Last week's Wisconsin Supreme Court election put a spotlight on state-level politics and the way that national politics can influence what happens in the states. But there are a lot of other developments happening at the state level that you might have missed. We catch up on what's happening with Alex Burness, a reporter who covers state and local democracy and criminal justice issues for Bolts. As the name suggests, Bolts covers the "nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local up." The topics we cover in this episode include: Felon disenfranchisement and mail-in voting Mail ..read more

Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how tech platforms have eroded over time. According to him, the process goes something like this:  First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. Doctorow joins us in a collaborative interview with News Over Noise to discuss how enshittifiation has affected our ability to find information, engage in deliberative democracy, and more. We also discuss what coal ..read more

As the lead investigator into both the 2017 racist riot in Charlottesville and the January 6 insurrection, Tim Heaphy has a unique perspective on the cynicism and anger that also fueled Trump’s return to the presidency. All three events, both the violent protests and the peaceful and lawful decisions made at the ballot box in November 2024, reflect an increasing lack of trust in institutions among a growing number of Americans. He reflects on his work and where we go from here in the book Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy Heaphy jo ..read more

Chris Beem, McCourtney Institute for Democracy managing director and research professor of political science at Penn State, talks with author Jonathan Rauch about why the current crisis in American Christianity is also a crisis in American democracy. In his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, Rauch (a lifelong atheist) asks what happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In the book and in this conversation, Rauch encourages Christians to recommit ..read more

It's easy to feel defeated in the face of political challenges, but this episode shows that everyone has the capacity to create positive change and contribute to a culture of peace in their communities. In her book "Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change," Lisa Silvestri shows how ordinary people addressed issues in their communities form the West Bank to Baltimore.   Silvestri found those stories through a process she calls "crowdsourcing hope" and found that deliberately seeking out peace led her to discover more and more of it. The book is grounded in the Ancient ..read more

Instances of political violence around the 2024 election and vote certification on January 6, 2025 did not come to fruition the way some experts feared they would throughout last year. But that doesn't mean that we can forget about threats of political violence until it's time for the next election. In fact, political violence continues to rise in the United States and throughout western Europe. Our guests this week, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca of Freedom House and the George W. Bush Institute, are two of the leading voices on ho ..read more

The results of the 2024 election — from Donald Trump's victory to the failure of democracy reform efforts like ranked-choice voting and citizen-led redistricting — took some in the pro-democracy movement by surprise. How could voters make decisions up and down the ballot that would weaken democracy? Scott Warren argues that it's because "democracy" has become too closely associated with the Democratic Party. He laid out the case in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article published shortly after the election and joins us on the show to talk about it. Warren is a fellow at the SNF Agora Inst ..read more

This episode marks the first time that all five of our hosts (Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, Cyanne Loyle, Candis Watts Smith, and Jenna Spinelle) are together on one episode. It's also the first time we've all been together since the election. We take some time to reflect on changes in America's political party, the decline of liberal democracy in the U.S., and how to harness the good from social media amid growing extremism and misinformation. Along the way, you'll hear from some of the guests who've appeared on the show this year: Joe Wright: How personalist parties destabilize democracy Cas ..read more

Balazs Trencsenyi, co-director of Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU), joins us to discuss the university's work to uphold education and democracy in Ukraine amid the country's ongoing war with Russia. IUFU, an initiative of Central European University was founded shortly after the start of the war in 2022. Since then, more than 1,000 students have taken online and in-person courses taught by faculty around the world. Trencsenyi is a professor of historical studies at CEU and and director of the university's Institute for Advanced Studies. He is a historian of East Central European politic ..read more

Dahlia Lithwick has covered the Supreme Court since the landmark Bush v. Gore decision in 2000. In that time, she's seen a sea change in the court itself, as well as the way that journalists cover it. We discuss those trends in this episode, as well as how former President Trump's legal team has changed since the 2020 election. Lithwick is the host of Amicus, Slate’s podcast about the law and the Supreme Court, and author of "Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America." She has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Georgia Law School, the University of Vir ..read more