Good morning. It's Sunday, June 1st. We begin this hour with Gryft. If we're serious about

reclaiming our democracy, we need to understand how someone like Donald Trump could emerge

in the first place, what conditions were in place that made his assent possible.

Here's what I mean.

When we think of the ideal of democracy, it's just that.

It's 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.

Think of it as walking the path that Aristotle, often called the father of political science, described as the golden mean, a balance between extremes where the strongest and the most

enduring form of governance is found in the stable center. And it's in that middle ground where

fair representation thrives. The social safety net is the strongest. Individual freedoms are

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

protected. The fartherer society strays from that 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. And the result is at record

levels of economic inequality and a slow but enduring shift upward in wealth began. And by that I don't

mean that people got wealthier. I mean that 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 in part

to a series of Supreme Court rulings. The 2010 Supreme Court 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, quote, political speech does not lose First Amendment protection simply because

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