Great Ideas

Something is wrong in America, and we’ve gotten so used to it, we don’t really talk about about, or not enough anyway. We are in a major happiness recession, and we have been for a long time. The highest proportion of Americans ever (80%) say they are satisfied with their family’s financial situation, while an all-time low reports being “very happy” in their lives (14%). Over the last 40 years, a median of 66% of Americans have told Gallup they were “dissatisfied.” In the decade or so before the pandemic sent our despair into overdrive, major depression was rapidly rising, the suicide rate was up 35%, drug use and death were skyrocketing, birth rates were down 23%, and Americans told Pew researchers that they had become deeply pessimistic about the future.

Our guest today, Catherine Sanderson, has become a widely cited author for her contributions on positive thinking and achieving better parenting, happier aging, and more courage in our lives. Dr. Sanderson is the POLER Family Professor and Chair of Psychology at Amherst College. In 2012, she was named one of the country's top 300 professors by the Princeton Review. Her talks have been featured in numerous mainstream media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Atlantic, CNN, and CBS Sunday Morning.

We've all heard about profound challenges facing American elections and the people who run them.  As we approach the 2022 midterms we wanted to check in with one of America's leading experts to see whether things are on track to run smoothly, or if maneuvers to harass election administrators, suppress votes, or even subvert elections are still coning to be a major concern.   Bob Brandon helped establish the Fair Election Center 16 years ago, and it continues to support election reform, litigation, advocacy, student engagement, and getting people to work at the polls to make the cogs and gears of our democracy run. 

Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash

Recently the Center for American Progress issued a report that said “Online service companies have produced substantial wealth, but these gains have failed to reach the American workforce more broadly. Pervasive, ubiquitous digital surveillance has eroded Americans’ civil liberties. Exploitation of people’s data has created novel consumer threats around privacy, manipulation of consumer behavior, and discrimination. Americans face these and other harms from online services, including but not limited to widespread fraud, abuse of small businesses, abuse of market power, faulty algorithms, racist and sexist technological development, cybersecurity challenges, threats to workers’ rights, curtailed innovation, and challenges with online radicalization and misinformation.”

But one of the authors of that reports says that despite this massive litany of destructive problems, big tech platforms can be fixed, and the Internet can be...good! Erin Simpson of CAP joins to explain.

Photo by Rahul Chakraborty on Unsplash

What is the real legacy and meaning of the life and work of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev? Erik Loomis, Associate Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island, says in a new article on The Editorial Board that "Despite what Americans want to believe about the man whom they credit with doing much to end the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev is probably best described as the greatest failure of a leader in Russian history." We unpack the complicated history and ongoing significance of one of the most important world leaders of the 20th century. 

The system of paying cash bail is so familiar to us in this country that it's faded into the background of our awareness. But in recent years, reform advocates have been sounding the alarm about the disastrous consequences of a system that is profoundly broken: more damaged lives, more economic ruin, and ironically, more crime. In fact, the practice of assigning cash bail as a condition of an individual’s pretrial release has led to a two-tiered system of justice. People with money can return to their communities while they await trial, while those without money are forced to choose between remaining incarcerated—and facing the harms that accompany pretrial detention—and entering into a predatory contract with a commercial bail company to obtain release.

Rachael Eisenberg is the Senior Director of Criminal Justice Reform at American Progress, where she leads the organization’s efforts to shrink the footprint of the criminal justice system and promote justice and safety. 

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In this crossover edition of Great Ideas and Beyond Politics, we take a closer look at Christian nationalism. Recently, controversial Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she’s a Christian nationalist...and the Republican party should be too. In fact, increasing numbers of candidates have embraced the language of Christian nationalism, if not the outright label, in the past year. But what does it actually mean? Is Christian nationalism an extreme religious and political ideology as practiced by Viktor Orbán of Hungary, or simply an expression of patriotic fervor combined with religious identity that fits into long-standing American traditions? Our guest today, Dr. Paul Miller, is a political scientist and a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is a devout Christian, a fervent patriot and military veteran, a conservative Republican, and the author of The Religion of American Greatness: What's Wrong With Christian Nationalism. And he explains why Christian nationalism is fundamentally un-Christian and un-American.

We are used to hearing absolutely gigantic numbers about how much debt our country has and how we keep adding to it through government deficits every year. Politicians frequently remind us that this is an enormous burden, one that we are passing on to our children. But recently, some economists have argued that we should stop worrying so much. They say that this is just money we owe to ourselves, or that eventually our economy will grow so big that we won’t really have to pay the money back at all. But our guest today economist Steve Robinson of the Concord Coalition begs to differ. He says the debt definitely does matter...and he’s here to explain why.

Many Americans of a certain age remember when the death penalty was one of the most fraught and divisive issues in America. In fact, it was the wedge issue that most defined the presidential election of 1988. Some of the biggest political headlines in the year 2000 were generated by the Republican governor of Illinois deciding to halt all executions. And the last decade has seen controversy over the method of executions with pharmaceutical companies unwilling to supply the chemicals used in lethal injections. But today we may be approaching a new era of the death penalty in America. Executions have fallen, public interest is waning, and when was the last time you saw the death penalty discussed as a major issue in a political campaign? To help us understand where we’ve been where we are now and where we may be going on the death penalty in America we are fortunate to have Maurice Chammah, a staff writer for the Marshall Project and the author of "Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty," which won the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Book Award.  He recently wrote an article for the NYT titled "The Supreme Court Let The Death Penalty Flourish. Now Americans are Ending It Themselves." And he’s here to tell us all about it.

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

The Supreme Court has just decided to limit what the EPA can do to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act.  So the big question now is: what's next? Christy Goldfuss, Senior Vice President of Energy and Environment Policy at the Center for American Progress, explains how we've regulated air pollution in this country under the Clean Air Act, what happened in the West Virginia v. EPA case, and what the future of carbon emission limits looks like now.

The question on everyone's minds right now is what can be done to tame inflation...and can we do it without creating a recession.  Zach Moller, the Director of Third Way’s Economic Program, oversees a team that specializes in developing innovative economic policy, and he has a few ideas about dealing with supply chains, increasing the labor force, lowering people's out of pocket expenses, and investing in longer term growth.