Dire States: the Video
On the evening of Trump’s first State of the Union address, and roughly one year after his inauguration, guests Sarah Jaffe (the Nation Institute) and Kazembe Balagun (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) joined BISR’s Kali Handelman, Patrick Blanchfield, Samantha Hill, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary at Caveat bar for a live Podcast for Social Research recording on the topic of the dire state of the union. Speakers took turns offering analyses of various aspects and tendencies of contemporary American politics—feminism and #metoo, Black Lives Matters, burgeoning socialist organizing, American political institutions, indices of imperial decline, and reasons for optimism and despair—and afterwards fielded questions from the audience. We video- (as well as audio-) recorded the event, and you can watch it, in full, below (the discussion starts at the 11:20 mark):