Thursday, November 9th, 2023 Bernard E. Harcourt is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University -- and he was also our very first guest on the podcast! Bernard's most recent book, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory, offers the blueprint for a society based on cooperation. The idea of creating a space that benefits the stakeholders, rather than the shareholders, has a long history. Cooperatives offer a robust way of b...
Nov 09, 2023•43 min•Ep 269•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, November 2nd, 2023 Hajar Yazdiha is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and the author of The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. We discuss the role of collective memory in the myth-making of American exceptionalism. Collective memory is the way that we remember history and that becomes central to our idea of who we are as a people. It’s a process of storytelling and...
Nov 02, 2023•38 min•Ep 268•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, October 26th, 2023 Nick Suplina is Senior Vice President for Law & Policy at Everytown for Gun Safety. He was previously an advisor for New York State’s Attorney General. We discuss how 10 years of grassroots organizing has changed the political calculus on gun safety legislation, starting with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Although progress is slow, 15 Republican senators did vote for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022. This was made possible because of 10 years wort...
Oct 26, 2023•40 min•Ep 267•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, October 19th, 2023 Sam Oliker-Friedland is the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsive Government and a former Department of Justice voting rights litigator at the Civil Rights Division. We discuss the promise of automation for good governance and democracy. There is a lot of good pro-voter legislation being implemented in states from Nevada to Michigan, Pennsylvania to New York. The success of automatic voter registration laws are fertile ground for better public policy mak...
Oct 19, 2023•43 min•Ep 266•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, October 12th, 2023 Steven Levitsky is Professor of Government at Harvard University. Together with Daniel Ziblatt, he is co-author of How Democracies Die and has just published Tyranny of the Minority. They argue that reforming American institutions to become more democratic will help us achieve a multiracial democracy—and in the process save democracy itself. We are on the cusp of a multiracial democracy, but to get there we need to reform our constitution and end counter-majoritarian...
Oct 12, 2023•39 min•Ep 265•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, October 5th, 2023 Jocelyn Simonson is Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, a former public defender, and the author of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration. We discuss how certain radical acts of justice challenge the legitimacy of the criminal system and form the underpinning of a new collective legal thought. The four pillars of this work comprise of court watching, community bail funds, participatory defense, and people’s budgets. Bail ...
Oct 05, 2023•48 min•Ep 264•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 28th, 2023 Stephen Bright and James Kwak are co-authors of The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts. Stephen Bright has been an advocate for death row inmates for four decades and was the long-time director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, where James Kwak is the immediate past chair. We do not have a level playing field between the prosecution and the defense. Inequality and injustice in the criminal legal ...
Sep 28, 2023•44 min•Ep 263•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 21st, 2023 Sara Schreiber is the Executive Director of America Votes, the coordination hub of progressive communities. We discuss expanding access to voting, modernizing elections, and getting out the vote up and down the ballot. The last three election cycles saw a real surge of voters: 46 million people who did not vote in the 2016 election, voted in 2018 or 2020. Unprecedented numbers of voter engagement and pro voter policies have also been implemented since 2016. New vot...
Sep 21, 2023•35 min•Ep 262•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 14th, 2023 Yoni Landau is the CEO and founder of Movement Labs, the founder of Contest Every Race, and a former White House Office of Management and Budget and Robert Reich staffer. We explore just how technology can empower our practice of democracy and enrich our civic action toolkit. Think about your personal impact in terms of additionality – how much you’ve done that wouldn’t have otherwise been done. Movement Labs aims to make it easy for you to have an impactful volunt...
Sep 14, 2023•41 min•Ep 261•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, September 7th, 2023 Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning professor of journalism at Columbia University and author of Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. We dive into Humphrey’s activism in the proto civil rights movement and his role to include civil rights in Democratic Party platform in 1948. Hubert Humphrey was a coalition builder. After his decisive win for mayor of Minneapolis, he put together a civil rights and human rights agenda th...
