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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America,

a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined today by Joshua Green, who is national correspondent for Bloomberg Business Week,

and he was the author of Devil's Bargain, which was a bestselling and fascinating book

about the relationship between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

But he is the author of a new book, which is entitled The Rebels, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and The Struggle for a New American Politics, which is, as you can probably tell from the title, about the left of American politics, not the right as the devil's bargain was.

Joshua, thank you for coming on to Americano. I thought I would start where you start in the book,

which is to say that the 2008 financial crisis is a formative moment for the Democratic Party

as it is now, but you go back a little bit further in the Democratic Party as it is now.

But you go back a little bit further in the early chapters and look at how Jimmy Carter

tried to push the Democratic Party left, particularly on money, on capitalism,

and that this process just failed or was stalled all the way through to

2008 is that right uh yeah i mean the the thesis in the book is that is that the 2008 financial crisis

was the defining and history shaping uh event in in my adult lifetime i've been a watching

political reporter for 25 years. And,

you know, as I tell the story of these three characters, I'm really writing about the rise of

left-wing populism in the Democratic Party, which hadn't really existed before the 2008 financial

crisis. But that crash gave rise to a brand of politician like Elizabeth Warren, like Bernie Sanders,

that's really steered the party to the left, especially on economics.

And it did that in large part because of the furious backlash that Americans had to the financial crisis

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