The Gray Area with Sean Illing8 Elo 2017

Sen. Michael Bennet on why this is a dismal, sociopathic era in Congress

Michael Bennet is an accidental senator. He was unexpectedly appointed to fill an open seat after Ken Salazar joined the Obama administration. He had never run for elected office before, or served in a legislative body. Perhaps that’s why he’s always, in my experience, been appropriately shocked by how the US Congress actually works. Since joining the Senate (and winning reelection in 2010 and 2016), Bennet has become one of its more effective members. He was part of the Gang of Eight that authored the immigration reform plan that passed the body, and he’s known for working well with both Republicans and Democrats. And yet, he is despairing over the state of the institution in which he serves. This is a conversation about why Congress is broken, and what broke it. We discuss money, partisanship, the media, the rules, the leadership, and much more. We talk about what Bennet thinks House of Cards gets right (hint: it’s the sociopathy) and whether President Trump’s antics are creating some hope of institutional renewal. There’s a lot of good stuff in this conversation, and I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice to say, if you care about the US Congress in this age — and you should — this is a discussion worth hearing. Books: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Why Bill Gates is worried

“To put it bluntly,” wrote Bill and Melinda Gates in their foundation’s annual Goalkeepers Report, “decades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stallin...

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Reihan Salam makes the case against open borders

In his new book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders, Reihan Salam tries to do something difficult: build a pro-immigrant case for a more restrictive immi...

11 Loka 20181h 30min

Jose Antonio Vargas on living undocumented in Trump’s America

Jose Antonio Vargas was born in the Philippines in 1981. When he was 12, his mother sent him to America, to live with family. When he was 16, he went to the DMV to get a driver's license and found out...

8 Loka 20181h 27min

Rebecca Traister: Women's rage is transforming America

Why did Christine Blasey Ford have to smile and politely ask for breaks while Brett Kavanaugh could rage at the cameras and dismiss the hearings as a farce? The answer is in Rebecca Traister’s essenti...

4 Loka 20181h 10min

Patrick Deneen says liberalism has failed. Is he right?

Liberalism, write Patrick Deneen, "has been for modern Americans like water for a fish, an encompassing political ecosystem in which we have swum, unaware of its existence.” Deneen, a political theori...

1 Loka 20181h

Francis Fukuyama’s case against identity politics

Is all politics identity politics? And if so, then what does it mean to condemn identity politics in the first place? That’s the subject of my discussion with Stanford political scientist Francis Fuku...

27 Syys 20181h 32min

Carol Anderson on the myth of American democracy

The president of the United States was the runner-up in the popular vote. The majority in the US Senate got fewer votes than the minority. And even if Democrats win a hefty majority of the vote in 201...

24 Syys 201855min

Martha C. Nussbaum on how fear deforms our politics

In her new book Monarchy of Fear, famed philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum identifies fear as the oldest and deepest of our emotions. Fear takes hold in our earliest infancy, when we can experience need b...

17 Syys 201856min