The United to Preserve Democracy & the Rule of Law speaker series is a nonpartisan initiative that brings together experts on American history, economics, political science, global affairs, and the U.S. Constitution to raise public awareness about the historic anti-democratic threat facing the United States. The program is sponsored by democracyFIRST (https://democracyfirst.org/).
Benjamin Carter Hett on "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power"
Historian Benjamin Carter Hett discusses Hitler's rise to power and the fall of the Weimar Republic, offering insights into threats to democracy with Jordan Wood in this interview.
7 Feb 2025TRANSCRIPT
Sen. Jeremy Moss & Constitutional Scholar Richard Primus
Constitutional scholar Richard Primus discusses his work with constitutional law at the state and federal levels, informing listeners about the complexities of legal scholarship; this is an interview with Senator Jeremy Moss.
28 Jan 2025TRANSCRIPT
"How Democracies Die: A Discussion with Daniel Ziblatt & Conor Lamb"
Historian Daniel Ziblatt and former Congressman Conor Lamb discuss how democracies erode, offering insights into preserving democratic institutions in this interview.
6 Jan 2025
Jason Stanley on "How Fascism Works"
Professor Jason Stanley discusses his book "How Fascism Works" and explores the insidious nature of fascist tactics in modern society in an interview.
6 Jan 2025
Anne Applebaum on the "Twilight of Democracy"
Historian Anne Applebaum discusses her book, *Twilight of Democracy*, and examines the appeal of authoritarianism, in this interview.
6 Jan 2025
Jonathan Alter on "American Reckoning"
Jonathan Alter discusses his book "American Reckoning" in a moderated discussion with Neil Makhija, offering insights into American history and its relevance to contemporary issues in this interview.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, Sarah Matthews, and Liz Cheney discuss the critical need for bipartisan unity to safeguard American democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law in 2024; this is an interview.
15 Nov 2024
Barbara F. Walter on "How Civil Wars Start"
Barbara F. Walter is one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terror. She is the author of five books and dozens of articles on these subjects and is a contributor to CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, the BBC and the PBS NewsHour. She has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Time, The New Republic, Reuters and Foreign Affairs.
She is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a TED2023 speaker. Her most recent book on civil wars, New York Times bestseller “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, (https://www.amazon.com/How-Civil-Wars-Start-Stop/dp/0593137787)” was named the best book of the year by The Times (UK), and one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times, Esquire and Prospect Magazine. The New York Times Book Review called the book “Required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.”
14 Nov 2024
Timothy Snyder "On Freedom" & "On Tyranny" with Stephen Marche
Historian Timothy Snyder and author of the books "On Tyranny" and "On Freedom" is a leading expert on fascism and the threat authoritarians pose to the future of American Democracy and the Rule of Law. In this video, he discusses the future of American Democracy and alarming rise of Authoritarianism with Timothy Snyder and Stephen Marche. 📌 Join us for an insightful conversation on democracy, the rule of law, and the future of America! This event, hosted by United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law, features a discussion between Timothy Snyder—author of "On Tyranny"—and Stephen Marche. Recorded in Kalamazoo, Michigan, this event is co-sponsored by DemocracyFIRST.
🔍 What You’ll Learn:
✅ The biggest threats to democracy in the U.S. and globally
✅ How history helps us understand modern democratic decline
✅ What Americans can do to protect democracy and the rule of law
12 Nov 2024
Ruth Ben-Ghiat on "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present"
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and the threats these present to democracies around the world.
Her most recent book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, looks at how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence, and machismo, and how they can be defeated.
She writes for CNN, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has appeared in many documentaries about dictators and threats to democracy, such as Netflix’s How To Become a Tyrant and PBS’s The Dictators’ Playbook.
12 Nov 2024
Joanne Freeman on Political Violence in America
Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History, specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. Her most recent book, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.
12 Nov 2024
Daniel Ziblatt & Steven Levitsky with the View's Alyssa Farah Griffin on the Future of Democracy
Daniel Ziblatt is a historian, expert on democracy, and the author of four books, including How Democracies Die (2018), co-authored with Steven Levitsky, a New York Times best-seller and described by The Economist magazine as “the most important book of the Trump era.” In 2023, he published Tyranny of the Minority, also with Steve Levitsky. The book is an analysis of American democracy in comparative perspective, also a New York Times bestseller.
Steven Levitsky is a professor at Harvard and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.
12 Nov 2024
Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Stakes for American Democracy
Join United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law for a livestream event with world-renowned presidential historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times #1 best-selling author Doris Kearns Goodwin. In this moderated discussion, Goodwin will provide insights from her five decades of scholarship and how our shared history can help guide us in navigating the current political climate.
12 Nov 2024
Heather Cox Richardson & Joanne Freeman on the Future of Democracy
Join us for the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law event, co-sponsored by DemocracyFIRST, with historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman.
Inside a recent episode
Benjamin Carter Hett on "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power"
Published 6 Mar 2025 · Transcript excerpt
[…] And there was that kind of cycle throughout the regime. And the other thing we know is that then in the 30s, as the economy got better and employment got better, Hitler's popularity rose. And then towards the end of the 1930s, as I'm sure a lot of folks will know, he had some diplomatic successes in a sense, getting control of Austria, and then getting control of part of Czechoslovakia, sort of threatening war, but ultimately doing it without war. And Germans were quite thrilled about that. One famous historian has written that if Hitler had died in late 1938, people would have forgotten about the concentration camps, which there were already at that time, and they would forget about the oppression and everything else. […]
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