Democracy in Danger

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. Find out why.

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 language. How has it overshadowed the public sphere for five years, and what does it say about the state of our democracy?

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 we need more social media, not less; and how machine learning and big data might be democratized for good.

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.