Sep 07, 2023•46 min•Ep 260•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 31st, 2023 Kurt Andersen is a prolific writer and author of Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History. We discuss the conservative playbook to move our society culturally, economically, and politically to the right, and why continuous civic engagement and investment in Americans can restore basic fairness. Influential conservatives capitalized on a wave of cultural nostalgia after the turbulent 1960s to turn the American economy into a version of extreme capitalis...
Aug 31, 2023•48 min•Ep 259•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 24th, 2023 Anne Nelson is an author and lecturer in the fields of international affairs, media, and human rights. Her most recent book is Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. We discuss the coordination between fundamentalist organizations and oil barons to win elections and pass socially conservative public policies. Before the demise of local news, the American public had a factual common page. That is now largely displaced by right-wing media...
Aug 24, 2023•52 min•Ep 258•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 17th, 2023 David Pepper is a lawyer, writer, political activist, and former elected official. He served as the Chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party between 2015 and 2021. He’s the author of several books, including the excellent how-to guide: Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American. We discuss how every one of us can use our personal footprint to lift democracy. The forces attacking democracy are doing so in order to keep their minority worldview locked in. All Ame...
Aug 17, 2023•54 min•Ep 257•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 10th, 2023 Skye Perryman is the President and CEO of Democracy Forward, an organization that uses the law to build collective power and advance a bold, vibrant democracy. We discuss successful legal action to protect and advance the rights of all Americans. A culmination of factors have come together to create a moment in which there are serious existential questions about what type of government and what kind of society Americans will be living in. Backsliding in areas such as ...
Aug 10, 2023•43 min•Ep 256•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, August 3rd, 2023 Norman Chen is the CEO of the Asian American Foundation or TAAF. We discuss racism against Asians and the pursuit of belonging through philanthropy, civic engagement, and education. Deep misconceptions about Asian Americans persist. Narrative change is key for people to see Asian Americans as really being Americans. Only about 1.5% of schools offer a formal Asian American studies program, although Asian American history and Pacific Islander history is a critical part o...
Aug 03, 2023•40 min•Ep 255•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, July 27th, 2023 Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran are co-authors of The Open System: Redesigning Education and Reigniting Democracy. Education is our greatest democracy-building endeavor. We discuss rebuilding trust in public education and marshaling the public will to do something great together. The democratic act is in the spark of everyday interactions with our community, such as in schools. Families and communities should be an integral part of the way that schools function. We n...
Jul 27, 2023•46 min•Ep 254•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, July 20th, 2023 Jenice Fountain is the Executive Director of the Yellowhammer Fund, a reproductive justice organization in Birmingham that serves Alabama, Mississippi, and the deep south. We discuss what the actual lived experience is in Alabama, a year after the Dobbs decision. Since the Dobbs decision, pregnancies are less safe in states where abortion is prohibited. Exceptions to protect the life of the pregnant person do not work in reality because interventions are only offered at...
Jul 20, 2023•38 min•Ep 253•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, July 13th, 2023 Layla Law-Gisiko serves on Manhattan’s Community Board 5 at the very center of New York City. She currently chairs the land use committee, which makes recommendations on the community’s built real estate environments. We discuss her community advocacy, the land use issues the Community Board considers, and the future of New York’s Penn Station. The community board’s power is its voice. Community boards give people an opportunity to get involved and participate in democr...
Jul 13, 2023•47 min•Ep 252•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, July 6th, 2023 We’re sharing an episode from fellow Democracy Group podcast, Democracy Decoded, a show that examines our government and discusses innovative ideas that could lead to a stronger, more transparent, accountable, and inclusive democracy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many states took steps to make voting safer and more accessible, but afterward, we saw a backlash with some states erecting barriers to voting access. Democracy Decoded host Simone Leeper speaks with Trevor Pot...
Jul 06, 2023•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 29th, 2023 Dr. Richard Haass is the President of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens. We discuss how we, as citizens, can fulfill our role in the social contract. The United States is a country founded on an idea about equality, about opportunity, and about freedom. Rights alone will not guarantee the smooth functioning of a society, but must be coupled with obligations. These include being informed, getting invol...
