The lasting implications of Jan. 6
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2023
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A lot has happened since the attack on our Capitol two years ago.
We’ve had congressional hearings, impeachments, investigations. And through it all the country has remained deeply polarized.
In the past 40 years, the United States has polarized a lot faster than other wealthy democracies like Canada or Germany. Why is the U.S. so different?
“Right now, our [political] system makes it extremely difficult to break out of this kind of rigid binary, the two-party system that we have,” said Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University.
On the show today, McCoy breaks down the state of our democracy post-Jan. 6, why the U.S. can’t seem to bridge its extreme political divide and what that could mean for the health of our economy and our democracy. Plus, some signs that all hope is not lost.
In the News Fix, we’ll go further into the far-right insurrection in Brazil over the weekend. Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s main government buildings in a strikingly similar fashion to the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. We’ll discuss what connects the two and what kind of influence the U.S. may have had in Brazil.
Later, we’ll hear from a listener about keeping New Year’s resolutions, and a writer shares how her own research proved her wrong about creating lasting habits.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
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- “How Can American Democracy Be Saved?” from Jennifer McCoy
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- “Polls show Americans are divided on the significance of January 6” from The Brookings Institution
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- “U.S. is polarizing faster than other democracies, study finds” from Brown University
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- “Videos of Brazil attack show striking similarities to Jan. 6” from The Washington Post
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- “How Trump’s allies stoked Brazil Congress attack” from BBC News
Got a question for our hosts? Email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org. Or leave us a voice message at 508 U-B-SMART, or 508-827-6278.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Unless Drew's not ready. |
| 0:02.8 | Choose always ready. He's just like this prizes |
| 0:10.8 | Hello, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome to Make Me Smart where none of us is as smart as all of us |
| 0:17.0 | I'm Cara Rizdal. It is Tuesday today a single topic on a single show today |
| 0:23.0 | We're talking about January 6th two years and you know whatever three four days on |
| 0:27.9 | And what it means has meant will mean for this democracy also this economy. We're gonna talk about that for a while |
| 0:36.4 | Yeah, I mean it's been two years since the attack on our capital for some of us especially here in Washington |
| 0:43.0 | It feels like it was just yesterday |
| 0:45.3 | But since then there's been so much that has happened we've had congressional hearings |
| 0:50.9 | We've had impeachments we've had investigations we've had actual election deniers some of whom |
| 0:56.1 | Participated in somewhere another in the attack on the capital taking office in the midterms |
| 1:02.5 | Through it all our country has been and remains |
| 1:07.0 | Extremely polarized so we wanted to take this moment to kind of look at |
| 1:12.5 | What this does mean for our democracy and if there's a path out of it |
| 1:17.0 | So here to make us smarter about all of these things is Jennifer McCoy a professor of political science at Georgia state |
| 1:24.6 | University welcome professor. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here |
| 1:28.7 | I imagine the answer to this question is not going to be delighted |
| 1:32.6 | But in a few words how would you describe the state of our democracy and how it compares to where we were two years ago? |
| 1:41.0 | Well, I think we're still in a very fragile situation |
| 1:45.1 | We've got though |
| 1:47.2 | some signs of hope of progress and I think in in this last election |
| 1:52.2 | With the defeat of many of the election deniers for the important posts of Secretary of State in some cases |
... |
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