Future Hindsight

New Socratic Method Socrates used direct questioning to make ancient Athenians reflect critically on their views, which often made people look foolish. The New Socratic Method is a kinder, gentler version that can actually change people’s minds without resentment. Clarifying questions can reveal why ideas are bad without antagonism. The New Socratic Method can be used to strengthen mental immunity and root out bad ideas. Reason’s Fulcrum Reason’s Fulcrum is a key part of the mind’s mental immunity. It states that if two people have differing points of view, the one with the best reasons supporting their argument will “win” and the loser must reflect and change their mind. When Reason’s Fulcrum is used, good reasons can change people’s minds. When it isn’t working, people lose the sense that speech and actions have accountability, and it becomes very difficult to change minds. Substantive Collaborative Dialogue One of the best ways to strengthen mental immunity in yourself and others is to have the difficult conversations you might otherwise shy away from. Asking hard and often philosophical questions like “What is a bad idea?” or engaging with family and friends who hold bad ideas can actually boost your mental immunity. Collaborative reasoning and exchanging honest dialogue is the best way to spread good ideas and build mental immunity. FIND OUT MORE: Andy Norman, Ph.D., directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. A public philosopher and award-winning author, he is developing the conceptual foundations of cognitive immunology—the emerging science of mental immunity. He thinks this science explains how demagogues short-circuit minds and how ideologies corrupt moral understanding. In his book Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, he identifies several mental immune disorders and develops the kind of mind-vaccine that could inoculate future generations against the worst outbreaks of viral nonsense. You can follow him on Twitter @DrAndyNo.

Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/hopeful12 and use code hopeful12 for 12 free meals, including free shipping! The Erosion of America Since the 1980s America has experienced an erosion of government regulations, societal norms, and equality. Trickle-down economics created a massive wealth gap. The Iran-Contra scandal set a new, low accountability standard for the highest levels of government. 24-hour news appeared as the Fairness Doctrine fell. This background, coupled with reality TV and social media, provided the perfect conditions to mainstream someone like Donald Trump. Myth of American Exceptionalism Every country is susceptible to democracy decay. American exceptionalism has helped mainstream government corruption because it blinds us from warning signs like illegal government acts or the threat of authoritarianism. Pretending that institutional collapse cannot happen in the US, makes it difficult to admit that we have experienced decades of decline in our institutions. Trump: Political Insider The idea that Trump is a political neophyte is a PR fiction the media attached itself to in the run-up of the 2016 election. Trump was mentored by GOP operative Roy Cohn and flirted with a presidential run as early as 1984. He considered running again in 1988, and then ran in 2000, and again in 2012. Trump has a more than 40-year interest in politics and has remained close with political operatives like Roger Stone throughout. FIND OUT MORE: Sarah Kendzior is a writer who lives in St Louis, Missouri. She is best known for her book Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America,  her reporting on political and economic problems in the US, her prescient coverage of the 2016 election and the Trump administration, and her academic research on authoritarian states in Central Asia. She is also the co-host of Gaslit Nation, a weekly podcast which covers corruption in the Trump administration and the rise of authoritarianism around the world. Since 2017, she has been covering the transformation of the US under the Trump administration, writing on authoritarian tactics, kleptocracy, racism and xenophobia, media, voting rights, technology, the environment, and the Russian interference case, among other topics. She is an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail, where she focuses primarily on US politics. She is also a frequent contributor to Fast Company, NBC News, and other national outlets. From 2012-2014 she was an op-ed columnist for Al Jazeera English. In addition to working as a journalist, she is a researcher and scholar. She has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in Saint Louis (2012) and an MA in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University (2006). Most of her work focuses on the authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union and how the internet affects political mobilization, self-expression, and trust. You can follow Sarah on Twitter @sarahkendzior.

