This is Democracy

This week, Zachary and Jeremi speak with UT Austin professor Lorinc Redei about Hungary’s recent election, in which longtime prime minister Viktor Orbán was defeated by opposition leader Péter Magyar, and what may come next.

Lorinc Redei is the assistant dean for undergraduate education and an associate professor of instruction at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is from Hungary and an expert on the politics of that country, policy-making in Europe, democratic backsliding, and international relations.

This week, Jeremi and Zachary host historian Mark Peterson to discuss his book, The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History, and to rethink the Constitution as a long-evolving relationship among people, government institutions, land, and written instruments rather than a single 1787 text.

Mark Peterson is the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History at Yale University.  He is the author of three major books: The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England; The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865; and, most recently, The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History.

This week, Zachary and Jeremi interview Atlantic writer and Johns Hopkins professor emeritus Eliot Cohen about his article “One War Two Mistakes” and how to think about the current U.S. war with Iran.

Eliot Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, author of the forthcoming book The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics, and co-host of the Shield of the Republic podcast. Cohen is also the author of The Hollow Crown, Supreme Command, Conquered Into Liberty, The Big Stick, and other works on military history and national-security policy. He created the strategic-studies program at Johns Hopkins SAIS and served as the school’s ninth dean. He has also served as the counselor of the Department of State and in other positions in the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

This week, Zachary and Jeremi have a conversation with Dr. Michael Dennis about the current war with Iran and the United States and Israel with a focus on the historical perspective.

Michael Dennis is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Dr. Dennis served as Chief of Intelligence Operations and Chief of Strategic Futures at Army Futures Command and was a member of the Intelligence Community, serving at the National Ground Intelligence Center as a Senior Intelligence Analyst. He was appointed an Exceptional Analyst Research Fellow at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and taught at the National Intelligence University’s Center for Strategic Intelligence and Research.

Jeremi and Zachary speak with historian Heather Ann Thompson about her book "Fear and Fury," using the 1984 Bernie Goetz subway case to explore how Reagan-era, rising inequality, and a newly powerful conservative media reshaped public attitudes about crime, race, and self-defense. They connect the episode to figures like Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Rudy Giuliani, and to the often-overlooked lives of the four teenagers at the center of the story.

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan, and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Her latest book is Fear and Fury: The Reagan 80s, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026).