Democracy in Danger

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 Voting Rights Act unravel — Americans keep risking their lives to protect the kernel of democracy: their ballots.

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 story, she says, is the deadliest act of domestic terrorism on record in America: the Oklahoma City bombing.

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 old-fashioned flyers on college campuses. But, Miller-Idriss has found, the path to extremism can be disrupted.

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, but the solutions — regulation and education — are within our grasp.

Join Will and Siva as they explore, with Jankowicz’s help, how the Kremlin has refined a concerted program of disinformation and cyber warfare to divide citizens in Estonia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and other former Soviet satellites. Is this stuff really any different from age-old propaganda campaigns used by many governments? She thinks so.

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 for a poignant discussion about the past and future of policing and mass incarceration in the United States.

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 expert, discusses the importance of heeding black protest, black politics, and black demands for reparations.

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 of 1790, which barred nonwhite people from becoming citizens, to the Trump administration's Muslim ban in 2017.

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 religious piety but a muscular resistance to pluralism that lies at the core of this belief system.

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 someone who grew up during Argentina's Dirty War, these current populists trends echo fascist regimes of the past.

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 Republican politics. How did the party of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt become the house of Trump and Breitbart?

Hemmer takes Will and Siva back to a little-known conservative radio host who supported Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, tracing the information tactics developed back then all the way to the illiberal politics of today’s alt-right movement.