Reject Modernity Embrace Tradition

The Trump administration's hardline stance on immigration mirrors a sea change in public opinion on the subject in the last four years. People are more concerned about immigrants taking jobs and bringing crime than they have been in some time. The only problem with these narratives is that they are not even a little bit true. Rather than falling for falsehoods, and calling for deportations and an end to birthright citizenship, we need to embrace the fact that immigration is what made America great in the first place.

In the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires, it is easy to feel powerless in the face of climate change. But this mentality is dangerous and counterproductive. Instead, as special guest Samantha Morales Johnson Yang explains, we need to embrace active environmental stewardship and get our hands dirty.

Much of the "enshittification" of modern life can be traced to the theory of shareholder supremacy (also called shareholder primacy), which has contributed to a monomaniacal drive towards short-term profits over anything and everything else. Listen as Megan and Clayton take you through the drawbacks of shareholder primacy, and what we might be able to do about it.

The last 30 years have seen an explosion of privately run, publicly funded charter schools. Proponents of charters argue that they are a better route than traditional public education, but in reality they only serve to further weaken education and enrich their for-profit operators. Listen along as special guest Alexander Elg joins Megan and Clayton to unpack the route we ought to take instead.

Americans increasingly focus their educational attention on a small cadre of elite institutions, to the detriment of university education as a whole, and with negative consequences for students. Listen along as Megan and Clayton discuss why this focus is so damaging, and what we can do about it.

The pandemic unleashed a tidal wave of attempts to ban books in American school libraries. However, rather than reflecting too much parental involvement in education, we hope to convince you that it's not the quantity of involvement that's the problem, but the quality. The way to fix this problem is not to curtail parental involvement altogether, but to encourage productive involvement.

Car dependency is bad for us in just about every way. From the danger they pose to the pollution they cause, being dependent on cars is bad for everyone. But more than that, we simply cannot solve transportation problems in cities through cars alone. It just doesn't work. Listen along as Megan and Clayton explain why we need a more diversified approach to transportation.

We used to amend the US Constitution somewhat frequently. But over the last half century, we've largely stopped doing so. As a result, the US Constitution is stuck in place and constitutional hardball has become more prominent. In this episode, Megan and Clayton talk about why this constitutional stasis is harmful, and why we should get back to a time when we were more comfortable amending the constitution.

Progressives, and the Democratic Party more generally, are often vexed by the fact that many voters will report preferring progressive policy in issue polling, and indeed will vote for progressive policy at the polls, but will simultaneously vote for Republican candidates who oppose those very policies. Listen along as Megan and Clayton explore why we might want to take these polls with a grain of salt and what we should do instead going forward.

The last couple of decades have seen a nationwide trend towards a more overbearing style of parenting, but this "Helicopter Parenting" has a whole host of negative consequences for children and their development into young adults. Listen along and Clayton and Megan examine why we should reject it in favor of more independence for kids.