Today we’re bringing you an episode of What Could Go Right from our friends at The Progress Network.
Each Wednesday on What Could Go Right, hosts Zachary Karabell and Emma Varvaloucas converse with diverse experts to have sharp, honest conversations about what’s going on in the world, even during difficult times. In this episode, Nick spoke with Emma and Zachary about the state of civics education in the US, as well as how we can start to talk to each other civilly in an increasingly polarized political landscape.
You can listen to What Could Go Right here or, as they say, wherever you get your everything.
Transcript
Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.
Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I'm Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varcaloucas, executive director of The progress Network. And What Could Go Right? Is our weekly podcast where we focus on issues that we believe to be important and hope that you concur.
And we talk to scintillating interesting people, at least we hope they're both scintillating and interesting about said issues. And one of the things that is surprisingly and suddenly germane this year is a term and an idea that many people of a certain age think of as dry, antiquated and frankly uninteresting. And that is civics, the study of, and the awareness of what governmental systems we in the United States live with, and I suppose to some degree live under. And it used to be that there was civics education as a required aspect of a education. You, you had to, in order to graduate high school, have one course that taught you about the constitutional framework of the United States, how laws are made, how governments exist, how state governments exist, and how they evolve. And that has waned as a focus to the point where not as many people are exposed to that knowledge. Interestingly, anyone who has to be naturalized as an American citizen and take a citizenship test is exposed to that because they have to learn civics in order to pass that test.
So you have this odd system now where anybody who is a recent or not so recent immigrant to the United States may in fact know more about the constitutional system in the United States than many native born Americans. So we're gonna talk to somebody today who has been focusing on and has created a podcast dedicated to this topic and dedicated to civics knowledge and civics education. And particularly as we debate the role of the presidency and the role of the Congress and the role of law and the role of the Supreme Court, this framework and understanding becomes ever more important.
So Emma, who are we going to talk to today?
Emma Varvaloucas: Today we are talking to Nick Capodice. He is the co-host and education outreach producer of a podcast called Civics 101. Basically, the podcast exists to help make civics accessible and invigorating for listeners nationwide, with a special focus on young people. They have an archive of something like 400 podcast episodes.
So if you're interested in learning about basically anything civics, especially now with a lot of this debate going on in the first six months or so of the Trump administration, it's a great resource to turn to.
Zachary Karabell: I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Nick Capodice, it is such a pleasure to have you on What Could Go Right? Now you get to be on the other side of the microphone, given that you do your own podcasts. You get to, it's like being the dentist in the dentist chair kind of thing, and equally unpredictable and possibly just as painful.
I am going to begin with a question that is ripped from the headlines. Big controversy at Texas A&M over a student who objected to the teaching of a like non-binary LBGTQ lesson. And the attention was entirely on, you know, whether he, he was unfairly being taught this after the Trump administration had done a bunch of executive orders about ending DEI and a variety of other programs, and it led to a big kerfluffle at Texas A&M. And what I'm struck by apropos our conversation and your work on civics is that he began his complaint to the teacher saying, this lesson is against the president's laws.
Nick Capodice: Oh dear.
Zachary Karabell: And what I was struck by was we ought to be talking about that statement in terms of civics far more than we should be debating whether or not it's appropriate or inappropriate or okay or in-okay to, you know, is non-binary a category?.
Please, for the audience here, I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just saying rather than focusing on that aspect of this particular controversy, what I was struck by was how little we focused on that first statement. So, I am going to, rather than preclude what I'm about to say and ask you, I'm gonna ask you to explain to our listeners why that statement is a civics problem.
Nick Capodice: It's a big civics problem. It's, I would argue, the biggest civics problem right now because for anybody out there, the president does not make laws. Congress makes laws. That's their purpose. The President does executive orders and executive actions, but those do not have the force of law. If I could just start explaining this with like the briefest of anecdotes.
We're, we're doing a thing at Civics 101. We're watching movies every other weekend that are sort of civic themed and having a big conversation after the film and the cinema. And we watched Mr. Smith goes to Washington last Saturday. Right. Great film. Capricorn. I love it. I sobbed 50% of the time.
Zachary Karabell: Best filibuster scene in any movie ever. Not that there are so many, but you know,
Emma Varvaloucas: I was gonna say, is it the only.
Nick Capodice: I don't know.
Zachary Karabell: There are some others. I'm sure? We could Google, Chat GPT.
Nick Capodice: Best filibuster, but instead of reading Green Eggs and Ham, you know, he is, he's expounding on the virtues of democracy. Which, which is, which is great, you know, so it's a good filibuster. But the point is, the, the word the President is said exactly one time in Mr. Smith goes to Washington. The president is never mentioned. It's never a thought. There's no relationship between the Senate and the President. And that just struck me as how far we've come to the point where so much power in terms of executive action is, is, is enacted by the current president of the United States.
But yeah, it's a civics problem where we perhaps due to a lack of understanding or perhaps due to something else, but we're at a point where we interpret the powers of the executive branch as being they've been taken away from Congress and invested in that body. So yeah, it's a big civics problem.
Zachary Karabell: I'm fully prepared to believe that the student who said this said this, believing that meaning there had been no prior civics education. Certainly nothing in the way news quote unquote is reported that would lead anyone in particular who didn't know otherwise. To believe that the president doesn't make laws like that should be obvious, but I don't actually believe it to be obvious.
