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The Most Important and Valuable Fast Politics Episode for Our Times-Laura Gamboa [1]
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Date: 2025-04-04
I just listened this conversation on Molly Jong-Fast’s podcast from April 2, 2025 with Laura Gamboa, Assistant Professor of Democracy and Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She spoke about her article in Foreign Affairs called How to Save a Democracy- Americans Can Learn From Opponents of Authoritarianism Elsewhere, published March 31,2025. (I haven’t read the article but you can by providing your email for a one time free read).
The interview starts at 30:20. She breaks down the ways democracies die, but she goes through the ways we can organize effectively to fight the dictatorial efforts. The transcript is rough so best to listen and take notes. COORDINATION is the way to make each individual’s effort most effective. One example she gave as a big missed opportunity that we all saw was the Joint Session of Congress.
Democrats could have missed the speech altogether and if they all miss it together it’s a huge visible signal of rejection. Or they could have disrupted the speech
one by one. Instead of having just one representative doing it,you could have added all of them doing it one by one, which would have been highly, highly disruptive and incredibly hard to stop. Or you could have leveraged the space to something else. I think what you cannot do is miss the opportunity to use those spaces
And as Molly said, “What you're saying, it seems to me is that Democrats need to do absolutely everything they can to transmit that this is not normal.” Which is exactly what Cory Booker was transmitting!
Yes, and to slow down the agenda. They have the resources to do it. They might not succeed right because they're not the majority, but that doesn't mean they cannot
delay it, or that they cannot leverage those spaces to send important messages to Americans, to their partisan members and to other still society organizations. At the end of the day,what we're seeing is a lot of responses, but they don't seem very coordinated. So you have a few members of the party, members of Congress doing their own thing, you have several society organizations doing their own thing. And
I think Democrats have the ability to use these resources to somehow create a more coordinated response.
Ms Gamboa pointed so clearly to what’s essential in saving Democracy. Organization, Coordination, Networks and Mobilization. Making the efforts of individuals powerful.
E pluribus unum.
You can (and must!) listen here
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