We take stock of our rapidly escalating constitutional crisis and how our interpretation has evolved over the first few weeks of the Trump regime. We talk about the role of Elon Musk, the political project the feudal tech barons are pursuing, and how Musk’s side coup relates to what the other MAGA factions have been up to: the Project 2025 crew, the America First nativists, and Trump himself. We also zoom in on what the stakes are in the fight over the agencies and departments the Trumpists want...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Is This Democracy is back! And what a time to be discussing the conflict over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America. We reflect on the Inauguration and the first 72 hours of the Trump regime: What stood out from the transfer of power on Monday and Trump’s speech(es)? Most importantly: What have we learned from the onslaught of presidential executive orders and proclamations? We try to establish a framework for how to think about what is happening around us: This is not mer...
Jan 24, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast We continue our conversation about “Landslide,” the fantastic new NPR podcast series – and about the transformation of politics in the 1970s, the emergence of a new kind of populist politics, how the Republican Party was taken over by rightwing radicalism that ultimately rose to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980, and how all that relates to what we are experiencing today. In last week’s Part I, we already talked about the process of partisan sorting and party realignment – certainly one of the ke...
Apr 16, 2024•55 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast “Landslide” is a new NPR podcast series that tells the story of American politics in the 1970s, specifically of the 1976 and 1980 presidential elections, of Jimmy Carter’s unlikely path to the White House and, most importantly, of how Ronald Reagan and the New Right rose to power. And as you will hear in our conversation with our guest Ben Bradford, the man who created, hosted, narrated, and produced “Landslide,” it is also so much more. For this episode, I recruited the help of Seth Cotlar, pro...
Apr 11, 2024•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Have we learned anything new about the Republican Party, its base, and MAGA America from the GOP primaries? We talk about why Trump was always going to win, why he is the dominant force in Republican politics – but also, even though too many people pretend he is electoral magic, a relatively weak general election candidate. We also discuss what is animating the group of self-identifying conservatives who do not like MAGA, but still overwhelmingly vote for Trump. And we examine the role of the Re...
Mar 19, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joe Biden is “too old” and should step aside – at least that is what many of the nation’s most prominent commentators are telling us. But do their arguments actually hold up to scrutiny? Is Joe Biden too old and unfit to be president? Is he incapable of campaigning and defeating Donald Trump in the 2024 election? And if he were to step aside, what should be the plan going forward? Specifically, is an open convention in the summer, as Ezra Klein has argued, the best path towards a Democratic vict...
Feb 23, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast What would a second Trump presidency look like? We dive deep into the detailed plans that have emerged on the Right for what they want to do immediately upon getting back to power. Almost two years ago, “Project 2025” was launched under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation. Different factions on the Right are preparing separate plans, but “Project 2025” stands out because it unites much of the conservative machine behind the goal of installing a much more effective, more ruthless rightwing ...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resigned on January 2 – the endpoint of a brutally dishonest rightwing campaign that could not have succeeded without the mainstream media eagerly joining the crusade to get her fired. We discuss why this disastrous affair matters: It was the latest iteration of the eternal reactionary grievance against higher education, which conservatives have always seen as a place of subversive liberal indoctrination and dangerous social engineering; part of an ...
Jan 11, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast In early November the New York Times released a poll that had Donald Trump clearly ahead in 5 of the 6 battleground states that will decide the 2024 election. It caused an earthquake and outright panic among (small-d) democrats. But just two days later, Democrats emerged victorious from an actual election. What on earth is going on in American politics right now? What are we to make of poll after poll claiming that Trump is on a path back to the White House? Do they tell us anything about what’s...
Nov 30, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast We start with a reflection on the results in Tuesday’s elections, and how they relate to polls that indicate Joe Biden is not just unpopular, but actually trailing Donald Trump in key swing states. What can and can’t we take away from such polling, one year out from the presidential election? We then dive deep into a very different kind of polling and survey data: the 2023 American Values Survey – arguably the most in-depth attempt to capture the values, ideas, and attitudes that shape American ...
Nov 10, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast The Speaker drama is over (for now) – but who is Mike Johnson? His ascension is not only further evidence that the January 6 insurrectionists are now fully in charge of the House, but also a manifestation of how much the Republican Party is dominated by the interests and sensibilities of religious reactionaries. Johnson rejects the separation of church and state, he disdains pluralism, and he certainly doesn’t like “democracy.” We also discuss the role threats of violence played in this whole af...
Oct 27, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast After a very long summer break, “Is This Democracy” is back! We start with a reflection on the terrorist attack on Israel and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war, how it’s being discussed in the U.S., and the moral, political, and intellectual obligations that shape our own perspective. We then tackle the latest round of Speaker drama: It took Kevin McCarthy 15 tries to get elected – and just 269 days later, he is out. Can we learn anything new from this Republican chaos? Maybe not – but it is a crucia...
Oct 13, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast Let’s survey the political landscape and take stock of where things stand almost halfway through 2023. We started this podcast a little over half a year ago, just a few days before the midterms. The election ended in a better result for Democrats than most people expected. That led to a lot of commentary about how the guardrails were supposedly holding, the system was working. Then in early December, the January 6 Committee referred Trump to the Department of Justice for prosecution. All that co...
Jun 07, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Let’s tackle the philosophy and culture of Silicon Valley, and how they help us explain the politics of reactionary-to-far-right tech titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. In 2020, Adrian Daub published “What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley.” In the book, he applied his skills as a literary and cultural scholar, as someone who is trained to dissect and analyze the stories that help us make sense of the world, to his immediate surroundings. Adrian ...
May 17, 2023•41 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast Let’s dive deep into the “cancel culture” moral panic, what it can tell us about U.S. society, culture, and politics, and how it has spread across the “West.” There is no one better equipped to help us do that than Adrian Daub. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality. In the fall of 2022, Adrian published “Cancel Culture Transfer: How...
May 16, 2023•2 hr 48 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast We need to be a lot more critical towards the pervasive polarization narrative, towards “polarization” as the central diagnosis of our time. “Polarization” obscures not only what the key challenge is – the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right – but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now. We start by outlining the central arguments and claims of the polarization narrative. We then offer an empirical, normative, and historical critique....
May 02, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Gun violence is a political problem, a democracy problem, an exceptionally American problem. We decided to do this episode after the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville. But that was over three weeks ago, and so there have been so many more mass shootings since, so much more death and destruction. In the U.S., it’s always right after and right before a mass shooting, regardless of whether we apply the term to shootings in public space or in the home. And day after day, myriad social interac...
Apr 21, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s hard to keep track of everything that’s happening in the struggle against the reactionary assault on democracy, on so many levels, all at the same time. We go through some of the big stories of the week and reflect on how to relate them to each other, where to direct our attention, how to process it all. We start in Manhattan, where, finally, Donald Trump had to turn himself in, was arrested, had to appear before a judge on Tuesday – and it was all… rather ordinary and boring, exactly the w...
Apr 06, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Let’s talk about the history of American conservatism, the past and present of the Far-Right, and the paths that led to Trumpism’s rise. If there is one underlying assumption that defines this podcast, it is that the central threat to democracy is the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right. In this episode, we talk about when, how, and why that actually happened – and Seth Cotlar is the perfect guest to help us tackle these questions. Seth Cotlar is a professor of history at Willamette Univ...
Mar 30, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast On Saturday, Donald Trump used his social media propaganda platform to urge his followers “TO TAKE OUR NATION BACK” – by which he really meant: Protect him from being arrested, which he announced was going to happen on Tuesday. We dive into the ex-president’s legal trouble (that’s a euphemism) and use it as a springboard for a discussion of some bigger-picture issues: What conservative reactions can tell us about Trump’s status in the Republican Party and on the Right more generally, and what ro...
