Jill Lepore on Democracy in Peril, Then and Now
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
In the nineteen-thirties, authoritarian regimes were on the rise around the world—as they are again today—and democratic governments that came into existence after the First World War were toppling. “American democracy, too, staggered,” Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker, “weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation.” Lepore talks with David Remnick about how Americans rallied to save democracy, and how we might apply those lessons in a new era with similar problems.
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| 1:10.9 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden on today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks with |
| 1:16.5 | New Yorker staff writer and Harvard history professor Jill Lepore. They'll discuss the |
| 1:22.2 | early 1930s when the American public began to doubt the future of liberal democracy. |
| 1:33.7 | Okay. when the American public began to doubt the future of liberal democracy. In the 1930s, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, |
| 1:39.2 | dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, |
| 1:44.0 | Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, |
| 1:46.9 | people lining up for blocks, for scraps of food, |
| 1:50.4 | and democracies dying from the Andes to the Ural's to the Alps. |
| 1:56.1 | Jillipur is a historian at Harvard University |
| 1:58.5 | and a staff writer at the New Yorker, |
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