Future Hindsight

American Ideals The Declaration of Independence clearly lists the promises Americans are entitled to: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If people want to use drugs to pursue that happiness, they have a right to do so under the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson himself argued that a government deciding what we are allowed to ingest would be like living under tyranny. Drug prohibition policy, which is based on lies about the negative effects of drug use, would be un-American to him. Legalization and Decriminalization Legalization is the foundation of a humane drug policy because it makes room for regulation. Regulation can generate tax revenue and allows for quality control, which in turn ensures users are not taking adulterated substances that may not be safe. Decriminalization of drugs means you will not go to jail for using or owning certain drugs. However, selling drugs is still a criminal offense. America needs both legalization and decriminalization. Average Users The average drug user in America is the average American across all income brackets. The vast majority of drug users are responsible adults who hold jobs, pay taxes, are good parents, and will never be addicted. They consume drugs in the way most people use tobacco or alcohol. Only between 10-30% of drug users—even of substances like heroin and alcohol—are addicted. The false narrative that drug users are criminals, addicts, or mentally deficient is harmful and perpetuates prohibition drug policies. FIND OUT MORE: Dr. Carl L. Hart is the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University and the Ziff Professor of Psychology in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry. Professor Hart has published numerous scientific and popular articles in the area of neuropsychopharmacology and is co-author of the textbook Drugs, Society and Human Behavior (with Charles Ksir). He has appeared on multiple podcasts, radio and television shows—including Real Time with Bill Maher—and has also appeared in several documentary films including the award-winning "The House I Live In." His essays have been published in several popular publications including The New York Times, Scientific American, The Nation, Ebony, The Root, and O Globo (Brazil's leading newspaper). You can follow him on Twitter @drcarlhart.

Punishment Bureaucracy The Punishment Bureaucracy defines the array of institutions that powerful members of our society have constructed to enforce their dominance in society. This includes police officers, probation officers, prosecutors, judges, private prisons, companies who profit off prisoners, handcuff and police gear manufacturers, and many others involved in the caging of Americans. Instead of being a justice system, the Punishment Bureaucracy helps maintain the status quo and profits massively from incarceration. Who Gets Incarcerated? Our current system is used for social control, not public safety or preventing crime. Police often justify their existence to protect civilians from violent crime. However, only 4% of all police time is spent on violent crime. Most police time is spent punishing those who cannot afford to pay fines or those in possession of marijuana or other drugs. The most common arrest in the US is driving with a suspended license, and suspension most often occurs when someone can't afford to pay a court fee. Police spend most of their time controlling sections of the population to protect the interests of elites, not solving crime and arresting criminals. Justice Reform Many of the leading 'criminal justice reformers' are the same people who built up mass incarceration and the punishment bureaucracy. For example, bail reform from the 1980s has paradoxically resulted in tripling the number of pre-trial detainees. Instead of calling for additional funding for police training or body cameras, we need to increased spending on arts and education, proper mental health counseling, and many other real improvements that improve everyday lives. Our current legal system is designed to control the population; working within that framework is unlikely to yield positive results. FIND OUT MORE: Alec Karakatsanis founded the non-profit Civil Rights Corps and serves as Executive Director. Before that, he was a civil rights lawyer and public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing impoverished people accused of federal crimes; and co-founder of the non-profit organization Equal Justice Under Law. Alec is interested in ending human caging, surveillance, the death penalty, immigration laws, war, and inequality. He graduated from Yale College in 2005 with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and Harvard Law School in 2008, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. If you're a teacher or professor assigning this book to your class, be sure to reach out to [email protected] so that you can get a free copy for your students and for an incarcerated person! You can follow him on Twitter @equalityAlec.

White Collar Crime White collar crime, as originally defined by Edwin Sutherland in 1939, are offenses committed by someone of high social status and respectability in the course of their occupation. Today, we tend to define white collar crime by the nature of the offense, instead of the status of the offender. We think of financial crimes such as fraud or embezzlement, which have a devastating impact on huge portions of the country. Precisely because of the high status of white collar criminals, very few are prosecuted and held accountable for their actions. Massive Scale White collar crime operates on a massive scale. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has pleaded guilty to federal crimes related to its opioid marketing scheme. Over 200,000 people have died of prescription opioid overdoses. In addition, embezzlement and fraud cost US citizens an estimated $800 billion per year. By contrast, property crimes like larceny and theft are heavily policed and account for only about $16 billion in costs per year. Future Accountability The Department of Justice can, and should, create a new division that focuses on prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating big money criminals. Prosecutors need better tools to succeed, such as: strengthening laws surrounding white collar crime; ending the practice of anonymous shell companies to prevent money laundering; corporate transparency laws; as well as protecting and promoting whistleblowers and journalists who uncover these types of crimes. FIND OUT MORE: Jennifer Taub is a legal scholar and advocate whose research and writing focuses on corporate governance, banking and financial market regulation, and white collar crime. Her latest book is Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime. Taub is a professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law where she teaches Civil Procedure, White Collar Crime, and other business and commercial law courses, and was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School during the fall 2019 semester. You can follow her on Twitter @jentaub

Objectification Pride and greed are vices of domination that are at the root of sexual harassment and assault. Narcissistic gender pride casts women as objects to be used, instead of full human beings. This objectification has made it acceptable to subjugate women. Greed prevents holding the rich and powerful members of society accountable, often making it easier for them to offend repeatedly with impunity. Sexual Assault and Harassment Sexual assault and harassment are abuses of power, most often of men over women. Sexual harassment is a federal offense, defined as unwanted sexual discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which includes hostile work environments, and a pattern of unwelcome discrimination by gender. It can be purely verbal and discriminatory. By contrast, sexual assault means any non-consensual sexual act that includes a wide range from touching to rape, and depends on each state. This is a crime, and thus is prosecuted at the state level. Radical Love and Justice Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated for purifying anger and discarding retributive punishment. Retribution and outrage do not create healing or overcome grief. Instead, he proposed combining outrage with a forward-looking faith and a love of humans that recognizes the root of goodness in everyone. Seeking justice through reconciliation and love is a radical way to construct new structures and new relationships, free of revenge and retribution. FIND OUT MORE: Martha C. Nussbaum is currently the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in both the Department of Philosophy and the Law School. In addition, she is an Associate in the Classics Department, the Divinity School, and the Political Science Department and a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. She received her BA from New York University and her MA and PhD from Harvard University. She has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford Universities. Professor Nussbaum is internationally renowned for her work in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy and the arts and is actively engaged in teaching and advising students in these subjects. She has received numerous awards and honorary degrees and is the author of many books and articles. She has received honorary degrees from sixty-three colleges and universities in the US, Canada, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Non-Traditional Labor Several kinds of non-traditional labor in the US leave Americans vulnerable to coercion at work. Prisoners work during their sentence at reduced or even no wages. Student athletes also work hard in employment-like conditions but do not get remunerated. Workfare workers are forced to do menial labor in order to qualify for welfare. Graduate students also work for their advisors and don't qualify for minimum wage. Although not technically considered employment in the US, these are jobs and should be considered as such. Status Coercion Unfair treatment is allowed to proliferate in non-traditional workplaces because bosses hold enormous power. Prisoners are forced to work to keep their "good standing" status, and are denied the right to exercise, purchase better meals, or call loved ones. Student athletes are at the whim of their coaches and must strive to stay in their good graces to receive playing time. Workfare workers are forced to work the menial tasks set forth by their bosses or risk losing their welfare eligibility. Graduate students must stay in the good graces of the professor they work under or risk losing their work or place in the university. Reframing Coercive Work The first step to ending status coercion is to reframe how we think about work. We must acknowledge that graduate students and student athletes—no matter how lucky or privileged—are workers and deserve the protection other workers get. We need to acknowledge that prisoners are also laborers, and that workfare workers are performing real work. Once they are treated as workers, we must give them the tools to bargain collectively, assert their rights, and earn minimum wage. FIND OUT MORE: Erin Hatton, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research focuses on work and political economy, while also extending into the fields of social inequality, labor, law and social policy. Hatton's new book, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment analyzes four very different--and unusual--groups of workers: incarcerated, workfare, college athlete, and graduate student workers. Drawing on more than 120 in-depth interviews across these four groups, in this book she uncovers a new form of labor coercion and analyzes its consequences for workers in America. Her first book, The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America, weaves together gender, race, class and work in a cultural analysis of the temporary help industry and rise of the new economy. You can follow her on Twitter @Eehatton.

Musical Chairs American poverty is a bit like a game of musical chairs. The US only has good opportunities for 8 out of 10 Americans, meaning 2 people always lose. Instead of adding new opportunities or chairs, we shuffle the opportunities around, but 2 of every 10 people still end up without the opportunities. This shows that poverty is a result of the systems we have in place, not personal shortcoming, and if we continue shuffling the opportunities, we will continue having a poverty problem. Poverty Myths Being poor in the US is subject to several damaging myths that make it harder to reduce poverty rates country wide. We think of a poverty rate between 10-15% of the US population, but shockingly 60-75% of Americans will spend at least one year of their lives in poverty. Another myth blames poor Americans for their own poverty, not the systems that maintain poverty in America. We also assume the costs of poverty are borne by the poor, but US taxpayers pay more than $1 trillion per year due to the externalities of poverty. Social Safety Nets The US has a much weaker social safety net than other developed countries. We view poverty as a personal shortcoming that is not to be rewarded with welfare programs or healthcare. Since we think the poor are undeserving of help, we do not invest in social safety nets, creating high rates of poverty. Social safety nets reduce poverty by 75-80% in other counties, whereas the US safety net only reduces it by 25-30%. The most successful anti-poverty program in the US is Social Security. FIND OUT MORE: Mark R. Rank is recognized as a foremost expert on issues of poverty, inequality, and social justice. His research on the life course risk of poverty has demonstrated for the first time that most Americans will experience poverty at some point during their lives. To date, he has written 10 books on a range of subjects, including an exploration of the American Dream, a new understanding of poverty and inequality, and the role of luck and chance in shaping the course of our lives. In addition, he has published articles in numerous academic journals across a wide variety of fields. He has provided research expertise to members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, as well as many national organizations involved in issues of economic and social justice. His work has been cited by then-President Barack Obama, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. You can check out his book Poorly Understood here.

