How does a dissident become a dissident? The Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman joins host Alex Lovit to discuss his new book, How to Be a Dissident. It’s part instruction manual, part history, and part call to action to resist the oppressive forces of our own times. Gal Beckerman is a writer and editor. His previous books include The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas and When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. https://www.galbeckerman.com/how-to-be-a-dissident https://www.galbeckerman.com/
Alex Lovit:
Before we dive into today's episode, I want to mention another podcast you might enjoy. Outrage Overload is about outrage in society and politics and how we can lower the temperature. Host David Beckemeyer and his guests talk about the outrage industry, how it affects us and what we can do about it. I'll be a guest on tomorrow's episode talking about the U.S. Justice Department and its history of abuses of power. Find the show at outrageoverload.net or wherever you get your podcasts. And now here's our show.
Gal Beckerman:
Building movements is obviously a very important thing if you want to address an injustice or actually change something in your society. But it seemed to me that we were missing a step, which is not how do we do this, but why are people not doing this? I needed to understand the psychological, the individual, the spiritual, the philosophical level at which a single person makes a decision to actually push back.
Alex Lovit:
History is full of heroes who risked everything to stand up to injustice. But when I think about people like Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela or Marsha P. Johnson, it could seem like they were born to do it. Their bravery feels inevitable, like being a dissident was in their DNA. But how can people like you and me learn to be dissidents too? You're listening to The Context.
It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Gal Beckerman. Gal's a staff writer at The Atlantic and his new book is How to Be a Dissident. Just like it sounds, the book is a manual for people who'd like to be more prepared to resist oppressive authority.
It's also a history of some exceptionally courageous people from across the world throughout the ages. Gal found that these people had 10 things in common that we can learn from to make a difference in our own time. He'll walk us through several of those today. Gal Beckerman, welcome to The Context.
Gal Beckerman:
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Alex Lovit:
So the new book is called How to Be a Dissident. Let's start with why to be a dissident or maybe just when to be a dissident. You're mostly writing about pretty oppressive societies, not entirely, but mostly. Is dissidence a concept that works for all societies? Is it a useful role in all societies?
Gal Beckerman:
I think so. I wrote the book very much with the state of mind that I was going to look at dissidence as almost like extreme examples of people who possess qualities that I think we can all somehow capture in our own lives in some way. And the main thing being sort of the pushing back against conformity, against a reality or a status quo that you feel somehow in your gut is not right or that dehumanizes you or that flattens you in some kind of way and takes away from your dignity, your autonomy as a human being.
And that definitely is the case when we're looking at totalitarian societies, but I think that to lesser degrees that can exist in our own life in a relatively free place like the United States and a relatively free moment like right now, even when we think about the technologies in our life that can have that effect on us, flattening us in the way that they sometimes do. Understanding what it means to be a dissident, to be the kind of person willing to push back against those forces felt to me important as a north star for thinking how maybe I should behave.
Alex Lovit:
How did you research this book? How did you figure out what stories you wanted to tell and research what those stories were?
Gal Beckerman:
So I really didn't want it to just be a collection of biographies of dissidents. I really wanted there to be a universal quality to what I was looking at to define a human type. And so in order for that to track and make sense and be valid, I had to see that human type as it existed not just now, but going back to Ancient Greece and all the way to Tehran today. So what I started with actually was a sense of the qualities of a dissident.
And there's neatly 10 in the book. There probably could have been more, but 10 is a nice round number. And these were aspects that I identified, facets that I identified of what it means to be a dissident, but it was not based on nothing. I mean, this is my third book and my two earlier books were about social movements and about change, societal change and how it happened.
So I've been thinking to some extent about dissidents and what it means to be a dissident for quite some time now. And so I had this idea that there were these qualities that a dissident has, but in order to really kick the tires of this idea, I had to find those manifestations of those qualities in people across time.
Alex Lovit:
Are those qualities that can be learned? So a lot of the people you're writing about are very impressive or are doing incredibly brave things in incredibly oppressive situations. And it's hard for me to imagine myself in their shoes. Are these skills that I can develop?
