A Historian's Guide to the 2022 Midterm Elections
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2022
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the country confronts racial tensions and class conflicts, it begs the question: How did we get here? We look back to a moment in history when our country was struggling to become a true, multiracial democracy -- meeting a lot of roadblocks, many of which persist today. Historian Eric Foner gives us a primer on the Reconstruction Era amendments that we explored in season four, as producer Veralyn Williams rides along to help us make sense of what it means today and how we can move forward as one nation.
Companion listening for this episode:
A History of Voter Suppression (1/20/2022)
A conversation with historian Dr. Carol Anderson about how Black Americans have fought for their right to participate in the democratic process safely and make their votes count.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're in front of the White House, the midterm elections are coming up, and democracies |
| 0:06.4 | on the mind. |
| 0:07.8 | And so, what in your opinion makes a democracy a democracy? |
| 0:12.2 | Freedom to choose one's own leaders in fair elections, civility, rule of law, respectful |
| 0:17.6 | judicial system, voting rights, so that all people's voices are heard in the elections. |
| 0:22.5 | Free media, free markets, how am I doing? |
| 0:25.2 | Everybody has a different definition, I'm just looking for nice. |
| 0:28.5 | Why for you personally is democracy important to keep alive? |
| 0:33.0 | If working, it's allows people to avoid being ruled by tyrants. |
| 0:37.3 | We have art to salient an example of that right now in terms of what's going on in Ukraine |
| 0:42.1 | and Russia. |
| 0:43.1 | It's what our society is built on, it's the values that we all understand to be true in |
| 0:49.0 | this country and that we need and want to preserve. |
| 0:57.5 | Welcome to the show, I'm Kai Wright, and this election year is well underway, 12 states |
| 1:02.6 | hold congressional primaries next month. |
| 1:05.1 | And I hate to get all schoolhouse rock on you about it, but I do still believe that |
| 1:10.2 | elections are about more than picking sides in a partisan feud. |
| 1:14.5 | They're an opportunity to debate what kind of society we want to create. |
| 1:19.2 | Many people have rightly noted that this year's election can be understood as a debate over |
| 1:24.4 | democracy itself, over whether to accept the results of the previous election. |
| 1:30.1 | And that's certainly true as far as it goes, but I argue it's more precisely described |
| 1:35.0 | as a referendum on our attempt to create a multiracial and multi-ethnic democracy. |
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