Ideal Peacebuilding The ideal peacebuilding model is context-specific. It heavily relies on grassroots peacebuilding efforts by the local community to address specific causes of violence. It also relies on outsiders using the traditional top-down approach to connect with government officials, elites, rebel leaders, and other power players. These responses should be led by locals with knowledge and supported by outsiders with resources. Communities must make the decisions that impact themselves, instead of outsider interveners. Bottom-Up Peacebuilding Bottom-up peacebuilding is a way to end conflict that focuses on identifying the roots causes of violence in a specific community, and addressing them directly. It engages all participants to reach long-lasting solutions to distinct and sometimes unrelated issues, resolve disputes through mediation, and work with outside organizations to help fund grassroots operations. Bottom-up peacebuilding has often succeeded where top-down peacebuilding efforts have failed. Peace, Inc. Peace, Inc. refers to the standard worldwide system of intervention and peacebuilding, also known as top-down peacebuilding. It focuses on brokering deals between elites, leaders, diplomats, and other high-level players, while ignoring the communities that are directly affected by conflict. It treats outsiders as experts and relegates locals to an inferior status. While outside intervention can bring expertise and resources to war-torn areas, Peace, Inc. tactics are often practically ineffective and can even result in harm. FIND OUT MORE: Séverine Autesserre is an award-winning author, peacebuilder, and researcher, as well as a Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of The Trouble with the Congo, Peaceland, and The Frontlines of Peace, in addition to articles for publications such as Foreign Affairs, International Organization, and The New York Times. She has been involved intimately in the world of international aid for more than twenty years. She has conducted research in twelve different conflict zones, from Colombia to Somalia to Israel and the Palestinian territories. She has worked for Doctors Without Borders in places like Afghanistan and Congo, and at the United Nations headquarters in the United States. Her research has helped shape the intervention strategies of several United Nations departments, foreign affairs ministries, and non-governmental organizations, as well as numerous philanthropists and activists. She has also been a featured speaker at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the United Nations Security Council. You can follow her on Twitter at @SeverineAR.

Public-Private Paradox: America has clearly delineated public and private domains: the public domain is regulated, and the private domain is not. A public-private paradox occurs when a decision made in the private domain creates issues in the public domain. In the case of fracking, choosing to allow drilling in your land is a private decision. That decision creates many externalities such as overuse of roads, unwanted sights and sounds, contaminated well water for the neighborhood, which harms the public good. Tragedy of the Commons The Tragedy of the Commons explains how individual decisions pertaining to common resources can lead to degradation of that resource, hurting everyone. It's in everyone's own best interest to use as much of a common resource as possible, because if they don't, someone else will. Unfortunately, when everyone does this the shared resource is often quickly degraded. In the case of fracking, many landowners decided to lease land because their neighbors were doing it, and choosing not to lease would mean absorbing the externalities of fracking without any compensation. American Property Rights American landowners own their land "up to heaven, and down to hell," meaning they own both the air and subsurface rights along with their land. This is quite different from almost all other countries, where subsurface mineral rights are owned, regulated, and sold by government bodies. Landowners in the US make entirely private decisions to allow oil and gas drilling on their property without the consent of their neighbors, and in some cases without any regulation from local, state, or federal governments. FIND OUT MORE: Colin Jerolmack is a professor of sociology and environmental studies at NYU, where he also teaches courses on human-animal relations and chairs the Environmental Studies Department. His first book, The Global Pigeon explores how human-animal relations shape our experience of urban life. His second book, Up To Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town follows residents of a rural Pennsylvania community who leased their land for gas drilling in order to understand how the exercise of property rights can undermine the commonwealth. He also co-edited the volume Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation with Shamus Khan. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons. You can follow Colin on Twitter @jerolmack.

New Socratic Method Socrates used direct questioning to make ancient Athenians reflect critically on their views, which often made people look foolish. The New Socratic Method is a kinder, gentler version that can actually change people's minds without resentment. Clarifying questions can reveal why ideas are bad without antagonism. The New Socratic Method can be used to strengthen mental immunity and root out bad ideas. Reason's Fulcrum Reason's Fulcrum is a key part of the mind's mental immunity. It states that if two people have differing points of view, the one with the best reasons supporting their argument will "win" and the loser must reflect and change their mind. When Reason's Fulcrum is used, good reasons can change people's minds. When it isn't working, people lose the sense that speech and actions have accountability, and it becomes very difficult to change minds. Substantive Collaborative Dialogue One of the best ways to strengthen mental immunity in yourself and others is to have the difficult conversations you might otherwise shy away from. Asking hard and often philosophical questions like "What is a bad idea?" or engaging with family and friends who hold bad ideas can actually boost your mental immunity. Collaborative reasoning and exchanging honest dialogue is the best way to spread good ideas and build mental immunity. FIND OUT MORE: Andy Norman, Ph.D., directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. A public philosopher and award-winning author, he is developing the conceptual foundations of cognitive immunology—the emerging science of mental immunity. He thinks this science explains how demagogues short-circuit minds and how ideologies corrupt moral understanding. In his book Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, he identifies several mental immune disorders and develops the kind of mind-vaccine that could inoculate future generations against the worst outbreaks of viral nonsense. You can follow him on Twitter @DrAndyNo.

Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/hopeful12 and use code hopeful12 for 12 free meals, including free shipping! The Erosion of America Since the 1980s America has experienced an erosion of government regulations, societal norms, and equality. Trickle-down economics created a massive wealth gap. The Iran-Contra scandal set a new, low accountability standard for the highest levels of government. 24-hour news appeared as the Fairness Doctrine fell. This background, coupled with reality TV and social media, provided the perfect conditions to mainstream someone like Donald Trump. Myth of American Exceptionalism Every country is susceptible to democracy decay. American exceptionalism has helped mainstream government corruption because it blinds us from warning signs like illegal government acts or the threat of authoritarianism. Pretending that institutional collapse cannot happen in the US, makes it difficult to admit that we have experienced decades of decline in our institutions. Trump: Political Insider The idea that Trump is a political neophyte is a PR fiction the media attached itself to in the run-up of the 2016 election. Trump was mentored by GOP operative Roy Cohn and flirted with a presidential run as early as 1984. He considered running again in 1988, and then ran in 2000, and again in 2012. Trump has a more than 40-year interest in politics and has remained close with political operatives like Roger Stone throughout. FIND OUT MORE: Sarah Kendzior is a writer who lives in St Louis, Missouri. She is best known for her book Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, her reporting on political and economic problems in the US, her prescient coverage of the 2016 election and the Trump administration, and her academic research on authoritarian states in Central Asia. She is also the co-host of Gaslit Nation, a weekly podcast which covers corruption in the Trump administration and the rise of authoritarianism around the world. Since 2017, she has been covering the transformation of the US under the Trump administration, writing on authoritarian tactics, kleptocracy, racism and xenophobia, media, voting rights, technology, the environment, and the Russian interference case, among other topics. She is an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail, where she focuses primarily on US politics. She is also a frequent contributor to Fast Company, NBC News, and other national outlets. From 2012-2014 she was an op-ed columnist for Al Jazeera English. In addition to working as a journalist, she is a researcher and scholar. She has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in Saint Louis (2012) and an MA in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University (2006). Most of her work focuses on the authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union and how the internet affects political mobilization, self-expression, and trust. You can follow Sarah on Twitter @sarahkendzior.

Evil Geniuses Influential conservatives have capitalized on a wave of cultural nostalgia after the turbulent 1960s to turn our economy into a version of extreme capitalism. Economists like Milton Friedman, politicians like Ronald Reagan and Mitch McConnell, and CEOs like the Koch Brothers have used money, policy, secrecy, and cultural movements to demonize the federal government and rig our economy for the rich. Together with neoliberalism from the left, the New Deal was replaced by the raw deal. Investing in America The US government is responsible for many of the greatest inventions of the last century, but does not capitalize on these discoveries. If the government acted like a private enterprise, it would have more money to invest in communities as well as support innovation. In Republican-led, individualist Alaska, royalties earned from natural gas and oil drillers is distributed to all Alaskans every year. The program is a form of socialism, a universal basic income. The government could use the Alaska model to reap the benefits of its assets, like charging industry for air pollution. Constant Engagement Continuous civic engagement is the way to undo decades of economic and civic destruction. Showing up to vote once every two or four years is not enough. Doing the steady work of championing good candidates who believe in the big ideas, and discussing the issues in a non-binary way are key to achieving basic fairness. Engagement looks different around the US, and what works in Queens, New York, will not work in Colorado or Nebraska. FIND OUT MORE: Kurt Andersen is a writer. He spent his first 20 years in Nebraska, and most of the rest in New York City. His most recent book is Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, a companion volume to Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International from 2000 to 2020. It was broadcast on 250 stations and distributed by podcast to almost 1 million listeners each week. Andersen was honored twice by New York State Associated Press for the best radio interview of the year, and the program won Peabody Awards twice. As an editor, Kurt co-founded the transformative satirical magazine Spy and served as editor-in-chief of New York. He also co-founded Inside, a digital and print publication covering the media and entertainment industries, oversaw a relaunch of Colors magazine, co-founded the online newsletter Very Short List, and served as editor-at-large for Random House. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt Institute, and taught at the Art Center College of Design (where he was "Visionary in Residence") and the School of Visual Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Anne Kreamer. You can follow him on Twitter @kbandersen.

We are launching an all-new authors' season, focusing on books that get into the weeds of America's most vexing problems. We'll be talking about everything from criminal justice, philosophy, to economics, labor, and poverty. Our first guest is the legendary Kurt Andersen, on his latest book: Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America: A Recent History. He looks under the hood of the movements that powered our continuous shift to the right, starting with a strong yearning for nostalgia. Sarah Kendzior, author of Hiding In Plain Sight, The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, follows on the heels of that interview with a deep dive into how the former president was decades in the making. And after that, we speak to Andy Norman, the author of Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. He offers tools to inoculate our minds against the worst forms of ideological contagion. It will be a thought-provoking season of visionary and practical ideas to reimagine our future.

Being a Good Neighbor Solving community problems can begin with a simple, common goal of being a good neighbor. Deep human relationships with people make the hard conversations—where we don't agree—possible. Finding common ground with different backgrounds can be hard, but focusing on caring for your neighbors strengthens communities and personal relationships alike. Storytelling Personal stories are an incredibly powerful tool for community building. Stories are the ways we make sense of life. When you tell someone your story, they stop seeing you as an issue or an enemy, and look at you as a person. This shared humanity lets us see the world through others' perspectives, which is critical to being a good neighbor. Society's Full Potential Future Hindsight and Shelter in Place share a common goal: to help us realize our best selves. Shelter in Place focuses on the microscale through personal stories and motivation. Future Hindsight hopes to inspire listeners go from the personal to get engaged on the community level and help realize our society's full potential. Find out more about Laura and Shelter in Place: Many whose life has been overturned by the pandemic are struggling — yet the Shelter in Place team's response was not simply to flee, but to create. Narrated by Laura Joyce Davis, Shelter in Place is the podcast that follows their travels — physical and emotional — through the pandemic. Through open-hearted storytelling and with an inviting voice, Laura gives us the agency to face the day, with a friend. She writes to explore the triumph of the human spirit in a broken world. A Fulbright scholar, Laura also won the Poets & Writers Exchange Award, earned Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices nominations for fiction, and was a finalist for WNYC's podcast accelerator. In previous lives, she was a running coach, a capella singer, and scholarship athlete. Laura's writing has often intertwined with nonprofit work. She writes for Micro Business Mentors, a nonprofit providing entrepreneurial loans and training in developing countries. As a Fulbright scholar to the Philippines in 2010, Laura spent a year working with sex trafficking survivors, whose courage in the face of corrosive injustice inspired her novel, which won the 2013 California Writers Exchange Award. You can follow her on Twitter @LauraJoyceDavis.

