How to Save a Country

In front of a live audience at the Hewlett Foundation’s New Common Sense Conference in March, Felicia and Michael talk to New York Times bestselling author Heather McGhee about her book The Sum of Us and how racism impacts the implementation and perception of public goods and services. Her research for the book, and for the audio documentary podcast that followed, took her across America and gave her unique insight into how racial resentment can be an obstacle to a better world—and how to overcome it. 

Heather argues that the “zero-sum mindset” has altered many white people’s support for public infrastructure because they falsely believe progress for people of color must come at their expense. To combat zero-sum politics, she says, we need to work across our differences to achieve a common good. Heather calls the material improvements that come from this the “solidarity dividend.”

“There are gains, real gains, that we can unlock—cleaner air and water, higher wages, better funded schools—but through the power of cross-racial solidarity,” she explains.

Heather, Michael, and Felicia also talk about how powerful stories shape our beliefs and politics; how housing, inequality, and racial segregation are linked; and how neoliberalism undercut the aspirations of the civil rights movement.

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.

To understand the challenges of this moment, we need to be clear-eyed about the emotional dynamics of partisanship and the dangerous tendencies they’ve fostered—people who care more about their group winning than the greater good, or about policies that would help us all.

Today’s guest is the perfect person to explain this phenomenon.

Dr. Lilliana Mason is an expert in political psychology and group psychology, and the co-author of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. 

As she’s observed in her research, many of our political behaviors aren't rational or even individual. And that’s because our political identities have become mega-identities. They don’t just represent how we think government should work or what our policy preferences are; these identities now encompass where we go to church, where we went to school, our values, and our prejudices.

“Before the social sorting occurred, the status of our party was the only thing at risk in every election,” Dr. Mason says. “But now that we have all of these other important identities linked to the status of our party, every election feels like it's also about the status of our religious group and our racial group, and our culture and where we live, and who we grew up with.”

And later, Dr. Mason talks with Felicia and Michael about the threat of white supremacist and anti-democratic blocs, the importance of union participation as a tool for progress, and the need for truth-telling with compassion.

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.

Whether you’re a canvasser knocking on doors or a member of Congress building coalitions on the House floor, persuasion is a fundamental part of politics. In recent years, deepening polarization has led to a renewed focus on voter turnout, but Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, argues that persuasion needs to be a bigger part of progressive strategy. Fresh off a tour on this topic with Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders, Maurice stopped by How to Save a Country to talk to Felicia and Michael about how progressives can better engage with those outside their politics—or outside politics altogether.

Maurice has been organizing for racial, social, and economic justice for decades, and played a pivotal role in organizing the first Movement for Black Lives conference in 2015. Now, he’s helping to make the Working Families Party a political home for a progressive and multiracial working-class movement.

“We’re trying to organize people to counterbalance the influence of organized capital,” he tells Felicia and Michael.

Maurice offers insights on how to engage with someone who fundamentally disagrees with you, and compares persuasion strategies between the right and the left. He discusses how progressive organizations can focus on the most important battles, by expanding on his essay that shook the progressive movement last fall: “Building Resilient Organizations.”

Finally, he argues that progressives need to adopt a more active role: “It’s helpful that we have ideas that work, but we need to persuade others that our ideas are their ideas.”

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.

In season 1 of How to Save a Country, hosts Felicia Wong (Roosevelt Institute) and Michael Tomasky (The New Republic) spoke to progressive luminaries about democracy-saving ideas at the intersection of economics, law, and politics.

Today, thanks to some surprising legislative successes, some of those big ideas are a lot more real. In Season 2, Felicia and Michael ask: what happens when ideas hit the real world? Where are they working? How can we do better? What ideas might work tomorrow? 

New episodes beginning April 6. Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX.

In our last bonus episode before the launch of season 2, we bring you an unaired clip from a previous episode with economic historian Brad DeLong.

Felicia, Michael, and Brad discuss a point from Brad’s book, Slouching Towards Utopia, about whether neoliberalism persisted as long as it did because of the perception that it won the Cold War for the US. They also discuss the tension between domestic and international economics, particularly in relation to the Inflation Reduction Act, and what listeners can look forward to in season 2 of How to Save a Country.

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.

Crypto has dominated headlines lately—and none of them have been good, to say the least. 

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried is facing fraud charges. Another lending platform, Celsius, went bankrupt. The value of Bitcoin has fallen by half, with other digital coins tumbling along behind it. 

Amid this crypto winter, we’re revisiting the case for regulation in the crypto markets with this previously unaired clip from our fall conversation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren. 

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.

To kick off a new year and a new congressional term, we’re bringing you a previously unaired clip from our conversation with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, now minority leader in the House. 

Leader Jeffries gives his take on divisions within the Democratic Party and its wide spectrum of beliefs. “We’re noisy,” he says, but we “get something over the finish line.”  But first, Michael and Felicia discuss the Republican struggle to elect a House speaker, and talk about the long-term implications of that party’s apparent inability to get the basics of governing done. Spoiler alert: It isn’t likely to be pretty.

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.

For our first bonus episode, we’re bringing you a never-before-heard clip from our conversation with labor scholar Dorian Warren.

Dorian talks through the sometimes strangely compatible relationship between inequality and democracy. We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Tweet @FeliciaWongRI and @mtomasky to let them know what you think.

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.

This week, we’re sharing an episode from our friends over at The Politics of Everything, a biweekly podcast from The New Republic that explores the intersection of culture, media, and politics through interviews with scholars and journalists.

Are we headed back to the 1970s? Politicians and pundits from across the political spectrum insist we are. They also make clear that nothing could be worse. Why is the decade so feared? What kinds of policy do the grim warnings justify? On episode 56 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene speak with the writer Aaron Timms about “nostophobia,” a term he coined to describe a condition that is something like the opposite of nostalgia, and “’70s syndrome,” the variant currently gripping our collective imagination. It’s hard to see how we fix the problems of today with the same failed policy solutions of the 1970s—but that isn’t stopping anyone from trying.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is known as the plan-wielding policy wonk of the progressive movement. But underlying those plans is a simple idea: We are the government.

“Government is the vehicle for letting us do together what none of us can do alone,” Sen. Warren tells Felicia and Michael. “We all contribute and it expands opportunity for all of us, and I feel like that's what's really been missing as we've become a post–New Deal nation.”

In this episode, Sen. Warren discusses how we can recapture that all-for-one ethos and build a stronger country: by investing in people and recognizing that democracy and freedom are inextricable.

Naturally, there’s plenty of policy to discuss as well. Sen. Warren talks with Felicia and Michael about the big wins of the last two years—from the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act to student debt cancellation—and how they shaped the midterms. 

“Good policy is good politics. When you do things that people want and care about and that touch their lives, that's both.” 

And later, Sen. Warren explains how her “personnel is policy” philosophy is reflected in antitrust and why abortion is a kitchen-table issue.

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.

You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.