Democracy in Danger

After such a wacky month in America, is there any question democracy is still in danger? Yeah, we didn’t think so either. Will and Siva are back with Season Two and a whole new lineup of guests. Listen to our trailer for a taste of what’s in store. We’ll bring you stories from the trenches of democracy around the world, interviews on climate change and economic inequality, a primer on QAnon... and...

President Biden has said he wants to move quickly to address racial injustice in America. But as historian Leah Wright Rigueur told us last summer, that remains a tall mountain to climb. She calls the U.S. a “failed state” that has always fallen short of its promise of equality. But she also saw hope in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 — and the possibility of transformation. Listen to this...

Among the more troubling kinds of iconography embraced by the mob that swarmed the U.S. Capitol earlier this month were symbols of the White Power movement. Historian Kathleen Belew traces an unbroken line from far-right militias operating largely under the radar since the 1980s to this very moment. Give this episode from September another listen.

Still reeling from last week’s turmoil in Washington? Yeah, same here. We thought it would be a good time to bring you a rebroadcast of last September’s show on violent extremist groups and their recruitment strategies. What draws young people into the toxic universe of far-right groups that pine for a white ethno-state? The temptation to hate often begins with innocent chatter before it’s fed by...

The Confederate flag flew inside the U.S. Capitol this week, a feat not even Robert E. Lee achieved. Egged on by President Trump, a violent mob laid siege to the building, bringing death and mayhem, and temporarily halting the work of Congress to certify Joe Biden’s victory. Siva and Will — together with their University of Virginia students — reflect on what happened. Much as the nation was stunn...

It’s been a long year: A tiny virus laid us low, protests over racial injustice erupted across the country, climate change loosed record-setting wildfires and hurricanes, and citizens voted in one of the most fraught national elections ever. So what did 2020 reveal about the state of democracy in America and across the world — and what will come in its wake? In this live recording for our season f...

President Trump is calling for recounts and crying voter fraud while the Biden transition team roars to life, laying the groundwork for action on key issues like climate change, the pandemic and economic reignition. But our guests this week say America’s democratic institutions will continue to buckle if political leaders and citizens alike don’t take bold action to strengthen — and alter — them....

Last month we learned that 545 immigrant children remained stranded in the United States, separated from their families: casualties of the president’s hard-nosed stance on immigration. And yet, despite all the tough talk and draconian policies, Trump’s administration hasn’t deported people as aggressively as his predecessor. So as Americans head to the polls this week, what should they make of thi...

Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court on the eve of a presidential election has raised questions about Congress’s duty to check the power of the judiciary. Risa Goluboff, dean of the UVA Law School, offers Will and Siva some judicial — and judicious — history, and weighs the future. What will Justice Barrett do to the Supreme Court? How will it change her? And what’s with all the tu...

Kate Manne argues that contempt for women is not a bug but a feature of Donald Trump’s politics. She says this helps explain why “masculine” issues — like the military, gun rights, law enforcement and border security — have drowned out health care, education, climate change and food protection. Manne, a philosopher at Cornell, also tells Will and Siva how such misogyny is refracted in the “himpath...

Fascism. We know what that looked like in 20th-century Germany and Italy: dictatorship, genocide, war. But can a creeping enthusiasm for authoritarianism in the 21st century — in democracies like India, Hungary and even the United States — be called “fascist”? Yale philosopher Jason Stanley thinks so. Not only that, he tells Siva and Will, but democracies are especially susceptible to fascism. Fin...

In less than a week, Donald Trump told Americans not to let coronavirus “dominate” them, spread falsehoods about the flu, and told a violent hate group to “stand back and stand by.” These are just the sort of statements that make him a demagogue, says Texas A&M rhetorician Jennifer Mercieca. This time, Mercieca helps Will and Siva make sense of the president’s penchant for inflammatory languag...

When Phil Howard lived in Budapest, he watched as Hungary’s fledgling democracy was polluted with polarizing stories spread online. It’s a phenomenon now threatening political discourse everywhere, and recent tweaks meant to improve social media policies and algorithms, he says, amount to “a drop in the bucket.” But find out why Howard, a professor of internet studies at Oxford University, thinks...

In 1890, Mississippi adopted a new constitution that offered a blueprint for Jim Crow. It all but banned African Americans from voting, erecting a charade of roadblocks: poll taxes, literacy tests and other targeted assaults on the franchise. As historian Carol Anderson explains, such laws blocked Black citizens from polling booths for decades. And today, she says — as the core safeguards of the V...

Charleston. Tree of Life. Christchurch. All these deadly attacks have some grim details in common — their death tolls were massive... white-power ideology fueled their architects... and they only seemed to be the work of loners, according to historian Kathleen Belew. Join Will and Siva as Belew traces the unsettling history of anti-government militias since the 1980s. Often misunderstood in this s...

What draws young people into the universe of toxic far-right groups that pine for a White ethno-state? The temptation to hate often begins with innocent chatter before it’s fed by degrees — and algorithms, says Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociologist and education expert who tracks such groups. They work through a mix of alluring aesthetics, direct appeals in social media and online gaming, even in o...

Internet giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter aren’t just part of the disinformation problem — they are the problem, according to author Nina Jankowicz. Her new book, “How to Lose the Information War,” details Russia’s efforts to meddle in the affairs of other countries by turning the tools of free speech against democracy itself. In this interview, Jankowicz makes clear the stakes are high, b...

America incarcerates more people than any country: nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population. And U.S. inmates are disproportionately Black and Latino. How did we get here? Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton argues that minority communities suffered from successive “wars” meant to save them — from poverty, from crime, from drugs — but which criminalized them instead. She joins Will and Siva f...

Leah Wright Rigueur calls America a failed state. As a polity, she says, the United States has failed black people, falling short of its promises of equality and justice. This summer's protests are a dramatic diagnostic of that failure — the latest in a long history of wake-up calls. But this is also, perhaps, a transformative moment, a sign of hope. Rigueur, a Harvard historian and public policy...

Donald Trump has called Mexican migrants criminals and rapists, vowed to build a “beautiful” wall along the southern border, and presided over traumatic family separations among asylum seekers. But nativist ideology in U.S. politics — and policy — is nothing new. Immigration scholar Erika Lee walks Will and Siva through America's spotty record as a nation of immigrants, from the Naturalization Act...

The U.S. Constitution guarantees religious freedom, but also freedom from religion — an idea that rankles many white Evangelicals who would like to see America remade in their own image of Christianity. Religion scholar Matt Hedstrom speaks with Siva and Will about the ideology of Christian nationalism and its harder-core variety, dominionism. Arguably, Hedstrom says, it’s not traditional religiou...

Populist regimes are gaining ground across the world, and perhaps nowhere have the consequences been more dramatic than in Brazil. Under the chaotic leadership of president Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has become a major hot spot in the coronavirus pandemic. In this episode, Will and Siva talk to historian Federico Finchelstein about the rise of populism in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. For som...

Government by the people can't work without getting reliable information in the people's hands. So when disinformation artists hijack the media, democracy itself is put at risk. On this debut episode of Democracy in Danger , political historian Nicole Hemmer joins hosts Will Hitchcock and Siva Vaidhyanathan to explore the roots of the powerful right-wing media in America, and their influence on Re...