Shadi and Damir have been circling a question for weeks: is the American left’s moment real? To find out, they invited Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of Know Your Enemy and a socialist since it was, in his words, about as fashionable as collecting model trains.

Radicalism keeps outperforming caution. Sam admits he used to advise against using the socialist label, against making Gaza a litmus test, against letting the movement’s fringe run loose — and history embarrassed him each time. So should the left keep pressing?

Damir hears something ominous in the pattern. Maybe these positions won because the whole country has slipped into a revolutionary mood, right and left together, and the adults in the room are simply gone.

Shadi wants to know whether a movement can inherit the future while losing working-class and black voters, the constituencies it claims to speak for. The Democratic establishment gets a vote too, and Michigan is where it plans to cast it.

Required Reading:

* Sam’s July 4th tweet. (X)

* Know Your Enemy, Sam’s podcast with Matthew Sitman. (Patreon)

* Zohran Mamdani’s July 4th speech.

* Bhaskar Sunkara on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. (New York Times)

Damir is back from a sweltering Europe, where some commentators seemed to treat air conditioning as a moral failing. He opens the show with a provocation: the European aversion to AC isn’t about strained grids or shuttered nuclear plants — it’s secular theology, Christian guilt repurposed for Gaia. Shadi, on a mini-sabbatical in New York City (thermostat set well below Mamdani’s recommended 78), mostly agrees, but argues that the new American Left isn’t like the sanctimonious European mainstream. It’s joyous, affirmative, and — in Zohran Mamdani’s case — ruthlessly practical rather than self-flagellating.

That sets up the real debate. Damir presses Shadi on what he’s actually signing up for beyond Palestine: Progressive prosecutors? Wealth taxes? Bernie’s proposal for the government to take large stakes in AI companies? Shadi names his red lines — nationalizing industry — but wagers that America’s political culture of individual agency is too deeply rooted for even decades of democratic socialism to undo. Damir isn’t so sure. After Trump’s unchained second term, isn’t anything possible?

Required Reading:

* Shadi’s thread about the centrality of Palestine in Democratic politics (X).

* Jonathan Chait on the DSA’s long march through the Democratic Party (The Atlantic).

* Democracy for Realists, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (Amazon).

This week, we are bringing you a conversation, recorded live at the Times Center in Manhattan last Thursday, between Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, head of the Anthropic Institute and the man behind the Import AI newsletter, and our own Samuel Kimbriel.

Clark opens with the uncomfortable premise: recursive self-improvement may arrive this decade — he’ll name 2028 if pressed — and with it a world where AI starts designing its own successors.

That cracks open choices nobody has had to make before. Which sciences do we deliberately speed up? Where do we set the dial between individual liberty and collective control when anyone can summon what used to require a nation-state? And who gets to shape the “personality”—air quotes his—of a tool that talks back?

It’s an engaging conversation about the big questions of our time. We hope you enjoy!