129 | Solo: Democracy in America

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2021

⏱️ 104 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you’re probably aware of, including a riotous mob storming the US Capitol. The situation has spurred me to take the unusual step of doing a solo podcast in response to current events. But never fear, I’m not actually trying to analyze current events for their own sakes. Rather, I’m using them as a jumping-off point for a more general discussion of how democracy is supposed to work and how we can make it better. We’ve talked about related topics recently with Cornel West and David Stasavage, but there are things I wanted to say in my own voice that fit well here. Politics is important everywhere, and it’s a crucial responsibility for those of us who live in societies that aspire to be participatory and democratic. We have to think these things through, and that’s what this podcast is all about.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Apologies to Alexis de Toqueville, who wrote an important book whose name I stole, and who is mentioned nowhere in this episode.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:03.8	And I'm recording this podcast around noon time, Pacific, on Saturday, January 9th, 2021.
0:11.0	Now, long time listeners will know that I'm usually not that specific about when things are being
0:15.6	recorded, in part because I want to be flexible about when they're released and so forth.
0:20.5	And in part because we aim here not for currency of the moment, responding to events that are
0:26.7	going on in real time, but rather the big questions, the eternal truths, the issues that are going
0:31.8	to matter for long-term consequences. Today's a little bit different. This is a special episode
0:37.8	that I'm doing on the fly. That means that a couple of podcasts that were scheduled, got bumped
0:43.4	a little bit, sorry folks, but that's okay. You'll appear eventually. But those of you who know,
0:48.0	well actually let me state it this way, you know, we'd like to be very considerate of those archival
0:54.0	historians, 500 years in the future, who are bravely going through all of the Mindscape episodes,
1:00.4	one by one, to see what people 500 years previously thought. So for those folks, I should explain
1:05.6	what's going on here. Okay. So right now, as of this moment, Donald Trump is the president of the
1:11.4	United States, but he lost an election back in November. And ordinarily, this would not be a big
1:17.6	deal. The votes were counted. It was clear that he lost, but he didn't accept. He didn't concede.
1:22.7	He did not believe that he lost the election. And he and his allies spread the idea that the
1:29.1	election had been stolen. So on a couple days ago, January 6th Wednesday, this was the day when
1:35.7	the electoral college, which is the bizarre system United States uses to elect a president,
1:41.6	their votes had already been cast, but they were going to be counted and approved in Congress
1:46.4	in the United States Senate. And so this was the last chance before the election was completely
1:51.2	certified. And Trump had a big rally on the United States Capitol. And sorry, in Washington,
1:58.3	D.C., the Capitol City of the United States. And he mentioned that he's not going to let it happen.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Sean Carroll | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.