Democracy Works

We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and political division spreads, our guest this week suggests there is no better time to reconsider ideas of unity in democracy.In his book, The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels argues that if the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination. Engels is professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State and the Barry Director of the Paterno Fellows Program. He's also a yoga and meditation instructor who has spent time studying yoga and philosophy in India. He is the author of The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita, The Art of Gratitude, The Politics of Resentment, and Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. Additional InformationThe Ethics of OnenessJeremy's websiteJoin The Democracy Group podcast network on July 7, 2021 at 2:00 p.m. ET for a virtual event on "Democracy's Crises and Failure of Imagination" featuring Lee Drutman of New America, Carah Ong Whaley of James Madison University, and Turi Munthe of Parlia. Register here or visit democracygroup.org to watch the recording.

The New York City mayoral primary is this week and will be the first one to use ranked-choice voting. This week, we revisit an episode that aired not longer after the city's voters approved ranked-choice voting via ballot measure  in November 2019. What is ranked-choice voting? How does it work? And, is it more democratic than the single-vote method we’re used to? This week’s guest has answers to all of those questions.Burt L. Monroe is Liberal Arts Professor Political Science, Social Data Analytics, and Informatics at Penn State and Director of the university’s Center for Social Data Analytics. He says ranked-choice voting is generally a good thing for democracy, but not entirely without problems of its own. We also talk about bullet voting, donkey voting, and other types of voting that have been tried around the world.As Michael and Chris discuss, ranked-choice voting falls into a category of grassroots organizing around pro-democracy initiatives like gerrymandering and open primaries. These efforts signal a frustration with the status quo and a desire to make the rules of democracy more fair and equitable.Additional InformationFairvote, an advocacy group for ranked-choice voting and election reformBurt’s Google Scholar listingRelated EpisodesHow to end democracy's doom loopThe case for open primariesOne state’s fight for fair maps

As we enter summer vacation season and emerge from pandemic isolation, Robert Talisse thinks it’s a good idea to take a break from politics. In fact, he might go so far as to say democracy is better off if you do.Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and author of a new book called Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place. The book combines philosophical analysis with real-world examples to examine the infiltration of politics into all social spaces, and the phenomenon of political polarization.Talisse's next book,Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe The Other Side, will be out later this year. He's also the host of the Why We Argue podcast.Additional InformationOverdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its PlaceSustaining Democracy: What We Owe the Other SideWhy We Argue podcast

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.Related EpisodesAmerican democracy's violent disruptionDanielle Allen on achieving democracy's idealsLaboratories of restricting democracyExtreme maps, extreme politics Additional InformationThe Vital Center podcastOn Opinion podcast

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 Sate 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.Additional InformationPower, Participation, and Protest in Flint, Michigan: Unpacking the Policy Paradox of Municipal TakeoverAshley Nickels's websiteGrowing Democracy podcastRelated EpisodesThe power of local governmentTen thousand democracies

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.Additional InformationThe Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It AgainShaylyn Romney Garrett's websiteRelated EpisodesHow democracies can win the war on realityColored 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. Additional InformationThis is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against RealityHow to Put Out Democracy's Dumpster Fire - article with Anne Applebaum in The AtlanticPeter Pomerantsev on TwitterRelated EpisodesA path forward for social media and democracyCan pranksters save democracy?How conspiracies are damaging 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.Additional InformationThe Highbrow Conspiracism of the New Intellectual Right: A Sampling From the Trump YearsRevisiting "Why Liberalism Failed:" A Five-Part SeriesLaura K. Field on TwitterThe Niskanen Center's podcasts: The Science of Politics and The Vital CenterRelated EpisodesHow conspiracies are damaging democracy?Is it possible to overdo 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, our guest this week argues that 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 courts and their relationship to the other branches of government over the past 40 years.Additional InformationIdeas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative CounterrevolutionAmanda's September 2020 congressional testimony Related EpisodesThe Supreme Court's politics and power

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.Additional InformationThe Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth CenturyThe Colored Conventions ProjectP. Gabrielle Foreman on TwitterRelated EpisodesThe long road to a multiracial democracy