Support us on Patreon! HBO's Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, is likely the most successful American political satire in television history. Yet, in seven seasons, the show never mentions the party labels "Democrat" or "Republican," instead using terms like "the enemy camp" or "my extremist colleague from across the aisle." In "Hollywood Presidents for a Partisan Nation (Part Three)," The Purple Principle speaks with Veep showrunner and head writer David Mandel, about this convention and the...
Oct 19, 2021•40 min•Season 2Ep. 17
Is it possible to have grace-filled conversations during these ingracious times of ours? After 500 episodes heard by hundreds of thousands of listeners, Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers, Kentucky-based creators of Pantsuit Politics, can decisively say that it is. In Episode 16, “Amazing Grace for Our Partisan Times,” they share some of the secrets to their podcasting and publishing success. But that doesn’t mean the two long-time friends agree on all things political. In fact, disagreement...
Oct 05, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 16
Here’s a seemingly inexplicable historical event: How did the anti-slavery Republican party take the White House in 1861, only six years after its formation? Thanks to the work of our special guest, Dr. Omar Ali, a historian at UNC-Greensboro, we know this accomplishment is largely due to the earlier work of the abolitionist Liberty Party beginning in the 1840s and continued by the Free Soil Party, which worked against the extension of slavery. Author of In the Balance of Power: Independent and ...
Sep 21, 2021•33 min•Season 2Ep. 15
Is civics education in the U.S. having a moment, as in a long-overdue upgrade, for a topic essential to our democracy? And will that moment translate into more substantial education on the rights and obligations of our citizens and voters-to-be? In “A Civic Way to Reverse Polarization,” The Purple Principle takes on these questions with four special guests well versed in civics, kicking off with the producer-hosts of the popular NHPR radio show, podcast, and educational series Civics 101, Hannah...
Sep 07, 2021•41 min•Season 2Ep. 14
“The rise of the conservative movement on the right and the decline of liberalism on the left have been a preoccupation of mine for 40 years or more,” Thomas Edsall confides in our latest Season Two episode, “Woking up to Backlash.” Edsall describes for us the high amperage polarities between the two parties – how the far left can be the right’s greatest ally, and vice-versa. He further notes that while the excesses of each party are not morally equivalent, they can often be politically equivale...
Aug 24, 2021•40 min•Season 2Ep. 13
This bonus episode features the passing of the ceremonial mic from Emily Crocetti to our new co-host, Jillian Youngblood, Executive Director of Civic Genius. After a full year and 35 episodes, Emily is moving onto a newspaper position in a breathtakingly beautiful area of California which is, unfortunately, clouded in fire smoke at this moment. While a co-host a few months ago, Emily interviewed Jillian in the early Season Two episode, “When Martians Land, Pigs Fly, and Americans Reach Consensus...
Aug 24, 2021•7 min
Imagine creating a television series premised on a U.S. Capitol building attack, then watching a less-lethal yet all too real version of that event unfold years later. Writer/Creator David Guggenheim relates how that felt in the second part of our Purple Principle series on Hollywood Presidents. “When the insurrection happened at the Capitol,” recalls Guggenheim, “so many people were emailing…‘Oh my God, this is like straight out of the show.’” That show was Designated Survivor, which aired on A...
Aug 10, 2021•23 min•Season 2Ep. 12
In a time of extreme polarization, how does Hollywood portray a POTUS with broad audience appeal? That question is at the heart of our multi-part series on Hollywood Presidents, starting with special guest Rod Lurie, the first to create an independent President in a major TV series, Commander in Chief (starring Geena Davis as President Mackenzie Allen in 2005). “I definitely made her an independent, then tried to keep the topics we were dealing with something that both sides could relate to,” sa...
Jul 27, 2021•35 min•Season 2Ep. 11
"Social media is not fundamentally a source of information or a competition of ideas, but a competition of identities." With that and other provocative findings, Dr. Chris Bail, Director of the Duke University Polarization Lab and author of Breaking the Social Media Prism (Princeton U. Press) challenges what we know about social media – its uses and abuses. Dr. Bail and his colleagues delineate the strong incentives to create online alter-egos, especially more extreme ones, that command so much ...
Jul 13, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Police reform, gun violence, global warming... When did you last have a civil, informative, productive conversation with someone of differing opinions on any of these vital but polarizing topics? In the current U.S. climate, such conversations range from difficult to impossible to regrettable. The eminent social psychologist, Peter Coleman (Director of The Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia University) is deeply familiar with such conversations and with longstanding group conflicts among na...