Gal Beckerman:
I wrote this book not from the perspective of being a dissident myself. I'm the coward. I'm somebody who was worried that I might be a coward. If this situation presents itself where I was at a moral crossroads and I had to make a decision, would I be able to act like them? So one of the things I was trying to do with this book was to say, first of all, what actually are the qualities that defines them. And then if I break these down, are there small ways in my own life that by keeping those qualities in mind, I could move towards the way that they are?
I actually don't think that all of us can be dissidents. It might not even be preferable for us to all be dissidents, but I do think that having this consciousness of what it means to actually have that level of sensitivity that dissidents have really good for building up a certain kind of muscle. It's a moral awareness and a sense of moral agency that you have choice in any given situation, whether it's opening a newspaper and feeling not let me turn the page, but I should really respond to this in some way.
And I have the agency, I have the capability of responding to it. Or if it's deciding to join with your neighbors to clean up your neighborhood, there is something about being reminded of moral agency that felt important to me, especially in this moment, and it felt like a gift that I got from understanding how these people who maybe were the superstars, the super athletes of dissidents, how they responded in their situations.
Alex Lovit:
The way I'm reading this book, it is largely a book about psychology. It's about the psychology of dissidents, of resistance. Could you talk a little bit about the challenge, what we have to fight back against in order to be a dissident? Why is it so psychologically hard to do that?
Gal Beckerman:
Well, I mean, look, this book is sort of a faux how-to book, right? I mean, I've been much more pleased with people identifying it as one man's existential wrestling with these questions, which is actually probably more accurate a description of the book. But each of these qualities is broken down into chapters and the very first one is be alone. And I've had some interesting responses to that, which is people saying, "Well, don't you have to join with other people in order to make a movement or to create a constituency?"
Alex Lovit:
Well, don't you?
Gal Beckerman:
Well, you do, you do, and ultimately we get there in the book. I'm definitely not suggesting that somebody can just beat their head against a wall by themselves and that that creates change in a society. Absolutely not. But in every instance where I read a dissident memoir or had a conversation with somebody who'd been in jail in Iran or in China or in Russia, they all talked about a initial moment where they discovered their own identity as dissidents.
And these were moments of deep existential aloneness. The sense that the way that they felt in their gut, their resistance to what they were being asked to do in a certain situation or asked not to see in a certain situation, their reaction put them apart from their families, their communities, their society, sometimes their country. And that initial understanding of themselves as being different in this fundamental way.
Just as a parenthetical comment here, I drawn Hannah Arendt in the book, the German philosopher. She, of course, was trying to understand after World War II why some Germans, very few of them, completely resisted the Nazis, resisted what their society was demanding of them. And she really tried to beat her head against this question, trying to understand. And she came to the conclusion that it wasn't people who had a strong set, a defined set of moral precepts. It wasn't the Christian people or religious people.
She said, in fact, those people, they just switched out one set of rules for another. So do not kill became do kill. And they were just looking for a set of rules to follow. She said the people who resisted are people who were perpetual doubters and skeptics and who asked themselves this central question, can I live with myself? And in that situation, if the answer was living with myself means living with a murderer, they said, "No, I can't do it. I absolutely can't do it." And so for her, that defined what a dissident is.
And so to come back to your question, having that frame of mind, having that perspective on the world and on other people and on your own society can be deeply alienating and make you feel very alone at times because everybody else is just trying to self-preserve, is just trying to do the things that they need to do to feed their family, to stay safe, to keep the people they love safe.
And so if you're the person who suddenly says, "All of this needs to stop until this issue, which is an injustice that I feel in my gut that I cannot live with, is resolved," that's a hard stance to take. But I think that when you work through that aloneness, you do find ultimately the other people who you can build solidarity and I use the word loyalty in the book with who can become the other people who share your perspective and allow you to grow the circle of concern and of action around something you believe in.
Alex Lovit:
Is that about effectiveness or is it about psychological ability? Do we need to find our group to achieve change or do we need to find our group just to maintain our own psychological health or both?
Gal Beckerman:
Well, part of the reason I wrote this book was to push back in a gentle way against the idea that it's all about solidarity and building networks of people who want change and finding your neighbors and then finding the other activists who are going to help you. That is important. But I found myself living in a time where the central question that was being asked around me was not how do we do this, but why are people not doing this?
