4.2 • 7.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, listeners, it's Ross and happy Thanksgiving. |
| 0:04.7 | If you're listening to me right now, I can only assume that you're either trying to escape your dinner time obligations or trying to prepare for them. |
| 0:13.8 | To prep for an afternoon or evening with your Victor Orban loving uncle, your openly communist aunt, or your generally politically |
| 0:22.8 | paranoid grandmother. |
| 0:25.1 | Maybe you're thinking, how will I get through this holiday? |
| 0:28.6 | Well, we're here to help. |
| 0:30.9 | Here on interesting times, we try to have respectful conversations about radical or extreme-sounding |
| 0:36.7 | ideas, and we try to talk seriously |
| 0:39.4 | and thoughtfully across some pretty big political divides. |
| 0:43.7 | So I thought I'd share an episode that might be a model for Thanksgiving discussion, |
| 0:48.4 | a conversation I had this summer with progressive writer Ossita Wanevu, who argues that |
| 0:54.0 | now is the moment for a constitutional revolution. |
| 0:58.1 | Ocita is pretty far to my left. We don't share many political views, and I'm confident I would not enjoy his political revolution. |
| 1:06.3 | But I think our conversation nonetheless reflected a mutual curiosity about the details of American history and where this strange political moment might be going. |
| 1:17.2 | So, respectful political debate is possible. Go forth and seek it out. And good luck out there. We'll see you back here next week. |
| 1:43.0 | From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is interesting times. |
| 2:06.9 | After the great rebuke of 2024, many Democrats seem to think that their party needs to become more moderate. |
| 2:18.8 | But there's another theory, potent on the American left, which holds that Donald Trump's election shows not just that American democracy is in danger, but that it doesn't really work at all. |
| 2:25.3 | What the country needs isn't just a new policy agenda. It might need the kind of constitutional revolution, from adding new states to packing the Supreme Court that some Democrats already |
| 2:31.7 | flirted with under Joe Biden. That's the kind of argument that my guest today makes in his new book, |
| 2:37.9 | The Right of the People, Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. |
| 2:44.1 | Ossita Wanevu, welcome to interesting times. |
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