This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

As we lurch painfully into another election season, we can't seem to avoid the phrase,

democracy hangs in the balance

yet again. We've been saying that since 2016, and sadly, alarmingly, it's even more the case

today. Donald Trump is ahead of Joe Biden in many polls, and he certainly isn't chastened by his

efforts to overturn the last election, and he certainly isn't chastened by his legal troubles overturn the last election, and he certainly isn't

chastened by his legal troubles.

Instead, he's called to suspend parts of the Constitution and recently called his political

enemies vermin, a word out of Hitler and Mussolini.

And this year's chaos in Congress, the like of which we hadn't seen in our history,

certainly doesn't give you much

comfort. So how did we get here? And can we ever get from here to safer ground where we can

argue about things like tax rates? That's a question that some of the New Yorkers' best

thinkers on politics gathered to discuss recently.

Jelani Cobb, Jillipur, and Evan Osnott are all staff writers and collectively the authors of a huge pile of excellent books on American history and cultural life.

They came together at the New Yorker Festival for a conversation moderated by Michael Luo, the editor of

of New Yorker.com.

Here's Michael.

Jill, Jolani, Evan, thank you all for being here.

Thank you, Mike.

So I wanted to start on a very New Yorker note with a reading of E.B. White's famous essay,

...