Democracy Works

While we were away over the summer, it was hard to miss stories about Democratic primary elections and seeming rise of the Democratic Socialists of America — followed almost immediately about the challenges DSA candidates will face in November's election. For our first episode of the fall season, we talk with a social movement scholar about whether the DSA's policies can win over enough votes to win in a general election and why political coalitions don't always align with the structure of America's two-party system.

Rory McVeigh is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements. He is the author of Politics and Privilege: How the Status Wars Sustain Inequality, along with William Carbonaro, Chang Liu, and Kenadi Silcox. The book investigates whether Americans are more likely to support a social-change organization if it explicitly opposes racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and religious bigotry or if it focuses exclusively on economic equality. Drawing on the results, they argue that privileged groups’ desire to preserve their status is the primary obstacle to forming progressive alliances.

We discuss what these findings mean for the DSA, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party as we head into the midterms and the next presidential election cycle.

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Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change and democracy reform are structural. They are larger than any one person can solve on their own, yet we're bombarded with information about individual actions like attending a public meeting or lowering your carbon footprint. Do these individual actions even matter? Should we focus instead of fixing broken systems? 

For our final episode of the season, we explore how individual actions and structural reform can work together to create lasting social change on a range of issues, including democracy. Our guests offer a way out of the either-or thinking and a framework for creating lasting social change.  In Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change, Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly show us how we can connect our personal choices to structural change and why individual choices matter, though not in the way people usually think.

Brownstein and Kelly join us on the show to discuss examples of how individual actions leveled up to create larger-scale change, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the milk pasteurization movement in the early 20th century. We also discuss how the lessons from these movements can be applied to democracy reform campaigns like campaign finance reform and ranked-choice voting. 

Brownstein is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Jay College and Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, where he is also the Director of the Cognition, Agency, and Intelligence Center.

This is our final episode before our summer break. Thank you to Brandon Stover for editing the show this year, to WPSU for production and promotional support, and to Michael Berkman, Chris Beem, Cyanne Loyle, and Candis Watts Smith for sharing their insights on the show. We'll see you in September!

 

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Democracy Works host Candis Watts Smith joins Cara Santa Maria on the Talk Nerdy podcast to discuss her new book, Black Evidence: A History and a Warning.

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence, Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Talk Nerdy host Cara Santa Maria is a clinical health psychologist, science communicator, podcaster, and Emmy Award-winning journalist. In addition to Talk Nerdy, she co-hosts the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast and coauthored Skeptics Guide to the Universe book.

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From the COVID-19 pandemic to debates over vaccines and the Make America Healthy Again movement, politics and medicine are intertwined in ways not seen in previous generations. When politics enters the doctor's office, what does it mean for the health of our democracy? Julianna Pacheco is working to answer that questions and joins Democracy Works host Chris Beem for a conversation about medicine and politics. They also discuss deaths of despair and how feeling hopeless can lead to political disengagement. 

Pacheco is professor and department chair of political science at the University of Iowa. She received a Ph.D. in political science from Penn State and postdoctoral training as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan. She is currently a Carnegie Fellow and part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program. Her research sits at the nexus of political science and population health. She is currently working on a book looking at the role of physicians on the polarization of health.

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Danielle Allen's work straddles the line between past and present. On one hand, she's on the road this year talking about America's 250th anniversary in the context of her book on the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, she's hard at work on Substack writing and talking about democracy reform (or renovation she calls it). She's also leading a coalition working to bring nonpartisan primary elections to Massachusetts through a ballot initiative this fall.

Allen return to the show to discuss America's Semiquincentennial and what lessons today's democracy renovators can draw from the process that the Founders undertook to create the Declaration of Independence. We also discuss her work on Educating for American Democracy and Our Common Purpose, two national projects launched in 2021 that were the subject of her first appearance on the podcast. She talks about what's changed, for better and worse, in the past five years.

Discussed in this episode:

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality - Allen's book on the Declaration of Independence

The Renovator - Allen's Substack

Coalition for a Healthy Democracy - group leading the Massachusetts nonpartisan primary ballot measure

Educating for American Democracy

Our Common Purpose

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