The roots of radical partisanship
Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation’s h...
4 Apr 202246min
How democracies can win the war on reality [rebroadcast]
Peter Pomerantsev will visit Penn State March 31 and April 1 to discus Ukraine, Russian misinformation, and more. To get ready for his visit, we're rebroadcasting our conversation with him from May 20...
28 Mar 202240min
Ro Khanna on dignity and democracy
The concept of dignity comes up a lot when we think about the condition of American democracy. Francis Fukuyama wrote about the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment and Chris Bail talked ...
21 Mar 202241min
Russia and Ukraine: How we got here
Was the war in Ukraine inevitable? What is Vladimir Putin trying to achieve? What does the conflict say about Ukraine as a democracy? Those are just a few of the questions Michael Berkman explores thi...
14 Mar 202234min
Defending democracy at home and abroad
Robert Kagan is a foreign policy expert who turned his focus to the United States last fall in a Washington Post column titled "Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here" that became one of the Post's...
7 Mar 202242min
What academic freedom really means in a democracy
What should academic freedom look like in 2022? How has it become conflated with the idea of free speech? Who should decide how issues regarding faculty speech should be adjudicated? Those are just a ...
28 Feb 202243min
Tracing the rise of illiberalism
Thomas Main's new book The Rise of Illiberalism explores the philosophical underpinnings of this toxic political ideology and documents how it has infiltrated the mainstream of political discourse in ...
21 Feb 202242min
Moving beyond news deserts and misinformation
We've talked a lot on this show about the problems that news deserts, misinformation, and information silos present to democracy. Our guest this week says these things are all downstream from a much m...
14 Feb 202242min
