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Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. I'm John Mulkins. If you want evidence of what a broken political system leads to, you don't have to look very far. In their new book, Democracy on the Edge, John Kenneth White and Matthew Kerbel report that 64 percent of Millennials and Zoomers say the government isn't doing enough on climate change. Only fifteen percent of young Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing. These are the young voters who have inherited a host of dysfunctional institutions and a ravaged natural environment. The government is failing to address their concerns, and an entire generation is watching it happen in real time.  White and Kerbel compare political time to the Master Clock at the Naval Observatory in Washington. The American political landscape keeps a clock of its own. Every generation or so, a president like Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Reagan resets it.  They argue a Fourth Republic is in the making, where Americans face a stark choice between authoritarian rule and a multiracial, multicultural democracy. Democracy on the Edge looks back at the January 6th insurrection, Trump's return to office, a Republican Party captured by its own fringe elements, a Democratic Party hunting for a durable majority, and a frustrated generation that neither trusts the government nor believes in a better future. When a well-funded minority can obscure the scientific consensus on the established science and the existential threats young voters face, the failure of our government to act is profoundly reshaping how an entire generation views its government; the crisis in our institutions and the decline of our democratic values are no longer two separate stories. They are the same story, told from two very different perspectives. John Kenneth White is professor emeritus of politics at the Catholic University of America, where he has taught since 1988. He is the author of a shelf of books on American political parties, values, and the presidency, including The Values Divide, What Happened to the Republican Party, and Barack Obama's America, and he writes a regular column on politics and religion for The Hill. Democracy on the Edge, written with Matthew Kerbel, is his latest book, and it may be his most urgent.

Hi, I'm John Mulkins. Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. When the National co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America talks about abolishing the Senate, a lot of Americans panic. It's hard for most of us to imagine living under a constitution other than the one we all know — even though our faith in government is at an all-time low. We are living in extraordinary times, and it's fair to say the framers of our 238-year-old Constitution had no idea what today's society would look like two remarkable centuries after they were all gone. Still, they understood, at least in principle, that our Constitution would need to evolve with our society, with technology, and with the challenges and discoveries they could never have imagined. George Washington may have declared that "the basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government, when done as an explicit act of the people as a whole" — but he never explained how that could happen. Surely the framers were in no rush to make it obvious. They were still shaken from Shays' Rebellion, staring down the collapse of the Articles of Confederation, and they wanted stability more than they wanted democracy in 1787. So, they gathered themselves in Independence Hall, locked the doors and shuttered the windows, and in secret, sweltering in the heat, built a system designed to secure their role as political elites — one built to restrain the spirit of democracy the War of Independence had unleashed just eleven years earlier. But Thomas Jefferson had his concerns. He argued that the earth belongs to the living, that no generation had the right to bind the next, and that constitutions should be rewritten every 19 years. But Americans have never grappled with the question of how to do that, let alone should they. Today, we'll have a look at what could have been had they taken Jefferson's advice. Beau Breslin holds the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government at Skidmore College, where he has served as Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs. He's the author of The Communitarian Constitution, From Words to Worlds, and his latest book, A Constitution For The Living, imagining how five different generations of Americans might have rewritten the nation's most fundamental law. He'll walk us through those imaginary halls of history: the constitutional conventions that might have happened, the amendments that could have been written, and the fate of the Senate, which has outlived every challenge to its undemocratic authority...until 2022.  It's a fun thought experiment, but a serious one, as it forces us to ask not just whether our political system is working, but whether Americans could ever create the tools we need to fix our Constitution when the Constitution itself becomes the problem. This is my conversation with Beau Breslin. I hope you enjoy it. Please like and subscribe if you find this conversation thought-provoking!  AUDIO PODCAST: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1861129/episodes/19623624 YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/4Q-kOrPGoe8 A Constitution For The Living https://a.co/d/0bi5T1Fh Article: https://thepenngazette.com/constitution-revised/ The Earth Belongs to the Living https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-james-madison-17/

Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Today I will share part two of my conversation with Camila Vergara, political theorist and author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic. Camila is one of the leading theorists working today on what real, structural democratic renewal actually looks like. In part one, we explored the theoretical backdrop, what she means when she says our democracies aren't merely corrupted by bad actors, but by genuine systemic corruption. In her view, most liberal democracies are built, structurally designed to protect the elites and a spreading international oligarchy. In this half, we get into the details of what real democratic resistance looks like and how Chileans took up the cause for democratic renewal. Camila walks us through the ground-level story of Chile's 2019 uprising — how a few cents added to a subway fare and one tone-deaf comment from a government minister advising the people to just, "wake up an hour earlier to save money" lit a fuse that had been smoldering for decades. She describes the students jumping turnstiles in solidarity with their parents, transit stations burning under circumstances that were never fully investigated, curfews meant to prevent dissent, and the first government troops in the streets since Pinochet. If that sounds all too familiar, keep listening.  She explains how out of that chaos came something genuinely rare: a network of citizen assemblies sharing one goal, to write the world's most progressive constitution. This movement came from the ground up, and in her view, even though it was ultimately defeated by a structural push that undermined the popular will of the people, the example set by the Chilean people remains a hugely significant one, one for all nations suffering from a decline in democratic norms and system corruption. From there we go further back, to the Marquis de Condorcet's 1793 constitution for revolutionary France, and his model of interlinked primary assemblies — a vision of direct democracy that never made it into what we now think of as the liberal democratic tradition. We'll discuss why the framers' fear of the "tyranny of the majority" doesn't actually hold up historically, and why energy cooperatives and neighborhood assemblies might matter more right now than at any other time in our history as a nation. That question, how close we are to a tipping point from oligarchy into outright tyranny, and what it would take to organize our way back out, is where Camila believes the United States stands today, and it should interest every American concerned about our future as a democracy. It's a wide-ranging, sometimes sobering, but ultimately hopeful conversation about power — who holds it, and how ordinary people can actually take it back. Here's part two of my conversation with Camila Vergara. I begin by asking her how this movement began.

Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. I want to begin today with a passage that has been sitting with me for some time. It comes from the Swiss scholar Pascal Lottaz, host of the Neutrality Studies podcast, in his March 2026 introduction to an interview with the political scientist Dr. Aaron Good. Lottaz opened that conversation this way. "Crime in the United States is not a bug; it's a feature. That actually explains a lot also about its illegal foreign policies. The US as a political entity is deeply intertwined with crime syndicates and explicitly illegal acts under international and local law. Epstein was not at all an exception. These shady dealers are part and parcel of how US politics works." Good's argument, in brief, is this. After the Second World War, the United States built what he calls a "tripartite state" — the public democratic state we learn about in civics class, the national-security state of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, and, behind both of them, a deep state that he defines as an obscured, dominant, supranational source of antidemocratic power. That deep state, he argues, did not emerge from any constitutional design. It emerged from the pursuit of empire — from a postwar project that required, in his words, an endless exception to the rule of law in order to function. That's quite a diagnosis. And it is a powerful one. But it leaves an obvious question hanging. If the rot is structural, what do we do about it? That question is what brings me to today's guest. Dr. Camila Vergara is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Research and Innovation at the Essex Business School at the University of Essex. She is the editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, and the author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic, published by Princeton University Press. Where Aaron Good gives us a forensic account of how the American state has been hollowed out by elite criminality, Camila Vergara takes a longer view. Drawing on Machiavelli, Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, she argues that the corruption we are describing is not a recent betrayal of an otherwise sound design — it is the predictable trajectory of representative government itself. Republics, she contends, decay into oligarchies. They always have. And the question is not whether the United States is corrupt, but whether the constitutional architecture we inherited contains the tools to push back against that decay — or whether we need to build new ones. Her answer, of course, is the latter. She proposes what she calls plebeian institutions — a network of local assemblies, independent of parties and government, designed to give ordinary people a permanent, structural check on the power of the few. Today, we are going to walk through that argument. We will talk about how she defines systemic corruption, why she thinks reform from within is unlikely to be enough, what plebeian power could actually look like in twenty-first century America, and whether the U.S. Constitution — as it stands — is part of the cure or part of the disease. Dr. Camila Vergara, it is a pleasure to have you on the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Welcome to the conversation. Quick Links SYSTEM CORRUPTION by Camila Vergara https://a.co/d/0eEmbDAF Pascal Lottaz, Neutrality Studies: https://youtu.be/WjgvH8xCbv4?si=gjQVXmbCbwhk3al1 YouTube: https://youtu.be/0KUlGYE6apw

Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. In this episode, I will be exploring one of the most important and timely questions facing our country today: What would it look like if Americans were to rethink the Constitution? For a long time, the thought of holding a constitutional convention has been dismissed by most Americans, something debated by historians and legal scholars, perhaps, but rarely engaged in by ordinary citizens. Recently, that conversation has begun to emerge. Across the country, citizens are asking deeper questions about whether the political system we inherited is capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century.  Stephanie Lindquist serves as the Nickerson Dean and professor of law at Washington University School of Law.  She is also the founder of the Model Constitutional Convention.  In May 2026, in St. Louis, this groundbreaking initiative will bring together participants from more than 80 universities across the country. Modeled on the Article 5 process of the US Constitution, the convention is designed to simulate national deliberations over our most basic law.   Beyond these deliberations, there is a growing national conversation concerning real-world constitutional reform.  Organizations like Unify USA, Braver Angels, Better Together America,  CELDF, Alliance for Democracy, Citizens Take Action, and many more are drafting their own amendments, forming their own citizen assemblies, and considering the possibility of calling for a popular national convention.  Thomas Jefferson once suggested that each generation should have the opportunity to reconsider the constitutional framework under which it lives. If that is true, this moment may represent an opportunity, especially for younger generations, to help shape what comes next.  The Model Constitutional Convention is an attempt to explore these questions in a serious, thoughtful, and constructive way. In this conversation, Stephanie Lindquist explains how the project began, how delegates will develop their proposals, what kinds of ideas are emerging, and how everyday Americans can follow along. Stefanie, it's a pleasure to have you on the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Welcome to the conversation.

When people talk about democracy in America, we often focus on elections… on candidates… on the latest headlines coming out of Washington. But the deeper question—the one that shapes everything—is this: Who actually holds power in our society? Is it the people? Is it our communities? Or is it wealth… concentrated power… and institutions that were never designed to answer to ordinary citizens? Today’s episode is all about movement building. Not the kind of movement-building calling for protests or boycotts. Not the kind of movement building that fades when yet another crisis emerges …But the kind of movement building that reshapes the legal and political foundations of our society. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, or CELDF, has been at the forefront of a remarkable experiment in democracy. An experiment that asks a simple but radical question: What if communities had the legal authority to defend their own environment… their own health… and their own future? Ben Price serves as the National Education Director at CELDF, where he has spent more than two decades helping communities organize, learn, and take action. He has mentored local leaders across the country as they developed ordinances asserting community rights and the legal rights of ecosystems. His book, How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property, examines how modern law has evolved to prioritize property and wealth over democracy and community self-government. The book earned the Independent Publishing Award’s Silver Medal in Finance, Investment, and Economics, and it has sparked important conversations about the relationship between law, economics, and democratic power. What makes Ben’s work especially important for our conversation today is that he doesn’t just analyze problems. He works directly with communities trying to solve them. Communities asking: How do we organize? How do we build durable movements? How do ordinary people reclaim authority over decisions that affect their land, water, and future? And perhaps most importantly, how do we build movements that are strong enough to challenge systems that have been in place for generations? These are exactly the kinds of questions we need to explore if we are serious about creating a more democratic constitutional order in America. Constitutions don’t change simply because people write some ideas down on a piece of paper. They change when movements emerge that are powerful enough to demand something better for everyone. Ben Price has spent years helping communities wrestle with the practical realities of movement building—what works, what doesn’t, and what it really takes to transform political power from the ground up. Today, we’re going to talk about organizing… democracy… and the long road toward structural change. Ben, welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. LINKS: https://celdf.org/ https://celdf.org/resources/multimedia/ https://celdf.org/resources/blog/ https://celdf.substack.com/

S3 E3 Confronting the Climate Emergency with Dr. Peter Carter remix 7/20/2026 Welcome to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Constitutional scholars, including UC Berkeley Dean of Law Erwin Chemerinsky, Sanford Levinson, and George Van Cleve, and many others, have been calling for constitutional reform for a long time. They say we will not solve the climate emergency until we repair or even replace our outdated and now dangerous Constitution. Climate scientists, even more so than most political scientists, understand our climate is in serious trouble. Yet they are struggling for solutions. They know our governments are failing to address the growing threat of the gathering climate emergency. Johan Rockstrom, Michael Mann, David Suzuki, and James Hansen foresee a pretty grim future for humanity. The chronology of climate-related "unnatural disasters"  is rapidly escalating. Unprecedented Crime, by Dr. Peter Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth, is a rich, legally grounded indictment of our government's failure to act. Peter is concerned, and like many, getting more concerned every day. I want to understand his frustration over the failure of government to respond to this unprecedented crime, and to discuss his thoughts on game changers for survival.  Confronting the Climate Emergency with Dr. Peter Carter takes listeners deep into the link between ecological collapse and political malfeasance. From David Suzuki’s call for a climate revolution to COP 30 in Brazil, people are struggling for answers. This episode asks the hardest question of all: can we confront the climate emergency before it is too late? Dr. Carter and I explore the crime scene, the power of citizen action, the technologies shaping our future, and the likely necessity of constitutional reform in this episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Because democracy, like all living things, must evolve or perish. I hope you get a lot out of this episode. Please leave your comments below, and if you enjoy this presentation, please like, share, and subscribe.

Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Today, I will be talking with Sanford Levinson. Levinson is the W. St John Garwood and W St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law. He teaches Law at both Harvard and the University of Texas Law School in Austin. Sanford is the author of over 450 articles and book reviews, and seven books, including Our Undemocratic Constitution, Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance, and Democracy and Dysfunction. Sanford is an early proponent of replacing our Constitution with a more democratic one, and for several good reasons; he knows more about our outdated and increasingly dangerous Constitution than almost anyone in America. I first interviewed Sanford in May of 2022, at which time he offered to come back to talk about his experience with the Democracy Journal project to draft a new model constitution for the United States.  Levinson chaired the project, calling upon several prominent legal scholars to contribute to the contents and style of this ambitious document. My hope is that this conversation might shed some light on the process and pitfalls of constitution-making in America, as we uncover some of the challenges even the best of planners have encountered. You may not know that in 2020, the National Constitution Center had also commissioned the drafting of three new models, each reflecting the values and goals of three very different worldviews. Specifically, these models were designed to reflect a Progressive, Libertarian, and Conservative worldview.  None of these models got much attention. In Sandford's own words, they just fell flat. Apparently, the American public had no interest, and the media graciously obliged by ignoring the whole thing. Was it the process, the results, or American hubris that led to the failure to engage the American psyche in the deliberations, or was there a deeper, and even more concerning problem?  I began our conversation by asking Sanford why no one had simply proposed to draft a more democratic model.  Outro Persuading the people that a convention is thinkable should be easy in a democracy. After all, that's what democracies are based on. I can think of a lot of things that are more unthinkable than a convention, like what our world will look like in a post-3-degree world. Tune in next time for a heated discussion about the failure of government to confront the Climate Emergency, with Dr Peter Carter, climate scientist and founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. This conversation is about to heat up!

Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. I’ve been on a kind of sabbatical this past year. So much has happened, and I really needed to take the time to explore some of the major developments which, in several important ways, relate directly to the issue of our Constitution. The first was the issue of UAP disclosure. In a stunning announcement, members of Congress revealed that UAPs have most certainly been retrieved and reverse-engineered by our own government—in secret, with the cooperation of a handful of very significant, and very private aerospace corporations. This revelation is profoundly significant, especially as it relates to government transparency and public accountability. Emerging from that conversation was a broader discussion about the nature of reality itself. It turns out that what we call “reality” is not as concrete as we once believed. Quantum entanglement, quantum fields, gravitic propulsion, consciousness, telepathy—all these topics have profound implications for humanity, which led me to reflect on the kind of society we are, and the kind of society we might become as we enter the 21st century. Our current systems—economic, political, and ecological—are literally collapsing before our eyes. We are entering a profound transformation. As futurist Peter Leyden has often stated, we are in a period of system collapse which will give birth to entirely new systems—ones that could enable us all to create a better world. What and how these next systems arise, requires us to understand something about the nature of change. That is why I thought it would be a good time to talk to Ben Manski. Ben studies the participation of ordinary people in the deliberate constitution of their societies. His work encompasses social movements, law, politics, climate and ecology, technology, and corporations, focusing on democracy, constitutionalism, and system change.  Manski  practiced public interest law for 8 years and managed national nonprofit organizations, direct action campaigns, and political campaigns, and parties for 25 years. Dr. Manski is an assistant professor of public sociology and director of Next System Studies involving research into the relationships between, systemic crisis, system design, social movements, and American constitutionalism. https://libertytreefoundation.org/ https://www.benmanski.com/ https://nextsystem.gmu.edu/about https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848/full

In season one, I spoke with Arend Lijphart about democratic political systems. He had a number of recommendations on how Americans could improve our democracy if they really wanted to do. The question as always remains, how would Americans do that?  I also spoke with George Van Cleve on his book, Making a New American Constitution. He had a pretty simple idea. Americans would form a national convention coordinating committee, for the purpose of raising funds for the endeavor, establishing the rules for the election of delegates, and perhaps setting guidelines for the convention itself. Ultimately, it would set a date for seating a convention to deliberate over a new constitution for the United States. As Madison so aptly put it back in 1787, "AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency* of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America.“ Those were weighty words then, but there was a palpable need to reform the political system. So, I thought we should talk a little bit more about Constituent Powers. Sergio Verdugo is an Assistant Professor of Law at the IE Law School, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Human Rights Law. He is also an editor of the International Journal of Constitutional Law and the Secretary General of the International Society of Public Law. Dr. Verdugo holds a doctorate in Law from the New York University School of Law and a Master’s Degree in Law from the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a Master in Public Law from P. Universidad Católica de Chile, and I am very happy to have him here to talk about his recent papers on Constituent Powers and the uncertain future of Constitutional Democracy. *The original might have been" inefficacy" tho I might be mistaken.

In the last episode, I talked with Juliano Benvindo about the similarities between the January 6th Capitol Insurrection and the more recent attack on all three branches of government in Brasilia. It turns out that Brazil has the greatest level of inequality in Latin America. Inequality in North America has also reached historic highs. It was bad enough that America had imported over 300,000 slaves from Africa. Brazil imported over 5 million. Inequality remains a serious problem for the 2 most populis Democracies in the Western Hemisphere, and that should alarm us all, especially when America is thought to be the leader of the free world.  We might not think inequality is such a dangerous threat to our democracy when it is normalized by public policies, and an economic system based on profit, which is then reinforced by corporate donors and advertisers promoting a pretty lavish and carefree lifestyle. But, is it leading to the collapse of democracies around the world? Do Americans believe in equality anymore? I wanted to talk to someone who might give us a little insight into the history of inequality.   Frances Chiu completed her doctorate in English Literature at Oxford University and currently teaches literature and history at The New School in New York City. She is the author of The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man (2020) and has written extensively for Occupy.com. She taught the first class in America devoted to Thomas Paine and his contemporaries, and she is currently completing her book on The History of English Inequality. I am happy to say that she is also the first woman to be on the podcast, and I am fully aware that's long overdue!

Events in America like the 2021 United States Capitol Insurrection are not unique to America. Brazil also suffered from a similar crisis on Jan 8, 2023.  The attack there, on all three branches of government in Brasilia, was largely the result of the former president's insistence the election had been rigged. His supporters believed him, and although he lost by almost 2 million votes, the crowds turned out to overturn the election, in much the same way Trump supporters did on Jan 6, 2021. I thought we should have a look at what's going on in Brazil and take a deeper dive into Brazil's constitution for a sense of what is driving the rise of populism in Brazil. The United States and Brazil enjoy broad political and economic relations. Brazil is the second most populus democracy in the Western Hemisphere, and the world’s twelfth-largest economy. The United States is Brazil’s second-largest trading partner, second only to China. It may surprise some of you to find out both the United States and Brazil are considered “flawed democracies," but there are differences. Whereas the promise of democracy in America is considered to be our birthright, Brazil has had to overcome a monarchy, as well as a dictatorship established by a military coup, which was supported by the United States and then president John F. Kennedy. That dictatorship lasted 21 years, until Feb 1, 1987 when a popular constituent assembly composed of elected representatives of the several political parties in Brazil, drafted a new democratic constitution, which was then formally ratified in 1988.   Juliano Zaiden Benvindo is Professor of Constitutional Law and Head of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at the University of Brasília. He is also a fellow at the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and Capes-Humboldt Senior Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. His books include: On the Limits of Constitutional Adjudication; The Rule of Law in Brazil, The Legal Construction of Inequality; and, Constitutional Change and Transformation in Latin America, co-authored by Richard Albertand Carlos Bernal.

Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in American Podcast. In Season 1 Episode 2  last year, I spoke with Professor Emeritus of Democracy & Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Harvey J. Kaye. He is an award-winning author and editor of 18 books on history and politics -including Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again and FDR on Democracy.  In S1 E2, we talked about his book Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He's a really gifted speaker and a real pleasure to talk to.  At that time, Harvey suggested he come back for another conversation, this time about FDR's Economic Bill of Rights.  I'm really happy to say that that conversation has finally arrived. In addition, we will be joined by his friend, activist, and Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America, Alan Minsky. Alan is a lifelong activist, who has worked as a progressive journalist for the past two decades. He was the Program Director at KPFK in Los Angeles from 2009-2018. He also has coordinated Pacifica Radio’s national coverage of elections. Before that, Alan was one of the founders of LA Indymedia. He is the creator and producer of the political podcasts for The Nation and Jacobin Magazine, as well as a contributor to Commondreams and Truthdig. Alan’s activism began in college with union solidarity work and opposition to US involvement in Central America. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Alan was active in the counter-globalization and media democracy movements. In 2011, he began organizing for Occupy Wall Street in the months leading up to the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Alan began working with PDA in 2014. This country has seen its share of opulence and struggle. But what about its share of democracy? We live in an era, not unlike the Gilded Age, which flourished from 1877 to 1900. The Gilded Age was marked by extreme concentrations of wealth and the rise of powerful industrial titans known as the Robber Barons; men like Jay Gould, JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. Corruption, unprecedented immigration, and the concentration of wealth by the 1% were just a few of the things that characterized that period of American history. This explosion of economic prosperity for a few arose only 12 years after the Civil War, which raged between 1861 and 1865, and only a few months after Reconstruction which lasted until 1877.  The Age of the Robber Barons or the "Gilded Age" was followed by a very different set of challenges, including events like WWI, which began in 1914 and ended in 1918. Along come the roaring twenties, then there was the Great Crash of 1929, and the Great Depression which lasted until 1939. In addition to all these hardships, Americans had to confront the Great Dust Bowl, from 1930 until 1936, caused by shortsighted federal land policies, changes in regional weather, and new mechanized farming techniques which led to the erosion of vital topsoil. FDR won the election to the New York State Senate in 1910 as a democrat and quickly became associated with the progressives of the party.  He was elected governor of New York in 1928 and again in 1930. He was first elected President in 1932. He was re-elected President in 1936, 1940, and once again in 1944. He died in office during his historic 4th term in office and is largely credited with bringing the United States out of the worst economic disaster America had ever faced, as well as a devastating World War. Harvey, Alan, it's an honor to be able to share your insights into FDR and as importantly, your proposal for a new Economic Bill of Rights. There's a lot to get into, but first, how are you doing?

Welcome back to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.  I couldn't go any further without a discussion about Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Not because it was historically significant, although it certainly was. But, because it lays the foundation for our nation and our identity as Americans, it is perhaps more relevant today than it was in 1792. I began this season with a discussion about American Sovereigns for a purpose. We need to begin to think of ourselves as the rightful and legal owners of our government. Fritz was pretty clear, this is our uniquely American heritage, a power that deserves all of our respect and comprehension. I followed this with a conversation about the elites, the ones who according to Robert Ovetz and a few others, created a political system to serve the oligarchy. The sovereigns and the elites have been here right from the beginning. We need to distinguish between those two groups in America and we need to understand the very different roles they play and how they are enabled. Today, we the sovereigns play a minor role in decision-making for our nation compared to most modern democracies. We have limited ways of getting our message out. We have limited choices. On the other hand, the elites have all kinds of ways to express their concerns and to advocate for their interests. They write the historical narrative. They create and sell the consensus reality you and I live in. If they wanted to normalize climate-related disasters or mass shootings, they could. They are making plans for our future as well, and none of them have been elected to do so.  We see this play out in numerous ways every day. We the Sovereigns, on the other hand, remain divided. We live in a manufactured reality because human beings are creative and industrious, it seems we the sovereigns have no other choice. But whose reality is it? Do we have the political and economic systems we need to create the reality we want?  Thomas Paine's message may be more relevant today than it ever was and to explain why, I've asked Gary Berton, president of the TPNHA to come back for a closer look, this time, at Thomas Paine and his seminal book, Rights of Man. OUTRO  So, are human beings fundamentally rational enough to know how to govern ourselves? The elites were capable of creating a government that would serve them, but what about the rest of us? Are we rational enough, informed enough, and committed enough, to create a political system that protects our mutual interests? At its core, the political question of the day isn't who will be running for president, it's who will be calling the shots? Will it be the tiny minority of global elites or will it be the vast majority of human beings on the planet? As Gary says, that will require a movement of movements. Where ever constitutions of government fail to protect and promote the interests of the majority of citizens, more work will always be necessary. America is no exception to this fundamentally Painsian maxim. We're all going to have to be much more aware of the deficiencies within our political systems if we are ever going to rid ourselves of them. Beam in next time for a look at how we might improve our political systems of government and the kind of rights Paine had in mind for all Americans when I talk again with Harvey J. Kaye on his book, FDR on Democracy, the Four Freedoms and FDR's Economic Bill of Rights. Until then, stay safe out there.

Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Bernie loves to point his finger at the elites, but who are they and where do they come from? It seems as if Bernie believes they possess a lot more influence than the rest of us.  But, what does our preamble mean if not that we the ordinary people in America are the ultimate source of power and law in America? So then, who were the elites? How did they differ from the mass of Americans in 1776 and later in 1787, even today? What about revolutionaries like Thomas Paine? Was he not an elite also? What role did he play in creating our government and just who were the founders anyway? Most Americans were revolutionaries in 1776. They were the self-proclaimed sovereigns over their new and independent nation, and it was only they who could grant the consent of the governed, or when necessary, exercise their power and duty to establish a constitution of government that would serve their needs and protect their interests. The concept of popular sovereignty is something of a dinosaur for most Americans today. America is the world's superpower, so how could everyday average Americans actually control their government, or if necessary, create a new government that would faithfully express the will of most Americans? I know I am still trying to figure out what it really means to be an American. Why it is that we think of ourselves as so exceptional? Is it our constitution? If it is, what is it about our constitution that we so revere and how does that make us so special? Robert Ovetz is a lecturer in Political Science and Public Administration and he writes about the politics of the labor movement and the crisis of capitalism at the turn of the 20th century. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Austin. Among other publications and advocacy work, Robert is the author of When Workers Shot Back (2019), Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle (2021), and most recently, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few. Robert, welcome to the peaceful political revolution in America podcast.