So what has, what's your experience been actually talking to students about what their kind of in the ether understanding is of how systems work, how our constitutional systems work.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, so the reason our show was created was in the wake of the 2016 election, there was a just swath of people asking questions about, can the president do X or can Congress do Y? Or what's the difference between the house and the Senate? And somebody wrote on a piece of paper schoolhouse rock for adults.
That's how Civics 101 was born.
Zachary Karabell: Emma, you don't remember Schoolhouse Rock?
Emma Varvaloucas: I like, I like vaguely know the reference like singing. Right? There was singing, there was rock, rocking, there was cartoons?
Nick Capodice: There was a bill who was very, very sad on the steps of the Capitol Hill.
Zachary Karabell: I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill.
Emma Varvaloucas: I'm too young for this. I, I'm gonna bow out of this conversation.
Nick Capodice: There was one about no kings and there was one about, you know, that's the one thing we stand for, interestingly enough. But the point is, a lot of people, when you talk to people in the fif in their fifties and sixties, remember having a rather robust civics education. And almost without exception, it is like, this was so boring, it was my least favorite class, but I did learn how a bill becomes a law.
What has happened since then? I believe it was in 2016. No, it was 2017. So for every $50 that the United States spent on STEM education, per student per year, federal government spends 50 bucks per kid per year on science, technology, engineering, and math. Right? And for every American student, for civics, it's 5 cents, $50, 5 cents. In 2020 that number has been, just massively exploded to 50 cents per student per year.
Zachary Karabell: Wow, 10x.
Nick Capodice: But it actually, it has results. I dunno if you folks are familiar. There's this fantastic study called the Annenberg Annenberg Civics Survey. It comes out every year. It's like, how are we doing? Like, how am I doing as a nation when it comes to civics understanding?
It just came out three or four, you know, a couple days ago, and the results were a marked in market increase in our understanding of civic concepts and procedures and systems by about 5%. The, the basic one is, Can you name all three branches of the US government? Last year, 70% of Americans could this year, 75% of Americans could. That's a big jump.
Same survey had the most staggering gap I have ever seen in the history of this survey in do you trust in the powers and in systems of the Supreme Court of the United States? Staggering. It's a 60 point shift. If someone was identified as a Democrat, 18% said they trusted the Supreme Court in the United States versus 75% of Republicans.
So these are two things combined, right? You have a staggering lack of funding for civics education in the United States, and it has gone down since the 1950s, sixties, seventies, eighties, combined with a steep, steepest rise in polarization we've seen in our lifetimes. And those two things combined are a perfect storm for someone to say the president's laws.
That's what's happening right now.
Emma Varvaloucas: It might depress you both to know that I had a civics class in high school that was optional and I did not take it. So I don't know many people who did.
Nick Capodice: I don't think I would've in high school.
Emma Varvaloucas: I can name all three branches of government though.
Nick Capodice: Well, well done. My love and understanding of civics truly went from zero to a thousand since starting on the show seven years ago, like it's, it's, I now, it's everything I think about and we go to events every month to talk to teachers and, you know, big civic thinkers. Like what do we do now? But yeah, it's also the, what we talk to a lot of teachers, right?
So I like to think about what the teachers are going through right now. The teachers in the US are having, I won't speak for any of them in particular, I won't name any names, but a hard time in navigating this and navigating how to deal with the administration of their school and the parents of, let's say, 90 kids all at the same time and trying to make everything okay so they don't get a call from a parent and get punished for it. It's, it's one of the toughest times I've ever seen for social studies and civics teachers in the country.
Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I can imagine that's a tough environment, especially I think the parents are more involved now than ever, even in stuff that doesn't have to do with politics. So, Nick, I wanted to ask you about, I mean, we're the, What Could Go Right? people, so we're totally here to celebrate the, the 5% increase in Americans who can name the three branches of government.
The other way to look at that is like, okay, 70 to 75% of Americans can name the three branches of government, which is like the most basic question that kind of sucks probably most of us if we took the citizenship test as citizens already would fail. Voter turnout is pretty low, right? Like we had record high voter turnout in the last, let's say, couple of elections, it was 65%. So, and, and that hasn't been a recent thing, right? Like that that's been throughout American history, voter turnout has been around that or less.
I'm wondering if you could talk about the relationship between those two things, both civics education and voter turnout, and also if you have any working theory for why like Americans suck so hard at both of these things.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, no, absolutely. I really do. So why are we so bad at civics education and why are we so bad at voting? And do those two things go hand in hand? I think they absolutely do. However, I will say specifically for younger people, that's who I'm focusing on right now, you know, why is that demographic of 18 to 25 year olds so bad at voting? I absolutely understand it. It's, it's, it's not apathy, it's just an under, if it's a feeling that the, the game is rigged and that, you know, they have no say in it. So many young people I talk to say, why should I bother voting? Right? And sometimes they'll say the parties are the same, but that's much, much more rare now than it used to be.
What I always like to tell those students is the reason that you feel unrepresented in your elected officials is because you don't vote. Because you're not a guaranteed, you know, slate that they can appeal to over and over again. What's the use of appealing to somebody if they don't vote for you? Right, so we always like to say that doing votes is like doing pushups for your generation, right?
