Jacobin Radio: Red Pilled w/ David Ost
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The rise of the far right is the defining political crisis of our time. But are we analyzing it correctly? Suzi speaks with David Ost about his book Red Pill Politics: Demystifying the Far Right from Fascism to Right-Wing Populism. David argues that by focusing on whether Trump, Orban, or Netanyahu is or isn’t a fascist, we’re missing the deeper question: what political species do fascism and right-wing populism share? And what does understanding that species tell us about why the left keeps losing workers it once counted as its core constituency?
It’s a sweeping comparative political analysis that argues fascism and today’s right-wing populism are not separate phenomena but two expressions of the same underlying political species, that of the Red Pill (a loose acronym of Right-wing, Exclusionary Nationalist-Democratic, Populist Illiberalism). From the Boulanger Affair in 1880s France to Tucker Carlson, from Mussolini's syndicalist unions to Orban’s welfare chauvinism, the radical right has won by offering workers something — economic recognition, belonging, enemies to hate — that the neoliberal center-left abandoned along with NAFTA and the Third Way.
David ends with a diagnosis of the left’s own failures and a prescription for what it would take to turn things around.
Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Jacobin Radio. I'm Susie Wiseman. |
| 0:11.9 | The Democratic National Committee released its long-awaited autopsy of the 2024 election on Thursday. |
| 0:18.9 | Under duress, after months of trying to suppress it and accompanied by the |
| 0:23.0 | admission from the party leadership that the report does not meet our standards. Among its more |
| 0:29.2 | revealing omissions, there's no mention of Israel's war on Gaza at all, which dampened democratic |
| 0:34.8 | turnout and support in 2024. |
| 0:43.3 | Meanwhile, in Britain, here Starmor's labor government, elected on a wave of anti-tory exhaustion, |
| 0:50.8 | has settled into a tepid status quo governance so uninspiring that the right is capitalizing on the disappointment, |
| 0:53.0 | and the left is backing the Greens. |
| 0:56.8 | In the face of the most aggressive authoritarian challenge to democratic politics in decades, |
| 0:59.4 | the official center left parties worldwide offer caution, |
| 1:02.7 | triangulation, and managed retreat. |
| 1:05.0 | Seeing the problem is too much radicalism rather than too little. |
| 1:09.0 | It's different in the streets in organizing drives in the mass |
| 1:12.3 | resistance to Trump's second term in the pro-Palestinian movement. The question is whether the |
| 1:18.2 | political left can theorize and channel that energy before the right consolidates its hold, |
| 1:23.6 | and that requires understanding how we got here. Not just is this fascism, a question my guest David Oest argues, is actually the wrong question, |
| 1:33.7 | but what political species produced both classical fascism and today's right-wing populism, |
| 1:39.3 | why it keeps winning and what the left has done to open the door to it. |
| 1:43.6 | David Oest is a Polish politics |
| 1:45.5 | specialist, the author of the 2005 book, The Defeat of Solidarity, which we discussed, and in which |
| 1:51.8 | he predicted years before most people were paying attention that Poland's right-wing nationalist |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jacobin, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Jacobin and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.