The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

By YVoteNewsNews Commentary
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The Round Table: A YVote Podcast episodes

  • A Woman of Conviction

    At this week's Round Table,  Inica, Julianna, Olivia, and Riya speak with Barbara McQuade, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, and a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. McQuade previously served as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017--the first woman to serve in the role in the region--taking on challenges like public corruption, terrorism, cybersecurity, and health care fraud. As part of President Trump's 2017 dismissal of U.S. attorneys. McQuade stepped down in March 2017. We had a wide-ranging conversation about what constitutes unlawful vs unreasonable, the danger of making facile comparisons that minimize historic suffering, how providing more information can be a strategic way to deal with disinformation, and best practices--and lack thereof--in political communication. Thanks for joining us!

    25 min
  • The only way people can stay home is if lots of other people aren’t
    Graham Brownstein shares his feelings about well off white people telling people to stay home given dependence on other people’s labor, often people who are non wealthy and nonwhite. He feels it’s racism wrapped up in do your service, civic duty, patriotic, protect our vulnerable people, we’re at war rhetoric but most people aren’t on the front lines, they’re sitting at home.
    1 min
  • Maybe we SHOULDN’T be sheltering-in-place

    At this week's Round Table, Inica, Julianna, Riya, and Sara speak with Graham Brownstein, Chief Strategy Officer for Global Water Farms. Graham is a strong proponent that the country has gone too far for too long with shelter- in- place orders in relation to Covid-19, with catastrophic consequences for communities that are disproportionately low income and of color. He shares his concerns and rationale, leading to a rich discussion about where we are in relation to the pandemic and implications for the road ahead. Thanks for listening!

    35 min
  • Getting people to create relationships across differences is key
    Avi Green of SSN talks about how insular academics can be and how important it is to get beyond campuses into their broader communities to meet new people and try to create compromises and shared projects. But ultimately, he thinks we need to change the political system and get out of the two-party doom loop.
    1 min
  • Change does happen
    Avi Green of Scholars Strategy Network talks about how in order to create political change, we need to create situations in which about 60% of people agree on the changes we need and then win power and use it. There are powerful historical examples of this: the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Motor Voter Act of 1993. Change CAN happen when we figure out which changes are necessary and then make sure enough people agree to implement those reforms.
    1 min
  • The founders did a good job of some things—and they did plenty of things wrong
    Avi Green of SSN talks about the gifts and the burdens left to us by our country’s founders. He underscored that to fix these things, we need a really good diagnosis of what they are.
    Some things are easy to diagnose: slavery
    Other things are harder: elections
    He shared his belief that for elections to work will require transforming our two party system and learning from other countries rather than presuming that ours is best.
    1 min
  • There used to be a lot more bipartisanship in the U.S.
    Avi Green of Scholars Strategy Network talks about how bipartisanship was a larger force in the U.S. when there was a heavy external threat. After the Cold War, we went back to the “normal” way of two parties fighting each other like crazy.
    We need to find a way out of that negative spiral
    1 min
  • Bridging Divides, Building Knowledge

    At this week's Round Table, Inica, Julianna, Olivia, and Riya spoke with Avi Green, Executive Director of the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN), which helps researchers use relationship-building and communications skills to increase the impact of research and evidence on public policy and to develop reciprocal relationships with government officials and policymakers on both sides of the aisle, and with Lyric Bowditch, a rising senior at Barnard College who is a National Fellow at SSN. At Next Gen, we’re all about bridging divides and we enjoyed learning about SSN’s powerful approach to doing so. We think you will too. 

    If you enjoyed learning about SSN's work, check out their fantastic weekly podcast No Jargon.

    Thanks for joining us!

    21 min

About The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

From the publisher's feed

The Round Table provides a platform for conversation and engagement of civically-minded young people from different parts of the country. We strive to model civil dialogue across various divides--socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, political, and regional. We aim to challenge norms and represent all kinds of diversity--especially of perspective and ideas--enabling listeners to “hear” our thinking.