvassing” strategies. Learn more here and here

* More from Brooke: People’s Action will hold a deep canvassing event on October 27, featuring appearances from AOC, Bernie, IL state senator Robert Peters, and artist/activist Vic Mensa. If interested, click here!

* Justice is Global’s deep canvassing experiment talking to voters about China

* Toby and friend-of-show Jake Werner’s nerdy memo on the US-China trade war

* Hear Toby and Jake and other great speakers at this Critical China Studies event on October 28, 7-8:30 ET: “Anti-China politics in the US election” (direct link to registration here)

* Tammy has a new feature out on the crucial Montana senate race (and she tells us that anti-China politics are alive and well there). Will labor unions and Native Americans make the difference for the state and, by extension, the body politic? Check it out in The New Yorker.

* Andy has a new academic/public piece riffing off the “China virus” stuff in the springtime and tracing Covid’s spread from China to the rest of the world. Some talk about “just-in-time” / “lean production” models, from 1960s Japan to China to the US, from the auto industry (think that “American Factory” documentary) to grocery stores and hospitals. Here on Feral Atlas, a new digital humanities project on human-nature-infrastructure relationships. Anthropocene. Synergy.

On the Gist, our civic obligations in 2020.

In the interview, Mike talks with journalist and veteran broadcast anchor Dan Rather about his decades-long career in covering elections, highlighting a few cautionary tales learned from the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Rather explains that for some major networks, making the right call in 2000 was marred by corporate interference in the control rooms, plus he stresses that unexpected delays could fuel conspiracy theories. Patience will be a virtue come “voting night,” he explains. Rather is the author of What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism, the host of The Big Interview on AXS TV, and the host of a documentary called Human Nature, which is now streaming on Netflix.

In the spiel, Michael Moore’s political predictions in 2020.

Email us at thegist@slate.com

Podcast production by Daniel Schroeder and Margaret Kelley.

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