Chris Beem talks with former Republican political operative Tim Miller about the party's loyalty to Donald Trump and where it might go in 2024 and beyond. Miller is a writer-at-large for The Bulwark and the author of the best-selling book Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell. He was previously political director for Republican Voters Against Trump and communications director for Jeb Bush 2016. He also appears on MSNBC and The Circus on Showtime.
Miller's book is a reflection on both his own past work for the Republican Party and the contortions of his former peers in the GOP establishment. He draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP to the Republican political class's Trumpian takeover, including the horrors of January 6th.
In this conversation, Miller and Beem also discuss alarming trends among young conservatives and how they may continue, or even exacerbate, some of what Miller observed after the 2016 election.
Americans want electoral reforms so that they can have more choice in elections. Recent surveys show that 20 to 50 percent of Americans are open to a new electoral system, while demand for a third party has crept upward since Gallup began asking in 2003. More Americans now call themselves "independent" than identify with either of the major parties, but what happens when Americans try to reform their way out of a two-party system?
In More Parties or No Parties, Jack Santucci traces the origins and performance of proportional representation in U.S. cities, the reasons for repeal in all but one case, and discusses the implications of this history for current reform movements at the state and national level. In a two-party system, reform requires appealing to the group that wants to "get the parties out of politics" (or, in modern terms, to "reduce polarization"). This leads to ostensibly nonpartisan reform packages, yet party-like formations emerge anyway, as voters and governments need to be organized. However, such reform is not stable and has tended to make voting difficult for everyday people.
This conversation, originally recorded in August 2022, looks back at the history of political reform and current movements like the Forward Party and the adoption of ranked-choice voting in Nevada and other states. As you'll hear, reform is easy to put into a slogan, but much harder to implement in practice.
People who want to improve the world often encounter problems of collective action (how to get many individuals to act in concert), of discourse (how to talk and think productively about contentious matters), and of exclusion. To get things done, they must form or join and sustain functional groups, and through them, develop skills and virtues that help them to be effective and responsible civic actors.
Peter Levine, one of America's leading scholars and practitioners of civic engagement, identifies the general challenges that confront people who ask the citizens' question and explores solutions in his most recent book, What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life. Democracy Works host Chris Beem also thinks through these questions in his most recent book, The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Democracy. In this conversation, Levine and Beem discuss how their approaches differ and how individual and collective actions can't be separated from each other when it comes to civic engagement.
Levine is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University's Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life.
What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life
The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy
We're taking a break this week to recover from the midterms. In the meantime, enjoy a rebroadcast of our conversation with Pennsylvania's Attorney General, and now Governor-Elect, Josh Shapiro.
We talked with Shapiro back in 2018, at the height of efforts by state attorneys general to block actions from the Trump administration on issues from immigration to opioids. We discuss those efforts in this conversation and the role that Shapiro sees states playing in American democracy — a new meaning to the term "states rights."
Looking back, you can hear some early seeds of the themes that would emerge during Shapiro's gubernatorial campaign, particularly around his desire to fight for the people of Pennsylvania and not be afraid to get political when the circumstances demanded.
We'll be back next week with a new episode featuring New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on majoritarianism and counter-majoritarianism in American democracy.
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This week, we bring you an episode from Future Hindsight. Our own Chris Beem talks with host Mila Atmos about his new book, The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy.
In the book and in this conversation, Beem argues that American democracy is at a crisis point and to fix our politics, we have to change our culture first. We can all take part in creating a culture that cultivates democratic virtues. Humility, for example, recognizes that all of us are biased and that we will disagree. In fact, anger is an essential emotion in democracy. Hatred, however, is disastrous. When we hate, we cannot operate as a democracy.
The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy
We are excited to share the first episode of a new narrative series on ballot initiatives from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy: When the People Decide.
In this reported series, Jenna Spinelle tells the stories of activists, legislators, academics, and average citizens who changed their cities, states, and the country by taking important issues directly to votes — like Medicaid expansion in Idaho, sentencing reform in California, and LGBTQ workplace protections in Ohio.
This episode tells the story of a campaign in Michigan to end partisan gerrymandering in 2018 and shows how it is part of a legacy of ballot initiatives dating back to the 1800s. After becoming disillusioned with the results of the 2016 election, Katie Fahey took to Facebook to gauge the interest of grassroots mobilization amongst her colleagues, friends and family.
Now the executive director of a nonpartisan voter reform organization, Fahey shares how the ballot initiative excited everyday people about becoming active in politics, including its 10,000 volunteers, and how they were inspired to make political changes in their communities. We also hear from historian Steven Piott about the unlikely origin of the initiative and referendum in the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
New episodes will be released throughout the summer. Subscribe to When the People Decide in your podcast app:
It's no secret that there's a partisan divide in the media, but thus far, solutions to bridge that divide have been few and far between. Our guest this week had an idea that seems to be taking hold and building a readership across the political spectrum.
Isaac Saul is the founder and publisher of Tangle, a non-partisan news and politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on one issue each day. He a politics reporter who grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, one of the most politically divided places in the United States. In 2020, he created Tangle in an attempt to get people out of their information bubbles.
Jake Grumbach's book "Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics" is out now from Princeton University Press. We were lucky enough to receive and advance copy and are rebroadcasting our conversation with him from earlier this year.
As many liberals were saying "thank God for federalism" in the Trump era, Grumbach saw some different — and disturbing — patterns emerging. He argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking in areas from health care to climate change. He also traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.
Grumbach is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington.
Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics
From COVID-19 policies to reproductive rights, conversations about freedom and liberty seem to be front and center in politics and the culture wars. This week, we take a deep dive into the philosophical underpinnings of these concepts and how different interpretations of them impact our ability to sustain a democracy. We also examine how bringing the idea of freedom into political debates can obscure what's really at stake and make it difficult to come to meaningful resolution.
Democracy Works host and McCourtney Institute for Democracy Managing Director Chris Beem talks with John Christman, professor of philosophy, political science, and women's studies at Penn State and director of the Humanities Institute. He is the author of numerous articles and books in social and political philosophy, specializing in topics such as the social conception of the self, theories of justice and oppression, and the idea of freedom. He is the editor of the newly-published Positive Freedom: Past, Present, and Future. The book includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy.
This week, we present an episode of the No Jargon podcast from the Scholars Strategy Network. Candis Watts Smith joins the show to discuss her research on racial attitudes among Millennials.
Millennials are often seen as a progressive-minded generation – as 80’s and 90’s kids, they grew up in a digital landscape that exposed them to a diversity of perspectives. But while expectations were high that this generation would be on the frontlines in the fight for racial equality, recent research by Democracy Works host Candis Watts Smith paints a different picture.
During this conversation with Lisa Hernandez and Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich, host of the Scholars Strategy Network's No Jargon podcast, Candis discussed how white millennials’ really think about race and the ways in which their views and beliefs have largely halted progress for Black Americans and other racial minorities in the United States.
Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter
We are part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.