How to Save Democracy, with Josiah Ober

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The story often told is that rural America is in decline, and that rural Americans are resentful of their suburban and urban counterparts. But Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues in her new book The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means For Our Country that rural Americans and rural America are in many ways actually thriving. Currid-Halkett joins Institute director of public policy Liam Julian for an enlightening discussion.

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Civics for Life and the O'Connor Institute welcome Professor Cristina Rodríguez and Mr. Adam White as they join host Liam Julian,  director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, for an online conversation and share diverse perspectives on the Future of the Court. Rodríguez and White both served as members of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, formed by President Joe Biden's Executive Order 14023 in April 2021.
 
The Commission’s purpose was to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals. The topics examined by the Commission included the genesis of the reform debate; the Court’s role in the constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices. At its public meeting on December 7, 2021, the 34-member Commission voted unanimously to approve the submission of the final report, concluding that it had met its charge to provide an account of the current debate over the “role and operation of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system."

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Do open primaries and ranked-choice voting have the potential to improve American elections, or will they create more problems than they solve? Kevin Meyer, former lieutenant governor of Alaska; Steve Goldstein, executive director of Save Democracy AZ; and Jaime Molera, former Arizona superintendent of public instruction join the O'Connor Institute and Civics for Life to discuss the issue.

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Civics for Life and the O'Connor Institute welcome Jed Perl as he joins Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, for a discussion on the relationship between art and society, the artist’s role in society, and whether art and artists have definite social and political responsibilities.

Perl is the author of nine books, including a two-volume biography of the American sculptor Alexander Calder; a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; an art critic for the New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor to Vogue for a decade. He now writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

In his book Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, Jed Perl argues that “authority and freedom are the lifeblood of the arts.” Are they also the lifeblood of civil society—and especially democratic society?

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Civics for Life and the O'Connor Institute welcome Professor Nick Seabrook as he joins Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, for an online conversation on Gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering, according to Webster, is "to divide or arrange (an area) into political units to give special advantages to one group when voting districts are designed to achieve specific political outcomes."

Nick Seabrook, an authority on gerrymandering and constitutional law, discusses his new book One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America and, just weeks before our nation heads to the polls, breaks down how new voting districts following the 2020 U.S. Census could affect election results for years to come.

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What is the museum’s role in society? How does – and can – the museum function as a civic space? Dr. Anthea Hartig, the first woman director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, recently sat down with Civics for Life to briefly discuss these and other questions

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In his book The Quest for Character, Massimo Pigliucci asks: can good character be taught?

Through an exploration of Greek and Roman philosophy, and especially the interaction of Socrates and Alcibiades, Pigliucci helps us understand what makes a good leader, and how we can educate others, and ourselves, to be better people and citizens.

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Emancipation in America is often presented as a single and singular undertaking. But Professor Kris Manjapra's new book, Black Ghost of Empire, complicates that story by situating America's national emancipation in a long line of global emancipations--including the first emancipations, which occurred in America's North in the late 18th century--that were in many ways structured to benefit former enslavers and ensure that the formerly enslaved remained repressed.

Were these compromised emancipations necessary concessions to the powers that existed at the time? Or did they suffer from an impoverished conception of "the possible"? Professor Manjapra joined Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, to discuss these and other questions; to examine the words and deeds of great Americans like Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; to consider the unique beauty of facts; and to ask what it would mean to live in a truly reciprocal society.

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The Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy presents a Civics for Life Conversation with author and historian Claire Rydell Arcenas and Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute. 

In her book America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life, Rydell Arcenas seeks to better understand and illuminate the crucial 17th century philosopher by showing how he influenced Americans at different historical moments. Widely known as the founding father of modern “liberal” thought, Locke pioneered the ideas of natural law, social contract, religious toleration, and the right to revolution that proved essential to both the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution that followed.

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