Live Podcast on Zoom, a recording is below
April 5, 9am PT; 6pm CET
How can we restore trust in democratic elections and what are the problems electoral systems are facing today? With his book Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020, Lawrence Douglas predicted with shocking clarity how Trump planned to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He will talk with hosts Tom Zoellner and Aida Baghernejad about ways to strengthen the electoral system and restore trust in transparent and reliable elections. Lawrence Douglas is professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College. Professor Douglas is currently Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
This event is part of the ongoing series 55 Voices for Democracy – The Podcast, presented by the Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Goethe-Institut Boston, Goethe Pop Ups in Seattle, Houston, and Kansas City and Wunderbar Together. The podcast is modeled after the BBC radio speeches, through which Thomas Mann, from his home in California, turned to listeners in Germany, Switzerland and occupied Netherlands and Czechia during the war. From 1940 until 1945, Thomas Mann pleaded to thousands of listeners to resist the Nazi regime and thus became the most important German voice in exile. His conviction that the “social renewal of democracy” is condition and warrant for its victory seems more relevant than ever. In this podcast series, intellectuals, artists, and activists will engage in conversations about how to renew democracy today.
Lawrence Douglas is professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College. He is the author of seven books, including The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust and most recently Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020. Douglas is the recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and American Academy in Berlin.
Tom Zoellner (host) is a journalist and author. He is New York Timesbestselling author of eight nonfiction books, including Uranium Train, and The Heartless Stone. He teaches at Chapman University and Dartmouth College. A former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, he is the politics editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Aida Baghernejad (co-host) is a journalist based in Berlin. Her work appears in international media outlets, among them the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the San Francisco Chronicle, Intro Magazine, Spexand Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She has previously taught at King’s College London and the Humboldt University Berlin.