Campaign Finance Laws The Supreme Court often operates like a conservative activist group to help the GOP. One of the most egregious ways they've tipped the scales is in campaign finance. Starting with their infamous Buckley ruling in 1976, SCOTUS categorized corporate political donations as free speech. Their 2011 follow-up, Citizens United, removed almost all limitations on political spending, creating a vast increase in campaign spending. Rich Americans and corporations are now free to give as much as they want to whoever they want. This has greatly benefitted Republicans at the cost of electoral fairness. Poverty The liberal, pro-New Deal, Warren Court was replaced in 1969 by the conservative Burger Court. The contrast was stark. One of the Warren Court's last cases provided significant due process protections to poor Americans whose welfare benefits were in danger. As soon as the Nixon-appointed Burger stepped in, decisions changed. The Burger Court immediately heard a case involving family caps on welfare and ruled in the opposite direction. Families with more than four children could only receive benefits for the maximum cap of four children, exacerbating poverty for large families. With that ruling, a new tone was struck and SCOTUS has ruled against the poor ever since. Education The conservative Burger Court also devastated public education. It reversed a Texas decision, which had ruled that the state must fund rich and poor school districts equally. This SCOTUS decision essentially created a tiered school system with affluent neighborhoods on the top and poor ones on the bottom. Next, it ruled that desegregation efforts in schools could not cross urban/suburban lines. This transformative ruling undercut desegregation efforts and exacerbated schooling inequities. Today, many schools are segregated by both race and class because of these rulings. Find out more: Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board and senior writer for Time magazine, is the author of Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. He is also the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was president of volume 100 of the Harvard Law Review. You can follow Adam on Twitter @adamscohen.

Race-Conscious Parenting Race-conscious parenting affirms that we should notice race, and to recognize racism and racial injustice. It rejects colorblindness, which is essentially white silence. Race-conscious parenting embraces multicultural, multiracial communities and encourages children to be active participants in anti-racist engagement. Race-conscious parenting is a commitment to teach about racism and activate for racial justice. Smog of Racism Racism is like smog: it exists whether we notice it or not. It's worse when we don't realize it exists because then we do not counter it. It doesn't take an adult to actively teach racism to children. White families often don't realize or talk about the smog of racism, which creates a space for children to interpret the world themselves. They will draw their own conclusions when systems of injustice remain invisible to them. Health White Identity Healthy white identity in the US is anti-racist. It acknowledges the full history of the nation, both good and bad, from enslavement and genocide to the abolition and civil rights movements. It also rejects white guilt, minimizing vulnerability to white nationalist recruitment. Whites have agency to choose what kind of white person they want to be, reject racist legacies, and to work across racial lines to create a more just society for everyone. Find out more: The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Harvey is an award-winning author, educator and public speaker. Her work focuses on ethics and race, gender, sexuality, activism, spirituality and politics—with particular attention to how religion shows up in these dimensions of our shared social life. Her greatest passion and longtime work, however, persistently and pointedly return to racial justice and white anti-racism. Her most recent books, Raising White Kids and Dear White Christians, take a decidedly practical turn. They bring her experience as an anti-racist activist and educator to bear on conversations about how white communities can more deeply support racial justice work being led by communities of color. She is also the author of Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty and a co-editor of Disrupting White Supremacy: White People on What We Need To Do. As our nation grapples with how to challenge and change white socialization to support anti-racist development in children and youth, she draws on her experience as both a seasoned activist and a parent to offer concrete and accessible models for doing so. Her work is rooted in evidence-based developmental theory, but also a relentless vision of a more just future in which all of us can flourish. You can follow her on Twitter @DrJenHarvey.

Expanding Access Health insurance is essential to accessing healthcare. The uninsured do not get routine preventive care and, therefore, experience lower health outcomes. We must have a system that includes everyone, whether through private or public sector options. The Affordable Care Act, which was just bolstered by the newly passed American Rescue Plan, goes a long way, but many states still need to expand Medicaid in order to close the insurance gap. COVID in Minority Communities COVID hit minority communities hardest. African-Americans were three times more likely to get COVID, and twice as likely to die from it, as their white counterparts. Structural discrimination means more minorities are in public-facing jobs, working in grocery stores or driving buses, increasing their exposure to the virus. Minorities also traditionally suffer from being in jobs that don't offer health insurance, living in neighborhoods with no doctors, and facing discrimination within the healthcare system. Representation in the Medical Profession Diversity at all levels of our medical system, from the top down, is critical to building more equitable health infrastructure. Increasing diversity in healthcare professionals, such as doctors, would be a good place to start. Currently, the rate of African-American men going to medical school is lower than when Dr. Benjamin attended school. In addition, diverse health professionals should be groomed and trained, and given the opportunity to become leaders. Find out more: Dr. Georges Benjamin is known as one of the nation's most influential physician leaders because he speaks passionately and eloquently about the health issues having the most impact on our nation today. From his firsthand experience as a physician, he knows what happens when preventive care is not available and when the healthy choice is not the easy choice. As Executive Director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) since 2002, he is leading the Association's push to make America the healthiest nation in one generation. Prior to APHA, Benjamin served as Secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He became Secretary of Health in Maryland in April 1999, following four years as its deputy secretary for public health services. As Secretary, Benjamin oversaw the expansion and improvement of the state's Medicaid program. Benjamin, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He is board-certified in internal medicine and a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, a fellow emeritus of the American College of Emergency Physicians and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health. You can follow the American Public Health Association @PublicHealth.

Inclusive excellence Diverse leadership and promoting inclusive excellence benefits everyone. In fact, it's critical to success in any organization. Always including women and minorities in a pool of job candidates increases the likelihood in finding the best possible person. This is also especially important in traditionally non-diverse positions or departments, like the IT department. Diverse leaders can both promote new ways of thinking and prevent harmful decisions from being made. Social Mobility Higher education provides social mobility to many students, and is perhaps the most important aspect of a college degree. Many of UNC Greensboro's students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, but arrive with intelligence and drive to succeed. UNCG is committed to replicating some of the advantages of well-off students for its own student body and delivering excellence in education. Unsurprisingly, UNCG is rated number 1 for social mobility in North Carolina. Get Invited to the Cookout Cross cultural understanding is key to an open and diverse future. Getting invited to the cookout by a person from another cultural background is a great way to get outside of your own identity, form new connections with new groups, and learn about different ways of life. The most important step in overcoming ignorance and indifference involves listening and being open to the experience of discovering the norms and traditions of other groups. Find out more: Dr. Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., was elected the eleventh Chancellor of UNC Greensboro (UNCG) in 2015, and brings a wealth of experience from a career that spans more than 30 years in higher education. During his tenure, UNCG has surpassed a record 20,000 students; grown its endowment, research enterprise, and overall facilities and campus infrastructure; significantly increased its fundraising; and elevated the presence, reputation, and real-world impact of the largest university in the North Carolina Triad region. Prior to this appointment, Chancellor Gilliam served as Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs for seven years and was a longtime UCLA Professor of Public Policy and Political Science. His research focused on strategic communications, public policy, electoral politics, and racial and ethnic politics. As Dean of UCLA Luskin, Dr. Gilliam shepherded a $50 million naming gift and launched and executed an ambitious strategic plan and capital campaign, establishing the school as a regional leader in addressing and finding solutions to some of society's most pressing problems. You can follow Chancellor Gilliam on Twitter @UNCGChancellor.

Implicit Bias in Preschool Teachers In a study to detect implicit bias, preschool teachers were instructed to watch a video of four young children (black and white, boy and girl) and identify potential behavioral issues. By tracking their eyes, the study showed that the teachers watched the black children more closely for behavioral problems than white children. When asked, teachers said they thought they had a gender bias and watched the two boys more closely. In fact, the defining factor was race. Preschool Expulsion Preschool children, ages 3 and 4, are expelled at a rate more than three times that of K-12 combined. More shockingly, they are expelled for normal, age-appropriate behavior, such as running in hallways or being rambunctious. Preschool programs are supposed to prepare children how to behave in school; instead, they often punish children who don't know the very rules they are meant to teach. Expulsion at such a young age can have wide-ranging negative impacts on a child. Free, universal Pre-Kindergarten offers a way to mitigate implicit bias because it would provide access to underprivileged children and create diverse learning spaces. Many preschool and childcare options today are segregated because of de-facto housing segregation. Instead of teaching different groups of children differently – whether in expensive private preschools or in low-income neighborhood programs – all children would learn the same set of standards, rules, and preparatory practices, promoting equality at an early age. Find out more: Walter S. Gilliam is the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale University Child Study Center, as well as the Director of The Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. Dr. Gilliam is co-recipient of the prestigious 2008 Grawemeyer Award in Education for the coauthored book A Vision for Universal Preschool Education. His research involves early childhood education and intervention policy analysis (specifically how policies translate into effective services), ways to improve the quality of prekindergarten and child care services, the impact of early childhood education programs on children's school readiness, and effective methods for reducing classroom behavior problems and preschool expulsion. His scholarly writing addresses early childhood care and education programs, school readiness, and developmental assessment of young children. He has led national analyses of state-funded prekindergarten policies and mandates, how prekindergarten programs are being implemented across the range of policy contexts, and the effectiveness of these programs at improving school readiness and educational achievement, as well as experimental and quasi-experimental studies on methods to improve early education quality. Dr. Gilliam actively provides consultation to state and federal decision-makers in the U.S. and other countries and is frequently called to provide U.S. Congressional testimony and briefings on issues related to early care and education. You can follow him on Twitter @WalterGilliam.

Achieving Education Equity Championing Indigenous students to be successful in school systems starts with school curriculums – telling the accurate history of the United States – and leadership that represents the Indigenous Americans they serve. Schools need to create spaces where Indigenous students can be unapologetically Indigenous by building immersion units and hiring Indigenous teachers. Most importantly, Native leaders, educators, and students need to be involved in each step of the process. Education Today The US education system was built to eliminate the Indigenous, and curriculum choice continues to perpetuate the silencing and erasure of Indigenous history. As a result, Native students are often subjected to discrimination by white teachers and administrators, and suffer high disciplinary rates. Native students in South Dakota today have one of the lowest achievement rates, graduation rates, and even mobility rates. Though they add up to about 10% of South Dakota public school students, only 1.6% of staff is Indigenous. History Starting in 1868, Western education was imposed on Native Americans. Children were forcibly taken and put in boarding schools. Native elders refer to this now-abandoned practice as the "severing of the sacred loop." The goal was to "tolerate" or assimilate Indigenous students, removing them from their cultures and ways of life. Trauma has been the biggest repercussion of the boarding school movement, and the current education system has failed the Indigenous for generations. Find out more: Sarah Pierce, Director of Education Equity at NDN Collective, is Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Pierce has 8 years of experience working and advocating for Title VI Indian Education Programs, working at Rapid City Area Schools in South Dakota and at Omaha Public Schools in Nebraska. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a master's in education degree from Creighton University, and a PK-12 Administrator endorsement from the University of South Dakota. Pierce will lead NDN Collective's education equity campaign work, expanding opportunities for Native American students to have access to culturally relevant and culturally responsive learning environments. Amy Sazue, NDN Collective Organizer, is Sicangu and Oglala Lakota, and an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. She is a teacher and program coordinator, and also has experience working in development. She has associate degrees from Bay Mills Community College in Education, a bachelor's degree in Early Childhood Education from Oglala Lakota College, and is currently working on a master's degree in Nonprofit Management and Leadership through Arizona State University. You can follow NDN Collective on Twitter @ndncollective.

