Terms of Engagement

With the 2026 midterms approaching, a troubling question surfaces: are we living in two completely different realities? Professor Matthew Baum of Harvard Kennedy School joins Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to examine new research from the Shorenstein Center in collaboration with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation on Americans’ knowledge of voting regulations in the 2026 Voting...

Racist appeals in American politics used to require deniability. Increasingly, they don’t. Critics on both the left and the right are writing articles with titles like “The G.O.P. Has Gone Off the Deep End" (Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, September 16, 2026) and "The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem" (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, February 23, 2026). In this episode of Terms of Engagement, Archon...

Everyone agrees that democracy is in trouble. But almost everyone disagrees on why. Larry Bartels, the Vanderbilt political scientist who wrote “Democracy for Realists” and “Democracy Erodes from the Top,” has spent two decades arguing that the story we tell ourselves about democracy – that informed voters guide government and policy from the voting booth – is a myth. A corollary of his rejection...

As college campuses gear up for another election cycle, a wave of nonpartisan efforts is registering students, training poll workers, and driving turnout at record levels. Yet these same efforts now face mounting resistance, including a Trump administration investigation into NSLVE, the primary data source tracking campus voting, and partisan accusations that get-out-the-vote work is politically m...

American men’s work rates have fallen relentlessly since the 1950s, with prime-age male labor force participation now approaching Depression-era lows—a trend political economist Nicholas Eberstadt has spent decades documenting. In this episode of Terms of Engagement, Eberstadt joins hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to unpack how this quiet collapse in male employment has shaped not just the ec...

Criminal justice researcher Matthew Cavedon joins Terms of Engagement hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to discuss democratic and legal implications of Flock cameras. The company’s roughly 120,000 license-plate reading cameras in the U.S. are now able to log time, location, and vehicle details on a scale that makes comprehensive movement-tracking possible without a warrant. The episode explores...

In this episode of Terms of Engagement, Amanda Carpenter of Protect Democracy joins hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to examine how political corruption undermines democratic institutions and public trust, distorts policymaking, and makes citizens increasingly cynical about the democratic process. Carpenter, a former journalist and Capitol Hill staffer, alleges that President Donald Trump has...

What does it take to stand up for what you believe in when your personal safety, security and even liberty are at stake? Ami Fields-Meyer, a political strategist and former senior policy advisor in the Biden-Harris White House, who spent the last two years crisscrossing the globe interviewing more than a hundred dissidents, organizers, and everyday people who chose to speak out despite real risk....

Thomas Hicks was in the middle of booking his travel to an election conference when he received an email from the White House saying was no longer a commissioner of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission—the agency he had served for eleven years and chaired. Hicks’ firing is the first in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter , which gave the president power to dismis...

Richard Hanania spent a decade as an influential voice on the online right — first pseudonymously in the alt-right, later as what New York magazine called "an intellectual muse of the Silicon Valley right." Then he watched his own ideas take power and, in his words, "was horrified at what I had helped create." His new book Kakistocracy is an argument that populism does not fail by accident but for...

The 2026 midterms are still months away, but a new tool shows where the trouble is most likely to erupt. Samantha Tarazi, co-founder and CEO of the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab (VRL), joins Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to walk through VRL's new Election Risk Heat Map, which scores every state and county in the country on "Election Risk Index" measured from 1 to 100. This episode examines what t...

The Democratic Party is navigating a period of change as progressive candidates continue to gain national attention, from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City to Melat Kiros’s upset of 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. But are recent successes by Democratic Socialists and other progressive candidates evidence of a lasting political realignmen...

Optimism is in short supply these days in the backlash against AI systems and their potential effects on everything from the economy to the environment to society and democracy. But technologist and security expert Bruce Schneier believes that AI, if deployed in the public interest, can strengthen democracy and help citizens have a stronger voice in how they are governed. Schneier, a Senior Fellow...

America’s 250th birthday is both a milestone and a crossroads, so as both a political historian and a theorist, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Danielle Allen is the ideal guest for this special episode of Terms of Engagement . She joins hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to discuss thoughtful and original ideas on the past, present, and future of U.S. democracy Allen, the director of the Allen...

What’s happening on the ground during an already-busy Congressional primary season? How much change and uncertainty has been the result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais? Are more voters registering, and what does it take to turn a civic bystander into a participant? The 2026 midterms seem to prompt a nearly endless array of questions. Andrea Hailey, who leads Vote.org,...

The United States is experiencing record levels of inequality amid the rising political and economic influence of finance, tech, and corporate leaders. But popular discontent from across the political spectrum is also growing, as issues including the impact of technology platforms, financial industry practices, and high-profile scandals involving prominent individuals are increasingly contributing...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in the case of Louisiana v. Callais effectively dismantled Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has been the primary tool for voting rights advocates to challenge racially discriminatory voting districts. Within days, states began altering maps, including in Louisiana where Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended a congressional primary—in which mail-in vot...

Princeton University Professor Kim Lane Scheppele is a leading scholar of international constitutions who coined the term “Frankenstate” to describe the legal, but illiberal, tactics employed by autocrats seeking to consolidate power in constitutional democracies. She joins Terms of Engagement to explore the future of Hungary, Europe, and Trump in a world after the recent resounding defeat of Hung...

This special episode of Terms of Engagement featuring a conversation with political commentator and former Obama administration advisor Van Jones. explores what drove that change and what it means for the future of democracy, political power, and the influence of technology elites. The relationship between Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party has undergone a dramatic shift over the past decade,...

In early 2023, federal juries found members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy, one of the most serious crimes under American law, for their role planning the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has moved to vacate those convictions, a legal maneuver that goes beyond the pardons he gave other January 6 defend...

The American institution of birthright citizenship, which stems from English law and was codified in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, generally grants automatic citizenship to those born on U.S. soil. But in one of the first acts of his second term, President Donald Trump tried to end birthright citizenship for children undocumented immigrants and temporary workers—only to have his executiv...

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy holds a unique vantage point on one of the most transformative eras in American politics. Having led a historic, 15-ballot effort to secure the Speakership in January 2023, McCarthy successfully steered the nation through critical moments, including negotiating a resolution to the debt ceiling crisis and passing bipartisan fiscal deals to prevent a government sh...

For more than two centuries, the U.S. Constitution and legal precedent have held that elections, even for federal officeholders, are the administrative domain of state and local governments. But now President Trump and much of the Republican congress are pushing a federal bill mandating proof-of-citizenship requirements and other restrictions, which critics say would make it harder for millions of...

The ideal college campus, the thinking goes, is a place where students and professors engage respectfully across the ideological gulfs that divide them. Yet free thought and expression are being squeezed from many sides: peer pressure from students and faculty, university leaders leery of the fallout from campus protests, and a presidential administration that has clear views about what kinds of s...

Father and son billionaire duo Larry and David Ellison, allies of President Donald Trump, are poised to add CNN and Comedy Central and soon TikTok US to their growing media empire. The Ellisons have already pushed CBS News’ programming to the Trump-friendly right, as fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos has done with the Washington Post's editorial page while laying off hundreds of journalists. Meanwhile...