The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast

Interviewer: JOSHUA ROSE. In this episode, host Joshua Rose speaks with DR. NATASHA PIANO, Assistant Professor of Political Theory at UCLA, about her book Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science. Together, they revisit early twentieth-century political theorists who challenged conventional understandings of democracy, elections, and elite power. Their conversation explores how concerns about plutocracy, political accountability, and democratic legitimacy shaped twentieth-century political thought, and why these debates remain deeply relevant as contemporary democracies grapple with growing inequality, institutional distrust, and democratic backsliding.

Interviewer: JOSHUA ROSE. In this episode, host Joshua Rose speaks with DR. NAREMAN AMIN about her new book, Is God for Revolution? Affect, Youth, and Islam in Post-2011 Egypt. Drawing on interviews with young Egyptians who lived through the 2011 revolution and its aftermath, Dr. Amin explores how political upheaval transformed not only civic participation but also religious identity, authority, and spirituality. The conversation examines the complex relationship between Islam and political activism, the emotional legacy of revolution, and how a generation continues to grapple with hope, disappointment, and the search for meaning in the years since Egypt's democratic opening closed.

Interviewer: MATTHEW ROTH. The acts of the current administration, as well as the OBBBA legislation passed by Congress, point to an economic vision that rejects sharing resources to relieve economic inequality, arguing that money diverted from rewarding success in the private sector is generally money wasted. Journalist ALISSA QUART, in her work as Executive Director of the non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project (founded with Barbara Ehrenreich) and as the author of several books, has worked to counter this vision, but also to understand its deep roots in American cultural history. In her discussion with histodrian Matthew Roth, she describes the way economic precarity has climbed the class ladder, as documented in her book Squeezed (2018). In her follow-up, Bootstrapped (2022), she argued that punishing economic policies are undergirded by the narrative of the American Dream, which attributes financial success or struggles entirely to individual merit or decisions. And with the ascendance of a self-described self-made billionaire to the White House, she argues that without the growth of counter-ideals of interdependence and mutual support, economic inequality is only going to get worse.

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN. Political theorist MICHAEL GORUP joins the podcast to discuss the intertwined histories of race, democracy, and popular sovereignty in the United States. Drawing on themes from Gorup's book The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People, the conversation ranges from Jefferson and Reconstruction to Black Power and the contemporary crises of neoliberalism, examining how democratic ideals and racial domination have evolved together across American history.

Interviewer: MATTHEW ROTH. At a moment when tough-on-crime rhetoric, as voiced by Donald Trump and others in the Republican Party, has again become a politically polarizing issue, it is perhaps an opportune time to take stock of the U.S.'s uniquely punitive treatment of certain sorts of crime. Penn political scientist MARIE GOTTSCHALK has long pointed out that, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the carceral state has expanded and become entrenched amid moral panics – variously about urban disorder, drugs, or sex offenses – that have had a bipartisan sweep. In her new book, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America, Gottschalk points to a contrary case: corporate crime, or "crime in the suites," which has been treated with ever greater lenience since the 1990s, even as a corporate crime wave brought down the global economy in 2008. In her discussion with historian Matthew Roth, she explores how these are flipsides of the same coin, indicative of how the American political system has redirected rage from those who causes the greatest harms to more vulnerable targets whose crimes pale in comparison.