Child Separation Policy's History The United States has a long history of using child separation to further racial nationalism. The two main groups targeted by these terrorizing policies were African Americans and Native Americans. Enslaved families were routinely split up, and Black families continue to suffer from child separation today thanks to 20th century laws like Suitable Home Rules and other similar legal mechanisms. Children of Indigenous Peoples were forcibly removed and put in boarding schools. The current separation of Central American children at the southern border follows these precedents. Boarding Schools The removal of Native children was originally considered a progressive policy to end the Indian Wars. Putting Indigenous children in boarding schools was touted as a non-violent solution to ending a 'native problem' at the time of westward expansion. The true ultimate goal was to turn Native children into a servant class, so it is not surprising that these boarding schools were rife with abuse. This program created mass trauma for entire generations of Native Americans, which is still felt heavily today. It also caused incalculable harm to the transmission of tribal culture, language, and tradition. Foster Homes As the Black freedom movement transformed into a movement of desegregation in public accommodations, Black children became the focus of the civil rights movement. At the same time, white segregationists focused attention on welfare and impoverished mothers, pushing narratives of welfare fraud. The more Black communities fought for their freedom, the more welfare was cut. Eventually, the small child welfare program that primarily served white families became an agency that actively worked to take Black children. Through Suitable Home Rules, the government villainized Black mothers and remove their children. This welfare system remains in place today. Find out more: Professor Laura Briggs, PhD is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. She received her A.B. from Mount Holyoke College, her M.T.S. from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University. Her research studies the relationship between reproductive politics, neoliberalism, and the longue durée of U.S. empire and imperialism. Briggs has also been at the forefront of rethinking the field and frameworks of transnational feminisms. Her newly published book Taking Children: A History of American Terror, examines the 400-year-old history of the United States' use of taking children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America's founding to Donald Trump's policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border—as a violent tool for political ends. Briggs is a public intellectual whose work has been featured in court cases, podcasts, and journalism, including National Public Radio, Slate, PBS, New Republic, Indian Country Today, and Ms. Magazine. She began her intellectual career as a journalist for Gay Community News. She regularly teaches seminars on transnational feminisms, reproductive politics, and contemporary feminist theory.

Colorblind Organizing US unions traditionally operate on a 'colorblind' approach to organizing, but focusing on class issues alone often fails to acknowledge that class is also racially coded. Unions need to combat racial disparities and inequality within its own membership and leadership. Diverse leadership brings lived experience to decision-making and problem-solving that can work against racist and classist discrimination. Union Innovation Innovation in organizing helps better serve union members. 'Whole-union organizing' looks at all the problems facing a union demographic. These may include immigration, police violence, and institutional safety issues, as well as race and pay issues. Working to alleviate these types of problems improves members' lives. Addressing issues of justice, in addition to economics, is key to the future of the labor market and labor movements. New Labor Laws & Equity Creation Current labor laws are 90 years old and need to be updated and reimagined. New laws should strive to create racial and economic equity, as well as social, prison, and climate justice. For example, setting pay-scales by industry can eliminate race and gender discrimination; and loan forgiveness could be based on wealth instead of income, alleviating the burden of student debt for the poor. Find out more: Tamara L. Lee, Esq. is an industrial engineer, labor lawyer, and Rutgers professor. She received her Ph.D. from the department of labor relations, law and history from the ILR School at Cornell University. Her academic research focuses on the popular participation of workers in macro-level political and economic reform in Cuba and the United States. She also conducts research on the political practice of workers under the National Labor Relations Act, the intersection of labor and racial justice, cross-movement solidarity building and the impact of radical adult education on workplace democracy. Her teaching focuses on identity politics in the workplace, and labor market discrimination. You can follow her on Twitter @tamilee2003

Government Created Segregation The US government codified overt segregation in housing policy at the beginning of the 20th century. The New Deal created the Federal Housing Administration, which required all new public or government-backed housing developments to be segregated. Zoning laws and plans around the country segregrated urban areas that were already integrated, and relegated African-Americans to less desirable areas. The government sought to solve the housing crisis after WWII by underwriting the development of suburbs for whites only. It also mandated racial covenants against African-Americans to secure housing loans and created red-lining and income-based discrimination to segregate urban areas. Unequal Access African Americans were excluded from government programs designed to create homeownership by being denied access to purchase a suburban home and to qualify for a mortgage. The Home Owners Loan Corporation provided government-backed, low-interest loans to whites who wanted to buy a house but refused to insure African Americans' loans. After World War II, the VA provided subsidized huge housing developments for white returning soldiers by allowing them to buy homes on mortgage without a down payment. Finally, real estate developers would not receive government-secured loans from banks to build suburban neighborhoods if they sold homes to African-Americans. These economic policies created and then entrenched housing segregation. Segregated Labor Organized labor flourished during and after the New Deal, but only whites felt the benefits. Unions were allowed to segregate their workforces, and some unions – like the construction workers' union – excluded Blacks outright. Blacks were routinely denied jobs held for whites and were never promoted if it meant overseeing whites. African American workers were forced to pay full union dues but only received partial fringe benefits, and the benefits of collective bargaining sometimes only applied to white workers. Being forced into lower-paying jobs exacerbated the income and wealth disparities between Blacks and whites. Find out more: Richard Rothstein is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. He is also the author of many other articles and books on race and education, which can be found on his at the Economic Policy Institute. Previous influential books include Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black–White Achievement Gap and Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right. If you'd like to get a notice about the New Movement to Redress Racial Segregation, send an email to Carrie at [email protected]. Refer us to your friends and get a free button or Moleskine notebook! Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

What is the Filibuster? In the Senate, a bill passes if it receives more than half of the vote. To bring a vote to the floor, the Majority Leader asks Senate members if anyone has any objections before moving to a simple majority vote. If any member objects, the filibuster comes into play. The filibuster forces a debate on the bill. A 'cloture' vote must be taken to end this debate and move forward with the original vote. This cloture vote requires 60 votes, significantly more than is needed to pass the legislation. Since any senator can object to any bill and force a debate that can only be overcome with 60 votes, the minority party can effectively scuttle any legislation without a vote if they control 41 or more seats. Undemocratic Filibuster Proponents of the filibuster argue that it promotes bipartisanship because it forces the majority party to negotiate its way out of the cloture vote. The Senate is already an undemocratic institution because it favors rural (mostly red) states and is not based on population. The filibuster further increases this undemocratic nature by forcing any vote to overcome a supermajority—something nearly impossible in today's polarized world. It also increases the power of a small minority of senators who can use to unilaterally end a vote on any bill they don't like and allows them to do so at will, without negotiation. The filibuster has a long history of terminating civil rights discussions and scuttling equality proposals for this reason. Ending the filibuster would force the minority party to negotiate with the majority to create better legislation instead of killing anything that comes to the floor. Eliminating the Filibuster Both Democratic and Republican Majority Leaders have already set a precedent for ending the filibuster in the last decade. Abolishing the filibuster outright would require 67 votes—an impossibility. There is another way, however. First, a cloture vote on a bill must be taken. If it fails to reach 60 votes, the Senate Parliamentarian will rule that the vote failed, ending its chances to become law. Once this occurs, the Senate Majority leader can object to the Parliamentarian's ruling. Only 51 votes are needed to overturn this ruling. That sets a new precedent, dictating only 51 votes are required to end cloture. Since the Senate operates on precedent, this will be the new standard, and the filibuster will no longer need a supermajority to end cloture, effectively ending its minority power. Find out more: Fix Our Senate is a campaign committed to tackling the filibuster problem head-on and making sure that Biden and the Senate majority can deliver on the promises they made to voters and make the progress our country desperately needs. Its highest priority is the elimination of the filibuster, an outdated Senate tool that gives veto power to a fraction of senators representing as little as 11% of the American population. President Obama recently called it "a Jim Crow relic" that cannot be allowed to continue standing in the way of progress. Fix Our Senate is focused on the rules and procedural changes needed to fix the broken Senate, but the campaign is ultimately about moving toward a government that can respond to its citizens and address the major problems we face. From COVID-19 response efforts, to critically-needed democracy reforms, the climate crisis, poverty and rampant inequality, the gun violence epidemic, police brutality and structural racism, health care access and affordability, child care, education and student loans, and so much more – meaningful progress will be impossible until the Senate is fixed. You can follow Eli on Twitter @elizupnick, and Fix Our Senate @fixoursenate.

Critical Race Theory Critical Race Theory is a theory of justice designed to respond to the endemic racism in America's legal system. It places intersectional anti-racism at the center of analysis of law, politics, and power. It examines the origins of the idea of race and seeks to understand how institutions continue to perpetuate racism today. Although slavery and the genocide of Indigenous people have ceased, these past practices continue to inform our institutional systems and create injustice. Critical Race Theory reveals unconscious bias and systemic disenfranchisement as legacies of racist attitudes and legislation. Inequality as a Threat to Freedom Inequality harms our freedoms in many ways. Corporate monopolization harms our freedom to choose where we get our food, products, and information. Inequality in the form of sexism and racism harms our freedom of expression, such as valuing some people's ideas over others. Education inequality can harm our freedom to learn, communicate, and succeed. Income inequality can dictate who people listen to in politics through campaign contributions and investments. Solving these inequalities will create a level playing field for everyday citizens to thrive in our society. Harmful Speech Valuing all speech necessitates cracking down on harmful speech. Hate speech has spread rapidly around the internet, which has a stifling effect on many who would otherwise make their voices heard. Hate speech is often directed toward women leaders, journalists, and authors. It can result in resignations and the withdrawal from public life—effectively stifling free speech. Free speech is critical to democracy, so we must keep tabs on speech that decreases the democratic conversation, like racism and misogyny. The market of ideas is suffering a failure, and like the real financial markets, we need better regulation to keep it working correctly. Find out more: Mari J. Matsuda is an American lawyer, activist, critical race theorist, and law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii. Prior to returning to Richardson in the fall of 2008, she was a professor at the UCLA School of Law – the first Asian American woman to be tenured at a law school in the US – and Georgetown University Law Center. She specialized in the fields of torts, constitutional law, legal history, feminist theory, Critical Race Theory, and civil rights law. From her earliest academic publications, Matsuda has spoken from the perspective and increasingly used the method that has come to be known as Critical Race Theory. She is not only one of its most powerful practitioners, but is among a handful of legal scholars credited with its origin. Voices from the bottom, Matsuda believes—and critical race theory posits—have the power to open up new legal concepts of even constitutional dimension. Paradoxically, bringing in the voices of outsiders has helped to make Matsuda's work central to the legal canon. A Yale Law School librarian ranked three of her publications as among the "top 10 most cited law review articles" for their year of publication. Judges and scholars regularly quote her work. She has also published several books, such as Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment and We Won't Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative Action. Matsuda serves on national advisory boards of social justice organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Asian American Justice Center. By court appointment, she served as a member of the Texaco Task Force on Equality and Fairness, assisting in the implementation of the then-largest employment discrimination settlement in U.S. history. A Magazine recognized her in 1999 as one of the 100 most influential Asian Americans. Refer us to your friends and get a free button or Moleskine notebook! Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