You're like trying to like strengthen it up and to have elected officials actually care about you because you'll vote for them. It's one of the strongest things you can do. Another thing though is, so if we look at the Constitution of the United States, what is it? We're, so we're at the 250th anniversary of the United States. You know, the Declaration of Independence, about 239 years since the Constitution came, but we just had Constitution Day. So we're 250 years into our nation. You know, 250th anniversary of the United States and the Declaration, and you know, the Constitution, 230 odd years since our constitution was written.
What we have seen as a country with the oldest surviving continuing constitution in the world is that it has been interpreted and adapted so many different ways over these 200 odd years that it gets to a point where you feel like whomever has the most money and whoever has the best lawyers. Is gonna be right. You look at things like precedent, you look like look at a hundred year old precedent set by the Supreme Court, and that just is overdone, overturned, and the blink of an eye, you can be like, well, it doesn't matter. All these rules don't matter if the people who are in power can do whatever they like with those rules.
Of course I would feel cynical and I would feel a little apathetic perhaps if you just see this happen over and over again. A tremendous example of this is the upswing in the shadow docket, which we just did an episode on for Civics 101. These are Supreme Court orders that are not typical. They're not, there's no briefs, there's no arguments, there's no great opinion that you get to read and sort of simmer over and you know, in the summer. This is, you know, the Supreme Court just saying, yep, uphold this. Don't uphold that. We are in, you know, we're in the fall and we have had a record, this has been a world record in shadow docket decisions by a court in US history.
So I can see both sides of it. I can see this lack of civics education mixed with an apathy, with a feeling that what you do doesn't matter, and with a feeling that the rules are not being followed.
Zachary Karabell: It's odd. We've actually done, I think two and a half episodes of this season have been on the shadow docket or aspects of it. One with Jeffrey Rosen, who's the head of the National Constitution Center. The other.
Nick Capodice: I met Jeffrey Rosen last week. I hung out with him just just a few days ago. He's phenomenal.
Zachary Karabell: Yeah, so we did a podcast with him. We did one with Stephen Vladeck, who's a Georgetown professor, and we did one with Joyce Vance who was a former US attorney and we talked about it, so it's, it's indicative of our time that we are all talking about something that we didn't talk about at all ever.
Nick Capodice: I never, yeah, I, my entire youth, I never would've known what the shadow docket was or what, you know, emergency injunctions were. But now we're all talking about it.
Zachary Karabell: Yeah, things change.
Like it's easy to to do the conversation as we are now doing it, which is to lament the legitimate lack of civic education, the fact that Emma made a horrifically wrong choice in her high school career, and which she has ameliorated with her autodidact self corrective mechanism. But that being.
Emma Varvaloucas: We hope, we can hope.
Zachary Karabell: Most of us don't do that. And then promptly left the United States, which is a whole other issue.
So what are the good stories here of, of people being exposed to civic education or having, I guess the question is the nature nurture, right? It, it may be a problem that there isn't civic education, but that doesn't mean there isn't kind of ingrained community history, civic sensibility.
And you pointed to this as the longest constitutional system, right? That the United States is this conundrum of, it's a, it's a young country in an old state or a young country in an old system, and that does work its way into people's sensibilities. Right? I imagine if you gather together, I imagine being the softball leading question for you, who does indeed gather together a group of high school students that many of them have civic sensibility that they've kind of imbibed in the ether.
Nick Capodice: Yeah.
Zachary Karabell: I wonder like what the good stories are there as opposed to the Oh My God stories, which constitute the bulk of our written and spoken stories, but are probably not the bulk of the actual stories.
Nick Capodice: That's a really good point and we always gotta start with the, Oh My God, right? We just gotta get it outta the way. It's like taking the medicine. I would say the successes far outweigh the negatives in terms of what we see with students across the country.
The first thing is that civics. When we say civics, I have lately been thinking we need to get a new word for it, 'cause when we hear civics, all this baggage comes with it. It's the thing that Emma did not want to do in high school, right? We did not.
Emma Varvaloucas: So boring.
Nick Capodice: So boring. What civics is, there's this wonderful teacher, Raj Vinnakota, who who has been advocating across the country. Civics is not the legislative process and it's not executive actions. It is learning in second grade that you have had a turn and you must give the toy to the other kid. That is the foundation of civics and it is everything. And it's not how to debate necessarily, 'cause debates have winners and losers. Civics is, how do I talk to you, Emma? How do I talk to you, Zachary? How do we do it in a way that is like kind and we can listen to each other's points of view and we can disagree? Right now, being able to disagree I think is, that is the big problem in the United States now.
So students are learning how to disagree with each other in most places, and they're using tools that I don't see in people my age you know, sitting at the bar in whatever state I happen to be in at any given time. Arguing is not happening, I think in a, in a really good way among people in my demographic. But it seems to be doing really well in students, 'cause teachers are enforcing these very good rules about how do we disagree with other classmates.
And that's what civics is. We are a nation born out of revolution and disagreement. That is, that's what we are, we're, you know, we're, I was gonna say we're a tea party nation, but that was gonna come out the wrong way. But we we're a nation from protest and we're a nation where people disagreed to create how we operate.
And once that disagreement is gone, I believe the spirit of the nation is gone. So you'll have some people calling it civil discourse. That's like the thing that we need to start doing, and you'll have some people calling it just talking. But I think that is what, right now, as in like, you know, the last few months in the United States, is gonna be the sort of central focus, which is not as much processes and much more, how can we get back to disagreeing again?
