Half of the U.S. Senate and one-third of the House of Representatives is 65 or older. What does that mean for Millennial politicians? Time magazine's Charlotte Alter joins us this week to discuss.
Generational divides in American politics are nothing new, but they seem particularly striking now as the oldest Millennials turn 40 this year. This generation has different lived experiences than its predecessors, but has been sidelines from political power as Baby Boomers live longer and benefit from incumbency advantages.
Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time magazine and author of The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America. The book covers national-level politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elise Stefanik, as well as local leaders like mayors Svante Myrick (Ithaca, New York) and Michael Tubbs (Stockton, California).
Alter's reporting defines the class of young leaders who are remaking the nation–how grappling with 9/11 as teens, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, occupying Wall Street and protesting with Black Lives Matter, and shouldering their way into a financially rigged political system has shaped the people who will govern the future.
The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
We're back after our summer break! Michael, Chris, Candis, and Jenna catch up on what happened over the summer, from COVID vaccine mandates to school board chaos to the refugee crisis in Afghanistan. The underlying theme of it all is one of democracy's central tensions — the collective vs. the individual.
The tension between individual liberty and the common good plays itself out in America's COVID response, debates over how race and history are taught in schools, and how we respond to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. We discuss all of those issues this week and reflect on what our responsibilities are as democratic citizens.
Refugees and the politics of displacement
The clumsy journey to antiracism
Chris Beem in The Conversation: Why refusing the COVID-19 vaccine is immoral and un-American
We end this season the way it began, with a roundtable discussion on the state of American democracy. Michael, Chris, and Candis reflect on the January 6 insurrection, the one year anniversary of George Floyd's death, and the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.
On the one hand, it's easy to be pessimistic about where things are as state legislatures continue to pass restrictive voting measures and Congress seems more polarized than ever. Yet, it's our duty as democrats to persevere despite these challenges and push the limits of our imagination about what democracy can and should be.
We've touched on both of those dynamics this season — from journalists David Daley and Chris Fitzsimon talking about state legislatures creating "democracy deserts" to Harvard professor Danielle Allen discussing how we can establish a new common purpose as Americans and Peter Pomerantsev on how to combat misinformation online. If you missed any of those episodes, check out the links below.
This is our last new episode with the entire team for the summer. Over the next few months, we'll be airing bonus episodes, rebroadcasts, and episodes from other podcasts we think you might enjoy.
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This week, we explore the questions of who governs in a democracy and what happens when the power is taken away from the people. Ashley Nickels, associate professor of political science at Kent tSate University, examines these questions through the lens of a municipal takeover in Flint, Michigan in 2011 that replaced elected city officials with an emergency manager appointed by the state. Nickels also challenges the notion that policy can be removed from politics and treating it as such has implications for democracy. The focus on austerity and cost cutting set the stage for the Flint water crisis in 2014 and, Nickels argues, left the city's residents with little power to change the situation.
Nickels is the author of Power, Participation, and Protest in Flint, Michigan: Unpacking the Policy Paradox of Municipal Takeovers, which won the American Political Science Association's Robert A. Dahl Award in 2020 — an award given to recognize scholarly work in the field of democracy. Michael and Candis discuss how Nickels's work picks up some of the questions that Dahl's landmark work on democracy introduced in the mid-20th century.
From economic inequality to racial injustice and political polarization, the deck seems to be stacked against rebuilding America's social fabric. Our guest this week draws from history to offer the motivation necessary todo the hard work of democracy.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett is a writer, speaker and changemaker pursuing connection, community, and healing in a fragmented world. She is the co-author with Robert Putnam of The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, which charts what the authors describe as the "I-We-I" curve in American democratic engagement and civic life.
In the book and in this interview, Romney Garrett takes us back to the Gilded Age, another time when America was highly unequal and divided. We discuss the reforms that came out of that era and how it led to decades of a "we" culture that got us through war and economic hardship with a reimagined civil society.
These trends reversed throughout the 1970s and 80s, but Romney Garrett argues that we could be on the cusp of making a shift back to 'we" — if we're willing to put in the work to get there. As a social entrepreneur, she talks about some of the organizations and projects that she sees as starting down the path toward this transformation.
