Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

Episode Summary

We’ve talked a lot on Theory of Change about the political manifestations of fundamentalist Christian viewpoints in American politics, but the religious origins of these ideas are also important to understand. And right now there is no bigger force within American Christian fundamentalism than Pentecostalism, a movement of unaffiliated churches that together represent the fastest growing Christian sect in the world.

B...

Episode Summary 

We live in an uncertain age, one in which wealthy and powerful forces are working tirelessly to overthrow democracy, turn back the clock on human progress and destroy the middle class. The sheer magnitude of the West’s crisis of democracy can be overwhelming, however, and that’s why in this episode, I wanted to take more than a few steps back to explore the Renaissance, a period of world history that is much discus...

Episode Summary 

Over the years on this program, I’ve often said that the political differences dividing Americans are really just artifacts of much deeper epistemic divides. In the episode before this one, we explored how those differences manifest psychologically—but psychology alone cannot explain why so many people feel so alienated that they willingly support political leaders like Donald Trump whom they acknowledge to be dece...

Episode Summary

Politics in the United States and everywhere else has always been about policy—which party wants to do this, which party wants to do that. But in the 21st century, a new dimension has been added: true and false.

That reality has become a serious problem for left-of-center political parties, because they have traditionally oriented themselves around an affinity for science and reason.

As a result, right-wing parties wit...

Episode Summary

Many people expected that Donald Trump's fate would be decided by women last year. It was, after all, the first presidential race since the Republican-dominated Supreme Court had decided to roll back a national right to abortion.

But Trump upended that possibility by deciding to run a campaign that was focused very heavily on men and trying to attract the votes of men who didn’t commonly participate in voting.

That’s ...

Episode Summary

The Trump Administration's wars on federal employees and research science are getting a lot of headlines, but there's a third war that's being conducted by the radical right that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should, and that is its efforts to control Americans’ bodily autonomy.

Whether it’s trying to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, or trying to place restrictions on birth control, the ...

Episode Summary

Donald Trump's second presidential administration has been remarkably different from his first one, primarily through his acceptance of long-standing reactionary goals to attack government and expertise—particularly federal agencies that produce and teach science such as NASA, the National Institutes for Health, and the Department of Education. What’s curious about this assault on science is that while it aligns per...