Why are people not joining together to resist the things that they feel are wrong? And to me, that seemed like a psychological question. It seemed like a question at the level of the individual, at the level of some kind of spiritual, philosophical, psychic decision that people are not making to do something different, to stand up, to go in the streets, to find the other people who can help them make change.
I think that something that we've forgotten about in this moment where a lot of people want to make change is the focus is so often on the tactics that are needed, the strategies needed to expand the community of activists that you're a part of to affect government, to affect legislation, to build movements, let's put it that way as a shorthand. And I think building movements is obviously a very important thing if you want to address an injustice or actually change something in your society.
But the problem that I was seeing around me was not how do you build or how do you push back or how do you resist as a group, but the question of why even do that? Because what I was seeing as I was looking around myself in the first few months of the second Trump administration, which is when I began to write this book, was people who felt that certain norms were being eroded, that certain exercises of executive power felt unprecedented and were having deep and inhumane effects in our society.
But people just began to... It's like the classic frog boiling in the water. It was just like one more thing would happen on top of another. And I felt like what I needed to understand was the psychological, the individual, the spiritual, the philosophical level at which a person, a single person makes a decision to actually push back. And that was something that I didn't really have a good handbook for.
Alex Lovit:
Let me ask about a couple. We won't go through all 10 of the chapters, the qualities, but let me ask about a couple that jumped out at me. And the first I wanted to ask about is be pessimistic. And that sort of flies in the face I think of our usual instinct of that we can make change by being optimistic about the change that is possible or just to maintain our psychological well-being and ability to move forward. What do you mean by be pessimistic?
Gal Beckerman:
Yeah. And I'm glad you pulled that one out because like be alone, it feels a little counterintuitive, but I came to see that in the profile of the dissident, this kind of pessimism, I actually call it a hopeful pessimism, is key. So the first thing to say is that pessimism and fatalism are not the same thing. Fatalism is the belief that things are bad and only ever going to get worse. They're determinately going to get worse. Pessimism is not that.
Pessimism is the belief that things will probably or most likely get worse. And in that probably and most likely, I believe there actually is a space for action that opens up because it's not necessary that they're going to get worse. It's just that if left alone, they will get worse. They will probably get worse. If you think about the opposite of that, which is optimism, it's the belief that things will probably get better, things will most likely get better.
And if you're somebody who's looking to change something about your society that feels unjust, if you're optimistic let's say about climate change, for example, you might say, "Well, probably, most likely some smart group of scientists is going to figure out how to create something that will help solve this problem of the increasing warmth of the planet. Or probably most likely politicians will come to their senses and create regulation that will stave off the worst from happening."
And I think that mentality could lead to passivity. It could lead to you saying, "Well, the arc of justice is going to bend in the right direction eventually, so what do I need to do right now? Maybe something, maybe not, but it doesn't really matter." If you have the opposite attitude of just pessimism, which is things are probably going to get worse, it's incumbent upon you to try to do what you can now to mitigate the worst of it.
It's not a pessimism that is a gloomy sort of pessimism. I borrowed this phrase hopeful pessimism, which I mentioned, from the Dutch philosopher Mara van der Lugt, contemporary philosopher who was looking at this idea. And hopeful pessimism means hopefulness without expectancy. You don't assume that the thing that you're going to do is going to solve the problem or create the change, but you have to do it anyways. And I really like this idea and it really seemed to track when I looked at dissidents.
They were very sober, these people. They're not people who had sunny dispositions about authoritarianism is just going to crumble if we work hard enough. When you talk to them, they would say or they would write in their memoirs that they worried that this was going to be the new state of affairs and that the oppression was just going to get worse and worse. Therefore, they need to do whatever they can to change the reality as it is right now.
Alex Lovit:
Well, so as someone personally inclined towards pessimism, thank you for making a pitch. I think pessimists don't get enough credit.
Gal Beckerman:
That's right.
Alex Lovit:
Let me ask about another one. It would just be funny. And again, that seems like a kind of counterintuitive, I'm going up against an autocrat with a lot of power, the power to kill me, and what I'm going to do is make a joke. Talk to me a little about that. Why is it important to be funny?
Gal Beckerman:
Well, after be alone and be pessimistic, I felt like I needed to give people, readers a breather. But yeah, so I think humor is really important and it's important for a number of reasons. First of all, I think this is intuitive. I think when we think about people who are in dark situations and find humor, it's a way that they can emerge from the worst of it with a sense of humanity because they're able to laugh at their situation.
