The Good Apocalypse Podcast

Jon Yates is the author of "Fractured: Why our societies are coming apart and how to put them back together again". He's uniquely well placed to explore these issues, having both served as a government adviser and co-founded a series of charities that are designed to bring people together.

For years, our societies have been becoming more disconnected, so that most of us spend less and less time with people who are different - whether in terms of age, race, class, earning power, or education.

In "Fractured", Jon Yates argues that the more time we spend with people unlike ourselves, the more understanding and tolerant we become. We now need to forge a new "Common Life": a set of shared practices and institutions that can strengthen the glue that bonds our societies, in all their diversity.

Dave Fleischer runs the team at the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Leadership Lab that created deep canvassing - a groundbreaking approach to political campaigning that uses doorstep conversations to change people's minds about potentially polarising issues and which helped to win the US equal marriage campaign.

Deep canvassing avoids pelting voters with arguments or facts; instead "we find surprising common ground by sharing our real, lived experience — vulnerable stories about ourselves and people we love— and invite voters to share in return." 

We spoke with Dave about how deep canvassing works, the psychology of what makes it so effective, and how it potentially points the way towards new approaches to campaigning where success is about bridging divides rather than deepening them.

*Show notes*

Dave's TED talk, which includes the video of the deep canvassing conversation that we discuss in the episode: https://youtu.be/xN6O5LTaGyg

NY Times profile of Dave and his work: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/how-do-you-change-voters-minds-have-a-conversation.html 

Karen Stenner has spent years researching why some people seem to have a psychological predisposition towards authoritarianism in the right conditions.

With her co-author Jonathan Haidt, Karen has explored how about a third of people across dozens of liberal democracies share this trait to some degree - a key factor in understanding why, for instance, so many Americans continued to support Donald Trump even as he lurched steadily further towards authoritarianism, and which has led Karen to argue that "liberal democracy has now exceeded many people's capacity to tolerate it."

We spoke to Karen about why support for authoritarianism is so widespread, what we can do about it, and what's next in countries like the US where right wing populism has been surging.

Hadiya Masieh has over two decades' experience in countering violent extremism and understanding how to challenge hate - and a unique perspective given her own experience as a former member of an extremist political organisation.

Today, Hadiya runs Groundswell Project, a pioneering initiative that works in communities to map both extremist and pro-peace groups on the ground, build a diverse coalition to tackle causes of extremism, and then amplify local voices through Groundswell Project's reach with local and national news and on social media.

We spoke to Hadiya about her story, her work, and how people working to support larger us rather than them-and-us dynamics can learn from Groundswell Project's insights.