Voices for the Future: How Democracy Became Broken
A Conversation with the Bestselling Author David Daley
Voices for the Future is a podcast series that I co-host with my collaborator Anodea Judith.
The next program is Thursday, October 24 at 7pm Eastern/4pm Pacific with bestselling author and democracy activist David Daley. The name of the program is How Democracy Became Broken.
You can attend for free on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86733127545
David Daley is a nationally recognized journalist, author and democracy activist. A former editor-in-chief of Salon magazine, his latest book, published by HarperCollins, is Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, a book praised by historian Heather Cox Richardson and Congressman Jaime Raskin, among others.
His earlier book, Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count, was a national best-seller, and has been credited with sparking the modern drive to reform redistricting and end partisan gerrymandering, and was also the basis for the award-winning documentary Slay The Dragon.
David's journalism on democracy and voting rights appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, The New Republic, and many other publications. He has taught journalism and political science as a fellow at Wesleyan University, Boston College and the University of Georgia, and is a senior fellow at FairVote, an organization dedicated to making ranked choice voting a reality. He is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.
David's work focuses on the forces that have broken democracy in the U.S. He traces it back to the Republican project to roll back voting rights, suppress voting, and remake the way democracy functions. He has written in detail about the three detrimental blows to democracy that occurred in the early 2010s: the Supreme Court's decision on Citizen United; the Republican radical gerrymandering project, called REDMAP, which stands for Redistricting Majority Project; and the Supreme Court's evisceration of the Voting Rights Act.
Each of these items, by themselves, represent serious threats to democracy; in tandem they have broken democracy and the U.S. political system. They led to Donald Trump's election in 2016; the election of all kinds of radical right-wing extremists to the House of Representatives; the Supreme Court's rulings turning back Roe v. Wade and the bestowing of presidential immunity on Trump, amongst other recent notorious SCOTUS judicial decisions; and the ability for billionaires like Elon Musk to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money to help elect Donald Trump president in 2024.
I hope you can join us for this very important conversation. Again, it takes place Thursday, October 24 at 7pm Eastern/4pm Pacific on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86733127545