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 …

“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…

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 …

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 …

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 “Pro…

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 agains…

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 poli…

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 …

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 ch…

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 McCar…

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 hol…

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 cultu…

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…

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.…

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…

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, …

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 tha…

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 bi…

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 prese…

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. Accord…

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: Wh…

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 manu…

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…

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 r…

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 …

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 th…

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 ob…

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 l…

The January 6 Committee is recommending prosecution: Justice is (maybe) coming for Donald Trump. We discuss the larger implications of this decision, the potential pitfalls, and the role of legal procedures in solving a political problem like Trumpism – Now that the Committee has finished its work, we reflect on what it has and has not achieved, ab…

A deep dive into “centrism,” inspired by Kyrsten Sinema leaving the Democratic Party: What is centrism (as an ideology, a political project, a brand)? Who are the centrists? And what do they actually want? – The centrist critique of the democracy discourse: Why do certain centrists reject the focus on the crisis of American democracy? What kind of …

What the Georgia runoff tells us about American politics, why Republicans mostly stuck with Walker, and why “hypocrisy” is really not a very useful (albeit well-deserved) criticism of conservative politics – What to expect next from the GOP, and why our default assumption based on the evidence of the past several decades of Republican politics shou…

Trump hosted a leading Holocaust denier and white power activist for dinner: What to take away from this latest reminder of who Trump is and what the Republican base wants, and why we must not be lulled into a false sense of security by the ridiculousness of it all – And we dive deep into the question of how to best capture and describe the definin…

Conservative justices are leaking decisions, but more importantly, they have made the Supreme Court the spearhead of a reactionary counter-mobilization against democracy: What is to be done about a Rogue Court? – The Assault on the LGBTQ community in Colorado Springs: America’s gun cult(ure), the escalating rightwing demonization of vulnerable grou…

The fate of Twitter: The democratic stakes of having so much of our media infrastructure in the hands of billionaires; the fraud relationship between the libertarian-to-far-right tech oligarchy and democracy; Twitter’s importance as an essential part of the virtual public square – Midterms fallout: The major storylines and key narratives that have …

A big-picture reflection on the midterms (what else!) and what they can tell us about the state of American democracy – Why the result, while heartening, doesn’t simply prove that “the system works” and why democracy is still very much in danger – What to make of Republican elites clamoring for DeSantis and why Trumpism without Trump is far more li…

Our mission statement: Podcasting about a democracy on the brink – Joe Biden says democracy is on the ballot: Is he right? – Midterm primer: Why the election is close (when maybe it shouldn’t be?) and what people are voting for; media coverage; Democratic messaging; and what worries us most going forward. Follow Thomas Follow Lily Follow Perry…