The Lost Cause Before and during the Civil War, Southern Baptist leaders argued that slavery was just and the slaveholding South represented the pinicle of human civilization. After the South lost, they began to espouse the idea of the Lost Cause—that the war on Earth may be lost, but God would ultimately redeem the South with the Second Coming. This idea became widespread throughout the South, and can still be seen today in Confederate Monuments like the one in Richmond, VA which reads "God Will Vindicate' in Latin, a direct reference to the idea of the Lost Cause, and the salvation awaiting Southerners. White Churches Perpetuate White Supremacy The Southern Baptist Church was founded on white supremacist principles and helped maintain a quasi-caste system where white Christians benefited. Other denominations like Protestant and Catholic display similar blind spots to—and even affinities for—white supremacy. Regular churchgoers are no less racist than the average American, and church-going evangelicals hold more racist attitudes than the average. Under the Doctrine of Discovery, the Catholic Church encouraged Catholic explorers to claim the lands of non-white, non-Christians, and thus has held up white supremacy for hundreds of years. White Christian America's Warped Morality White supremacy has warped and stunted the morality of white Christian Americans. After the Civil War, Southern Baptists argued civilization was in decline that could only be rectified by Jesus's Second Coming. This belief focused on inner piety while waiting for Jesus to reappear – being "good Christians" – and overlooked the injustices caused by white supremacy in society. This inward looking theology created a moral framework that sought reconciliation without the work of repairing the damage and/or achieving justice. Find out more: Robert P. Jones is the CEO and Founder of PRRI and a leading scholar and commentator on religion, culture, and politics. He is the author of "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," and "The End of White Christian America," which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Jones writes regularly on politics, culture, and religion for The Atlantic online, NBC Think, and other outlets. He is frequently featured in major national media, such as CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. Jones serves on the national program committee for the American Academy of Religion and is a past member of the editorial boards for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Politics and Religion, a journal of the American Political Science Association. He holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University, an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a B.S. in computing science and mathematics from Mississippi College. Jones was selected by Emory University's Graduate Division of Religion as Distinguished Alumnus of the Year in 2013, and by Mississippi College's Mathematics Department as Alumnus of the Year in 2016. Before founding PRRI, Jones worked as a consultant and senior research fellow at several think tanks in Washington, D.C., and was an assistant professor of religious studies at Missouri State University. Refer us to your friends and get a free button or Moleskine notebook! Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

Surveillance Capitalism Surveillance Capitalism is the dominant economic logic in our world today. It claims private human experience for the marketplace and turns it into a commodity. Vast amounts of personal data are necessary -- often harvested without our knowledge or consent –- in order to predict future behavior. Surveillance capitalists create certainties for companies by modifying people's behavior. Instrumentarian Power Instrumentarianism seeks to modify, predict, monetize, and control human behavior through the instruments of surveillance capitalism, our digital devices. Having mined all of our data, instrumentarians can tune and herd users into specific actions through triggers and subliminal messaging. It is ultimately a political project intended to install computational governance instead of democratic governance. Protecting Your Privacy A myriad of programs and apps can block tracking and scramble your location, making your behavioral data less accessible or even inaccessible. Since instrumentarians gain their power through our use of their devices, limiting internet use and working in-person reduces the power they have over you. Find out more: Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Her masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, synthesizes years of research and thinking to reveal a world in which technology users are neither customers, employees, nor products. Instead, they are the raw material for new procedures of manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order: a surveillance economy. In the late 1980s, her decade-in-the-making book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, became an instant classic that foresaw how computers would revolutionize the modern workplace. At the dawn of the twenty-first century her influential The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (with James Maxmin), written before the invention of the iPod or Uber, predicted the rise of digitally-mediated products and services tailored to the individual. It warned of the individual and societal risks if companies failed to alter their approach to capitalism. You can follow her on Twitter @shoshanazuboff

Innovation in the Classroom Classroom innovation stems from teachers and students working together to pursue subjects that excite students to learn. Examples include allowing students to design robots and make documentaries about local landmarks. In the age of Zoom learning, keeping students engaged by letting them solve community problems or pursue independent learning goals will achieve much more than endless worksheets and standardized test prep. Standards V. Standardized Tests Implementing and upholding academic standards are not the same as demanding high scores on standardized tests. Engaging and exciting students about a topic should be the focus, like teaching students to think critically like scientists. Information retention rates are abysmal when the emphasis is to just regurgitate scientific facts for a test. Other basic standards should include knowing how democracy works, reading, writing, and thinking critically. High School Education A high school education should prepare all Americans for a life of civic and economic success. Our current education system fails to deliver this promise, which has resulted in many of our current social problems. Maintaining a functioning and thriving democracy requires high-quality education that equips students with pragmatic life and civic engagement skills. Find out more: Ted Dintersmith is one of America's leaders in innovation, entrepreneurship, and education. Ted has become one of America's leading advocates for education policies that foster creativity, innovation, motivation, and purpose. He knows what skills are valuable in a world of innovation, and how we can transform our schools to prepare kids for their futures. His contributions span film, books, philanthropy, and the hard work of going all across America. He's funded and executive produced acclaimed education documentaries, including Most Likely To Succeed, (Sundance, AFI, and Tribeca). With co-author Tony Wagner, he wrote Most Likely To Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era. During the 2015/16 school year, he went to all fifty U.S. states, meeting with governors, legislators, educators, parents, and students, and encouraging communities to work collectively to re-imagine school and its purpose. The culmination of that effort was his recent book What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America. Ted's professional experience includes two decades in venture capital, including being ranked by Business 2.0 as the top-performing U.S. venture capitalist for 1995-1999. He chaired the Public Policy Committee of the Board of the National Venture Capital Association. In the public sector, he was a staff analyst in 1976-78 for the U.S. House of Representatives, and was appointed in 2012 by President Obama to represent the U.S. at the United Nations General Assembly. Ted earned a Ph.D. in Engineering from Stanford University and a B.A. from the College of William and Mary, with High Honors in Physics and English. Learn more about his work from his website or by following him on Twitter @dintersmith. We've started a referral program! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

Democracy and Education Democracy and education are inextricably linked. A democracy can only work when voters have an open mind, the ability to think critically, and are tolerant of others and their beliefs. A good education should be designed to cultivate these instincts, and the result should be we well-rounded citizens who respect each other, engage in healthy public discourse, and are able to think critically to uncover lies and bad ideas. Education should prepare all citizens to properly participate in civic life. The 4 Pillars of Good Education First, students should gain a firm grasp on language, and be able to read and write critically, uncover lies and discuss opinions respectfully. Second, students need strong mathematic, scientific, and computational literacy. Third, we need to understand and be able to think critically about the past, because the way we understand history has an impact on what we do in the future. Finally, we need to encourage creative thinking, and learn to understand the beauty and importance of things like poetry, art, and design. The Bankruptcy of US Education Our education system does not prepare us for the nation and the economy we live in. First, a high school degree does not prepare students for a life of work. With the current level of specialization and technology, we must make higher education free in order to give graduates a way to succeed. Our education system is also failing us civically. Most adults can't name the three branches of government, a huge percentage of the electorate can be easily manipulated by obvious falsehoods, and many lack critical thinking skills as evidenced by COVID denial. Find out more: Leon Botstein's entire life and his work in all its aspects is devoted to one mission: the improvement of peoples' lives through education and exposure to the arts. A child of a generation that experienced extreme prejudice and barbarity, his firm belief that a better and more equitable world can be created by cultivating the life of the mind remains the principle that informs and connects all of his performances, writing, public service, and teaching. He was born in Zurich and immigrated to the US as a child. He studied history and philosophy at the University of Chicago and earned a PhD in history from Harvard University. In 1975 Botstein became the president of Bard College, a position he still holds. Under his leadership, Bard has developed into a distinctive liberal arts institution offering a vast range of undergraduate and graduate programs. In 1990 Botstein established the internationally admired Bard Music Festival, the success of which helped in the development of the beautiful Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a multi-functional facility designed by Frank Gehry on the Bard College campus. Opening in 2003, the Fisher Center inspired a programmatic expansion, Bard SummerScape, that includes opera, dance, theater, and cabaret over six weeks every summer. In 1992 he was named music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, a position he still holds. During his directorship, he transformed ASO into a pioneer, presenting great works that have long been ignored by history, alongside the acknowledged masterpieces, in concerts curated thematically, using history and ideas to catch the imagination of a wider and non-traditional audience. On January 23, 2020, Botstein was named chancellor of the Open Society University Network, of which Bard College and Central European University are founding members. We've started a referral program! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

Counterrevolution Since 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US warfare has focused on counterinsurgency. America now uses this counterrevolutionary playbook to govern domestically. Counterrevolutionary theory identifies a passive majority in all populations and a small insurgency. The first step is to brutally eliminate the rebellion, and then win over the passive majority. Using counterrevolutionary measures necessitates creating an internal enemy—for instance, Muslims, immigrants, minorities, or ANTIFA. Counterinsurgency establishes brutal violence as a policy, which quickly becomes the norm, as we've seen with the current level of government violence directed at US citizens. Legalizing Brutality America is a profoundly legalistic country, which looks to the law for the protection of rights. At the same time, it also has a long history of rendering questionable actions legal. The CIA redefined torture under the Bush Administration to require organ failure, which legalized many torture techniques that fell short of this standard. The summary drone strike execution of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki required a 41-page legal memo to frame it as legal under due process. Prisoners are legally held indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay through convoluted legal justification. Counterinsurgency requires state-sponsored violence, and America is adept at legalizing actions that are normally viewed as illegal to achieve this. Once these actions are legalized, they then become normalized. Abolition Democracy To move past counterrevolution as a governing theory, we should look to WEB Dubois's idea of Abolition Democracy. Abolition Democracy stated that no action was taken after slavery's end to support former slaves with education, employment, and other necessities. Because of this failure, we are still combatting the legacy of slavery in the US. Abolition theory can be applied to the counterrevolution as well. We cannot merely disassemble the drones and/or shutter the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. We need a new governing paradigm, new institutions, and new norms to ensure we move away from the institutionalized brutality of counterinsurgency in a country with no insurgents. Find out more: Bernard E. Harcourt is a distinguished contemporary critical theorist, justice advocate, and prolific writer and editor. In his books, articles, and teaching, his scholarship focuses on social and critical theory with a particular interest in punishment and surveillance. Harcourt is the founding director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, which brings contemporary theory to bear on current social problems and seeks to address them through practical engagement including litigation and public policy interventions. He is also the executive director of Columbia University's Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, which sponsors courses, public events, student internships, and fellowships dedicated to strengthening the pillars of all communities—truth, justice, and law. Harcourt is the author or editor of more than a dozen books. Critique & Praxis (2020) charts a vision for political action and social transformation. In The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018), Harcourt examines how techniques of counterinsurgency warfare spread to U.S. domestic policy. Harcourt served as a law clerk for Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He began his legal career representing death row inmates, working with Bryan Stevenson at what is now the Equal Justice Initiative, in Montgomery, Alabama. He continues to represent pro bono inmates sentenced to death and life imprisonment without parole. In 2019, Harcourt was awarded the New York City Bar Association Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award for his work on behalf of individuals on death row. You can follow him on Twitter @BernardHarcourt. We've started a referral program! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

