Ryan Busse is a Democratic candidate for governor of Montana and the author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America. We discuss how Montana is a bulwark against anti-democratic forces and how Ryan cuts through the politi-speak on the campaign trail. It's important for Democrats to identify with the basic democratic freedom values of the vast majority of people, whether that’s fair taxes on homeowners or reproductive freedom. Ryan argues that a vibrant democracy depen...
Jan 18, 2024•43 min•Ep 278•Transcript available on Metacast Deb Otis is the Director of Research & Policy at FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that researches and advances voting reforms that make democracy more functional and representative for every American. We discuss the benefits of ranked choice voting and the likelihood that it will become more popular after the 2024 presidential election. Ranked choice voting addresses a variety of problems in “vote one” elections, such as vote splitting among similar candidates; ranking candidates in order of...
Jan 11, 2024•32 min•Ep 277•Transcript available on Metacast Lala Wu is the co-founder and executive director of Sister District, an organization that works to build enduring progressive power in state legislatures. We discuss how state races will continue to be important during the presidential election cycle and why the battle for redistricting will be center stage. State legislatures are where a lot of impactful policy is made, such as abortion laws. They’re also critical because in most states, state legislatures control redistricting. Building progre...
Jan 04, 2024•37 min•Ep 276•Transcript available on Metacast Over the last several years our politics has been pushed from a place of collaboration to bold faced loyalty tests. In his latest book: Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, our guest, author and NPR Morning Edition co-host, Steve Inskeep, discusses with Waj and Danielle why dissent necessary and is as American as apple pie! Listen to Democracy-ish: https://www.dcpofficial.com/democracy-ish Follow Danielle on X: https://twitter.com/DeeTwoCents Follow Waj on X: https://twitt...
Dec 28, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rich Harwood is the president and founder of The Harwood Institute, who just launched a campaign to reclaim the public square from the most divisive voices and build it into a place that can make hope real for all. The public square is a noisy and messy place where society disagrees, argues, and also finds solutions. It’s through working out expectations, engaging in the work to be on the right path forward, and holding ourselves accountable to our goals that we engender hope. Acknowledging what...
Dec 21, 2023•40 min•Ep 275•Transcript available on Metacast Juliet Hooker is the author of Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss and the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University. We talk about how racism has narrowed the political imagination of both black and white citizens. In American politics and democracy, neither side is supposed to win all the time. Losing is a fundamental part of democracy, and does not make the losers victims. In a multiracial democracy, having a president or any other el...
Dec 14, 2023•37 min•Ep 274•Transcript available on Metacast Shaun Donovan is the CEO & President of Enterprise Community Partners. We discuss how the deeply entrenched housing crisis has become worse in recent years and the multiple strategies to make home and community places of pride, power, and belonging. Housing is a basic need that is fundamental to democratic participation. The lack of housing is preventing communities around the country from attracting workers and studies show slowing GDP growth due to housing affordability. People across the US a...
Dec 07, 2023•44 min•Ep 273•Transcript available on Metacast Christopher Paul Harris is Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of To Build A Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care . We discuss why addressing our society’s hard-wired prejudices must be a substantial part of our endeavors toward a truly multicultural democracy. Central to building a Black future is reframing and recreating institutions from the perspective of those who have been historically marginaliz...
Nov 30, 2023•42 min•Ep 272•Transcript available on Metacast Just in time for Thanksgiving, Neal Rickner joins us to talk about the American Values Coalition, a growing community of Americans who are empowered to lead with truth, reject extremism and misinformation, and defend democracy. Get some pointers to dialogue across political divides and across the table. First, have the courage to have the conversation. As much as hiding in the kitchen sounds preferable, we’re going to engage on the issues one relationship at a time. Begin the conversation with a...
Nov 21, 2023•39 min•Ep 271•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday, November 16th, 2023 Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University and co-author of Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party. We learn how unions are true laboratories of democracy and why their demise has eroded our democratic culture. Unions were at the heart of local communities well beyond bargaining for contracts. They were part of recreational and social life, and even the churche...
Nov 16, 2023•46 min•Ep 270•Transcript available on Metacast 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 
