Background Briefing: September 8, 2022

On By gram

 

The Death of Queen Elizabeth II and the Royal Family’s Future Under a New King Charles

We begin with the death of Queen Elizabeth II after seven decades on the throne and go to the UK to get a sense of the shock and sadness gripping the country. Joining us is Polly Toynbee, a columnist for the Guardian who was formerly BBC social affairs editor, columnist and associate editor of the Independent, co-editor of the Washington Monthly and a reporter and feature writer for the Observer. She is the co-author of Dismembered: How the attack on the state harms us all and her latest article at the Guardian is “In grieving for the Queen, we also mourn the losses in our own lives.” We discuss the royal family’s future under a new king, Charles, and the internal strife in the royal family following the departure of Charles’s younger son Harry and his American wife Meghan for California. And although the British sovereign’s political power is largely symbolic, the monarchy plays a constitutional role even though there is no written constitution, nevertheless within 24 hours of the queen’s death, lawmakers in Parliament will take oaths of allegiance to the new King Charles.

 

How American Political Culture Disempowers Ordinary Citizens and How to Take Back the Ground We Have Ceded to Anti-Politics

Then we look into how American political culture disempowers ordinary citizens and speak with Jedediah Purdy, who makes the case for a reinvigorated democracy to revive our weakened and ineffective political system and reverse our increasingly unequal and polarized society to take back the ground that we’ve ceded to anti-politics so that we can entrust one another with the power to shape our common life. A Professor of Law at Duke Law School and noted scholar of environmental, property, and constitutional law as well as legal and political theory, his books include This Land Is Our Land, After Nature, Being America, and For Common Things. And we discuss his latest book, just out, Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening―and Our Best Hope.