Community Policing The future of public safety is community police partnership. Stamper suggests a plebiscite in which neighborhoods elect representatives to work side by side with the police department. These citizens would be involved in every single aspect of modern policing from setting policy, crafting procedures, selecting new police officers, developing the curriculum for police academy training, and partnering with those best equipped to deal with substance abuse, homelessness, and mental illness. Cop Culture The structure of American policing is top-down, paramilitary, bureaucratic, and antagonistic to democratic values. Patterns of behavior are institutionalized through interactions in locker rooms, patrol cars, and other unmonitored places. The paramilitary structure of police forces leads to an "us-vs-them" mentality, which results in a toxic culture of distrusting civilians. Undoing this culture begins with undoing the existing structure of the organization and reshaping it to meet the needs of civilians, municipalities, and communities. The War on Drugs The War on Drugs is actually a War on Americans. Most drug dealers and users swept up in the War on Drugs are low-level offenders who are addicts, mentally ill, or chronically poor. They need medical and financial help. Instead, police treat them as enemy combatants, resulting in death and destruction for many Americans, including police officers. Ending the War on Drugs would make it possible to repurpose some police funding for rehabilitation and mental health services. Demilitarization is also a critical factor to creating a safer America. Find out more: Norm Stamper was a police officer for 34 years, the first 28 in San Diego, the last six (1994-2000) as Seattle's Chief of Police. He earned his Ph.D. in Leadership and Human Behavior, and is the author of two books: To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America's Police (2016) and Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (2005). He recently finished a novel and is at work on another. Throughout his career and into "retirement," Norm has served as a trainer, consultant, expert witness, and keynote speaker. His commitment to police reform and social justice has shaped an agenda that calls for an end to the drug war; abolition of the death penalty; vanquishment of domestic violence from our society; a concerted effort to drive bigotry and brutality out of the criminal justice system; development of broad respect and support for the nation's police officers; a campaign to make every school, every workplace, every neighborhood and home a place of safety, particularly for our children; rejection of mass incarceration; and a fully-fledged dedication to our civil liberties and constitutional guarantees. Norm lives in the San Juan Islands off Washington State, and is a proud and humble father, father-in-law, grandfather, uncle, brother, and friend. We've started a referral program! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

Proposition 22 Prop 22, the most expensive California ballot initiative in history, carves out app-based gig economy workers as a new employee class that lacks the benefits and protections that other workers in California get. Prop 22 also makes it more difficult for drivers and delivery workers to unionize. Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and other app-based services threatened their workers with lack of flexibility and job loss. They also spent more than $200M to persuade voters. The passage of Prop 22 is a significant loss for labor law, and copycat legislation in other states is already following. Taxi Unions The San Francisco chauffeurs' union was powerful and effective because it had 100% participation from taxi drivers and built a strong collective identity for drivers. It even had a union hall! Unions negotiated fair contracts – wages and hours – and prevented oversaturation in the taxi market. For most of the 20th century, US taxi drivers were unionized. Today, most app-based drivers are completely atomized, lack tools to communicate with each other, and don't see driving as a craft identity. Laws and Regulations Since the 1930s, taxi work was considered a public utility. In San Francisco, the Taxi Commission regulated fares and worker supply in order to ensure a living wage. Although the San Francisco Taxi Commission is disbanded, the Municipal Transportation Agency could again take up regulation and supply management. In addition, employment protection should be strengthened by including proper unemployment and work place insurance. Find out more: Veena Dubal is a law professor at UC Hastings. Her research focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and precarious work. Within this broad frame, she uses empirical methodologies and critical theory to understand (1) the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on the lives of workers, (2) the co-constitutive influences of law and work on identity, and (3) the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements. Professor Dubal has been cited by the California Supreme Court, and her scholarship has been published in top-tier law review and peer-reviewed journals, including the California Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Berkeley Journal of Empirical and Labor Law, and Perspectives on Politics. Based on over a decade of ethnographic and historical study, Professor Dubal is currently writing a manuscript on how five decades of shifting technologies and emergent regulatory regimes changed the everyday lives and work experiences of ride-hail drivers in San Francisco. Professor Dubal joined the Hastings Faculty in 2015, after a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University (also her undergraduate alma mater). Prior to that, Professor Dubal received her J.D. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases. You can follow her on Twitter @veenadubal We've started a referral program! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

Monopolies are Anti-Democratic A monopoly is a company that has the power to set the terms of interactions, from the pricing of consumer goods to interactions with suppliers and resolving disputes. The most insidious and anti-democratic example is private arbitration, a judicial system where the parties to the suit pay the judges. Large companies force employees and even customers to litigate all grievances through arbitration courts, making a mockery of justice and infringing upon our civil rights. In essence, monopolies exert a form of private governing power and control over citizens within our democracy. US History of Trust-Busting America has a long history of trust-busting, dating back to the late 19th century. At that time, thousands of antitrust leagues around the country verified that companies were not controlling large market shares. Anti-monopolism was once a vital facet of American political activism, and it could be again. US antitrust law still exists; it just isn't being enforced—and hasn't been since Reagan's administration. The Biden-Harris administration could start enforcing existing laws, which would create a sea-change in the antitrust landscape. We have the tools to break up monopolies, but we lack the political and organizational will-power. Chickenization Chickenization refers to the ways large poultry distributors subjugate independent chicken farmers who depend on them to bring their chickens to market. These regional monopolies exercise immense control over these farmers by forcing them to use their feed, abide by their coup house specifications, and accept the equivalent of poverty wages. They also require arbitration contracts, ban communication between farmers, and retaliate against farmers who break the rules. Other sectors of the economy are following suit: delivery apps control restaurants and ride-share apps control taxi drivers. Find out more: Zephyr Teachout is an Associate Law Professor and has taught at Fordham Law School since 2009. In addition to Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money, she published Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens' United and has written dozens of law review articles and essays. Teachout was a death penalty defense lawyer at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina. She co-founded a non-profit dedicated to providing trial experience to new law school graduates. She is known for her pioneering work in internet organizing and was the Sunlight Foundation's first National Director. She grew up in Vermont and received her BA from Yale in English and then graduated summa cum laude from Duke Law School, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review. She also received an MA in Political Science from Duke. She clerked for Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. She ran unsuccessfully for New York State Attorney General in 2018, for Congress's 19th Congressional District in 2016, and for the Democratic nomination of the Governor of New York in 2014. You can follow her on Twitter @ZephyrTeachout. We've started a referral program! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

Keynes's Goals Keynes concerned himself with his day's most significant problems: WWI and WWII, the rise of fascism and revolution, and the Great Depression in the United States. He believed that assuaging fears about an uncertain future was most important, and that a more equal society would also be more secure from deflation, deprivation, and dictatorship. He aimed for policies that would grapple with crisis and uncertainty. Economics as Politics Keynes firmly believed that economics was an extension of politics and government, not a separate entity that existed outside of the governmental sphere of influence. Governments needed to manage their economies to ensure success, by controlling wages and working conditions, as well as setting interest rates and fiscal policy. Economics and monetary policy were political tools to achieve healthy and stable societies. A Keynesian Future A Keynesian in the incoming Biden administration would prioritize solving the problems of climate change, COVID, and economic inequality through a large-scale project like FDR's New Deal. Together with traditional infrastructure spending, decarbonizing our economy would require massive public works efforts similar to the New Deal's WPA, creating millions of new jobs, buoying the working class, and mitigating income inequality. Find out more: Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers economic policy and American politics. He is a frequent guest on cable news and whose work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. He is also the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, which was just selected as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Carter began his career at SNL Financial (now a division of S&P Global), where he was a banking reporter during the financial crisis of 2008. He wrote features about macroeconomic policy, regional economic instability, and the bank bailouts, but his passion was for the complex, arcane world of financial regulatory policy. He covered the accounting standards that both fed the crisis and shielded bank executives from its blowback, detailed the consumer protection abuses that consumed the mortgage business and exposed oversight failures at the Federal Reserve and other government agencies that allowed reckless debts to pile up around the world. Carter graduated from the University of Virginia, where he studied philosophy and politics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can follow him on Twitter @zachdcarter. We've started a referral program! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight, which you can then forward to your friends.

This is a thought-provoking season of visionary and practical ideas to reimagine our future in a post pandemic and post trump world. We cover everything from needing to be civically engaged all the time, which is to say in between elections, education, policing our communities, and having the courage to think big when it comes to rebuilding our economy.

Civic Engagement Online and In-Person Technology can make participating in democracy easier than ever before because it's scalable and makes it possible for everyone's voices to be heard. However, civic engagement must also be done with human connection and in person, like in community conversations, town halls, and organizing. IssueVoter uses its online platform to motivate users to perform civic engagement in the real world. Thirty percent of IssueVoter users say the platform is the reason they voted, showing that the more information the user has, the more he or she is motivated to take action. Fostering Accountability IssueVoter fosters civic engagement in between elections by making it easier for users to know what bills are being proposed in Congress, and sending their opinions on those bills to their representatives. Then, users are informed how their representatives voted. It turns out that representatives aren't always in alignment with their constituents. Knowing how your elected representatives voted is key to holding them accountable. In fact, 33% of users have changed their voting decisions based on IssueVoter information. IssueVoter stresses the importance of primary elections to vote for candidates in line with your values. Policy Impacts Lives We need to do a better job of connecting the dots between public policy and politics. Policies are created and enacted by the politicians we elect. All policies, ranging from healthcare to education, impact all of us, regardless of who we voted for or whether we voted at all. IssueVoter helps us understand how our elected politicians vote on policy matters and bills in Congress so that we know whether they are representing us and whether we should vote for them again. Find out more: Maria Yuan is the Founder of IssueVoter. an innovative non-profit and non-partisan platform that offers everyone a voice in our democracy by making civic engagement accessible, efficient, and impactful. The time between elections is when the work that impacts our lives gets done. IssueVoter answers the question, "The election is over, now what?" Individuals use IssueVoter to get alerts about new bills related to issues they care about, send opinions to their Representative before Congress votes, and track how often s/he represents them. In partnership with companies, organizations, and candidates, IssueVoter encourages year-round civic engagement with their employees, customers, members, or constituents. Maria's political experience includes introducing and passing a bill as a constituent, working in a State Representative's office in Texas, and managing and winning one of the most targeted races in Iowa – an open seat in a swing district. Maria earned degrees from The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania and The University of Texas at Austin. Maria's writing has appeared in Huffington Post and The Hill, and she has spoken at SXSW, The Social Innovation Summit, Shearman & Sterling, UBS, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania. You can follow IssueVoter on Twitter @IssueVoter. We're starting a referral program this week! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link to get your personal referral code: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight

October Surprise The term 'October Surprise' refers to a type of dirty trick that comes so late in the election calendar that a candidate does not have the time or space to respond, and voters don't have the time to consider what it might mean. Comey's letter to Congress a mere 11 days before Election Day 2016, announcing a renewed investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, is one of the most significant October Surprises on record. Trump contracting COVID-19 in October does not fit the description because a political opponent or third party did not orchestrate it; it was merely a surprising event in October. Restoring Trust in the FBI In the aftermath of 9/11, the FBI pivoted from criminal justice to national security. National Security agents soon came to run the bureau, instead of agents whose focus was on law enforcement, including in high-profile political cases. Comey's security-focused inner circle lacked the insight of agents with such expertise, who might have cautioned him against his investigations and actions in 2016. To regain America's trust, the FBI must reinvest in their public corruption and public integrity offices, demonstrating they have the leadership to stay impartial in elections, political investigations, and high-profile cases of public importance. Lessons from 2016 Though Comey's ill-advised letter helped tip the scales in Trump's favor, some of the onus falls on the voting public who were prone to believing in conspiracy theories and fake news stories. We need to bolster a healthy skepticism of our leaders, teach more civic engagement, and reemphasize the importance of critical thinking over blind devotion. Giving Americans the tools to rationally analyze news stories is vital to remedying our collective failure in 2016 and providing a better future for our democracy. Find out more: Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department for the Washington Post and is the author of October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for National Reporting, for coverage of Russian interference in the U.S. election. In 2017 he was a co-finalist for both the Pulitzer for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer for International Reporting. He has covered federal law enforcement for more than 20 years, and has worked at The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and the New York Post. You can follow him on Twitter @DevlinBarrett. We're starting a referral program this week! Refer us to your friends to get a free button or Moleskine notebook. Please use this link: https://refer.glow.fm/future-hindsight

Legitimacy Hitler is one of the early modern autocrats for whom legitimacy was crucial to his claim to power. He recognized the importance of including the people and representing himself as presenting the will of the people. Being legitimately elected provided Hitler with a mandate to propagate Nazi ideology within Germany and beyond, and build a popular mass movement. Hitler's example continues to serve as a model in fascist politics today. Popularity Hitler enjoyed immense popularity, which he carefully cultivated and constantly orchestrated in public appearances. He built a reputation as a mythic Führer who could do no wrong. If something were wrong, his followers would commonly say that Hitler must not know about it because if he did, he would fix it. He portrayed himself as always striving for Germans on Germany's behalf. General belief of Hitler's greatness was so impeccably maintained that it became nearly impossible to shake in the masses. Ideology Hitler firmly believed in the superiority of National Socialism as an ideology. In fact, he wanted to fundamentally change his society's norms to align with those of Nazism – such as the primacy of Aryans and euthanasia for useless eaters – and replace Christianity as the dominant belief system in Germany. By using propaganda and the aesthetics of consensus around National Socialist thought, he and his ministers worked to ensure Germans were deeply internalizing Nazi beliefs so they would be Nazis both in public and even in private when no one was watching. Find out more: Nathan Stoltzfus is the Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University and author or editor of seven books, including Hitler's Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany and Resistance of the Heart. Resistance of the Heart was the Fraenkel Prize co-winner and a New Statesman Book of the Year and prize winner of Munich's Besten Liste for nonfiction. His work has been translated into German, French, Swedish, Greek, Turkish, and Russian. Stoltzfus has been a long-term member of the faculty of the National Judicial College. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993, and has been a Fulbright and IREX scholar in East as well as West Germany, a Friedrich Ebert Stiftung grantee, a DAAD research scholar, a Humboldt German American Center for Visiting Scholars grantee, and a H.F. Guggenheim Foundation Scholar as well as a Florida State University "Developing Scholar." His work has formed a basis for several films, and he has published in the Atlantic Monthly, the Daily Beast, Der Spiegel, The American Scholar, and Die Zeit. His current book projects include the study of the memories of World War II as a basis for national myths and social cohesion. You can follow him on Twitter @nate_stoltzfus.

Hashtag Activism Black Lives Matter is the epitome of 'hashtag activism.' #BLM is a native social media activist movement that started on the internet and builds support for itself there. #BLM combines traditional protest with online activism, allowing people to express support on social media without necessarily going to a protest. This has proven to reveal wide-spread support for #BLM, amplifying and mainstreaming the group's cause. Low overhead actions like retweets, Instagram stories, and Facebook posts helped the movement grow meaningfully. Politicians on Social Media Lawmakers are increasingly turning to social media as a campaign strategy. The most successful congressmembers, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are able to humanize themselves, put forth policies, connect with constituents, and build a broader base of support. Others, such as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, have struggled to gain a solid footing online. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the need for a powerful social media presence, which has been challenging for new candidates who cannot capitalize on in-person events to grow their online following. Social Media and Politics Social media has opened up new ways to participate in politics. Previously, gate-keeping legacy media controlled most of the coverage surrounding politics. Users can now directly analyze and interpret world events, policies, and politics. Unfortunately, social media also accounts for a vast array of misinformation, disinformation, and hyper partisanship. While social media can make us feel more involved and optimistic about what's possible in demanding accountability and good governance, it can also feel overwhelming to be inundated with an endless stream of bad news. Find out more: Alice E. Marwick is Associate Professor of Communication and a Principal Researcher at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. Marwick is also a Faculty Advisor to the Media Manipulation project at the Data & Society Research Institute, which studies far-right online subcultures and their use of social media to spread misinformation. Her first book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the San Francisco tech scene to examine how people seek social status through attention and visibility online. Marwick was formerly Director of the McGannon Communication Research Center and Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. You can follow her on Twitter @alicetiara.

Democracy at Work Our work lives are an important place to practice democracy. Union members learn negotiation and problem solving skills to determine wages and working conditions. They have a voice when voting on a contract. The decline in union participation coincides with the decline in American civic life. Promoting more workplace democracy also increases civic engagement in America. Digital Labor Organizing Coworker.org offers digital tools to help non-union workers mobilize around the country. Digital organizing has successfully won wage increases, scheduling reform, and parental leave benefits. Digital advocacy is meant to work in tandem with more established trade unions and regulatory bodies. Organized labor has a long history of experimenting with different paths to success, and digital organizing represents an exciting new chapter. Worker Voice Workers should have a say in their working conditions, industry standards, mechanisms for whistleblowing, and in negotiating their wages. Making worker voices heard, especially in the gig economy, is key to eliminating precarity in the workplace. Almost all Americans are currently "at-will" employees, meaning they can be fired at any time without cause. Removing this status would create more stable work environments and give workers agency. Find out more: Jess Kutch is the co-founder of Coworker.org, a platform that deploys digital tools, data, and strategies to help people improve their work lives. Since its founding in 2013, Coworker.org has catalyzed the growth of global, independent employee networks advancing wins like paid parental leave benefits at Netflix, scheduling reform at Starbucks, and wage increases for workers at a Southern restaurant chain. In 2015, Coworker.org hosted the first-ever digital townhall at the White House on the future of worker voice with President Obama. A digital innovator, Kutch has 15 years' experience working at the intersection of technology and social change. Prior to launching Coworker.org, she led a team at Change.org in raising the company's profile around the world and inspiring hundreds of thousands of people to launch and lead their own efforts on the platform. Kutch also spent five years at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) where she pioneered digital strategies for the labor movement. Jess Kutch is an Echoing Green Global Fellow and J.M. Kaplan Innovation Prize winner. You can follow Jess on Twitter @jess_kutch

Wondering what being a member of our Civics Club is like on Patreon? Well, here's a free look at our bonus content from our talk this week with Adam Cohen! Each week we take time to ask our guests personal questions about their involvement with democracy, why they're so engaged, and maybe even who inspired them. The questions change every week, so make sure to join The Civics Club so you never miss another round of bonus questions.

Supreme Court's Agenda Although we are taught to believe the Supreme Court is a neutral institution whose primary concern is justice, it is actually an extremely powerful legal body with its own agenda. For the last 50 years, that agenda has been staunchly conservative. Instead of functioning as a check on executive and legislative powers, it operates as its own power building machine, often making decisions that favor itself or the conservative lawmakers who put a majority of the justices in power. The Supreme Court is confident in its position and its conservative views, and has no qualms about overruling democratic decisions to keep itself—and conservative lawmakers—in power. Far-Reaching Impacts Decisions made by the Supreme Court have long and far-reaching consequences. On the positive side, single Supreme Court decisions helped desegregate American schools, create due process protections like Miranda Rights, and legalize same-sex marriages. At the same time, the conservative Supreme Court has greatly inflated the power of corporations over ordinary citizens; consistently ruled against the poor and welfare rights; and allowed our electoral system to become overrun by powerful interests with their campaign finance rulings. Their decisions have very real consequences for everyday Americans, whether we all understand that or not. Anti-Poor With the exception of the progressive Warren Court of the 1950-60s, the Supreme Court has showed itself to be antagonistic towards America's poor. It has continually ruled against welfare rights, labor rights, voting rights, and even equal funding for education. The court has also refused to give poor Americans the protected minority status they so desperately need. Instead, the court has repeatedly ruled in favor of America's rich and on behalf of corporations, further exacerbating the plight of the poor. Companies have substantially increased protections in their power over workers, while organized labor has lost much of their ability to protect workers. Find out more: Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board and senior writer for Time magazine, is the author of Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. He is also the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was president of volume 100 of the Harvard Law Review. You can follow Adam on Twitter @adamscohen. Thank you to Podcorn for sponsoring this episode. For more information, visit Podcorn.com

Self-Determination Self-determination empowers those who are most affected to be in the driver's seat of policy-making decisions. For example, if an oil company wants to run a pipeline through Indigenous land, Indigenous communities themselves would decide based on their values and the impact on their families, water, air, and land. NDN collective works to restore self-determination through three pillars: defense, development, and decolonization. Decolonization European colonization was a system of white supremacy that annihilated complex Indigenous populations, cultures, languages, beliefs, land, and governing systems. The work of decolonization includes dismantling white supremacist systems of economic extraction and governance; education about the totality of colonial history; and the revitalization of Native languages and ways of being. Reclaiming Indigenous heritage is also an act of healing past traumas from colonization. Land Back A key tenet of self-determination and decolonization is the "land back" movement. Theft of Indigenous lands was one of the fundamental ways Europeans colonized America. Stealing land and extracting its resources decimated both the land and the people who lived on it. The land back movement aims to right this wrong by returning public lands, like National Parks and National Forests, to the care of Indigenous People. Land back does not mean removing Americans from their homes. Instead, it means returning the land to Native stewardship focusing on preservation and rejuvenation. Find out more: Nick Tilsen is the President & CEO of NDN Collective, and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Tilsen has over 18 years of experience building place-based innovations that have the ability to inform systems change solutions around climate resiliency, sustainable housing, and equitable community development. He founded NDN Collective to scale these place-based solutions while building needed philanthropic, social impact investment, capacity and advocacy infrastructure geared towards building the collective power of Indigenous Peoples. Tilsen has received numerous fellowships and awards from Ashoka, Rockefeller Foundation, Bush Foundation and the Social Impact Award from Claremont-Lincoln University. He has an honorary doctorate degree from Sinte Gleska University. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTilsen And you can follow NDN Collective on Twitter @ndncollective

Civic Power Civic power puts communities most impacted by legislative decisions in the drivers' seat of making public policy. Community members get to have a say in areas like policing, zoning, education, taxation, voting rights, and more. Participatory budgeting creates a structure of representative decision making that is responsive and reflective of the affected communities. This form of civic power exists around the world and can be replicated in the United States on a large scale. Radical Democracy True bottom-up democracy is a radical but simple concept that fully espouses civic power. The representative democracy in the US puts bureaucrats, not affected communities, in control of many aspects of public policy. To achieve true democracy, we need to demand a policy shift in institutions, which creates more power for citizens in the long run. It's a demand about changing the way policy is made tomorrow, and not just today. An Inclusive and Equitable Society The markers of a society's success must include the flourishing of low-income workers and black and brown communities. It would require restructuring work and capital that does not exploit workers; investing in universal public services like health care and education; ending predatory lending practices as well as the system of crippling debt, especially for education; and dismantling systemic and systematic racism. Find out more: K. Sabeel Rahman is the President of Demos, a dynamic think-and-do tank that powers the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy. Rahman is also an Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where he teaches constitutional law, administrative law, and courses on law and inequality. He is the author of Democracy Against Domination, which won the Dahl Prize for scholarship on the subject of democracy. His academic work explores the history, values, and policy strategies that animate efforts to make our society more inclusive and democratic, and our economy more equitable. His new book, Civic Power, looks at how to build a more inclusive and empowered bottom-up democracy. He has previously served as a Special Advisor on economic development strategy in New York City, a public member of the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, and the Design Director for the Gettysburg Project, an initiative working with organizers, academics, and funders to develop new strategies for civic engagement and building civic capacity. You can follow him on Twitter @ksabeelrahman.

