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HIS SOCIALIST PODCAST BECAME A SURPRISE HIT. NOW HE’S AN
UNCOMMITTED DEMOCRATIC DELEGATE  
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Sammy Feldblum
August 13, 2024
The Guardian
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_ With guests including Rashida Tlaib and Bernie Sanders, Daniel
Denvir aims to bring critical theory to a growing audience. This
month, he’ll represent the uncommitted movement in Chicago _

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The elected officials, party functionaries, staffers and donors
descending on Chicago for the most rollicking Democratic national
convention in more than half a century will welcome an unlikely guest.
Daniel Denvir, who as host of the socialist podcast The Dig regularly
criticizes the Democratic party from its left, will attend as an
alternate Rhode Island delegate for the uncommitted movement, a
nationwide effort
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to pressure the Democrats to change course on the war in Gaza.

The movement has shifted its focus to Kamala Harris
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dropped out of the presidential race. Denvir is a forceful voice on
the topic, having spent the last 10 months honing and broadcasting a
leftist perspective on the US role in the Middle East. The pivot to
focus on Palestine has culminated in Thawra, a 16-part, 40-hour
conversation with the historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti on Arab radical
movements that has spanned five months of programming.

The link between on-the-ground organizing and historical analysis is
at the heart of The Dig’s political education project. “I had long
thought that the academic left was far too cloistered from the
activist left in the United States,” Denvir recalls of the show’s
founding impetus, “and that activists and organizers outside of
academia would greatly benefit from understanding the world better in
their efforts to change it.”

[large crowd holds up signs that say ‘ceasefire now’ and ‘free
palestine’]
Thousands of protesters rally during a pro-Palestinian demonstration
at Freedom Plaza in Washington DC in November. Photograph: José Luis
Magaña/AP

In the show’s near-decade of life, it has become a crucial hub of
the left media ecosystem, with political guests including Rashida
Tlaib [[link removed]], Bernie
Sanders [[link removed]] and the
former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis joined by Marxist
academics such as David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Silvia
Federici.

In the aftermath of 7 October, listenership has leapt, with October
downloads up about 150% from the month prior. That bump came thanks to
episodes like one on the history of Hamas
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bizarre relationship with Israel
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and historical tensions
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between Zionism and anti-Zionism within the Jewish diaspora, which
together have been downloaded a quarter of a million times.

The Dig_ _was born into a moment of growth of the American left: the
Democratic Socialists of America were expanding, American attitudes
toward capitalism were cooling
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and Trump’s presidency was propelling protests
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and resistance movements
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has matured alongside surging nationwide support for unions
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rising labor militancy
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on campuses and youthful demonstrations against US support
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for Israel’s war in Gaza.

The Dig’s listeners are “overwhelmingly sharp, interesting people,
committed to doing important work to transform the world, all over the
world. What do they need to know?” Denvir says, in explaining how he
chooses his subjects. “I’m trying to map out the terrain.”

Denvir’s visit to Chicago
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for the DNC will bring his intensive study of the history of the
Middle East to bear on the current political moment. “We continue to
witness constant massacres of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli
military with American weapons. It’s clear that the
administration’s policy is not only morally abhorrent, but also
driving away large numbers of voters who Kamala Harris needs to defeat
Donald Trump,” Denvir says. “Our uncommitted delegation will be
inviting Harris delegates from across the nation to join us in calling
for an arms embargo on Israel. We speak for the majority of Democratic
voters who have long supported a ceasefire.”

As he reminds listeners at the end of each episode, in a cheeky nod to
Marx: while other podcasts aim to understand the world, The Dig aims
to change it.

‘It’s empowering to people’

The Dig has been focusing primarily on the war in Gaza since last
October – specifically on, as Denvir describes it, undoing the
“reactionary, colonialist propaganda” fueling US support for the
unfolding catastrophe.

“This sense that the Arab world is full of backward fundamentalists
who irrationally want to do violence unto us in the US is only
possible if the actual history showing that things are precisely
otherwise is thoroughly mystified,” Denvir says. “Thawra is a
project aimed at the very heart of the mystifications that have
sustained a century-plus of colonialism and imperialism in the Middle
East and that has led to the current genocide in Gaza.”

Early experience attuned Denvir to narratives emerging from outside
Washington. He cut his teeth in media freelancing in Ecuador, where he
lived in 2008 with his partner, the political scientist Thea
Riofrancos. When they returned to the US, he worked as a staff
reporter for the Philadelphia City Paper, and – after moving in 2015
to Providence for Riofrancos’s job – cobbled together piecemeal
writing work in a hollowing-out digital news ecosystem. As an
experiment, he made a scuffling effort to kick the podcast off in
September of that year, without finding much direction: one of the
guests on his first episode was an editor of the libertarian magazine
Reason.

During that election season, Denvir campaigned for Bernie Sanders and
joined the growing Democratic Socialists of America. The podcast found
its footing, Denvir recalls, amid “Trump’s election in the context
of my own unemployment and lack of a clear path as a journalist”. It
was soon picked up by Jacobin magazine, where it is still hosted.

Denvir’s aim was to “translate the intellectual and academic left
to a broader audience”, he says, addressing its persistent gap with
activists and organizers – a gap he found less pronounced in Latin
America. “There shouldn’t be a hard divide between organizing and
analysis or theorization,” Denvir says. “Organizing is a way to
test those theories and see what works and what doesn’t.”

Initially, Denvir invited journalists, scholars and organizers to
discuss “American class warfare” in the form of its punitive
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immigration
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system [[link removed]], mass
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incarceration
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and social
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and labor
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movements
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In the years since, Denvir began doing more interviews with book
authors, becoming something of a socialist Terry Gross.

