Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Racism, police and the pandemic are dominating hearts and headlines, but will they translate to votes in national and regional elections? One study found wavering Trump voters rank immigration and climate change as top reasons for a possible vote change, but it’s unclear if that will materialize. Other studies contend climate doesn’t even rank on the minds of swing voters.Young, liberal Americans are leading the charge on climate, but Bernie Sanders learned they are more likely to protest than vote. What issues are top of mind for Obama-Trump voters in swing states? How will the Coronavirus and racial justice crises of 2020 impact voters this cycle?Guests:Tiffany Cross, Co-Founder, The Beat DC; Author, Say It Louder! Black Voters, White Narratives, and Saving Our DemocracyRich Thau, President & Co-founder, EngagiousRick Wilson, Republican Political StrategistThis program was recorded via video on June 23, 2020.For full show notes, visit our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for a virtual conversation with best-selling author, A. J. Baime, to discuss his latest book, the thrilling story of the 1948 presidential election, during which Truman mounted a remarkable comeback and staked a claim for a new course for America. On the eve of the 1948 election, America was a fractured country. Racism was rampant, foreign relations were fraught, and political parties were more divided than ever. Americans were certain that President Truman's political career was over, his own staff did not believe he could win, nor did his wife Bess. But win he did. Baime sheds light on one of the most action-packed six months in American history, as Truman not only triumphs, but also oversees watershed events: the Marshall Plan, the creation of Israel, the origins of the Cold War, and the first desegregation of the military. Not only did Truman win, he succeeded in guiding his country forward at a critical time with high stakes and haunting parallels to current events. MLF ORGANIZER George Hammond Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zerlina Maxwell is an expert on the divisions plaguing the liberal left. As an MSNBC political analyst and staffer on both Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaigns, Maxwell witnessed firsthand the successes and failures of the Democratic party’s attempt to unify voters. Now with the 2020 election boiled down to two older white male candidates, she is asking liberals to take an introspective look at why they have been unable to engage women and people of color for years. Maxwell’s new book, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide, asks progressives to hold themselves accountable for their own racist and misogynist blindspots while also challenging them to do better by their constituents. She argues that by leaning into a more diverse landscape in American politics, every single citizen would benefit. Join us at INFORUM, where Maxwell will give us her vision on the future of the Democratic Party and how she thinks there may still be time to save it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

COVID-19 cases are surging again across the United States. Governors, colleges, sports teams and others are announcing new plans every day. It’s hard to know what to expect, or understand the shifts. Is this part of the first wave of infections, or a second one? While hospitalizations are up, why are death rates are lower? With younger people making up a larger number of positive cases, what should the response be? Will schools open in the fall, and if so, under what circumstances? Will employees be able to go back to work, and even if they can, is it wise? More broadly, should we be easing restrictions or clamping down? Should our government mandate or only recommend mask wearing, social distancing, and business closing? Why does the United States seem out of step from the rest of the developed world? Never have public officials and individuals faced such complex choices and such an uncertain future. Hear two leading public health officials and policy advisors explain where we are in managing the pandemic, what we should do, and what we can expect through the rest of 2020. NOTES In association with the Zetema Project Generously supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Advancing technology, changing social attitudes and evolving laws have all combined to make establish this as a time when LGBTQ people are looking to create or expand families. How do they do it? What do they need to know? To answer these and other questions, Michelle Meow talks with fertility experts from the medical and legal realms, as well as proud parents of a new 3-month-old baby. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As an old adage (mistakenly attributed to Confucius) notes, it’s difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. Conspiracy theories have always been prevalent in the United States, but today they seem to be especially popular, from politics to popular culture, particularly on social media. In the spirit of another adage, even paranoids have enemies: there are real conspiracies, and some of them are important and even dangerous. How do you tell the genuine conspiracies from the tinfoil hat ones? Dr. Eugenie C. Scott is the former executive director of the National Center for Science Education, Inc. Dr. Scott is an internationally known expert on the creationism and evolution controversy and science denialism, and she is called upon by the press and other media to explain science to the general public. The author of Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction and co-editor with Glenn Branch of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools, she is the recipient of numerous awards from scientists and educators, and has been awarded 10 honorary degrees. MLF ORGANIZER Patrick O'Reilly NOTES MLF: Psychology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This event is the Middle East Forum’s fourth annual panel about how the Trump presidency is affecting the Middle East. Our distinguished panel of Middle East experts will continue the conversation and will also discuss why some believe that during the past year, Trump has helped destabilize the region with impulsive rhetoric and inflammatory actions, while others believe that Trump is making America safer. MLF ORGANIZER Celia Menczel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this discussion, the third in a