Evil Geniuses Influential conservatives have capitalized on a wave of cultural nostalgia after the turbulent 1960s to turn our economy into a version of extreme capitalism. Economists like Milton Friedman, politicians like Ronald Reagan and Mitch McConnell, and CEOs like the Koch Brothers have used money, policy, secrecy, and cultural movements to demonize the federal government and rig our economy for the rich. Together with neoliberalism from the left, the New Deal was replaced by the raw deal.  Investing in America The US government is responsible for many of the greatest inventions of the last century, but does not capitalize on these discoveries. If the government acted like a private enterprise, it would have more money to invest in communities as well as support innovation. In Republican-led, individualist Alaska, royalties earned from natural gas and oil drillers is distributed to all Alaskans every year. The program is a form of socialism, a universal basic income. The government could use the Alaska model to reap the benefits of its assets, like charging industry for air pollution. Constant Engagement Continuous civic engagement is the way to undo decades of economic and civic destruction. Showing up to vote once every two or four years is not enough. Doing the steady work of championing good candidates who believe in the big ideas, and discussing the issues in a non-binary way are key to achieving basic fairness. Engagement looks different around the US, and what works in Queens, New York, will not work in Colorado or Nebraska. FIND OUT MORE: Kurt Andersen is a writer. He spent his first 20 years in Nebraska, and most of the rest in New York City. His most recent book is Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, a companion volume to Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International from 2000 to 2020. It was broadcast on 250 stations and distributed by podcast to almost 1 million listeners each week. Andersen was honored twice by New York State Associated Press for the best radio interview of the year, and the program won Peabody Awards twice. As an editor, Kurt co-founded the transformative satirical magazine Spy and served as editor-in-chief of New York. He also co-founded Inside, a digital and print publication covering the media and entertainment industries, oversaw a relaunch of Colors magazine, co-founded the online newsletter Very Short List, and served as editor-at-large for Random House. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt Institute, and taught at the Art Center College of Design (where he was "Visionary in Residence") and the School of Visual Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Anne Kreamer. You can follow him on Twitter @kbandersen.

We are launching an all-new authors’ season, focusing on books that get into the weeds of America’s most vexing problems. We’ll be talking about everything from criminal justice, philosophy, to economics, labor, and poverty. Our first guest is the legendary Kurt Andersen, on his latest book: Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America: A Recent History. He looks under the hood of the movements that powered our continuous shift to the right, starting with a strong yearning for nostalgia. Sarah Kendzior, author of Hiding In Plain Sight, The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, follows on the heels of that interview with a deep dive into how the former president was decades in the making. And after that, we speak to Andy Norman, the author of Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. He offers tools to inoculate our minds against the worst forms of ideological contagion. It will be a thought-provoking season of visionary and practical ideas to reimagine our future.

Being a Good Neighbor Solving community problems can begin with a simple, common goal of being a good neighbor. Deep human relationships with people make the hard conversations—where we don’t agree—possible. Finding common ground with different backgrounds can be hard, but focusing on caring for your neighbors strengthens communities and personal relationships alike. Storytelling Personal stories are an incredibly powerful tool for community building. Stories are the ways we make sense of life. When you tell someone your story, they stop seeing you as an issue or an enemy, and look at you as a person. This shared humanity lets us see the world through others’ perspectives, which is critical to being a good neighbor.  Society’s Full Potential Future Hindsight and Shelter in Place share a common goal: to help us realize our best selves. Shelter in Place focuses on the microscale through personal stories and motivation. Future Hindsight hopes to inspire listeners go from the personal to get engaged on the community level and help realize our society’s full potential. Find out more about Laura and Shelter in Place: Many whose life has been overturned by the pandemic are struggling — yet the Shelter in Place team’s response was not simply to flee, but to create. Narrated by Laura Joyce Davis, Shelter in Place  is the podcast that follows their travels — physical and emotional — through the pandemic. Through open-hearted storytelling and with an inviting voice, Laura gives us the agency to face the day, with a friend. She writes to explore the triumph of the human spirit in a broken world. A Fulbright scholar, Laura also won the Poets & Writers Exchange Award, earned Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices nominations for fiction, and was a finalist for WNYC’s podcast accelerator. In previous lives, she was a running coach, a capella singer, and scholarship athlete. Laura's writing has often intertwined with nonprofit work. She writes for Micro Business Mentors, a nonprofit providing entrepreneurial loans and training in developing countries. As a Fulbright scholar to the Philippines in 2010, Laura spent a year working with sex trafficking survivors, whose courage in the face of corrosive injustice inspired her novel, which won the 2013 California Writers Exchange Award. You can follow her on Twitter @LauraJoyceDavis.

Campaign Finance Laws The Supreme Court often operates like a conservative activist group to help the GOP. One of the most egregious ways they've tipped the scales is in campaign finance. Starting with their infamous Buckley ruling in 1976, SCOTUS categorized corporate political donations as free speech. Their 2011 follow-up, Citizens United, removed almost all limitations on political spending, creating a vast increase in campaign spending. Rich Americans and corporations are now free to give as much as they want to whoever they want. This has greatly benefitted Republicans at the cost of electoral fairness. Poverty The liberal, pro-New Deal, Warren Court was replaced in 1969 by the conservative Burger Court. The contrast was stark. One of the Warren Court's last cases provided significant due process protections to poor Americans whose welfare benefits were in danger. As soon as the Nixon-appointed Burger stepped in, decisions changed. The Burger Court immediately heard a case involving family caps on welfare and ruled in the opposite direction. Families with more than four children could only receive benefits for the maximum cap of four children, exacerbating poverty for large families. With that ruling, a new tone was struck and SCOTUS has ruled against the poor ever since. Education The conservative Burger Court also devastated public education. It reversed a Texas decision, which had ruled that the state must fund rich and poor school districts equally. This SCOTUS decision essentially created a tiered school system with affluent neighborhoods on the top and poor ones on the bottom. Next, it ruled that desegregation efforts in schools could not cross urban/suburban lines. This transformative ruling undercut desegregation efforts and exacerbated schooling inequities. Today, many schools are segregated by both race and class because of these rulings. Find out more: Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board and senior writer for Time magazine, is the author of Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. He is also the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was president of volume 100 of the Harvard Law Review. You can follow Adam on Twitter @adamscohen.

Race-Conscious Parenting Race-conscious parenting affirms that we should notice race, and to recognize racism and racial injustice. It rejects colorblindness, which is essentially white silence. Race-conscious parenting embraces multicultural, multiracial communities and encourages children to be active participants in anti-racist engagement. Race-conscious parenting is a commitment to teach about racism and activate for racial justice. Smog of Racism Racism is like smog: it exists whether we notice it or not. It’s worse when we don’t realize it exists because then we do not counter it. It doesn’t take an adult to actively teach racism to children. White families often don’t realize or talk about the smog of racism, which creates a space for children to interpret the world themselves. They will draw their own conclusions when systems of injustice remain invisible to them. Health White Identity Healthy white identity in the US is anti-racist. It acknowledges the full history of the nation, both good and bad, from enslavement and genocide to the abolition and civil rights movements. It also rejects white guilt, minimizing vulnerability to white nationalist recruitment. Whites have agency to choose what kind of white person they want to be, reject racist legacies, and to work across racial lines to create a more just society for everyone. Find out more: The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Harvey is an award-winning author, educator and public speaker. Her work focuses on ethics and race, gender, sexuality, activism, spirituality and politics—with particular attention to how religion shows up in these dimensions of our shared social life. Her greatest passion and longtime work, however, persistently and pointedly return to racial justice and white anti-racism. Her most recent books, Raising White Kids and Dear White Christians, take a decidedly practical turn. They bring her experience as an anti-racist activist and educator to bear on conversations about how white communities can more deeply support racial justice work being led by communities of color. She is also the author of Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty and a co-editor of Disrupting White Supremacy: White People on What We Need To Do. As our nation grapples with how to challenge and change white socialization to support anti-racist development in children and youth, she draws on her experience as both a seasoned activist and a parent to offer concrete and accessible models for doing so. Her work is rooted in evidence-based developmental theory, but also a relentless vision of a more just future in which all of us can flourish. You can follow her on Twitter @DrJenHarvey.

Expanding Access Health insurance is essential to accessing healthcare. The uninsured do not get routine preventive care and, therefore, experience lower health outcomes. We must have a system that includes everyone, whether through private or public sector options. The Affordable Care Act, which was just bolstered by the newly passed American Rescue Plan, goes a long way, but many states still need to expand Medicaid in order to close the insurance gap. COVID in Minority Communities COVID hit minority communities hardest. African-Americans were three times more likely to get COVID, and twice as likely to die from it, as their white counterparts. Structural discrimination means more minorities are in public-facing jobs, working in grocery stores or driving buses, increasing their exposure to the virus. Minorities also traditionally suffer from being in jobs that don’t offer health insurance, living in neighborhoods with no doctors, and facing discrimination within the healthcare system. Representation in the Medical Profession Diversity at all levels of our medical system, from the top down, is critical to building more equitable health infrastructure. Increasing diversity in healthcare professionals, such as doctors, would be a good place to start. Currently, the rate of African-American men going to medical school is lower than when Dr. Benjamin attended school. In addition, diverse health professionals should be groomed and trained, and given the opportunity to become leaders. Find out more: Dr. Georges Benjamin is known as one of the nation's most influential physician leaders because he speaks passionately and eloquently about the health issues having the most impact on our nation today. From his firsthand experience as a physician, he knows what happens when preventive care is not available and when the healthy choice is not the easy choice. As Executive Director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) since 2002, he is leading the Association's push to make America the healthiest nation in one generation. Prior to APHA, Benjamin served as Secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He became Secretary of Health in Maryland in April 1999, following four years as its deputy secretary for public health services. As Secretary, Benjamin oversaw the expansion and improvement of the state's Medicaid program. Benjamin, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He is board-certified in internal medicine and a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, a fellow emeritus of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health. You can follow the American Public Health Association @PublicHealth.