The show has also become more international: even before the turn to
Palestine, Denvir conducted multipart interviews on the history of
Iran
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China [[link removed]],
and the relationship between Cuba and southern Africa
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Though he lacks formal graduate education, he evinces a professor’s
comfort with critical theory and its vocabulary. His voice is
schoolboyish and bright, his delivery considered, and he occasionally
breaks out in small fits of laughter in reaction to his
interlocutors’ – and his own – just-so points.

[man seated with legs crossed in front of bookshelf]
Denvir’s podcasts often run for more than two hours, sometimes
approaching three. Photograph: Cody O’Loughlin/The Guardian

If its themes seem at first blush seem disparate, the show coheres by
finding the connectedness of sundry struggles for liberation. “Labor
or housing or immigrant rights or anti-carceral or anti-cop
organizing, all of that is at its best when it’s systemically
aligned with a broader struggle for socialist transformation, and a
broader understanding of the capitalist order,” Denvir says.

“Everything he does he brings the same care to. That itself is part
of his political analysis that everything matters,” says Riofrancos
of Denvir. “Every person’s important, every issue is important,
everything requires care and attention, everything has a history.
Everything has a struggle behind it.”

His urge toward comprehensiveness means that episodes often run above
the two-hour mark, occasionally approaching three. “I’m pushing
the boundaries of what people think is possible, or reasonable, on a
podcast,” he says. But anything less would mean for a fundamentally
different podcast. I pointed out to Denvir that this length puts him
in league with Joe Rogan. The difference, he says, is that “I
don’t smoke weed until after I get off air”.

The show’s great success is in achieving a scholarly rigor that’s
accessible to the masses. Riofrancos, who as senior adviser to The Dig
consults with Denvir on question lists and the show’s direction,
says guests regularly thank Denvir for his especially close reads,
often comparing the experience to their dissertation defenses.

Yet “you can be someone that does not have academic formation and
listen to his podcast and become more intellectual and knowledgeable.
I think that’s empowering to people,” says Riofrancos. “When you
listen, you feel like you’re getting smarter, you feel like you’re
touching something that’s new to you.

‘I’ve learned something I can use’

Astra Taylor, a film-maker, writer and co-founder of the Debt
Collective debtors’ union, first appeared on The Dig in 2018 to
discuss a book she’d co-authored
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Hannah Arendt. She was won over by Denvir’s close attention to the
art of interviewing, they became friends, and she has since come to
guest-host the show, including interviewing Denvir
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about his own book All-American Nativism in 2020. Like Riofrancos, she
sees the show as being “not just smart” but also “empowering”.

“You exit a Dig interview and you’re like: ‘I’ve learned
something I can use to be a part of this bigger socialist movement,
that over the course of history has changed the world,’” Taylor
says. “We might be losing right now, we might be in an electoral
morass, but when I take this long perspective I see that people have
made it through similarly complicated, fraught periods, that people
have transcended their circumstances, that people have been
unrelenting in their quest to build power.”

The Dig’s backlog of episodes reads as an index of how the left
interpreted crucial political events over the last eight years. A
two-part episode on higher education in crisis
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university unionism
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closely followed my own graduate workers’ union’s six-week strike
in the winter of 2022, helping me to contextualize that charged
experience. The late Mike Davis, whose The Monster at Our Door
analyzed the threat of a global virus outbreak, came on for an episode
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at the outset of the Covid pandemic to situate the moment; when the
George Floyd protests broke out three months later, he came back to
discuss
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Prisoners of the American Dream, his treatment of the destructive
effect of racism on US socialist and labor politics. Adjacent episodes
more directly spoke to demands to defund police
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the context of the uprising
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As the show has become more popular, Denvir has himself turned more
directly toward building power. In 2020, after throwing himself into
the Sanders campaign, Denvir argued
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for retooling that campaign’s infrastructure to fight more lastingly
for social and economic justice. At the state level, he and other
veterans of the campaign co-founded Reclaim RI, which has become a
vehicle for tenant organizing and pursuing housing justice in Rhode
Island.

Joe Shekarchi, speaker of the Rhode Island house of representatives,
credits Reclaim RI with playing an important role in addressing the
state’s housing woes, including authorizing $10m toward launching a
first-of-its-kind public housing developer at the state level. “Dan
is a gentleman. He’s polite,” says Shekarchi. “I consider myself
a moderate; I’m sure he would consider himself a progressive, but
he’s someone I can sit down and have a productive conversation with,
come to an agreement and work collaboratively to get whatever the
issue is over the goal line.”

This summer, Denvir is taking his productive conversations on the
road. On 26 July, he co-hosted a live episode in London interviewing
the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the political scientist
Laleh Khalili, on Palestine and international politics. This month, he
will travel to the DNC; two weeks later, he will tape a live episode
at the Socialism [[link removed]] 2024
conference, also in Chicago, on the geopolitics of energy transition.

Each of these disparate geographies and themes is of a larger piece.
The world as interpreted by The Dig is deeply interrelated,
comprehensible through close study and changeable insofar as it can be
understood. The convention is the next opportunity to put that
framework into action.

“We can’t win social democratic reforms on the domestic front
without challenging US power abroad,” Denvir says. “We are
confronting climate change, the genocide in Gaza and increasingly
violent great power rivalries: we need a global program that acts in
concert with progressive forces around the world.”

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* US Politics; Socialism; Uncommitted Delegates;
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INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

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