Emma Varvaloucas: What does that look like for you or maybe for these students on the ground, 'cause I feel like my personal anecdote about this is that I was trying to actively like quote unquote depolarize myself for years. And I thought that I was doing a pretty good job. And then I started dating somebody who, the only vote he's ever cast in his life was for Trump in 2016.
And like I was just shouting at him most of the time. Right? Like I was not depolarized at all. Like it was, it was, I was super reactive.
Nick Capodice: What were you arguing about?
Emma Varvaloucas: We argued a lot about the fact that he had never voted except for Trump. We argued about a lot of the like culture war issues, like he's ex-military and he really felt that the military had gone quote unquote woke under Obama and that there was a woke agenda.
I was like, I heard the term woke agenda was just like, what are you talking about? This is social justice. You know, like it was just like people at each other. I'm curious what your circles are like, as somebody who's been doing this podcast now for four or five years, and as you say, you've been seeing some good examples in classrooms, like it's one thing to talk abstractly about civil discourse, 'cause I was talking abstractly about it myself. And then when I realized, when I really came down to it, like I was like a shrieking banshee with somebody who I really cared about. So yeah, looking for tips here, I suppose.
Nick Capodice: Al, I got a bunch of tips. This is great. So one thing, we recently did an episode on framing, on political framing, and it's the thing that I am, it's like the only thing I'm thinking about, and for anyone out there who's not familiar with the concept, I'm sure you both are. The reason I did the episode is somebody skeeted on Bluesky. You know, if you're against all of the things in the quote unquote Big, Beautiful Bill that has been put forward sort of by, not by the president, but through Congress at the whim of the president, stop calling it the big, beautiful bill. And what I saw at night is, you know, people who were quite against the policies within it would say Trump's so-called Big, Beautiful Bill. And they would do the air quotes and they would be snide and sarcastic about it. However they had already entered the president's framing. We keep hearing Big, Beautiful Bill. Big, Beautiful, Big, Beautiful Bill. We're going to think it's a big bill. It's maybe not the most beautiful, but it's a little bit beautiful.
You know, the, the framing is more powerful than anything. And in your example, Emma, you know, you've got social justice versus woke agenda. These are two frames and no amount of facts. No, like statistics that you bring up on the wall and photographs. You will never ever be able with facts to break somebody out of their frame.
It's nearly impossible. This is, you know, I've been reading the books of, you know, George Lakoff and the words of Frank Luntz. You know, these notions of, once a thing has been decided, once we start calling something, for example, a partial birth abortion, which is a non-existent term in the medical community, once we start using the, the shift from global warming to climate change, these words that we use to define problems.
And again, social justice versus woke agenda, you can't get out of them. So how do you get out of them? There's a phenomenal guy named Ben Klutsey who works at George Mason University, who works, he's sort of like working in a pluralist or pluralism, pluralism institute. He says to have a conversation with somebody with whom you disagree, it will not be possible unless three steps are met. Three adamantine rules. These are ironclad adamantine Is that a real element or is that just an X-Men element?
Zachary Karabell: I'm not sure, but it's a good word regardless.
Nick Capodice: It is inexcusable and adamantine, but here's the three adamantine rules. Number one, it has to be done with respect at the outset, you cannot say something that disrespects him and he cannot say something that disrespects you. You have to talk to each other with respect, and if you screw up, you have to say sorry. Sorry, sorry. Sorry. That's like the base foundation.
Number two is honesty. Honesty is you have to say the real reason you're feeling something. I think a lot about my father who was a very against same-sex marriage in the 1980s and 1990s, and he would have all these sort of willowy side reasons why he was against it. It was about taxes and it was about, well, I could marry my best friend and get a tax break, and I'm like, dad. What's your real problem, dad? And it was not about the taxes. You have to be honest about why you feel that way.
And step number three, adamatine rule number three is curiosity. You actually have to be curious. Why do you think this way? How does it affect you? And if you have those three things met, you're going to be able to talk to each other. Another one is don't try to change somebody's mind. I, I've heard that, but I can't help myself, Emma. I try to do it all the time. I love trying to change people's mind, but I'm willing to have my own changed.
So that's a good tip for anybody who's trying to have a civil conversation with somebody with whom they disagree. And then the last thing is hyperlocal, right? I can't have a, an argument with somebody about immigration law in the United States, right? But I might be able to talk about funding for, you know, the paving on my street in Concord. I can talk about that and we can have a good conversation about that. And then eventually we can get to much bigger things with the truth is, we forget that we are completely far more affected by the things that affect us on a hyperlocal level than on the national level, though I will argue of the last six to eight months, that's changed a tiny bit, but I still advocate caring about what's going on locally.
You're gonna be able to have much better conversations and you're gonna get a lot more stuff done.
Zachary Karabell: So you work with teachers and with students, right? And.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, we do. Our show is designed secretly, not so secretly, to be used in classrooms from eighth to 12th grade across the United States. The vast, vast majority of our listenership is people from the ages of 30 to 60. So you know, it's teachers are playing our show in the classroom, but most people who listen to our show listen because they want to know how some piece of our government operates.
Like what is the difference between the House and the Senate? What is the shadow docket decision? You know, we're doing one right now on what are the grievances and the Declaration of Independence. How does the Supreme Court pick cases to hear all these very small things one at a time? And if you listen to all 400, you'll have an understanding of how the system actually works.
