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Jacobin Radio

The Dig: Counterrevolution w/ Melinda Cooper

Jacobin Radio

Jacobin

Socialism, History, News, Left, Jacobin, Alternative, Socialist, Politics

4.71.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2025

⏱️ 114 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Featuring Melinda Cooper on Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. Neoliberalism remade the American economy into an engine for the appreciation of assets stretching from the single-family suburban home to the stock market. This revanchist offensive sought to enforce not only the class order and fiscal rectitude but also gender, sexual, and racial hierarchies.

The first in a two-part series.

Call in to leave a question for The Dig’s mailbag episode: speakpipe.com/ListenerMailbag

Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Buy Challenging the Myths of US History at UCPress.edu

Buy Trouble! at Coal Creek at Haymarketbooks.org

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

Transcript

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0:00.0

This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com

0:04.8

and by University of California Press, which has loads of great titles perfect for

0:11.2

dig listeners like you. One that you might like is challenging the myths of U.S. history by Mark

0:17.6

Agnell. The story of the United States is often told as one of steady progress

0:22.5

toward a more perfect union, where ideals of liberty and freedom drove racial progress and

0:28.7

explained the revolution in civil war. In seven pithy and provocative essays, historian Mark

0:35.3

Egnall disputes this narrative, arguing that it was wealthy individuals

0:39.7

set on economic and territorial expansion that shaped the country's trajectory.

0:45.8

Challenging the myths of U.S. history urges readers to question long-held assumptions

0:51.0

and to look at the American past from a very different perspective.

0:56.4

Learn more at UCpress.edu.

1:08.9

Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.

1:12.6

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting this introduction on the road.

1:18.6

The 1970s New York fiscal crisis and its austere resolution marked a spectacular opening act to the neoliberal counter-revolution in the

1:29.7

United States, smashing the closest thing this country had to a working-class social democracy

1:35.9

and replacing it with the machine for mass-producing real estate hypervaluation. Notably, this

1:43.3

austerity was directly imposed by lifelong New Deal

1:46.9

Democrats, acting in response to sharp constraints imposed from above by the federal government.

1:53.5

This was the bleeding edge of a new regime that would remake the entire American economy

1:59.1

into an engine for the appreciation of assets stretching

2:03.2

from the single-family suburban home to the stock market. That's what I'm discussing in this

2:09.1

two-part interview with Melinda Cooper on her complex and giant book, Counter-Revolution,

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