The Dig: Empire Unhinged with Aslı Bâli & Aziz Rana
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2020
⏱️ 127 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dan interviews returning guests Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana on the long history behind the crisis of American imperial legitimation that has become so manifest amid the pandemic.
Some works by Bâli and Rana cited in this interview:
lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/constitutionalism-and-american-imperial-imagination
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of The Dig, like every episode of the Dig, is produced in partnership with Jacobin magazine. |
| 0:07.0 | Jacobin is an incredible publication and you've probably seen a lot of what they've published online, but they also have a really beautiful print magazine. |
| 0:17.0 | It comes out quarterly and has well over 100 pages packed with illustrations, infographics, and some of the best graphic design in the country. |
| 0:28.0 | Dig listeners can join 50,000 Jacobin subscribers, developing socialist political thought and debate for just |
| 0:35.0 | $15 a year. $15 gets you an entire year of Jacobin in print and access to the magazine's entire back catalog. If you've never |
| 0:46.9 | subscribed to Jacobin before you can access this deal by going to BIT dot LY slash Dig Jacobin all lowercase that's |
| 1:00.0 | bitly slash dig Jacobin BIT dot LY bit dot y, y, d'I, dig jack-a-b-I-t-l-e-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a bit Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. |
| 1:26.4 | What happened to American Empire? We see evidence of crisis at home. |
| 1:31.2 | Where mass uprisings have brought the legitimacy of the police in the era of |
| 1:34.8 | neoliberal mass incarceration into unprecedented question. The crisis is also |
| 1:40.9 | plenty evident abroad as is evident from the US's humiliating failure to tame |
| 1:46.0 | COVID-19 and from its bellicose attacks on the WHO and China. |
| 1:51.7 | This crisis, of course, isn't new. The so-called American century |
| 1:55.8 | had built multilateral institutions through which the US could exercise global power. |
| 2:01.5 | But after the fall of the Soviet Union, the unilateralism at the core of American |
| 2:05.7 | imperium began to operate free of checks and constraints, and also, increasingly, free of any sort |
| 2:12.3 | of legitimating principle. |
| 2:14.5 | It's not so much perhaps that the raw materiality of U.S. power is in crisis, but rather that |
| 2:20.1 | the rationale for U.S. power is in crisis. |
| 2:24.1 | Donald Trump and his brazen disregard for global institutions |
| 2:28.2 | then are not a break with the history that has come before |
| 2:31.0 | so much as its consummation. This is something with deep roots stretching way |
... |
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