Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen

Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen


Latest Episodes

The Pandemic is Boosting Unions in the South
September 09, 2020

The standard picture we northerners have of The South may no longer be accurate. Average working people are starting to see that the anti-union governments there are really just serving the rich. The long-thought-dormant left populist tradition of peop...

Racism in the Women’s Suffrage Movement
September 03, 2020

There’s a brand new Central Park monument of feminist leaders Stanton, Anthony, and Sojourner Truth. It was a hundred years ago that the 19th Amendment became law: women won the right to vote. But what kind of compromises did the

Why is Sexual Freedom So Frightening?
September 01, 2020

The nuclear family, white hetero male dominance and control is not the only way it can be. Why can we can have firearms freedom but not sexual freedom? On this show, Janet Jakobsen professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Armed Poll Watchers: To Protect or Intimidate?
August 25, 2020

Blurring the lines between law enforcement and vigilantism, why are off duty police at the polling stations mainly in black and brown neighborhoods? New Jersey in 1981 is a case study in what has happened and most likely will happen

Black and Indian, Kamala Harris: A New Mandate?
August 20, 2020

She is exactly what Trumpists hate: a strong woman who is both black and Indian. Both groups were the subjects of white male dominance and control. American slavery and British rule over India both had their peak at the same

Crowds Win in Waves Over Time
August 18, 2020

Many of us were taught to be wary of “mob psychology.” But according to history professor Peter Stearns who has studied the effects of crowds on political change, emotion is not necessarily in conflict with rationality. The protests of the

“Homeland Security:” Ideal Authoritarian Tool
August 13, 2020

Other countries, like those we defeated, use the paramilitary domestically, not America. Or so it was before the Department of Homeland Security was transformed into the ideal authoritarian tool. Former CIA analyst and professor of government at Johns ...

“Homeland Security:” The Ideal Authoritarian Tool
August 13, 2020

Other countries, like those we defeated, use the paramilitary domestically, not America. Or so it was before the Department of Homeland Security was transformed into the ideal authoritarian tool. Former CIA analyst and professor of government at Johns ...

What If Trump Loses? A Future for the Republican Party?
August 11, 2020

Donald Trump IS the Republican Party of 2020. So what of the future of the party; is there one? According to David Smith, Washington Bureau chief for The Guardian, some party members quietly hope for a Democratic landslide so they

The Jewish Tradition of Anti-Zionism
August 07, 2020

How is it that Jewish liberals felt the State of Israel was exempt from criticism applied elsewhere? Our guest today Benjamin Balthaser, who teaches multi-ethnic literature at Indiana University, talks about a little known history: Most liberal and lef...