Resentment has long driven much of American politics, and global politics too. Think of antebellum southern planters who resented northern manufacturers and moral “meddlers” we know as abolitionists. Think of yesterday and today’s anti-immigrant xenophobes. Think of anti-labor tycoons who resent the notion that their workers are human beings to whom a crude definition of “property” should not apply.

But the Right has no monopoly on resentment. Sadly, I’ve heard its call, and acted upon it.

In this second segment, I examine the history of the idea of “socialism,” tracing out how the ideal of an egalitarian society has animated religious as well as secular movements for change. I also discuss the relationship of “socialism” to the state, and how the caricatured understanding of this relationship—where socialism is synonymous with ‘Big Government’—gets in the way of imagining a bottom-up, 21st century socialism. At the same time, I emphasize the pitfalls of isolated experiments without a framework for engaging politically with the larger economic context.

In this clip, the first in a series of segments from an extensive and wide-ranging interview, I talk about my political background and previous work, before moving on to discuss the effects of systemic inequality in the distribution of wealth, and the real sources of productive value in the knowledge economy (as explored in my book with Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts).

In Chris Cillizza’s smug dismissal of liberal frustration, with the curt statement “liberals and progressives have nowhere else to go,” he overlooks the fact that liberals have plenty of places to go. More than ever, in fact. From a movement-building perspective, there are more opportunities than normal in an off year to really make a difference on progressive policy.

I’m not a big Charlie Cook fan, and I think he’s deeply confused about economics in this post. But I feel like he definitely gets it right about the era we’re heading into.

Somewhere over my computer screen is a modest group of thoughtful, worried, anxious and maybe hopeful folk who happened upon these words by choice or accident. Writers, communicating from a distance, have a moral responsibility to imagine their readers as individual embodied beings with their own histories, victories, challenges and tragedies.

A good writer’s motto: There are stories in readers’ eyes that are more poignant than your own.

David Wittman’s (aka DJ Dave) popular video, “Whole Foods Parking Lot,” is a hilarious send-up of some of the apparent moral contradictions of participants in today’s postmodern counter-culture. It’s a counter-culture only in the sense that it has more to do with the checkout counter than it does any challenge to the culture at large. Hell, it is the culture at large.

An unafraid, untamed truth-telling voice has gone from our midst. Let’s remember the best of what he gave to us, and use his memory as inspiration to carry on in that spirit.

Harvey Milk had plenty of comfort to spare for the afflicted, but he damn sure afflicted the comfortable as best he could. Wouldn’t Harvey be horrified at the oligarchy, the plutocracy that sets — and benefits from — almost all American policy today?

We were idling away the evening on the balcony, drinking wine and talking about everything from the Keith Richards book to Medicare cuts. Our neighbors – she a world class blues singer; he an accomplished painter, musician and entertaining raconteur – were just paying a warm, old-American style social call.

But when I happened to mention that many today consider our generation, the Sixties generation, a failure, I set the singer’s eyes ablaze and we took off on a lively historical survey of the last few decades.