So I think it serves that function at the most basic level. But I also think that humor is fundamentally about inverting the world. It's about taking the things that we take for granted, throwing them up in the air and being able to laugh at them and understand them is not set in stone. And when you think about the great observational comedians that we have, that's what they do.
They'll take something that we walk through our lives every day and don't even really think about and say, "Isn't it bizarre that we do X, Y, Z, that we eat our breakfast in the way that we do, or that we interact with our loved ones in the way that we do?" And when you think about an authoritarian environment where what the authoritarian leader hopes for the most is that their control over society is seen as natural, as seen as something that can never be questioned and that their role is almost godlike, comedy is threatening to that because a humor, what it says is it doesn't have to be this way.
When you think about somebody like Stalin, the thing that he most despised was people somehow making fun of him. Putin was the same when he came into power. One of the first things he did was got rid of a puppet show that was on TV that made fun of him. And this goes way back. When I was doing this research, I came across this fascinating work about the French Revolution and the years that led up to the French Revolution.
And there were these pornographic really body jokes about the king that were circulating in cafes in Paris. And why do we know this? We know this because the police were trying to track them down. If you go to the police records of Paris from the late 18th century, you find records of so-and-so said to so-and-so shared this joke about the king, shared this made up story about him, because they were trying to lock down, to clamp down on this activity because it was so threatening.
Because once you imagine the king is supposed to be a deity as immortal, as somebody who's a human just like anybody who can be laughed at and made fun of, has bodily functions like everybody else, you begin to take him down a few notches and you go down the road of being able to cut his head off eventually because he's no longer a deity. But I think it's humor that does this. It's humor that inverts the world in this totally subversive way that actually opens up possibility.
Alex Lovit:
Let me ask about one example that you write about in the book that I think combines these kind of attributes of pessimism and humor. Alexei Navalny. Last year the Kennedy Foundation created a democracy prize and he was posthumously awarded the first of that prize. I'm sure most people are aware of the general outlines of his story, but he was a dissident. He was resisting Putin in Russia.
Putin attempted to poison him and kill him in 2020 and he escaped the country, was living in Germany for a little while, and then returns to Russia in 2021 to almost certain death because this was the place where the leader had already tried to kill him. And then, in fact, he was killed in prison in 2024. And what strikes me about Navalny, one of the things that strikes me about Navalny is obviously incredibly bravery, but also he was so funny.
I watched Putin's Palace documentary. So this was like he returned to Russia and then released this documentary that he'd already recorded and it's real investigative reporting, but it's also very funny. It's like The Daily Show in ProPublica all wrapped up in one by a guy that's heading back into a police state. So I guess the question is, what is the role of humor in Navalny's story? And that's not necessarily a success story. Does pessimism have risks?
Gal Beckerman:
Well, Navalny is another real touchstone in this book and actually his death really affected... I mean, I felt very emotionally affected by it because he's somebody who really did stand as a quintessential dissident, as somebody who took enormous risks, which were hard for me to understand, the decision to go back to Russia after he'd already been poisoned when he had a family, a wife, and two young children. But it wasn't really a question for him.
In his own mind, it just would've been a violation of everything that he is or was to not go back and to not take that risk and make himself ultimately a martyr, which I think is he understood that that's what he was doing. But you're right. When you read his memoirs, they're really funny and funny in the darkest moments. I mean, he goes on a hunger strike at some point when he's in prison and he says, "Well, I went on this hunger strike, but look, I still don't have a six-pack."
He was able to really laugh at his situation really up until the end. This is, of course, like I said, the extreme case of dissidence where you're even willing to sacrifice your own life for the cause that you believe in. But I think in Navalny's case, and I don't think this is true in every case of somebody who sets themselves on fire to protest something.
This is an issue I explore in the book and I put it under the heading of recklessness, that a dissident needs a certain amount of recklessness, but how much and what kind of recklessness is a really tricky thing to sort out. But in Navalny's case, I think he really approached this danger to his life with a lot of clearheadedness.
