Democracy Works

We’re back after our summer break and catch up on what’s happened to American democracy while we were on hiatus. Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, Candis Watts Smith, and Jenna Spinelle are back after summer break to discuss the January 6 committee hearings, which we previously teased as “democracy’s summer blockbusters.” Did they live up to […]

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, […]

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 […]

Democracy Works is taking its annual summer hiatus starting next week, but that does not mean the wheels of democracy will stop turning while we’re away. In fact, this summer could prove to be quite the opposite. In this episode, we discuss what’s going on in the Supreme Court and the impact of the rulings […]

The Baby Boomers are the most powerful generation in American history — and they’re not going away anytime soon.  Their influence in politics, media, business, and other areas of life is likely to continue for at least the next decade. What does that mean for younger generations? Generational conflict, with Millennials and Generation Z pitted […]

Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in student debt and some members of the Millennial and Gen Z wonder whether they’ll ever pay off their loans. Student loans began as a well-intended government program to help increase America’s brainpower in the Cold War era, but as our guest this week describes, grew into a political […]

Jon Meacham is one of America’s leading thinkers on how the country’s political history can inform the present. He recently visited Penn State to present a lecture on his 2018 book The Soul of America and joined us for a wide-ranging conversation on the war in Ukraine (and whether Zelensky really is like Churchill), American […]

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 history. The January 6, 2021 insurrection and the partisan responses that ensued are a vivid illustration of how deep these currents run. How did American politics become […]

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 with us how dignity offline impacts our behavior online, just to name a few. Rep. Ro Khanna  combines his experience in […]

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 most-read pieces of 2021. We’re lucky to have Kagan with us this week to discuss the ongoing crises of democracy […]

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 more fundamental disconnect between the need for a free press in a democracy and the models the United States has set up […]

We’re back with a new season and our 200th episode! Penn State’s Jim Piazza returns to the show this week to discuss a new study on why the loser’s consent is a critical part of a healthy democracy — and what happens when politicians and other elites fail to abide by it. Piazza found that […]

As we’ve heard from Carol Anderson and others on this show, the fight for voting rights often breaks down along racial and partisan lines. Desmond Meade saw that as a problem and set out to change it by channeling our shared sense of humanity and the common good to push for change. Meade is a […]

Over the past 30 years, citizens of democracies who claim to value freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law have increasingly embraced illiberal politicians and platforms on both the right and the left. Democracy is in trouble, but who is really to blame? In Our Own Worst Enemy, Tom Nichols challenges the current depictions of […]

The problems of disinformation, conspiracies, and cancel culture are probably familiar to many of our listeners. But they’re usually talked about separately, including on this show. In his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch ties these threads together and shows how they contribute to a larger problem of a departure […]

As we’ve said many times on this show, democracy is long and slow, which is the exact opposite of the ethos that Amazon has pushed into our culture through quick shipping, easily accessible entertainment, its takeover of cloud computing, and more. Amazon’s expansion across America, from distribution facilities to data centers, is exacerbating regional inequities […]

Half of the U.S. Senate and one-third of the House of Representatives is 65 or older. What does that mean for Millennial politicians? Time magazine’s Charlotte Alter joins us this week to discuss. Generational divides in American politics are nothing new, but they seem particularly striking now as the oldest Millennials turn 40 this year. […]

We’re back after our summer break! Michael, Chris, Candis, and Jenna catch up on what happened over the summer, from COVID vaccine mandates to school board chaos to the refugee crisis in Afghanistan. The underlying theme of it all is one of democracy’s central tensions — the collective vs. the individual. The tension between individual […]

We often talk about democracy in the context of politics and institutions, but this week’s guest draws from Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Dewey to offer a different perspective. We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and political […]

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 […]