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Progressives Are Winning Big in This Year’s Primaries

John Nichols on moving the Democrats left, Yanis Varoufakis on Trump and Europe, and Arthur Goldhammer on Paris in May ’68.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

May 24, 2018

Democratic Nebraska Second District House candidate Kara Eastman is hugged by her campaign manager in Omaha on May 15, 2018.(AP Photo / Nati Harnik)

Progressive and populist Democrats had some impressive victories in primaries last week in Pennsylvania, and also in Nebraska and Idaho—defeating centrist, establishment rivals, and showing a new path to victory in November for the party. John Nichols explains.

Also: Trump versus Europe. He’s threatening European banks and industries with sanctions: If they don’t cut off trade with Iran, they would be barred from American markets and transactions with American banks. We asked Yanis Varoufakis for his analysis—he’s the former finance minister of Greece who led the resistance to European Bankers demanding austerity—now he has cofounded an international grassroots movement that is campaigning for the revival of democracy in Europe.

Plus: Fifty years ago this month, in May ’68, students in Paris took to the streets calling for a new kind of revolution. Over the next year or two, there were student uprisings and revolts around the world in many places. But Paris in May 1968 was the best one, the only one to move beyond the campus, with a general strike involving ten million workers threatening the political system. Arthur Goldhammer, the translator and writer, comments.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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