Democracy Works

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Debating the future of debates May 02, 2022

Show notes

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.

Additional Information

Hudak's piece for Brookings

Hudak on Twitter

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What student debt says about democratic institutions Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in student debt and some members of the Millennial and Gen Z wonder whether they'll ever pay off their loans. Student loans began as a well-intended government program to help increase America's brainpower in the Cold War era, but as our guest this week describes, grew into a political and financial morass that's swept up millions of people over the past 50 years.

The Department of Education announced on April 19 that at least 40,000 borrowers will be eligible for debt forgiveness through a loan forgiveness program for public servants, but as we discuss in this episode, the program is complicated and places an administrative burden on borrowers to comply with its rules.

Our guest this week is Josh Mitchell, a reporter who covers the economy and higher education for The Wall Street Journal, and author ofThe Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe. In the book, Mitchell draws alarming parallels to the housing crisis in the late 2000s, showing the catastrophic consequences student debt has had on families and the nation’s future.

Additional Information

The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe

April 2022 loan forgiveness announcement from the Department of Education

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Combating disinformation at home and abroad Apr 18, 2022

Show notes

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.

Additional Information

Peter's lecture on Ukraine at Penn State

Peter's article on Ukraine in Time

Peter's article on Ukraine in The Economist

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Jon Meacham on creating a more perfect union Apr 11, 2022

Show notes

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.

Additional Information

Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy
Hope Through History
Fate of Fact
The Soul of America
His Truth is Marching On

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The roots of radical partisanship Apr 04, 2022

Show notes

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.

Additional Information

Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy

Lilliana Mason on Twitter

SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University

Related Episodes

Sore losers are bad for democracy

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How democracies can win the war on reality [rebroadcast] Mar 28, 2022

Show notes

Peter Pomerantsev will visit Penn State March 31 and April 1 to discus Ukraine, Russian misinformation, and more. To get ready for his visit, we're rebroadcasting our conversation with him from May 2021. Click the link below to register to watch his lectures via livestream.

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.

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.

Additional Information

Pomerantsev on Twitter

This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

Related Episodes

A path forward for social media and democracy

Can pranksters save democracy?

How conspiracies are damaging democracy

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Ro Khanna on dignity and democracy Mar 21, 2022

Show notes

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.

Additional Information

Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us

Related Episodes

How Amazon is disrupting democracy

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Russia and Ukraine: How we got here Mar 14, 2022

Show notes

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.

Related Episodes

Will Alexei Navalny make Russia more democratic?

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Defending democracy at home and abroad Mar 07, 2022

Show notes

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.

Additional Information

Kagan's piece on constitutional crisis

Kagan's piece on Ukraine

Kagan's lecture at Penn State

Related Episodes

Sore losers are bad for democracy

How national parties are breaking state politics

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What academic freedom really means in a democracy Feb 28, 2022

Show notes

What should academic freedom look like in 2022? How has it become conflated with the idea of free speech? Who should decide how issues regarding faculty speech should be adjudicated? Those are just a few of the questions we explore this week with Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, authors of It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom.

The book considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Bérubé and Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy—theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. They argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech.

Bérubé is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Penn State; Ruth is a professor of film at Portland State University. They've also coauthored Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments.