Current Affairs17 Apr 2023

The Dysfunctions of Our "Democracy" and How To Fix Them (w/ Tom Geoghegan)

Thomas Geoghegan is a labor lawyer and writer whose latest book is The History of Democracy Has Yet To Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over Again. MSNBC's Chris Hayes says of the book: "This book made me laugh out loud and also gave me glimpses of an entire horizon of possibility I hadn't seen before.” Indeed, while Tom's book examines the hopeless dysfunction of our political system (including amusingly describing his own effort to run for Congress), it's also a look at how we could make a much, much better system of government if we were committed to getting rid of the filibuster, making voting mandatory, restructuring congress, and passing the PRO Act. Even though we often assume that we stand on the cusp of an authoritarian end to democracy, we actually have within our grasp the possibility of making it far more stable and having a Congress that actually represents the people of the country. Today, Tom joins to discuss his book, telling us what it's like to run for Congress in Chicago in a freezing winter (not fun) and why democracy depends on making the labor movement flourish again.

"The labor movement is necessary to pull people into the political process. If it's the right kind of labor movement, it's going to have the goal of all true republican government: to help people govern themselves, to increase people's capacity to be citizens, to increase people's capacity to rule and take responsibility for all aspects of their lives." — Tom Geoghegan

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