Jun 29, 2023•53 min•Ep 251•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 22nd, 2023 Anna Chu is the executive director of We The Action, an organization that connects volunteer lawyers with nonprofits that require legal assistance. We discuss how lawyers play a unique and critical role in strengthening American democracy. A strong democracy relies on everyone having the ability to have their voices heard at every level of the government, but in the US there is a huge gap between who is actually eligible to vote and who actually votes. In addition, ther...
Jun 22, 2023•39 min•Ep 250•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 15th, 2023 Frank Guridy is the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University and the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. We discuss social movements in the past, present, and future. Social movements consist of mass participation from outside of established political structures to address grievances or to pursue larger social goals. They are often long term endeavors ...
Jun 15, 2023•47 min•Ep 249•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 8th, 2023 David Priess is the Director of Intelligence at Bedrock Learning and has served at the CIA as an intelligence officer, a manager, and a daily intelligence briefer during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. We discuss how the issues of waging war and negotiating peace affect our everyday lives. The intelligence function is about discovering the truth in order to reduce uncertainty for decision-makers on issues of national security. Intelligence cannot pre...
Jun 08, 2023•54 min•Ep 248•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, June 1st, 2023 Beto O’Rourke is a fourth-generation Texan, the former US Representative of Texas’s 16th Congressional district, the Democratic Party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate in 2018, and the Democratic nominee for the 2022 Texas gubernatorial election. He is also the author of We've Got to Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible. We discuss the outsized importance of Texas politics for the nation. Republicans have relied on winning Texas’s electoral col...
Jun 01, 2023•55 min•Ep 247•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, May 25th, 2023 Representative Anna Eskamani serves on behalf of Florida’s 42nd district of Orange County in the state House of Representatives. We discuss her victories at the ballot box and her work to represent her constituents. Her campaign slogan is “Working for you. Fighting for us.” When serving in the minority of the Florida state legislature, you only pass legislation by working across the aisle. Anna is a firm believer in calling people in before calling them out, and on findi...
May 25, 2023•33 min•Ep 246•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, May 18th, 2023 Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones are co-authors of How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms. Chris is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the New York Times’s chief data scientist and Matt is a professor of history at Columbia. Together, they taught a course called “Data: Past, Present, and Future," and their book is an extension thereof. We discuss the history of how data is made; the relationshi...
May 18, 2023•42 min•Ep 245•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, May 11th, 2023 Judge Victoria Pratt was Chief Judge in Newark Municipal Court in New Jersey and the author of The Power of Dignity. She is currently the Executive Director of Odyssey Impact, an interfaith non-profit driving social change through innovative storytelling and media. We discuss procedural justice, municipal court reform, and increasing the public's trust in the justice system. Tough-on-crime laws are ineffective. Punishing people for wrongdoing does not change behavior. Ju...
May 11, 2023•39 min•Ep 244•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, May 4th, 2023 Craig Aaron is the Co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action. We discuss the civic information bill in New Jersey and the promise of centering civic information in the media. A vibrant multiracial democracy requires civic information media, which delivers the information that helps us live better lives in our communities. Journalism or civic media are a public good, and the public needs to invest in media along those lines. In New Jersey, bipartisan legislative support l...
May 04, 2023•45 min•Ep 243•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, April 27th, 2023 Jeff Sharlet is a journalist, best-selling author, and longtime observer and investigator of the Christian right. His latest book is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. We discuss America's democratic bankruptcy, the martyrdom of Ashli Babbit, and the rightward shift of the mainstream. The notion of civil war was a fringe idea, but in recent years it has become mainstream. It was just a question of time and for some, it was already happening. Fascism does not r...
Apr 27, 2023•43 min•Ep 242•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, April 20th, 2023 Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward are the co-authors of Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why our Future Depends on It. We discuss the importance of winning rural races in America. When Chloe ran for office in rural Maine, she knocked on over 20,000 doors and discovered that constituents feel a lack of representation in their daily lives. Democrats really stopped showing up and investing in strong organizing infrastructure in rural places, but it's po...
Apr 20, 2023•41 min•Ep 241•Transcript available on Metacast 