series on the relation between catastrophe and narrative, Homer scholar Dr. James Porter and poet Gillian Conoley will discuss how disaster and catastrophe have found narrative expression from Ancient Greece to the present day. Unbeknownst to itself, the Western tradition is founded on violent catastrophe, and the wounds of this history are deeply embedded in its cultural memory. Homer's poems, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," commemorate a war that led to the capture and obliteration of an ancient city called Troy. Looming behind Troy lies a much larger catastrophe, the massive "systems collapse" that swept across the Aegean and Mediterranean East sometime around 1200 BCE and that wiped out Bronze Age palaces on the Greek mainland, on Crete, Cyprus, in the Levant and Asia Minor, and that threw these civilizations back into a prehistoric state, a truly "Dark Age," for half a millennium. How such massive changes could have come about in so many places at once and in so short a time—seemingly in a blink of the eye, though it probably took less than a century—is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. Warfare was involved, but the evidence points primarily to destruction by natural and not human forces, earthquakes and fires first and foremost, while a host of further factors have been conjectured, from droughts and floods to drastic climate changes. Homer's epics preserve a distorted memory of this collapse: they encode this trauma in their narrative form and substance, which complicates their understanding as celebrations of heroic glory. This presentation will unravel some of the mysteries that haunt Homeric Troy, in addition to rereading the poems as an invitation to deep ethical and aesthetic discomfort and reflection, not glorification. A short excerpt from Smoke, Ashes, Fable, a film montage that formed part of an exhibition from 2002 by the South African multi-media artist William Kentridge, will help us think through the broader question of what it means to live with the present and imminent realities of our own massive systems collapse today. Gillian Conoley received the 2017 Shelley Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. Her most recent collection is A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems, published with Nightboat Books. She is the author of seven previous books, including PEACE, an Academy of American Poets Standout Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Conoley’s translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appeared in 2014 with City Lights. Conoley is poet-in-residence and professor of English at Sonoma State University, where she edits Volt. In association with Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California Berkeley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The coronavirus pandemic has had a significant impact on the Latino community in California and throughout the United States. Due to a range of factors, the Latino community has disproportionately high rates of infections from the coronavirus as well as hospitalizations and deaths. These impacts can be seen in the Latino community throughout California—north and south, urban and rural. What are the risk factors, particularly around employment and housing that have made the pandemic such a public health challenge for the Latino community, and what are key Latino-serving organizations in the state doing to address these problems? This program will feature leaders from organizations and experts on the frontlines serving California’s Latino community. Learn how they have been handling these critical issues over the past few months and what they expect now as confirmed coronavirus cases continue to surge locally and nationally. We’ll hear from the head of the Latino Community Foundation and the executive directors of two frontline nonprofits, Nuestra Casa (in East Palo Alto) and 99Rootz (in California’s Central Valley). The moderator for the conversation will be Teresa Alvarado, chief of local impact of SPUR. Alvarado formerly served as deputy administrative officer with the Santa Clara Valley Water District, where she led two departments. Prior to that she served as the first executive director of the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley. She is a member of the Silicon Valley Recovery & Resilience Committee, a group of Silicon Valley leaders working to set the path for economic recovery in the region, co-chairing its Inclusive Prosperity subcommittee. She is founder of the Latina Coalition of Silicon Valley and serves on its advisory board. Please join us for this important event. NOTES In association with the Latino Community Foundation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As President Trump seeks a second term in office, the apparent makeover of the GOP from a tax-cutting old guard into a populist new guard is a critical part of the upcoming 2020 election. But how much of this is just an appearance, and how much is a real shift among Republicans? In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling authors and political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a definitive answer: Trump isn’t a break with the GOP’s recent past. On the contrary, he embodies its tightening embrace of plutocracy and right-wing extremism―a dynamic Hacker and Pierson call “plutocratic populism.” As they argue in this new book and elsewhere, the GOP serves its plutocratic “masters” to a degree without precedent in modern global history. Today’s Republicans have doubled down on a truly radical, elite-benefiting economic agenda while at the same time making increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to their almost entirely white base. Hacker and Pierson’s new book demonstrates that since the early 1980s, when inequality started spiking, extreme tax cutting, union busting, and deregulation have gone hand-in-hand with extreme race-baiting, outrage stoking, and disinformation. Instead of responding to the real challenges facing voters, they say the Republican Party offers division and distraction―most prominently in the "racist, nativist bile" of the president’s Twitter feed. What does it mean for the country and the upcoming election when reactionary plutocrats and right-wing populists have become the two faces of one of the country’s two major parties? Please join us for an important conversation on these topics as America prepare for the 2020 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices