Democracy Works

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The soul of democracy Nov 22, 2021

Show notes

As we've heard from Carol Anderson and others on this show, the fight for voting rights often breaks down along racial and partisan lines. Desmond Meade saw that as a problem and set out to change it by channeling our shared sense of humanity and the common good to push for change.

Meade is a formerly homeless returning citizen who overcame many obstacles to eventually become the President of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), Chair of Floridians for a Fair Democracy, and a graduate of Florida International University College of Law. He led the FRRC to a historic victory in 2018 with the successful passage of Amendment 4, a grassroots citizen’s initiative which restored voting rights to over 1.4 million Floridians with past felony convictions.

He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow — a recipient of the organization's prestigious genius grant — and was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2019. He received the 2021 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State.

Additional Information

America's Disenfranchised: Why Restoring Their Vote Can Save the Soul of Our Democracy

Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens

Meade's Brown Democracy Medal lecture

Florida Rights Restoration Coalition

Related Episodes

Voter suppression doesn't repeat, but it rhymes

Danielle Allen on achieving democracy's ideals

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Jonathan Haidt on democracy's moral foundations [rebroadcast] Nov 15, 2021

Show notes

Jonathan Haidt is part of the newly-announced University of Austin, created in response to what its founders deem a lack of viewpoint diversity among college faculty. Haidt was beginning to explore those themes when he joined on the show in March 2019.

We say on this show all the time that democracy is hard work. But what does that really mean? What it is about our dispositions that makes it so hard to see eye to eye and come together for the greater good? And why, despite all that, do we feel compelled to do it anyway? Jonathan Haidt is the perfect person to help us unpack those questions.

We also explore what we can do now to educate the next generation of democratic citizens, based on the research Jonathan and co-author Greg Lukianoff did for their latest book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

Jonathan is social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures — including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians.

Additional Information

The University of Austin

Heterodox Academy

The Coddling of the American Mind

Related Episodes

A love letter to democratic institutions

Andrew Sullivan on democracy's double-edged sword

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Why social media is so polarizing — and what we can do about it Nov 08, 2021

Show notes

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible.

Bail's book, Breaking the Social Media Prism, challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves. Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less.

Bail is professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. He is the author of Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream.

Additional Information

Breaking the Social Media Prism

The Polarization Lab

Bail's website

Bail on Twitter

Related Episodes

A path forward for social media and democracy

Facebook is not a democracy

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What makes a campaign deplorable? Nov 01, 2021

Show notes

Political campaigns in the United States, especially those for the presidency, can be nasty—very nasty. And while we would like to believe that the 2020 election was an aberration, insults, invective, and yes, even violence have characterized U.S. electoral politics since the republic’s early days. By examining the political discourse around nine particularly deplorable elections, Mary E. Stuckey seeks to explain why.

Stuckey is the Sparks Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. She specializes in political and presidential rhetoric, political communication, and American Indian politics.

After the interview, Michael Berkman and Candis Watts Smith discuss how the despicable discourse Stuckey describes trickles down to local politics, particularly school board races in the current election cycle.

Additional Information

Deplorable: The Worst Presidential Campaigns from Jefferson to Trump

Mary Stuckey on Twitter

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Demagogues are more common than you think

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Fighting for democracy in the GOP Oct 25, 2021

Show notes

As another election cycle approaches, moderates in the Republican Party have some choices to make. Will they continue to fight Trumpism from within? Or break out to form a new political party, perhaps in coalition with moderate Democrats who feel alienated by the party's leftward turn? Miles Taylor and Charlie Dent are two Republicans at the forefront of addressing that question through the Renew America, a movement to deepen America’s pro-democracy bench.

By working together across party lines, the group hopes to shift the balance of power in Washington, DC away from those who want to dismantle democracy’s guardrails and back to real leaders who will put country over party.

Taylor is the co-founder of Renew America, former chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security and author of the New York Times bestseller A Warning. Dent is the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s fall 2021 visiting fellow. He served seven terms in Congress representing and is now executive director of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program and CNN political analyst.

Additional Information

Renew America

Miles Taylor on Twitter

Charlie Dent on Twitter

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What really motivates Trump supporters

Congressional oversight and making America pragmatic again

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Tom Nichols on democracy's worst enemy Oct 18, 2021

Show notes

Over the past 30 years, citizens of democracies who claim to value freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law have increasingly embraced illiberal politicians and platforms on both the right and the left. Democracy is in trouble, but who is really to blame?
In Our Own Worst Enemy, Tom Nichols challenges the current depictions of the rise of illiberal and anti-democratic movements in the United States and elsewhere as the result of the deprivations of globalization or the malign decisions of elites. Rather, he places the blame for the rise of illiberalism on the people themselves. Ordinary citizens, laden with grievances, have joined forces with political entrepreneurs who thrive on the creation of rage rather than on the encouragement of civic virtue and democratic cooperation. While it will be difficult, Nichols argues that we need to defend democracy by resurrecting the virtues of altruism, compromise, stoicism, and cooperation — and by recognizing how good we've actually had it in the modern world.

Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs, at the US Naval War College, a columnist for USA Today, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Death of Expertise, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and US National Security (2013), and Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War.

Additional Information

Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy

Tom Nichols on Twitter

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Primaries, parties, and the public

Chris Beem on democratic virtues

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Independent commissions alone can't create fair maps Oct 11, 2021

Show notes

Gerrymandering is one of the topics we've discussed most on this show, with good reason. But those conversations mostly stopped at the solution of creating independent redistricting commissions to draw electoral maps, taking the process out of partisan-controlled state legislatures. While that's undeniably a good thing, this week's guest argues it's just one part of a bigger solution. An independent nonpartisan commission is not always going to create a nonpartisan map.

Christopher Fowler is an associate professor of geography at Penn State and a member of Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf's Redistricting Advisory Council. His research examines the way our choices about geographic boundaries shape the outcomes we are able to observe. He examine neighborhoods, school catchment areas, electoral districts, metropolitan areas, and labor markets with a focus on how these units of observation reflect the distribution of populations in space.

After the interview, Chris Beem and Candis Watts Smith discuss whether ideas like ranked-choice voting and multi-member districts can take hold in America's political landscape. Regular listeners of the show will not be surprised to hear that Chris is doubtful, while Candis is optimistic.

Additional Information

Fowler's Monkey Cage article on redistricting

Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council

Related Episodes

Extreme maps, extreme politics

One state's fight for fair maps

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Voter suppression doesn't repeat, but it rhymes Oct 04, 2021

Show notes

Carol Anderson's book One Person, No Vote was written before COVID-19, but many of the patterns she discussed are more salient than ever as states enact new voting restrictions ahead of the 2022 midterms. In the book and in this conversation, Anderson traces the history of voter suppression since the Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which nullified critical pieces of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

She draws parallels between poll taxes and literacy tests in the Jim Crow era to voter ID laws and other modern-day barriers designed to keep people of color from voting. As Mark Twain famously said, "history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." After listening to this conversation, it's hard not to think that's the case with voting.

This week is National Voter Education week, an effort to bridge the gap between registering to vote and casting a ballot. Visit votereducationweek.org to learn more about this important effort.

Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of the bestselling books One Person No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide, and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

Additional Information

Anderson's website

Anderson on Twitter

Brennan Center for Justice on DMV closures

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Laboratories of restricting democracy

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A love letter to democratic institutions Sep 27, 2021

Show notes

The problems of disinformation, conspiracies, and cancel culture are probably familiar to many of our listeners. But they're usually talked about separately, including on this show. In his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch ties these threads together and shows how they contribute to a larger problem of a departure from facts and truth in favor of feelings and falsehoods.

The book reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth. The institutions that Rauch describes as "reality-based communities," universities, media, government organizations, and the courts, need our support now more than ever as they face attacks from illiberal forces across the political spectrum.

But are the problems on the left and the right really the same? Rauch argues they are. Michael Berkman and Chris Beem consider that equivalency after the interview.

Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program and the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer of The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. He has also authored research on political parties, marijuana legalization, LGBT rights and religious liberty, and more.

Additional Information

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

Jonathan Rauch on Twitter

Related Episodes

How democracies can win the war on reality

Andrew Sullivan on democracy's double-edged sword

Jonathan Haidt on the psychology of democracy

How conspiracies are damaging democracy

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How Amazon is disrupting democracy Sep 20, 2021

Show notes

As we've said many times on this show, democracy is long and slow, which is the exact opposite of the ethos that Amazon has pushed into our culture through quick shipping, easily accessible entertainment, its takeover of cloud computing, and more.

Amazon's expansion across America, from distribution facilities to data centers, is exacerbating regional inequities and contributing to the unraveling of America's social fabric. Not only that, cities competing for Amazon's new facilities offer tax breaks that prevent funding from going to basic government services. And, the company's takeover of government procurement has taken lucrative contracts away from local businesses.

Alec MacGillis, a senior reporter at ProPublica, chronicles these trends in new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. The book chronicles how Amazon contributed to the gap between the country’s winning and losing regions, and how its workplace practices foster isolation and competition, rather than camaraderie and shared goals.

Was Amazon deliberately trying to undermine democracy? Or using the existing system to its benefit? We talk with MacGillis about founder Jeff Bezos's political philosophy and how it's impacted the company's decision-making over the years. We also discuss what we as democratic citizens can do to push back against some of these forces.