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.
This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
How to Put Out Democracy's Dumpster Fire - article with Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic
A path forward for social media and 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.
The Highbrow Conspiracism of the New Intellectual Right: A Sampling From the Trump Years
Revisiting "Why Liberalism Failed:" A Five-Part Series
The Federalist Society began as a way for libertarian and conservative intellectuals to share and advance legal and policy ideas. Over the past 40 years, our guest this week argued that they've "bottled lightning" and transformed into something that's altered the very fabric of American 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, 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 judicial branch of government.
Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution
Amanda's September 2020 congressional testimony
The Supreme Court's politics and power
At a time when democracy is in retreat around the world, it can be difficult to find the motivation to keep movements going. Our guests this week offer a framework for effective nonviolent organizing by trapping authority figures between a rock and a hard place.
Srjda Popovic and Sophia A. McClennen have appeared on our show separately and are now joining forces to apply a research framework to dilemma actions, a nonviolent organizing tactic that works by capitalizing on a belief that's commonly held by the public but not supported by those in power.
Rather than simply getting people together to protest in the streets, you organize them to do something that causes a scene, like kissing on a crowded subway platform or planting flowers in potholes that line a city's streets. Authority figures are faced with the dilemma of making themselves look foolish by taking the bait or doing nothing and looking weak. Either way, the pranksters win and can gain media attention, new members for their cause, and in some cases, a much-needed morale boost.
Popovic is co-founder and executive director of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), an organization that trains nonviolent activists around the world. McClennen is a professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State. She studies how satire and irony impact political actions and behavior. Popovic and McClennen collaborated on the new book Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism, written as part of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's 2020 Brown Democracy Medal.
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.
The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century
The Colored Conventions Project
P. Gabrielle Foreman on Twitter
Our guest this week argues that, much like democracy itself, public education is an ideal that we've never quite lived up to. We discuss the constitutional right to education and how it's ebbed and flowed over the years, following many of the same trends as support for and access to other democratic institutions.
The Trump administration infamously referred to public schools as "failing government schools," illustrating how education has been caught up in the broader attack on the roots of American democracy. While the language is new, Derek W. Black argues the sentiment very much is not.
Black is a professor of law at the University of South Carolina and one of the nation’s foremost experts in education law and policy, focusing on school funding and equality for disadvantaged students He is the author of Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy. The book traces the legal history of public education, and how the right to education was challenged during Reconstruction, the Civil Rights era, and other pivotal moments in American history.
After the interview, Candis and Chris discuss the ways that neoliberalism has impacted public education, the promise and peril of teacher's unions, and how COVID-19 has further complicated our already complex relationship with public education.
Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy
Black's talk for Penn State's Center for Education and Civil Rights
This week's featured show from The Democracy Group podcast network: How Do We Fix It?
School segregation then and now
Citizenship, patriotism, and democracy in the classroom
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner joins us to discuss the promise and peril of institutional reform and how he built a coalition of voters who are traditionally overlooked in politics. He spent his career as a civil rights attorney, not a as a prosecutor like his predecessors. He's part of a growing movement of progressive district attorneys who focus on ending mass incarceration, not solely on enforcing law and order.
Krasner won in 2017 and increased voter turnout in an off-year election; he is up for re-election this year. He is the subject of the new PBS Independent Lens documentary Philly D.A., which follows his campaign and first three years in office. He is also the author of For the People: A Story of Justice and Power. Both the book and the documentary series will be released April 20.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, legislators in 43 states have introduced more than 250 bills aimed at restricting access to voting in person, by mail, or both. Chris Fizsimon, director and publisher of States Newsroom, returns to the show to give us a birds-eye view of what's happening on the ground in state legislatures.
We discuss how Republican legislators are pushing things like shortened mail-in voting windows, expanded voter ID requirements, and other cumbersome administrative changes under the guise of protecting or restoring election integrity after the 2020 election. After the interview, Michael and Candis reflect on the broader question of voting as a partisan issue and what that means for the future of American democracy.
States Newsroom is a nonprofit news organization with newsrooms across the country specifically focused on state politics. Fitzsimon joined us last spring to discuss COVID-19 protests at state capitols.
Brennan Center State Voting Bills Tracker
Give me liberty or give me COVID-19? - Fitzsimon's first appearance on the show
Danielle Allen is a leader of two large-scale efforts to make democracy truly inclusive and reimagine the way we teach new generations of democratic citizens. She joins us this week to discuss both initiatives and how to build coalitions for effective change
Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She is a leader and spokesperson for Our Common Purpose from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Educating for American Democracy, a collaboration among dozens of civics-focused organizations educators.
These projects share a theme that democracy is in crisis and the only way out of it is to double down on democratic reforms while wrestling with our complicated past and admitting that the United States has never been a fully inclusive democracy. Allen says that reforms are achievable and desired by many people across the country and across the political spectrum.
Getting there won't be easy, however. Chris describes these efforts as the "Manhattan Project for democracy," but Allen says she is a "not an optionalist," meaning that, if we want democracy to succeed, we have no other choice but to push forward despite the naysayers out there.
Educating for American Democracy
Citizenship, patriotism, and democracy in the classroom
Your guide to ranked-choice voting
If you're listening to this podcast, you probably don't fit Ethan Porter's definition of a consumer citizen, but you probably know someone who does — someone who tunes out of politics and would rather focus on just about anything else. Porter argues that appealing to consumer behavior might be on way to spark civic engagement among this group.
In The Consumer Citizen, Porter also makes the case that Americans would trust the government more if it did a better job of communicating about its services. He has some ideas about how businesses can join the effort to increase civics education for everyone, not just students in school. We cover all of those topics in this conversation, and Michael and Chris offer their reflections — and a healthy dose of skepticism — after the interview.
Porter is an assistant professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 2016. He is the author of The Consumer Citizen and the forthcoming False Alarm: The Truth About Political Mistruths in the Trump Era.
When the "business of business" bleeds into politics
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.