But yeah, we work with teachers a lot.
Zachary Karabell: One of the other challenges, of course, is local polarization, and what I mean by that is it's even harder now to be in a class where different sides are at least somewhat evenly divided or represented. So like if you're in a high school in Concord, Mass, you know, you might get a handful of real staunch Maggie e or just conservatives for at large. But you're, you're, you're not gonna have like a lot of diversity, even in a public high school. You'll have some, and there's a little more, you know, even in the most red or blue parts of the United States, 20% of people vote for the other side. Like, you know, even in Alabama there's some Democrats and I mean some more liberal Democrats and there are definitely in the northeast some, you know, genuine conservatives.
So I, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but it can always, it usually will feel, I think in a, in a school context where the deck is somewhat stacked against you socially. I don't know how you offset that part, right? Like nobody really wants, it's, it's a rare person who enjoys tilting against the group.
Nick Capodice: I will just push back on that, Zachary. My whole life has been the, as the tilter at the mini, the mini windmills that we've seen in the world. I went to a, I went to a really conservative boarding school for high school, in which there were 600 kids in the graduating class and the members of the young Republican party, there were about 200.
You know, the members of the Young Democrat Party, were a Democratic party were five, five people, so you're gonna have that anywhere you go in life, you're, I mean, there's a reason we have these bubbles that ensconse us all the time. And yeah, the deck is gonna be stacked against you, whichever side you're on.
If you're an, you know, rabid MAGA conservative, and you're in a liberal classroom, you're gonna have a tough time and you're gonna put your armor on and you're gonna come out fighting in a way maybe differently than you talk to a friend. I will say to your point though, Zachary, the polarization, and this is not new, this is, we have been on a ramp up incline in polarization basically since the, what is it, the contract for America in the 1990s.
After that it has increased and increased and increased and increased and at the same time, we are in a sea of information and a sea of myth and disinformation and propaganda. We're in all, we have more information than we could ever consume. What do we do with that? We use anything we can to fight if we are the person who's tilting against the crowd. I think I, I have many friends who believe differently politically than me, Emma, a very similar situation in my life to what you went through. But there you, there's always a way to talk to somebody if you appeal to something outside of a party line. If you don't quote stats that you've read, if you don't have pre-designed arguments of how to chew somebody up, if you just talk to somebody and say, how are you? One exercise I heard the other day was somebody was talking to somebody else about Thanksgiving was coming up, right? Oh, and my uncle is gonna, he's gonna give me a raft to this Thanksgiving 'cause he's mad about this. How do I talk to my uncle? And the advice was start by asking your uncle, like what are, you know, some real wonderful things he's done for his community lately, or people who need support locally for him that he's helped out or he has friends who helped out.
You'll hear stories about people that he cares about and things in his community that you know really good things. And once you're able to talk to somebody in about things that are not the hot button, political issues about your community and who you care about, 'cause that's what civics is. The word civic, civos, comes from citizen as well. Citizen just means a person in the town. That's all it means. A person in a community. That's where we get the word civics. If you care about your town and your community and your neighbor and you can talk to them, eventually you can get to the things that matter politically.
Emma Varvaloucas: I also think that we can just choose not to talk about politics at all, right?
Nick Capodice: Uh, I don't know if you want to do that though. you wanna do that?
Emma Varvaloucas: I mean with, let, let me say that like strategically with some people. Like I, I think that when we're, sometimes when we talk about conversations about how to have conversations, we kind of imagine like this person all the way over on the left or this person all the way over on the right and I need to talk to like the hardest person there is to talk to where it's really just like, you might just need to talk to like someone who's like one step from you on the right or one step from you on the left, and like that's a much easier conversation than being like, lemme just jump right over to like my most difficult uncle at Thanksgiving. Like, I'm not sure. I'm not saying don't talk at all. I'm just saying like, maybe you don't need to talk to the guy who thinks that Hillary Clinton is a lizard in a human suit.
Nick Capodice: You know, that's a fair point. I, I mean, I will, I always love talking to the people who think Hillary Clinton is a lizard in a human suit.
Emma Varvaloucas: Well, there's that.
Nick Capodice: Uh, 'cause you know, one of those David Ikes books. Yeah. Fingerprints with like all those weird books about the lizard people. But I think you're right. There's a big argument these days that we all, capital we, we the people have a lot more in common than we have differently, and one of the terms I heard used is conflict. Entrepreneurs are out there who are trying to breed and make money and get power. From that conflict division actors and conflict entrepreneurs. And that's true. There, there are media organizations and there are politicians who are just racking up the power and the dollar bills by stoking those fires, by having woke agenda versus social justice arguments, right?
But there's so much that makes up a person politically, and this is evidenced by the media, and I mean far left media, central media and far right media's inability to make sense of the atrocious assassination of Charlie Kirk that happened recently. Everybody's trying to take this person in this horrible action and to put it into some sort of frame and some sort of nutshell and an absolute inability to do so because the truth is there is no one hard line.
We, we contain multitudes, but we really do so. Yeah, somebody can agree with you on, on immigration policy and completely disagree with you on a woman's right to choose and it's, it's baffling, but that's what we are and that's what I hope we eventually return to as a nation. That's kind of how we started, which is somebody can disagree with you about representation in the States and the Senate and the versus the house, and then somebody can really disagree with you on, you know, slavery and you can have these arguments about what we are and what we should be, and it's okay as long as you sort of maintain that way of talking to that other person nonviolently.