Capturing State Legislatures State capture refers to the idea that a set of organizations, businesses, and movements can capture a political office and dictate its agenda, decisions, and resource allocation to benefit their interests. Capturing state legislatures is especially effective because state governments – as opposed to the federal government – have control over significant aspects of our daily lives: taxes, minimum wage, health insurance, and administering elections. The Troika Three powerful conservative organizations, commonly referred to as the troika, work in tandem to capture state legislatures: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the State Policy Network (SPN), and Americans for Prosperity (AFP). ALEC works with lawmakers directly to pass legislation it often writes and provides. SPN is a network of think tanks that works outside of government, creating reports, legislative testimony, and polling that champion conservative bills often created by ALEC. AFP operates like a political party with national, state, and local offices, all aimed at electing conservative lawmakers around the country. Public Policy Changes Politics Public policy can and does change politics. The troika has successfully promoted the adoption of so-called "right-to-work" laws, which weaken labor unions. These laws make it more difficult to unionize, collect dues, and support pro-labor candidates for office. In fact, they are a direct response to the unionization of public sector workers and their successful organizing, specifically the National Education Association in the 1960s-70s. Once anti-labor policies were in effect, it became easier for conservatives to continuously win elections and cement their political power. Find out more: Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is Associate Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public affairs, where he studies the political economy of the United States, with a focus on the politics of organized interests, especially business and labor, and public policy. His most recent book, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation, examines how networks of conservative activists, donors, and businesses built organizations to successfully reshape public policy across the states and why progressives failed in similar efforts. Hertel-Fernandez received his B.A. in political science from Northwestern University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in government and social policy from Harvard University. You can follow him on Twitter @awh.

Political Learning In response to the elections of Obama and Trump, grassroots political movements sprung up on the right and the left. Members of these groups demonstrated an eagerness to learn about and understand local and state politics, which is where they are most actively engaged. After the 2016 election, Resist groups used many of the Tea Party movement's tactics, like writing to law makers, running local candidates, and knocking on doors to get out the vote. Impact on Politics Grassroots movements are highly impactful across the political spectrum, often revitalizing local capacities of both political parties. Resist groups on the left are dominated by women, who are organizing and insisting on a more open and inclusive Democratic Party. Increasing voter turnout has had the strongest impact on both sides. Boosting the margins for the Democratic candidate in a swing state could lead to electoral victory in 2020. Organized Groups Swing Elections Organized groups helped swing the 2016 election. Donald Trump met with select groups who hold power over large swaths of voters, notably far right evangelical ministers, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the NRA. In the case of the Fraternal Order of Police, Trump pledged to protect white officers, leading to an endorsement from the Order—something Mitt Romney did not receive. Research shows that endorsement led to extra Republican votes in key battleground states like Pennsylvania. Find out more: Theda Skocpol (PhD, Harvard, 1975) is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. At Harvard, she has served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2005-2007) and as Director of the Center for American Political Studies (2000-2006). In 2007, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for her "visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust, pursued with theoretical depth and empirical evidence." Skocpol's work covers an unusually broad spectrum of topics including both comparative politics and American politics. Her books and articles have been widely cited in political science literature and have won numerous awards, including the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science for the previous year. Skocpol's research focuses on U.S. social policy and civic engagement in American democracy, including changes since the 1960s. Caroline Tervo is a research coordinator in the Harvard Government Department, working with Theda Skocpol and others on studies of citizen grassroots organizing, state and local party building, and the local effects of federal policy changes. A native North Carolinian, Tervo holds a BA in government from Harvard University. You can follow her on Twitter @CarolineTervo.

Building Precincts Precincts are critical to building local and regional party power. Kromer started Davidson's Democratic party precinct with only four other people. Once established, they gained political legitimacy as well as access to state and county voter databases. This allowed them to organize and knock on doors, inform their constituents about the candidates who are running, and get out the vote. As a result, Davidson had a higher voter turnout rate than other local towns. Politics Flows Up The road to high-ranking state or federal positions often begins with local offices where only tens or hundreds of votes decide elections. Holding local office serves as validation for a candidate's run for higher office. The mayor of your small town could become your congressional representative in the next election cycle. Focusing on local politics and seriously opposing bad candidates makes it harder for them to succeed and climb the political ladder. Showing Up We often think of party politics as exclusive clubs or murky organizations full of political operatives, but this is not the case. According to Kromer, 90% of becoming civically engaged is simply showing up. The best way to make sure your voice is heard is by attending local group or precinct meetings. Most local political organizations will welcome you to their initiative, to be engaged, and help solve the issues of your community. Find out more: Drew Kromer studied at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he became involved in the local College Democrats and built the local Democratic precinct in the town of Davidson, NC. He has served as the Vice-Chair of the National Council of College Democrats and currently serves as a DNC delegate in North Carolina. He is now in law school at UNC Chapel Hill. You can learn more about the work Kromer did to revitalize his community here.

Politics Begins with Service Political power starts with service to others. For instance, Russian immigrant and Boston resident Naakh Vysoky began his political career by helping his fellow Russian immigrants gain citizenship and keep their government benefits. He also advocated on their behalf in Washington. Members of his community recognized his leadership and initiative, and began to follow his lead politically. They voted according to his recommendations. By building a voting bloc, Naakh created lasting political power to make government more responsive to his community. Politics Solves Problems Politics is about working together to solve problems. Uniting like-minded citizens through political organizing builds political power, which can be used to ask the government to help resolve the particular issues facing communities. Naakh Vysoky created a voting bloc of more than 1,000, and his precinct voted at three times the state average. When he called the governor's office, the governor called back. The politics of empowerment helps a community grow and thrive, addressing issues like government benefits, the relationship of the police with the community, and communications between parents and the school district. Political Hobbyism Political hobbyism is distinct from power building: it is time spent thinking or worrying about politics without actually doing anything to change it. Political hobbyism includes news binges, political tweets, petition signing, and other forms of "shallow" activism. Further, this makes us look at politics from the "horserace" perspective, entrenching tribalism and making politicians misbehave. By engaging in political hobbyism, we learn the wrong lessons and acquire the wrong skillset, like paying attention to significant national issues. Instead, we should be engaged in local politics, where we can actually have an outsized influence. Find out more: Eitan D. Hersh is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, focusing on American politics. He studies US elections, civic participation, and voting rights. Much of his work utilizes large databases of personal records to study political behavior. His second book, Politics is for Power, was published in January 2020. His first book, Hacking the Electorate, was published in 2015 (Cambridge UP). His peer-reviewed articles have been published in venues such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His next major research project, now underway, is about the civic role of businesses and business leaders. You can follow him on Twitter @eitanhersh.

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Sexual Citizenship The concept of sexual citizenship asserts that people have the right to sexual self-determination, including young people. Recognizing young people's sexual citizenship prepares them to both say no and yes, as well as to be able to hear other people when they do or don't want to have sex. It also recognizes their fundamental humanity. Establishing sexual citizenship and autonomy for young people is a critical step in preventing campus sexual assault and promoting relationships based on trust, kindness, and love. Power and Precarity Meaningful action against sexual assault in its many forms must be grounded in a general project of equality because experiences of assault are fundamentally about power and precarity. Studies show young people who have difficulty paying for basic needs are at a significantly elevated risk of sexual assault. The highest rates of sexual assault reports come from LGBTQ communities because of systemic invalidation of queer identities. Racism, gender discrimination, transphobia, homophobia, and income inequality exacerbate the occurrence of sexual assault. Comprehensive Sex Ed Comprehensive sexual education goes well beyond biology, teaching healthy habits and boundaries around consent and mutual respect. Women who have learned refusal skills are half as likely to be assaulted as their less educated peers. Multi-faceted sex education should begin at a young age, so that by the time they mature, young people are prepared to safely and responsibly explore their sexuality. Parents also play a critical role in how to bring values like trust and empathy to any sexual interaction. Find out more: Jennifer S. Hirsch is professor of socio-medical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Her research spans five intertwined domains: the anthropology of love; gender, sexuality and migration; sexual, reproductive and HIV risk practices; social scientific research on sexual assault and undergraduate well-being, and the intersections between anthropology and public health. She's been named one of New York City's 16 'Heroes in the Fight Against Gender-Based Violence.' In 2012 she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow. You can follow her on Twitter @JenniferSHirsch. Shamus Khan is professor and chair of sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of dozens of books and articles on inequality, American Culture, gender, and elites. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and many other media outlets. In 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize for "the best sociologist under 40." You can follow him on Twitter @shamuskhan. "Sexual Citizens reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault a predictable element of life on a college campus. The powerful concepts of sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies provide a new language for understanding the forces that shape young people's sexual relationships. Bringing attention to the importance of physical spaces, of peer influences and norms, of alcohol, and most of all, to the many forms of inequality on campus helps shine new and powerful light upon the ways in which young people experience and interpret sex and assault. The result is an innovative lens that transforms our understanding of sexual assault and provides a new roadmap for how to address it.

Surveillance Capitalism Surveillance Capitalism is the dominant economic logic in our world today. It claims private human experience for the marketplace and turns it into a commodity. Vast amounts of personal data are necessary -- often harvested without our knowledge or consent –- in order to predict future behavior. Surveillance capitalists create certainties for companies by modifying people's behavior. Instrumentarian Power Instrumentarianism seeks to modify, predict, monetize, and control human behavior through the instruments of surveillance capitalism, our digital devices. Having mined all of our data, instrumentarians can tune and herd users into specific actions through triggers and subliminal messaging. It is ultimately a political project intended to install computational governance instead of democratic governance. Protecting Your Privacy A myriad of programs and apps can block tracking and scramble your location, making your behavioral data less accessible or even inaccessible. Since instrumentarians gain their power through our use of their devices, limiting internet use and working in-person reduces the power they have over you. Find out more: Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Her masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, synthesizes years of research and thinking to reveal a world in which technology users are neither customers, employees, nor products. Instead, they are the raw material for new procedures of manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order: a surveillance economy. In the late 1980s, her decade-in-the-making book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, became an instant classic that foresaw how computers would revolutionize the modern workplace. At the dawn of the twenty-first century her influential The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (with James Maxmin), written before the invention of the iPod or Uber, predicted the rise of digitally-mediated products and services tailored to the individual. It warned of the individual and societal risks if companies failed to alter their approach to capitalism. You can follow her on Twitter @shoshanazuboff