If You Want Me to Pay My Taxes 
Americans tend to imagine that aversion to taxation is deeply rooted in our national political culture. Not so fast, Vanessa S. Williamson argues in her new book, The Price of Democracy.
Winter 2026
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If You Want Me to Pay My Taxes
The Case for a Third Reconstruction
The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking.
The Perfectionist Tradition
The African American perfectionists offered “faith” instead of “hope”—emphasizing the struggle to realize a vision of justice rather than passive assurance that it would prevail.
Who Are the People?
The politics of the 2010s and 2020s are about who the people are and what it means for them to matter.
Know Your Enemy: A Second Civil War? With Jamelle Bouie
Jamelle Bouie returns to the show to discuss the rise of rhetoric—not only but especially from the right—about a “second Civil War” in the United States.
The Austerity Politics of White Supremacy
Since the end of the Confederacy, the cult of the “taxpayer” has provided a socially acceptable veneer for racist attacks on democracy.
This Is Who We Are
The rioters at the Capitol are part of an unbroken American tradition. Sweet talk about our “better angels” did not defeat them before and will not now.
The Urgency of a Third Reconstruction
The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment marked a turning point in U.S. history. Yet 150 years later, its promises remain unfulfilled.
Booked #4: What Did Race Mean to W.E.B. Du Bois?
Tim Shenk talked with Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, about how Du Bois’s experiences as a black American shaped his theories of race, and how his theories relate to politics then and now.