Zachary Karabell: You've talked a lot about the role of fun or making things more fun.
Nick Capodice: Have I, have I been talking about fun?
Zachary Karabell: Not, not in this conversation, no.
Nick Capodice: Oh, okay.
Emma Varvaloucas: But you are fun.
Nick Capodice: Oh, thank you Emma.
Zachary Karabell: In some of your other podcasts and work, no, we haven't been talking about that right now, but we're about to making education, you know, as it were. Not boring, but you know, therefore more fun. Right. Something that engages people. How do you respond to the, I guess the, the, the pushback is these things are too serious to be fun. Just like when people push back saying this is, this is of too much gravitas to be humorous, right? Humor has a place, but not here. Fun has a place, but not here. But of course, one of the things that engages people educationally right, is this, this idea that it's enjoyable, right? That it's a process that would have engaged the teenage Emma and not put her off.
Emma Varvaloucas: Okay, now I feel like I'm getting flagellated here.
Zachary Karabell: No, you're getting, you're getting used as Exhibit A. There's a difference.
Emma Varvaloucas: Uh, fine. Fine.
Zachary Karabell: And a rather apropos exhibit A. I mean, meaning like, I, I don't, I I think you are massively representative rather than, you know, out of the box. I mean, you're outta the box in other ways. I'm just talking about this way.
Nick Capodice: So to, to the fun question. The fun question. Let's have a serious talk about the fun.
fun
Zachary Karabell: be serious.
Nick Capodice: Put that fun in a little box and we're gonna talk about it. So when the show Civics one one was started in 2017, it was a, what was called, what's called a two-way in the radio world, which is just another word for an interview. I don't know what, we don't just say interview. And my initial job was try to sort of, to, to sort of push that towards high school students in the country to make the show approachable to them. And that didn't re, it wasn't really working because it just, a straight up interview about civics concepts was not really digestible or fun. Then sort of the show shifted, the host, she was fantastic. She moved to another broadcasting company, Hannah, my co-host and I, deep friends. We decided to make the show a bit more fun and to use music and sound effects and jokes and talk to each other, like human beings and tell sort of a narrative story about how we learned about this one concept.
That's what each episode is. There are some things that are not fun. If we're doing an episode about, you know, Dred Scott V. Sanford or Plessy v Ferguson, I'm not gonna have jokes in there, I will have sound effects and I will have music. But what we do in the show, if we're talking about something serious, we will address it seriously.
But then to have the fun, we'll talk about a related concept, an earlier Supreme Court case, an earlier law that was passed in America, and that has parallels to this much more serious thing. And once you understand that, you can understand the serious thing. Another thing is we talk about systems and processes.
We don't talk about politics on our show, we just talk about this means, this means, this means this means this. And that's how it happens. And that can always be fun. That can always have ragtime piano music in the background. Hannah always calls it, Nick, is this another wi, you know, the Price of Milk episode? And I'm like, yep. This is another one of those me rattling off fun stories about the price of milk from, you know, 1863 all the way to now. But I think there's always a space for fun. And in terms of engagement, I love. Emma Zachary, I love what I do more than anything I've done in my entire life. Adore working for this show.
I am nowhere in the same grade as these high school teachers in the United States, civics teachers across the country, high school teachers, social studies teachers. There is no better group. At getting students engaged, they know better than anybody, anybody, how to make a lesson engaging. All we can offer to them is an extra voice or an extra way to listen to understand a civics concept, and I am perpetually in awe of their work.
So it's happening. It's happening out there.
Zachary Karabell: I think you could have done a fun thing with Plessy versus Ferguson. Like imagine you're a Supreme Court Justice in 1896 and you're trying to come up with a catchphrase that eventually is separate but equal. Come up with different ones, like different but the same.
You could do like a whole list.
Nick Capodice: Same, but different.
Yeah. One of these things is not like the other. You know what's interesting? Actually, if, just as a side little civics note about that one we had a guest on for our Plessy versus Ferguson episode who said one of his, he has a search, a Google search. Alert when everybody says Plessy v Ferguson enshrined the concept of separate but equal and made it the law of the land, and that is just like how we started today. Zachary, this is the Supreme Court made separate but equal the law of the land. Does the Supreme Court make laws? No, it certainly does not. Did it enshrine separate but equal. No. States, dozens of states practiced, had separation laws on the books at that time.
Small congresses and states were the ones who enshrined the law of separate but equal. The Supreme Court just upheld that law and then, you know, overturned it in Brown versus Board of Topeka Board of Education. But it's like. We've been doing this since the beginning, is like we, we sort of give the power and we give the blame to the wrong people sometimes.
We did a whole series of Supreme Court decisions that were civil rights decisions and for each one when we could, we interviewed a direct descendant of the named party in the case. So, you know, one of the descendants of, you know, and Dred Scott, I, I talked to descendants of Plessy and Ferguson. Who live in in New Orleans and Korematsu.
Oh, and I even got to talk to Jim Obergefell himself in Obergefell v Hodges. It's important to talk to the people who are the parties in these cases.
Emma Varvaloucas: What did the Plessy vs. Ferguson descendants have to say?
Nick Capodice: They were wonderful. They actually got together and started a foundation called Plessy and Ferguson in New Orleans.
