Cato Events Podcast

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Polarization threatens American democracy, deeply pervading politics, schools, and everyday life. What sits at the root of this trend and how might we turn the tide? Philosopher Robert Talisse offers a compelling examination of these issues and offers a provocative solution—civic solitude. Join the Cato Institute and Sphere Education Initiatives on April 17th at 11 am EST, in person or online, for a discussion of Talisse’s new book, Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance.

About Civic Solitude

An internet search of the phrase “this is what democracy looks like” returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy? Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals’ perspectives can be distorted by group dynamics.

The culprit is a cognitive dynamic called belief polarization. As we interact with our political allies, we are exposed to forces that render us more radical in our beliefs and increasingly hostile to those who do not share them. What’s more, the social environments we inhabit in our day-to-day lives are sorted along partisan lines. We are surrounded by triggers of political extremity and animosity. Thus, our ordinary activities encourage the attitude that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees–a profoundly antidemocratic stance.

Drawing on extensive research about polarization and partisanship, Talisse argues that certain core democratic capacities can be cultivated only at a distance from the political fray. If we are to meet the responsibilities of democratic citizenship, we must occasionally step away from our allies and opponents alike. We can perform this self-work only in secluded settings where we can engage in civic reflection that is not prepackaged in the idiom of our political divides, allowing us to contemplate political circumstances that are not our own.

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As government regulations increasingly encroach upon personal health care choices, patients face growing limitations on their ability to make their own decisions. In Your Body, Your Health Care, Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer validates these frustrations while presenting a bold philosophical framework for reforming the relationship between individuals, the health care system, and the state.

Through thoughtful analysis of issues like prescription requirements, self-medication rights, harm-reduction access, and licensing laws, Dr. Singer outlines a path toward health care policy that prioritizes individual rights and adult autonomy.

Please join us in discussing the book and its transformative implications with the author.

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With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of its prisoners, the United States indisputably has a mass incarceration problem. The Constitution contains numerous safeguards that check the state’s power to lock people up. Yet since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has repeatedly disregarded these limits, bowing instead to unfounded claims that adherence to the Constitution is incompatible with public safety.

In Justice Abandoned, Rachel Barkow highlights six Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for mass incarceration. If the Court were committed to protecting constitutional rights and followed its standard methods of interpretation, none of these cases would have been decided as they were, and punishment in America would look very different than it does today.

Barkow shows that sound public policy, fundamental fairness, and the originalist methodology embraced by a majority of sitting justices demands overturning the unconstitutional policies underlying mass incarceration.

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The September 6, 1901, assassination of President William McKinley by self-professed anarchist Leon Czolgosz triggered a nationwide political backlash against the killer’s like-minded political adherents. It also served as the catalyst for the expansion of nascent federal government surveillance capabilities used against not only anarchists but socialists and members of other social or political movements that were challenging the prevailing political, economic, and social paradigms of the day. And it was the ensuing, decades-long persistent exaggerations of domestic political threats from those movements that drove an exponential increase in the frequency and scale of unlawful government surveillance and related political repression against hundreds of thousands of individual Americans and civil society organizations.

The Triumph of Fear is a history of the rise and expansion of surveillance-enabled political repression in America from the late 1890s to early 1961. Drawing on declassified government documents (many obtained via dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits) and other primary sources, Cato Institute senior fellow Patrick Eddington offers historians, legal scholars, political leaders, and general readers surprising new revelations about the scope of government surveillance programs and how this domestic spying helped fuel federal assaults on free speech and association that continue to this day. Join us for a conversation about the book with Eddington led by Caleb Brown, Cato’s director of multimedia.

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We tend to think of public education as a ladder of opportunity—a system that ensures that no matter a child’s economic circumstances, they will get the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in life. But what if that’s wrong? Indeed, what if the goal is actually the opposite: to keep people docilely in their place, no matter how bad their situation?

This is what Raised to Obey, grounded in deep, original research on the timing and targeting of mass education, contends. Public education was very often created not to give children what they needed to do or be whatever they wanted but to keep people in their place.

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Somewhere between the tendency to see everything through the lens of race and racial oppression and the tendency to dismiss those dynamics altogether lies the truth in any given setting, including criminal justice.

That there are police officers in this country who hold racist views is a problem the FBI has acknowledged in its own intelligence reports and information-sharing guidance to its agents. But how pervasive are racist views among police at the federal, state, and local levels? To what extent is there empirical evidence that racism among police leads to greater harassment, arrests, or violence against racial, ethnic, or religious minorities? Though the term “white supremacy” may be overused today, even as a synonym for racism, it should not desensitize us to the existence and true nature of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups nor stop us from asking to what extent such elements have been able to find employment within law enforcement.

In Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within, FBI veteran Mike German tackles these and other questions. German spent 16 years with the bureau and conducted extensive and very dangerous undercover work targeting white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Join us on March 26 at 1 p.m. EDT as Cato senior fellow Patrick Eddington and Cato legal fellow Mike Fox question German about his new book and his own experiences as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated violent right-wing groups.

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