How to Talk to One Another in Politics

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The U.S. has many mechanisms of what you call horizontal accountability, right? So Congress can stop the presidency from doing things. The Irish used citizens' assemblies to try and decide when they legalized abortion. And there's one other thing I would say, which is that we can do smaller scale things about learning to talk to one another.

As you may have noticed, modern democracies aren’t doing so hot. In country after country, income inequality soars while solidarity plummets. Resentment simmers while national unity cools. In places like the US and the UK, beacons of liberal democracy, words like “autocracy” and “anarchy” are thrown around with alarming regularity. Meanwhile, our ability to take action on existential threats like AI and climate change is stymied by sniping politicians who are obsessed with point-scoring and eerily disinclined to agree on a shared set of facts.

Given all this, it’s not unreasonable to wonder: Are we doomed?

This week, on the 247th anniversary of America’s birthday — and the dawn of the modern democratic experiment — we’ll get to the bottom of that unsettling question with Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail.”