Alex Lovit:
So you mentioned there the chapter Be Reckless, which obviously if you only focus on the risk, on the harm that may befall you, then you won't be a dissident. How reckless should people be?
Gal Beckerman:
Well, I think the question of recklessness is the most challenging one for me to wrestle with in the book because I do think that there is kind of a recklessness that can be a form of self-harm and can also be not motivated by the right things. It can be about a kind of purity or something that's more inner-focused. I guess that's one way to put it. That's the distinction that I came up with that is a very rough distinction.
But people who do acts of recklessness that are about purifying themselves in order to prove something about their levels of commitment or their levels of risk that they're willing to take. And then there are people who do that, engage maybe in the same behaviors, but it's all outwardly focused. It's focused on what the things are that they can change.
And in order to really, again, test this proposition, I took an example that to most people, I think people look back on as a unqualified success and maybe not even from a perspective of recklessness, which is the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. And this was the decision to send children basically to the barricades against one of the most cruel segregationist city policies in the South, in Birmingham.
There was a sheriff named Bill Connor who was willing to use extreme tactics to maintain segregation in the city. King and the civil rights movement were trying to desegregate especially the Downtown. And they came to a decision to have children be the ones who were leading the march. Now, we know some of the images that then emerged from this confrontation, the children being attacked with dogs, being attacked with water cannons.
And what happened ultimately was a success, which is people saw those images, especially people in the North, Kennedy in particular, and they were horrified because the images themselves, the images that King created through this confrontation, through this embrace of recklessness and of tension allowed people to see in a visceral way the evils of segregation because you saw children being abused and hurt in this way.
But I rewound the tape a little bit to the decision to even send children, which was an incredibly tortured one from King's perspective I found. And though their parents, middle-class Black parents in Birmingham, did not like the idea of their children being cannon fodder for the civil rights movement.
And King's own philosophy was tested because while he was sitting in jail in Birmingham at an earlier phase of the movement in Birmingham, he wrote this famous letter from Birmingham Jail where he really articulated this idea that the only way that you can make people confront an evil-like segregation and racism is by creating these moments of tension, by creating these moments of conflict so that the injustice is illustrated.
You can see it. So he had this idea, but then he had the reality of this means sending children into really harmful situations where they might not even know what's in their own best interests. And they decided to do it anyways. And the argument that King made to the parents was there is an objective here.
There is an objective to this recklessness, which is yes, there's harm that might come to your child right now, but we're trying to build towards a reality that will be better for them and for other children in the future where they'll be able to go to the downtown and sit in the Woolworths and order a soda without being harmed and freely like everybody else.
Alex Lovit:
Yeah. The outcome can never be sure. Navalny doesn't know for sure what's going to happen. King doesn't know for sure what's going to happen. And so those risks have to be taken without...
Gal Beckerman:
Yeah, yeah, that's in the nature of risk.
Alex Lovit:
I think a lot about that challenge of drawing attention to oppression. Today it's a pretty different situation, but I think about the authoritarian moves that are being made right now by the White House prosecuting James Comey, going after universities and law firms, attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center. These are all authoritarian moves, but I don't feel them. They aren't happening to me. How do you think about that challenge of drawing attention to the ways that people are being oppressed, even if it's not affecting everybody?
Gal Beckerman:
Yeah, no, and it is important. And so I want to say, first of all, that I think of making change is having a toolbox with lots of different tools that you can use. And one of them is a bullhorn and it's an important tool. But I do think that, and this goes back to what we were talking about in Birmingham was King, is that he understood that you needed to make it visible. You needed to make people see and viscerally understand the evils of a certain system.
I use evil very deliberately because that's how he understood it too. I don't know. In our own time, it's true. I think that one of the challenges is how do you make it tangible? How do you make it real? And so a positive example, I mean, although it led to two very tragic deaths, is what we saw in Minneapolis, which brought together for me a lot of the things that I've been writing and thinking about in a real world example that I thought, "Wow, this actually can work."
Because what you had in Minneapolis is people responding to something that was going on in their communities. They were seeing an injustice that was manifested as people not being able to leave their houses because they were scared that they were going to get pulled in by ICE and whether or not they actually had legal status to be here or not. Children who weren't going to school because they were too scared to leave their houses.
