It is Sunday, June 1st, and we begin this hour with Gryft.

If we're serious about reclaiming our democracy, we need to understand how someone like Donald Trump could have emerged in the first place.

What conditions were already in place that made his assent possible?

Here's what I mean. When we think about the

ideal of democracy, it's just that, an ideal. No government is perfect, but America has always

tried its best to strive toward a more perfect union, as our founding fathers wrote. So think about

it as walking the path of Aristotle, often called the father of political science, described as the golden

mean. It's a balance between the extremes, where the strongest and most enduring form of

governments is found in the stable center. In that middle ground where representation thrives,

the social safety net is the strongest. Individual freedoms are consistently and reliably

protected. The farther as society strays from the middle, the weaker its democracy becomes,

and America began drifting toward the outer extremes some decades ago.

The era of Reaganomics ushered in laissez-faire worldviews that championed free unregulated markets.

The result, record levels of economic inequality and a slow but

enduring shift upward in wealth. And by that, I don't mean that people got wealthier. I mean

wealth increasingly concentrated at the highest levels. Corporations under freer global trade also

got wealthier and bolder, and they demanded and spent a lot of time lobbying for more

political power, and they got it, thanks to a series of Supreme Court rulings.

The 2010 case Citizens United, which fundamentally reshaped American politics by unleashing

unlimited corporate spending and some argue rendering the fundamental tenet of one person,

one vote, meaningless.

The court held that, quote, political speech does not lose First Amendment protection simply because its source is a corporation. Translation? Big business could now cut

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