The Purple Principle

The Purple Principle kicks off its extended Season Three series on state level polarization with a mini-series on the great state of Texas. And who better to discuss Texas politics than the co-hosts of the artfully named podcast, Y’all-itics: Jason Wheeler (Senior News Reporter) and Jason Whitely (News Anchor) of the ABC Dallas affiliate, WFAA.  Both Jasons concur that polarization has been eating...

What’s it like to represent one of the very few remaining swing districts on the U.S. Congressional map, and be virtually the only Republican member at that time to publicly address climate change?  Former Congressman Carlos Curbelo from Florida’s 26th district (including southwest Miami and the Florida Keys) fields these questions in a season-ending Purple Principle episode entitled, Heard the On...

“I have been paying attention for thirty years,” CNN and SiriusXM host & commentator Michael Smerconish tells us. “And during that time the country has been driven into a partisan ditch.” A well-known visage from his CNN show, Smerconish is also a widely recognized voice, having started on “terrestrial” AM radio two decades before migrating to his current SiriusXM show and podcasts. The Purple Pri...

“If we believe democracy has failed us,” writes author and scholar Tom Nichols in his latest book, Our Own Worst Enemy, “we should first ask ourselves whether we have failed the test of democracy.”   In this Purple Principle episode entitled “The United States of Narcissism,“ co-hosts Rob Pease and Jillian Youngblood ask Nichols why many Americans seem to be enthusiastically failing that test in r...

“I'm watching everybody slowly turn into a pro-Trump zombie that I've ever worked with or been around; everyone's doing their rationalizations.“ So recalls special guest this episode, Sarah Longwell, conservative strategist turned watchdog of Republican populism as Executive Director of the Republican Accountability Project and Publisher of The Bulwark. “The fact that there were a bunch of people...

Cast your votes here!  The year 2021 would certainly be worth forgetting if its worst elements weren’t so clearly continuing on into the New Year 2022 and very likely beyond: the Omicron surge, the worst U.S. inflation in decades, and the maelstrom of misinformation swirling around the clear benefits of vaccination and the equally obvious outcome of the 2020 election.   In this episode entitled Sp...

Support us on Patreon! Can a German town be socially divided by sneakers? Or the Canadian landmass united by a beer commercial? And is US individualism more a group identity than its individualistic citizens would ever admit?  Tune into the third and final episode in our Holiday Survival Kit, Identity with All the Trimmings, featuring Psychology Professor Dominic Packer of Lehigh University for an...

It’s tempting to think of anti-science sentiments, such as the current pushback against COVID vaccination, as the disparate sum of misinformed individuals. But Lee McIntyre, author of the recent book, How to Talk to a Science Denier, has found otherwise.  “All science denial is really organized. It’s a campaign,” explains McIntyre. “And as a campaign it deserves some pushback, which is what I do.”...

Are we Americans trapped in our end zones of polarized bubbles ever more motivated to reason away conflicting information or viewpoints?  Our featured guest, psychologist Tania Israel, thinks not and should know. Dr. Israel has been holding workshops over the past two decades to help participants bridge political and social divisions. In this Purple Principle episode, the first in a three-part ser...

Our Purple Principle series on Hollywood Presidents would not be complete without a stroll back in time through that show of all Potus shows, The West Wing, featuring Martin Sheen as President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet. We speak with award-winning West Wing writer, Paul Redford, a former Shakespearean actor turned screenscribe, who recalls: “West Wing came along and...filled a need that nobody knew was...

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 Purp...

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....

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 Par...

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 t...

“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 tha...

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...

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...

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 independ...

"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 t...

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 U...

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...

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 an...

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 mult...

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, Kathe...

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 Senat...