Jun 29, 2021•30 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Do we live in an age where online conspiracies and cults proliferate ever more frequently and powerfully? We continue to explore this question by focusing on the growth of the flat earth movement in “Online Conspiracies & Virtual Cults, Part 2: Celebrity Makes the World Go Flat.” Our special guests for this episode, filmmakers Daniel Clark and Nick Andert, gained unprecedented access to the flat earthers for their insightful Netflix documentary, Behind the Curve. The central character in the...
Jun 15, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Our digital universe is full of information, and misinformation, swirling about constantly, sampled in bits and bytes, most of it rarely gaining more than passing attention. How then does misinformation swirl up into a popular conspiracy theory? How do some conspiracy theories, such as Qanon, eventually gain a loyal cult-like following without physical contact between members or between leaders and followers? In this episode, The Purple Principle speaks with three noted cultic experts on these i...
Jun 01, 2021•36 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Battling the COVID pandemic has been a war on many fronts – disease management, the race to develop effective vaccines, and now the equally tricky PR battle against vaccine misinformation and skepticism. In this episode, the Purple Principle speaks with Dr. Jeanine Guidry, Director of the Media and Health Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University, on the varied approaches needed to address the multiple forms of COVID vaccine anxiety: concerns about effectiveness, safety, fertility, and personal li...
May 18, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Our national legislative agenda hinges on any one Senator’s vote or abstention or last minute demand… A few months into term and the majority of U.S. House Members already anticipate their next primary battle… Meanwhile, bridges crumble, the border crisis deepens, and gun carnage continues unabated… Might be time to take a fresh look at our political gridlock. This episode’s featured guest, Katherine Gehl (co-author of The Politics Industry) provides a sorely needed new perspective on our two-pa...
May 05, 2021•39 min•Season 2Ep. 5
The U.S. system of government is commonly known as one of checks and balances. But a careful review of legislative efforts over the past century might need to revise that description to checks and balances and filibusters. In this episode of The Purple Principle, we look at that awkwardly named but often-debated tactic unique to the U.S. Senate, the filibuster. This rule currently allows any Senator to silently delay a vote on a piece of legislation until a supermajority of 60 Senators votes oth...
Apr 20, 2021•38 min•Season 2Ep. 4
In this episode of The Purple Principle, we wonder, what’s behind those red and blue maps of American political and social geography and our deepening urban-rural divide? To find out, we consult not one but two political scientists named Ryan who have extensively researched the social geography of polarization in the U.S. – Ryan Enos of Harvard University (author of The Space Between Us) and Ryan Strickler of Colorado State ( co-author of Demography, Politics and Partisan Polarization in the US ...
Apr 06, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 3
We’ve all seen and heard the sad decline of civil discussions at congressional town hall forums over the past decade or two. The anger, the shouting, the gotcha questions. Not to mention generous amounts of obfuscation from congressional representatives. The result being that even before COVID, many members of Congress and other elected officials began to abandon town halls all together. But the non-profit, non-partisan group Civic Genius sensed opportunity where others just heard shouting. One ...
Mar 23, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Does history create vulnerabilities that any number of populist politicians could seize upon? Or do exceptional populists create those opportunities only he or she can exploit? There’s no simple answer to that question. But it does frame the informative discussion we have surrounding a major populist figure, Newt Gingrich, on our first Season Two episode with Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. Zelizer’s most recent book is Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Ri...
Mar 18, 2021•34 min•Season 2Ep. 1
To some degree, all Americans realize we’ve become more polarized in recent times. Those at one extreme obsess about the other, while those in between wonder if that incessant tug of war will fray our social fabric to the breaking point. Fortunately, there are committed individuals and groups working hard to combat polarization. In Part Two of our season finale (“We’re Polarized; Now What?”), we highlight this important work. First off, the anti-gerrymandering efforts of the Campaign Legal Cente...
Feb 23, 2021•29 min•Season 1Ep. 23
A first presidential impeachment… the COVID pandemic with great dissension over shutdowns, social distancing and mask-wearing…Our hotly contested 2020 election followed by major efforts at election reversal culminating with insurrection and a second impeachment trial... It’s been quite a year, much too full of subject matter since we started researching and producing Purple Principle episodes on the theme of polarization. Episode 22, “Polarization as Plague,” is Part One of our two-part season f...