Inclusive excellence Diverse leadership and promoting inclusive excellence benefits everyone. In fact, it’s critical to success in any organization. Always including women and minorities in a pool of job candidates increases the likelihood in finding the best possible person. This is also especially important in traditionally non-diverse positions or departments, like the IT department. Diverse leaders can both promote new ways of thinking and prevent harmful decisions from being made. Social Mobility Higher education provides social mobility to many students, and is perhaps the most important aspect of a college degree. Many of UNC Greensboro’s students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, but arrive with intelligence and drive to succeed. UNCG is committed to replicating some of the advantages of well-off students for its own student body and delivering excellence in education. Unsurprisingly, UNCG is rated number 1 for social mobility in North Carolina.  Get Invited to the Cookout Cross cultural understanding is key to an open and diverse future. Getting invited to the cookout by a person from another cultural background is a great way to get outside of your own identity, form new connections with new groups, and learn about different ways of life. The most important step in overcoming ignorance and indifference involves listening and being open to the experience of discovering the norms and traditions of other groups. Find out more: Dr. Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., was elected the eleventh Chancellor of UNC Greensboro (UNCG) in 2015, and brings a wealth of experience from a career that spans more than 30 years in higher education. During his tenure, UNCG has surpassed a record 20,000 students; grown its endowment, research enterprise, and overall facilities and campus infrastructure; significantly increased its fundraising; and elevated the presence, reputation, and real-world impact of the largest university in the North Carolina Triad region. Prior to this appointment, Chancellor Gilliam served as Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs for seven years and was a longtime UCLA Professor of Public Policy and Political Science. His research focused on strategic communications, public policy, electoral politics, and racial and ethnic politics. As Dean of UCLA Luskin, Dr. Gilliam shepherded a $50 million naming gift and launched and executed an ambitious strategic plan and capital campaign, establishing the school as a regional leader in addressing and finding solutions to some of society’s most pressing problems. You can follow Chancellor Gilliam on Twitter @UNCGChancellor.

Implicit Bias in Preschool Teachers In a study to detect implicit bias, preschool teachers were instructed to watch a video of four young children (black and white, boy and girl) and identify potential behavioral issues. By tracking their eyes, the study showed that the teachers watched the black children more closely for behavioral problems than white children. When asked, teachers said they thought they had a gender bias and watched the two boys more closely. In fact, the defining factor was race. Preschool Expulsion Preschool children, ages 3 and 4, are expelled at a rate more than three times that of K-12 combined. More shockingly, they are expelled for normal, age-appropriate behavior, such as running in hallways or being rambunctious. Preschool programs are supposed to prepare children how to behave in school; instead, they often punish children who don’t know the very rules they are meant to teach. Expulsion at such a young age can have wide-ranging negative impacts on a child. Free, universal Pre-Kindergarten offers a way to mitigate implicit bias because it would provide access to underprivileged children and create diverse learning spaces. Many preschool and childcare options today are segregated because of de-facto housing segregation. Instead of teaching different groups of children differently – whether in expensive private preschools or in low-income neighborhood programs – all children would learn the same set of standards, rules, and preparatory practices, promoting equality at an early age. Find out more: Walter S. Gilliam is the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale University Child Study Center, as well as the Director of The Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. Dr. Gilliam is co-recipient of the prestigious 2008 Grawemeyer Award in Education for the coauthored book A Vision for Universal Preschool Education. His research involves early childhood education and intervention policy analysis (specifically how policies translate into effective services), ways to improve the quality of prekindergarten and child care services, the impact of early childhood education programs on children’s school readiness, and effective methods for reducing classroom behavior problems and preschool expulsion. His scholarly writing addresses early childhood care and education programs, school readiness, and developmental assessment of young children. He has led national analyses of state-funded prekindergarten policies and mandates, how prekindergarten programs are being implemented across the range of policy contexts, and the effectiveness of these programs at improving school readiness and educational achievement, as well as experimental and quasi-experimental studies on methods to improve early education quality. Dr. Gilliam actively provides consultation to state and federal decision-makers in the U.S. and other countries and is frequently called to provide U.S. Congressional testimony and briefings on issues related to early care and education. You can follow him on Twitter @WalterGilliam.