Habits of the Heart: Introductory

Pantsuit Politics

Lemonada Media

News, News Commentary, Politics, Society & Culture

4.5 • 4.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As our team takes time off for the holidays, we are sharing the conversations Sarah and Beth had this year about Habits of the Heart. This first episode originally aired in February for our premium members on Substack. Whether you’re also taking a well-deserved break, spending time with family, or just looking for something meaningful to listen to, we hope you’ll join us to revisit (or enjoy for the first time!) this thoughtful exploration from Sarah and Beth of this powerful, prescient book. In this episode, they discuss the introductory, and imagine where the authors would push them, and investigate what the meaning of “the pursuit of happiness” was to the founders in comparison to how we define it now. Ready to go deeper? Visit our website for complete show notes, exclusive premium content, chats, and more. If you're not already subscribed, you can use this link to ensure you're getting our show notes, weekly newsletter, and more. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Lemonada. This is Maggie Penton. You're listening to Pantsuit Politics. Our team is taking some time off to enjoy the holidays. So today, we're sharing the
0:22.6	first episode from our 2025 slow read on Habits of the Heart. You may remember that in 2024,
0:29.8	Sarah and Beth read Democracy in America with our community. Democracy in America was written
0:35.6	in the 1830s by the French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and talked about the relationship between character and society in America.
0:45.7	Toakville traveled our young country and talked with citizens from the urban centers in the north, rural farmers on the frontier, and slave labor farms in the south.
0:56.2	Toakville described the social customs that he called Habits of the Heart that formed the
1:01.8	American character. Habits of the Heart was published in 1985 as a sociological check-in on our
1:09.6	civic life that was modeled after Tocqueville's work,
1:12.3	with sections on our family lives, religious observance, and local leaders.
1:17.2	The authors asked regular people across America, what does happiness mean to you?
1:21.9	What's your life like? What kind of role do you play in your community?
1:26.0	Over the next four episodes, which Sarah and Beth
1:28.6	recorded throughout this year, we're diving into a deeper question that has hovered over our country
1:33.3	since its founding. Can we balance our individual pursuit of freedom with our duty to our communities
1:39.5	and govern ourselves? Or to put it more plainly, can the American experiment actually work?
1:46.5	The answer for the last 250 years has been some version of, let's see if we can hold it together
1:52.6	until the next election. Habits of the heart digs into the way that our American identity
1:58.7	supports or could support making our democratic
2:02.3	systems work and points to some solutions for bringing people together in these divided times.
2:08.6	In these discussions, you'll hear Sarah and Beth talk about the way this book resonates still,
2:14.2	how the speed and development of new technologies have exacerbated issues that were taking
2:18.8	root in the 80s, and what our citizenship asks of us today?
	...

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