Feb 09, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Anyone casually following the 2020 election this year may have noticed a particular pattern in polling trends and election results. That pattern, in key presidential states as well as Senate races, went something like this: Democrat ahead… Democrat still ahead... Democrat a bit ahead, days away from the election… But then: Republican wins by a fair amount. How was so much polling inaccuracy possible again in 2020 at nearly all levels? Episode 21 of the Purple Principle, “2020 Polling in Hindsigh...
Jan 27, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 21
A Major Pandemic… Election 2020 that lasted weeks… Election Denial 2020 is still going months later… Insurrection… Impeachment… And possibly more to come. There’s been a lot of polarized and polarizing events over the past few months. So it seems time to step back and take a longer range, wider-angle view of partisanship in our DisUnited States. The Purple Principle does that in Episode 20 with featured guests Dr. Andrew Gelman of Columbia University (Departments of Political Science and Statist...
Jan 12, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 20
The Year 2020 has not exactly been brimming with good news. Certainly in terms of public health and the economy, you could say it was the worst of times and the worst of times. But we did find a bright audio spot in Purple Principle Episode 13, which we repodcast today with important new information, most notably that Alaska’s ambitious Ballot Measure Two has officially passed. Ballot Measure Two packaged together the opening of statewide primaries to non-partisan or independent voters with top ...
Dec 31, 2020•28 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Colleges have come to be known as havens for divisive politics, cancel culture, and trollism, all miserably co-existing with academic stress, social pressure and stale pizza. In Episode 18, “Civil society and Campus Politics,” The Purple Principle profiles two college students pushing back against the polarizing forces on college campuses and the nation writ large. Avinash Bakshi, President of the Penn State College Independents, describes the importance of having a third, less tribal option amo...
Dec 22, 2020•19 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Inaccurate polling… Split-ticket results… Denial of election results by large numbers of Republican voters and members of Congress... There have been plenty of head-scratching developments related to the 2020 election. In Episode 17, “Party Dynamics in Context,” we turn to noted historian and columnist, Geoffrey Kabaservice, for 2020 election analysis. Given the demise of moderates in the Republican party, Dr. Kabaservice explains that today’s unprecedented Republican loyalty to Donald Trump, th...
Dec 16, 2020•40 min•Season 1Ep. 17
The 2020 election has revealed the partisan state of American politics and society like no other event in recent history. How did we get to this point? Our special guest today, Trevor Potter, Founder and President of the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), provides insight into that question and suggestions for rehabilitating our polarized polity. Gerrymandering, the partisan drawing of electoral districts, is one major factor. In Episode 16, “Democracy & Elections Under Stress,” Trevor Potter (a f...
Dec 09, 2020•41 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Exactly one hundred years ago this month, at a time of political polarization and the Spanish Flu pandemic, William Butler Yeats published “The Second Coming,” a poem premised on the cycles of history that resonates today with striking immediacy. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, the worst are full of passionate intensity... These and other enduring lines from “The Second Coming” are now part of our collective vocabulary. In Episode 15, “The Second Coming Turns 100," we look at the hist...
Nov 19, 2020•28 min•Season 1Ep. 15
How does a century-old poem written in Ireland as European civil wars erupted in the aftermath of World War I still resonate in our own partisan era? That is the central question The Purple Principle asks in both Episode 14 and 15, as the classic poem, “The Second Coming”, by William Butler Yeats, turns one hundred years young. In Episode 14, our special guest is another great Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, author of 15 collections of poetry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Professor of Poetry at P...
Nov 12, 2020•23 min•Season 1Ep. 14
The great state of Alaska is different in many ways – its vast size, low population, and great distance from “the lower 48” (states). Politics in Alaska is different as well: a remarkable 57% of Alaskans are registered as either non-partisan or unaffiliated voters. The proponents of Alaska Ballot Measure 2 would like to preserve and enhance the state’s non-partisan political culture. This measure would create an open unified primary system, top four ranked choice voting, and greater campaign fin...
Oct 27, 2020•25 min•Season 1Ep. 13
Independent candidate David Krucoff is running for the non-voting D.C. Congress position without much hope of unseating incumbent Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton for her 16th term. Instead, Krucoff seeks to call attention to his non-partisan “retrocession” solution to D.C. disenfranchisement – the creation of Douglass (as in Frederick Douglass) County, Maryland as the new and fully enfranchised home for Washington, D.C. citizens. Could David’s retrocession proposal slay the D.C. disenfranchisemen...
Oct 20, 2020•19 min•Season 1Ep. 12