Masked men with guns whose jurisdiction was not entirely clear going in aggressive way through their communities. These were all things that people saw and responded to. And so this was very visceral, right? I mean, in that case, the injustice that was happening felt very real in people's faces, but what they did was not a signaling performative thing.
They created networks, networks that where most of the activity was the way people would communicate around monitoring ICE and what was happening in their communities, was helping people creating food trains to bring food to people who were afraid to leave their houses. And this is not just your usual suspect, Democrat, Liberal, however you want to label them.
I remember talking to this elderly couple who they just felt terrible that their neighbor's kid was afraid to walk to school, so they took it upon themselves to walk them to school every day. These kind of things happen all over Minneapolis. I mean, it led to two very tragic deaths. And what those deaths did, just like the actions in Birmingham that were taken against the children, they illustrated that there was something not right, something deeply morally not right about this policy.
And the Trump administration never, of course, said that this was why they retracted most of those government forces from Minneapolis, but that's eventually what happened. And so I think that what it offers us as an example is people can really join together at a community level when they feel that there is something fundamentally human that's being violated, some condition of what it means to live a dignified autonomous human life being overstepped, and that a wider circle of people will actually once they agree that that's the case, can actually do something about it.
Alex Lovit:
Yeah. And then maybe that gets us to what people can do now. And you said you don't consider yourself a dissident. You're trying to figure out what role you can play. How do you think people should ask themselves that question? We can't all be Alexei Navalny. How should we be thinking about our role in this moment?
Gal Beckerman:
Well, I think, and again, I'm not a dissident in the sense that when I say that, I mean that I'm not out there taking enormously brave stands. I'm not Alexei Navalny. But what I do think that I learned from this book, which is something that I hope is the useful part of it for people reading it right now, is this concept of moral choice, which I think we don't actually fully consider and grasp and hold onto.
I think people might pay lip service to the idea that they have moral choice, but I don't know how many of us walk through our lives really feeling like we can potentially do something or at least it's incumbent upon us to decide whether we want to do something because we can in any given situation, whether it's seeing somebody who's destitute on the street that you pass by or reading something in the newspaper that bothers you in a deep way about your own society.
Now, it doesn't always mean that you're going to react and do something about in each of those instances. I think that part of this embracing of moral choice is actually understanding the moments when you make a decision not to do something because you can't because the risk is too high or you have to balance it against your responsibilities to your family, to their well-being, to even your economic interests.
I can't leave this job because I need it to feed my family even though what I'm being asked to do is something wrong. We each need to grapple with those choices in those moments. And what I felt by the end of this book was a desire to embrace a kind of life that actually did see the choices as choices, if that makes sense.
And then the other part of it was not to understand that as only a burden and a responsibility because it can feel pretty exhausting to imagine that every day that you open the newspaper and you see a dead child somewhere in the world that it's incumbent upon you to do something. That feels like a heaviness and a sense of responsibility that you have that can be overwhelming.
That is true. I don't think we can discount that, but I also came to understand it as a great creative opportunity. The sense that I can make my own life through these choices, that there is something that gives substance to a meaningful life, to actually being able to say, "I was at these moral crossroads and I decided to do this thing that felt hard, but felt like something that I couldn't live with myself truly if I didn't do."
And I imagine myself looking back at my life and I think we can all probably imagine this too and thinking the thing that's going to feel most meaningful are those moments where we did the hard thing that actually felt like it came out of that embrace of moral choice and moral agency.
And so I'm not trying to have a cop out here by not giving you a, everyone should do X, Y, Z. I certainly have my X, Y, my things that I feel like I needed to become more conscious and aware of and engage with as a result of this book, but they might sound small to somebody else, but to me they're a result of a different kind of orientation towards the world.
I think that that's really was the effect I was going for here because I think before we can imagine big change on a large magnitude, we have to think about how we relate to our own societies and to each other and to the kind of attention that we pay to the things that actually our conscience or our moral compass tells us might be wrong.
Alex Lovit:
Well, thank you for that. And I appreciated this book in part because it gave me a belief that small things can make a difference and paying attention to our own actions matters even if we don't live up to the extreme examples that some of the ones in this book. So Gal Beckerman, thank you for your work and thank you for joining me on The Context.
Gal Beckerman:
Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.
Alex Lovit:
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter.
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