Emma Varvaloucas: Gosh. Wow.
Nick Capodice: it's the two of them. It's Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, and they teach students across the country, you know, how did this happen? Pbe Ferguson is like such a fascinating case, such a fascinating story.
Zachary Karabell: There's something like this in Charlottesville, I think with the descendants of Sally Hemmings and the descendants of of Jefferson, there's like a Jefferson Hemmings society.
Nick Capodice: I think that's important. The Supreme Court is, well, the Supreme Court Historical Society, I should say, not the Supreme Court is doing some really cool projects called Hometowns, where students from across the country go to the town that was the center of a Supreme Court ruling, and they see where the thing happened that was argued about in the court and they learn about it with law professors and judges and lawyers for like three weeks. And these high school students after three weeks are at the level of constitutional scholars in this one case. 'cause they were there where it happened. That's so important.
Zachary Karabell: See these things we don't focus on, right? We try to focus on good stories, good news, things that are going on in the world at The Progress Network that just fly beneath the radar, right? Because they're not dramatic. They're usually more, you know, there's more Concord, not your Concord, Massachusetts actual Concord, and not the grapes either.
Just so we're all clear, because that doesn't usually constitute news and stories. And if it does, it's, it's allowed, it's footnote. We've joked for years that you always got the last segment of the local news was the firemen saving, you know, cats and trees kind of thing, and 'cause everything else was just, you know, murder and collapse and corruption and stories like the one you just told of the Supreme Court Historical Society doing this, which require a lot of effort and time and a lot of buy-in from a lot of different groups. It doesn't resonate as a news story.
Nick Capodice: Hmm.
Zachary Karabell: A news story would be on one of those trips, one of the professors said something that a student got offended by and he got suspended. Right.
That, that would be the news story. The news story would not be the 72 other times where everybody emerged from that experience. Like, wow, that was great. My life isn't riched. I, I, my horizons were opened. Isn't that a, I mean, wow.
Nick Capodice: My school, my school had a great debate about the Second Amendment and kids came and they, and they agreed and they disagreed and they all agreed to disagree and disagreed to agree. You know, that story doesn't come out in the, in the newspaper. And you know, if it did come out anywhere, it'd be the local newspaper, which is a dying institution. We are all hyperfocused on what is the big gruesome thing that happened today?
Zachary Karabell: There is a human nature to that, right? Like nobody, nobody writes a story saying, you know, 12,000 planes took off and landed safely this week. Talk to your local air traffic controller going, yeah. Thanks for fun.
Nick Capodice: And yet another political assassination that happened a while ago, and sorry to bring it so gruesome again, but I would see people, I spend all my time on, you know, left-leaning articles, right-leaning articles. I listen to, well, there's not much left wing radio, but I listen to what I can and far right, conservative radio.
I listen to all of it. That's what I have to do for my job. And there was this thing was, you know, this assassination happened in a state that had red flag laws, so therefore these red flag laws are useless. And that that's the same thing, which is you don't read a news story about a red flag law that prevented somebody being shot. You know, that's just, it doesn't happen. That wouldn't be news. We don't talk about the things that are wholesome, good and fun and interesting, unless we're a local newspaper. But the good stuff's out there, and specifically in civics and social studies classrooms.
Zachary Karabell: To circle back to our beginning as we end. That too is not news. My example at the beginning of the student, misunderstanding the constitutional structure of the United States for, for presumably lack of prior education is a story. Everybody getting it right in a debate about these things isn't.
Nick Capodice: That's right. Well, that's a problem. The bigger problem is how do we get people to be interested in the, in the sort of quotidian successes of our everyday civic lives. That's what you're all trying to do, I suppose.
Zachary Karabell: On that one, I would encourage everyone to tune in to Nick's podcast.
Nick Capodice: So yeah. The show is called Civics 101. You can listen on Spotify, apple Podcasts, wherever you get your audio. And the book that Hannah and I wrote about these systems, it's called A User's Guide to Democracy, how America Works, and you can get that wherever you get your books.
Zachary Karabell: As we say, everything is now everywhere, so you can get all these things anywhere,
Nick Capodice: All at once. That's right.
Zachary Karabell: All at once, audio, visual, you name it, whatever medium works for you, spiritual included. Anyway. Nick, I wanna thank you for your work and your time today. It's God's work, yeoman's work, layman's work, anybody's work, but it's work that needs to be done and the fact that it's being done more informally.
So you talked at one point about cutting of government funding, which is a problem, but some of those informal spaces, some of those formal spaces are then filled by informal action. And I would include your podcast and this one as well as informal action, but real action that that fills some of the place, not sufficiently maybe. And that too, I think is an indication of kind of a much more robust civic society defacto in the United States. Then the observable one, dejure. And we'll use Emma again as the, as the example 1 0 1. The fact.
Emma Varvaloucas: You're me.
Zachary Karabell: Have lived. No, no, but I mean, the fact that you've lived the life that you've lived, I think is also indicative of, yes, it's true.
You didn't do that, but you kind of did it anyway.
And while I do think you're unusual, I don't think you're. One in a million unusual. I mean, yes, you're absolutely unique and you're, you're, you're one in a billion.
Emma Varvaloucas: I contain multitudes.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, multitudes. Emma is one and one the greatest number of all.