The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
Shaylyn Romney Garrett's website
How democracies can win the war on reality
Colored Conventions show us where democracy really happens
Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda — the terms are thrown around a lot but often used to describe the same general trend toward conspiratorial thinking that spread from the post-Soviet world to the West over the past two decades. Peter Pomerantsev had a front seat to this shift and is one of the people trying to figure out how to make the Internet more democratic and combat disinformation from both the supply side and the demand side.
These issues came to a head in the United States last week as Liz Cheney was removed from her leadership position in Congress for not pledging her support to the lies surrounding a rigged 2020 election. Michael and Chris begin with a discussion of this dynamic before the interview.
Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the London School of Economics and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality and Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. He has a forthcoming project with Anne Applebaum that will examine why people believe in conspiracies and how to create content that fosters collaboration, rather than sows division.
This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
How to Put Out Democracy's Dumpster Fire - article with Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic
A path forward for social media and democracy
Chris Beem takes the interviewer's chair this week for a conversation with political theorist Laura K. Field about her recent work that examines how the conspiracism described by Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead in their book A Lot of People Are Saying has made its way to prominent conservative intellectuals and the institutions that support them. The conversation ends with ways that listeners can take conspiracy-minded arguments with the appropriate grain of salt and perhaps disconnect from politics a little in the process.
Field is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and scholar in residence at American University. She he writes about current political affairs from a vantage point informed by the history of political thought. Her academic writing spans antiquity and modernity, and has appeared in the The Journal of Politics, The Review of Politics, and Polity. She earned a Ph.D. in political theory and public law from the University of Texas at Austin.
The Highbrow Conspiracism of the New Intellectual Right: A Sampling From the Trump Years
Revisiting "Why Liberalism Failed:" A Five-Part Series
The Federalist Society began as a way for libertarian and conservative intellectuals to share and advance legal and policy ideas. Over the past 40 years, our guest this week argued that they've "bottled lightning" and transformed into something that's altered the very fabric of American democracy.
Is the Federalist Society bad for democracy? There's nothing inherently wrong with groups of like-minded people organizing to share and disseminate their ideas — everyone from James Madison to Alexis de Tocqueville would agree on that. However, the group's outsized role in the courts has undermined the notion of judicial independence, one of the hallmarks of our democratic experiment.
Amanda Hollis-Brusky is an associate professor of politics at Pomona College. She is the author of Ideas with Consequences, which examines the history of the Federalist Society and how it's shaped the judicial branch of government.
Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution
Amanda's September 2020 congressional testimony
The Supreme Court's politics and power
At a time when democracy is in retreat around the world, it can be difficult to find the motivation to keep movements going. Our guests this week offer a framework for effective nonviolent organizing by trapping authority figures between a rock and a hard place.
Srjda Popovic and Sophia A. McClennen have appeared on our show separately and are now joining forces to apply a research framework to dilemma actions, a nonviolent organizing tactic that works by capitalizing on a belief that's commonly held by the public but not supported by those in power.
Rather than simply getting people together to protest in the streets, you organize them to do something that causes a scene, like kissing on a crowded subway platform or planting flowers in potholes that line a city's streets. Authority figures are faced with the dilemma of making themselves look foolish by taking the bait or doing nothing and looking weak. Either way, the pranksters win and can gain media attention, new members for their cause, and in some cases, a much-needed morale boost.
Popovic is co-founder and executive director of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), an organization that trains nonviolent activists around the world. McClennen is a professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State. She studies how satire and irony impact political actions and behavior. Popovic and McClennen collaborated on the new book Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism, written as part of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's 2020 Brown Democracy Medal.
For nearly 100 years, African Americans gathered in cities across the United States to participate in state and national-level political meetings that went far beyond slavery and conventional racial narratives to discuss education, labor, and what true equal citizenship would look like. This rich history went largely unnoticed for decades until P. Gabrielle Foreman and her colleagues formed the Colored Conventions Project to collect and categorize convention records and associated documents.
Foreman and Colored Conventions Project Co-Director Jim Casey, both professors at Penn State, join us this week to explain what the Colored Conventions were and how they fit into the larger arc of the Black freedom struggle and the ongoing effort to make the United States a fully-inclusive multiracial democracy. In addition to co-leading the Colored Conventions Project, Foreman and Casey are also co-authors ofThe Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, released in March 2021 by the University of North Carolina Press.
The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century
The Colored Conventions Project
P. Gabrielle Foreman on Twitter
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