Welcome to With Friends Like These Good Intentions Edition.

When I was telling people about this season, I promised that some episodes would deal with

things that most of us think are good, but are actually bad.

And this is the first one of those episodes.

We're going to talk about the phenomenon of political junkies and how they, as our guest

this week puts it, hooked us on politics and broke our democracy.

That guest is Claire Bond Potter.

She's a political historian at the New School for Social Research.

She's the executive editor of Public Seminar and was the author of the blog, Tenured Radical

from 2006 to 2015.

And I want to add a quick word about the term we'll be using.

As someone with several recovering opioid addicts in my life, I find the word junkie

to be kind of jarring.

And I did my best to avoid repeating it too much, but it is the thing we call a certain group

of people.

And so we will be using that word.

It is a thing that some people call themselves.

Please consider this a preemptive apology and a content warning to those who may have

some similar issues to mine.

Now, Claire Bond Potter.

Claire, welcome to the show.

So I think when most people hear the term political junkie, especially people who listen to

...