Jacobin Radio

As this episode was being finalized, the Trump administration was threatening to attack Iran for the second time in less than a year. The threats come against the backdrop of mass protests inside Iran that appear to have been repressed by the state security forces for the time being.

Long Reads is joined by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi. He’s a lecturer on the international politics of the Middle East at the University of St Andrews. And the author of Revolution and Its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran. Eskandar joined us last summer to talk about the situation in Iran, and we spoke again earlier this week to cover the latest developments. This interview was recorded on Tuesday January 27th.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://jacobin.com/2026/01/iran-protests-authoritarianism-trump-israel

Listen to our interview from last summer here: https://apple.co/4rI5ekr

Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by features editor Daniel Finn. Produced by Conor Gillies with music by Knxwledge.

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Suzi speaks with historian Robert Brenner and sociologist Dylan Riley about the deeper meaning of Trump’s return to power.

Is Trump just a narcissistic strongman — or the carrier of a coherent counterrevolutionary project? Brenner and Riley argue that Trumpism is not a return to the past but an attempt to reorganize society for a future in which capitalism can no longer grow — only command, police, and exclude.

They trace the roots of Trump Two to decades of economic stagnation, the collapse of US hegemony, the failure of Bidenomics, and a deep class split between credentialed and non-credentialed workers.

They describe Trumpism as a reactionary social revolution from above, aimed at dismantling the social bases of liberal democracy. Its pillars include the attack on universities, the expansion of the security state as an ICE jobs program, AI as a form of class warfare undermining credentialed labor, and the dismantling of the international order.

It’s a wide-ranging conversation about empire without growth, class politics under stagnation, and the future of the left in what Brenner and Riley call the wilderness of contemporary capitalism.

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Behind the News, hosted by Doug Henwood, covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global.