Mar 22, 2023•53 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast We are in the midst of an escalating rightwing assault on public education in America. It comes in the form of an attempted authoritarian takeover of schools and universities, in hundreds of bills establishing state censorship, banning books, purging anything that dares to dissent from a white nationalist understanding of the nation’s past or present from the classroom, the libraries, the curriculum – but also as a radical push for school privatization, a dimension that has received far less att...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast Lily and Thomas dissect the “free speech crisis on campus” discourse. The pervasive “free speech crisis” narrative wants us to believe that liberty and freedom in this country are being threatened by “woke” radicals imposing an ever-more authoritarian “cancel culture,” a culture of censoriousness on college life and on the nation in general. According to a never-ending barrage of op-eds and editorials in leading mainstream papers, this is a national emergency in desperate need of intervention. B...
Mar 10, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast We are in the midst of an escalating moral panic around “Critical Race Theory” that is serving, across Republican-led states, as justification to censor and purge anything that dares to dissent from a white nationalist understanding of America’s past or present. That is the context in which Victor Ray published his book “On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care.” Victor Ray is a sociologist, a professor at the Universitxy of Iowa, and you’ll hear in this conversatio...
Mar 08, 2023•58 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast We are in the midst of a reactionary moral panic over “Critical Race Theory” that is being used by Republicans across the country to justify an escalating assault on academic freedom and attempts to stifle, censor, and ban any dissent from the white nationalist patriarchal worldview, anything that dares to upset reactionary sensibilities. This manufactured panic took off in the fall of 2020 – not coincidentally in the aftermath of the mobilization of civil society after the murder of George Floy...
Mar 02, 2023•31 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast After an unexpected hiatus, we are back! And we focus on what is undoubtedly one of the most pressing democracy and civil rights issues in America today: The escalating assault on trans rights, the reactionary crusade against one of the country’s most vulnerable communities. We talk about the situation of trans people in the U.S. and do our best to address the confusion, misinformation, and anxiety that are constantly being weaponized. We look at the unprecedented wave of anti-trans bills, the e...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast We share our thoughts on the murder of Tyre Nichols, on why we need to grapple with structural, systemic racism and how it produces discriminatory outcomes, and why the lack of accountability for police departments is a democratic crisis – We then focus on Ron DeSantis’ authoritarian takeover of the education system in Florida: We discuss why the rejection of the AP African American Studies course is emblematic of an escalating assault on public education, of a reactionary rollback of all attemp...
Feb 03, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Transcript available on Metacast We asked for your questions – and you delivered. We tried our best to answer some of them. The result is a wide-ranging discussion on a bunch of crucial issues, including: Why “economic anxiety” is not what fuels Trumpism or the rightwing radicalization, and why the eagerness with which some people cling to this narrative despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary is indicative of a tendency to sanitize the political discourse; how Democrats should react to the GOP’s radical abandonment ...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast Every year, MLK Day brings a lot of shallow proclamations of admiration for a man whose actual vision and political project are often sanitized and sterilized to such extent that even Republicans whose mission it is to undo any of the racial progress since the 1960s will happily (and shamelessly) “celebrate” the legacy of Martin Luther King. But the racial reckoning King envisioned has never happened. It seemed possible, perhaps, in the summer of 2020, during the mass protests after the public m...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast It took 15 votes, and in the end, the insurrectionists finally captured the House: Our takeaways from how the speaker drama played out and what has transpired since, what it all tells us about the Republican Party, and how the rightwing fringe has moved to the center of conservative politics – Nihilism. Chaos agents. Burning it all down. To many observers, the speaker spectacle confirmed that’s basically all there is to the MAGA Right. We discuss the “nihilism” interpretation, why it risks obscu...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast We are witnessing a historic spectacle in the House. A deep dive into the Republican inability to elect a speaker from all angles: How to explain it, what the fault lines are, why it’s misleading to present the McCarthy camp as “moderates,” what it means for government and governance going forward – Whatever happened to “moderate” Republicans? We look at the case of Elise Stefanik and reflect on the lure of Trumpism, the relationship between opportunism and ideology, and the personal dynamics of...
Jan 05, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast 