Zachary Karabell: I think there are a lot of people who, you know, as you said, who gravitate toward all this anyway, you know, who listen to your podcast, who didn't have that, who, who seek this stuff out. And we should probably celebrate that a little bit more too.
Nick Capodice: I appreciate that and I do have a partan shot in that direction, Zachary, which is, of all of the things that I've talked about, all the political issues over the last six years, there is truly only one that is for real bipartisan, where the right and the left field, exactly as strongly about it, and it is civics education.
You go to any of these conferences, we were in DC yesterday for Constitution Day. Huge institutions, and these are institutions that you would think are far right-leaning institutions. Pouring money, investment and ideas and devotion into supporting civics education and to having civil discourse and to reducing polarization.
It's there, the money is starting to be there. It's not federal money anymore for civics 1 0 1 after the recessions, but you know, it's, it's happening. So celebrate that everybody wants this on both sides.
Zachary Karabell: Thank you, Nick.
Emma Varvaloucas: Great ending.
Nick Capodice: Oh, thank you.
Zachary Karabell: It's striking how much we have, almost without purposely doing it, ended up focusing on a series of themes this season, and one of which sort of civics, the role of the court. We touched on that a little bit in the episode, but it's clearly kind of in the air, right? It's, it's something that it feels palpable as people around the country are grappling with what is the nature of our constitutional system? What is the nature of, of our government and the relationship between government and the citizenry, and that's a much larger thing that's being grappled with than the immediacy of the sort of partisan argument because I think there's a lot of people grappling with this.
It's not just left responding negatively to Trump or the right triumphantly, you know, celebrating it. I think there's a lot of back and forth here about the system that is engendering people to actually look at, well, what is the nature of our system? And I see that happening more. Rather than the more extreme examples, which, yeah, I kicked off the show with because it's, it's an example of where things are still lacking.
Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I, I feel like the rejoinder to that is like, this discussion is happening precisely because of the threats. I don't know, maybe you can explain to me like where you see the kind of like larger conversation beyond the fact that there's a lot of executive overreach going on right now, because that seems to me like that's, that's what's bringing all this up.
Zachary Karabell: I do think there was a legitimacy to some of the rights reactiveness of under both Biden and Obama and creepingly over the 20th century, there was a lot of executive overreach. I mean, the irony of course is executive overreach that is objectionable to one side is being encountered by executive overreach on the other side.
So it's not as if anybody is, is currently saying the solution to these problems is less executive overreach. It's more like my executive overreach will override your executive overreach. But the whole question of like, what is the power of the executive and the court is indeed sort of grappling with this.
It's, you know, we will, we will see how this evolves, but there's an emerging legal doctrine about what the nature of executive authority is, which is a, a change from the 20th century, but it's not purely the president has more power, right? Because there's a huge aspect of the court that's actually trying to limit the powers of the administrative state, even if it increases the power of the president over the executive branch. You know, the rights had its own debate dynamic around this for decades, about the creeping powers of the presidency. And again, I'm admitting the irony of some of the ways the creeping powers of the presidency seem to be being solved by the right are to, to not only creep the powers of the presidency, but step on the accelerator. But the debate remains very alive and very lively.
Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. No, that's fair. I mean, there's certainly, I, I think that's a fair characterization. There's, there's, there's quite a few things that, you know, going back a couple of decades or more, and we've certainly stepped on the accelerator now. I think that's a fair characterization. I was kinda hoping that some of this is gonna get us back to, and I'm thinking a little bit about a piece by Garry Kasparov, the chess master.
If anyone's unfamiliar with him saying like, the only thing that is going to work right now, and this was in response to Charlie Kirk, actually is a return to like a values backed debate, values back debate over free speech of values, back debate over executive overreach and the power of government. You know, this goes into arguments around the filibuster going beyond the, the partisanship.
It might be a very polyannish hope for where we could go from here, but this is a show to make that argument, I suppose.
Zachary Karabell: I, and I think there's more of it going on every day because I don't remember having this level of. Intense public, often angry debate over what's the nature of the government. I mean, there's a lot of debate over what should we, what policy should we do. Our debates now are far more about the, the, the government framework.
I mean, there are over policies as well, but it's interesting that we've spent a lot of time this year both on the show and I think collectively as a country debating what's the nature of government.
Emma Varvaloucas: I think that's very true and I have seen, I think the online discourse after Charlie Kirk was killed has been, has been exhausting. But I, I did also see some really wonderful videos that's like, guys, like you were the whole point of avoiding political violence and the whole point of living in a, in a liberal system is I have my rights and you have your rights. And my rights don't infringe on you practicing your rights And like, let's get back to that. Right?
So that that conversation does exist and it is out there, even if it's not the thing that seems like it's the thing floating around right now.
Zachary Karabell: So on that note, as we begin to wind down our season, we have a couple more episodes. We want to thank you for listening. If you've been consistent listeners throughout 2025, we will take a bit of a pause at the end of the year and be back with you in 2026.
But we want to thank you for your time and energy and effort. We do not take your time lightly, given that the one thing we all have a finite amount of individually is time. So the fact that you have chosen to spend it with us, we are honored by and thankful for.
I want to thank the Podglomerate for producing, the team at The Progress Network for supporting, Emma for co-hosting and all of you for listening. Please sign up for our weekly newsletter, What Could Go Right? which you find at theprogressnetwork.org, and we'll be with you soon.
