Democracy Works is taking its annual summer hiatus starting next week, but that does not mean the wheels of democracy will stop turning while we're away. In fact, this summer could prove to be quite the opposite.
In this episode, we discuss what's going on in the Supreme Court and the impact of the rulings that are expected to come out by the end of June. We'll also be watching the January 6 committee hearings, which are scheduled to begin June 9. We consider what the goals of the hearings are and how our fractured media landscape will impact how the committee's work is received by the public.
Finally, we share some recommendations for books and series that have nothing to do with politics and tease a new series that we'll be launching this summer while Democracy Works is on break.
Candis's recommendation: A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
Chris's recommendation: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Michael's recommendation: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Jenna's recommendation: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Federalist Society's ideas have consequences for democracy
This week, we explore the question of whether requiring every American to vote would change our fractured political landscape and strengthen our sense of civic duty.
In 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting, E.J. Dionne and Miles Rapoport argue that all members of a democracy must participate in elections. Universal voting would be the surest way to protect against voter suppression and the active disenfranchisement of a large share of our citizens. And it would create a system true to the Declaration of Independence's aspirations by calling for a government based on the consent of all of the governed.
The system works in Australia, but can it work in the United States? Would it become just another tool in partisan warfare? Can American democracy even handle something like universal voting? We explore those questions this week.
Dionne is is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, university professor at Georgetown University, and visiting professor at Harvard University. He is the author of Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country.
Rapoport is the Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. He formerly served in the Connecticut state legislature and as secretary of the state. He also served as president of Demos and of Common Cause.
100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting
Danielle Allen on achieving democracy's ideals
How national parties are breaking state politics
E.J. Dionne on empathy and democracy - E.J.'s first appearance on the show in April 2019
The Baby Boomers are the most powerful generation in American history — and they're not going away anytime soon. Their influence in politics, media, business, and other areas of life is likely to continue for at least the next decade. What does that mean for younger generations?
Generational conflict, with Millennials and Generation Z pitted against the aging Boomer cohort, has become a media staple. Older and younger voters are increasingly at odds: Republicans as a whole skew gray-haired, and within the Democratic Party, the left-leaning youth vote propels primary challengers. The generation gap is widening into a political fault line. Kevin Munger leverages data and survey evidence to argue that generational conflict will define the politics of the next decade.
Munger is an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State and the author of the new book Generation Gap: Why Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture.
Generation Gap: Why Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture
We love a good debate — and have certainly had plenty of them on this show. But how effective are they in today's media and political landscape? We take up that question this week, prompted by the Republican National Committee's recent decision to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates.
John Hudak, deputy director of the Center for Effective Public Management and a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, wrote a piece on the GOP's decision that caught our attention. He joins us to discuss the commission's history and where things might go between now and 2024.
Peter Pomerantsev visited Penn State at the end of March, when he was just back from a trip to Ukraine. We discuss what he saw there, as well as how American media is covering the war. We also talk about the similarities between Ukraine and the United States when it comes to being vulnerable to Russian disinformation — and how both countries can strengthen democratic media.
Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and author of the books This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality and Everything Is True and Nothing Is Possible : The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
Peter's lecture on Ukraine at Penn State
Jon Meacham is one of America's leading thinkers on how the country's political history can inform the present. He recently visited Penn State to present a lecture on his 2018 book The Soul of America and joined us for a wide-ranging conversation on the war in Ukraine (and whether Zelensky really is like Churchill), American polarization polarization, the changing media landscape, and more.
Meacham is author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University and co-chair of Vanderbilt's Project on Unity and American Democracy, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians.
Thank you to the Center for Character, Conscience, and Public Purpose at Penn State for bringing Jon to campus and making this interview possible.
Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy
Hope Through History
Fate of Fact
The Soul of America
His Truth is Marching On
Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation’s history. The January 6, 2021 insurrection and the partisan responses that ensued are a vivid illustration of how deep these currents run. How did American politics become so divided that we cannot agree on how to categorize an attack on our own Capitol?
In the new book Radical American Partisanship, Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe bring together four years of studying radicalism among ordinary American partisans. They draw on new evidence—as well as insights from history, psychology, and political science—to put our present partisan fractiousness in context and to explain broad patterns of political and social change.
Mason joins us this week to discuss the findings and the rocky path toward making the United States a fully-realized multiracial democracy She is an associate professor of political science at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.
SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University
The concept of dignity comes up a lot when we think about the condition of American democracy. Francis Fukuyama wrote about the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment and Chris Bail talked with us how dignity offline impacts our behavior online, just to name a few.
Rep. Ro Khanna combines his experience in politics and technology policy to address the question of dignity in his new book, Dignity in the Digital Age. Khanna presents a vision for how the digital economy can create opportunities for people all across the country without uprooting them. He argues that democratizing digital innovation to build economically vibrant and inclusive communities. Instead of being subject to tech’s reshaping of our economy, Khanna says we must channel those powerful forces toward creating a more healthy, equal, and democratic society.
We begin this conversation by talking about the war in Ukraine and whether it might help bring unity to America. We also discuss why it's essential to make sure companies are contributing more than just jobs to the communities they operate in, as we heard from Alec MacGillis in his work on Amazon.
Khanna represents Silicon Valley in Congress. He has taught economics at Stanford, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration, and represented tech companies and startups in private practice.
Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us
Was the war in Ukraine inevitable? What is Vladimir Putin trying to achieve? What does the conflict say about Ukraine as a democracy? Those are just a few of the questions Michael Berkman explores this week with Donna Bahry, professor emerita of political science at Penn State and an expert in Soviet and post-Soviet politics and democratization.
Donna has studied Russia and the Soviet Union for decades and traveled to the country dozes of time from late Gorbachev era through 2018. She also talks about the challenges of doing scholarly work in the region and how that task will become even more difficult in the wake of the current crisis.
Robert Kagan is a foreign policy expert who turned his focus to the United States last fall in a Washington Post column titled "Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here" that became one of the Post's most-read pieces of 2021. We're lucky to have Kagan with us this week to discuss the ongoing crises of democracy at home and abroad as Russia's war on Ukraine continues to unfold.
Kagan has argued that there was nothing inevitable about the relatively peaceful liberal democratic order that followed World War II, and that there is nothing inevitable about the perseverance of American democracy. In fact, he says that because so many reject the 2020 presidential election, we are already in a constitutional crisis, and it will take deliberate actions by the public and members of both political parties to get us out. For too many politicians, a recognition of our condition, let alone a commitment to those actions, appears to be a long way off.
Kagan is the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute and a member of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board in the U.S. State Department. He is the author of The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World and The New York Times bestseller, The World America Made.
Kagan's piece on constitutional crisis
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