PROGRAM

In the first event of a new “Democracy Under Pressure” series, the new Roosevelt House Public Policy Program Director Joe Lowndes will interview political scientist and co-president of Community Change, Dorian Warren. Topics will include strategies and tactics grassroots communities across the United States are using to resist authoritarian assaults on cities, and the relationship of this resistance to the realization of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy.

Dorian Warren is co-president of Community Change and Community Change Action, and co-founder of the Economic Security Project. Warren taught for over a decade at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. He’s the co-author of The Hidden Rules of Race, co-editor of Race and American Political Development, and has penned numerous academic articles. He previously worked as a guest host and contributor at MSNBC.

Joe Lowndes serves as the Public Policy Program Director of Roosevelt House and is a Professor of Political Science at Hunter College. He is a scholar of American politics, with a specific focus on right-wing politics, populism, and race, and the author of From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism and co-author with Daniel Martinez HoSang of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity.

The “Democracy Under Pressure” series, presented by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Program, is devoted to examining the mounting threats to democratic governance in the United States and beyond. Through conversations with scholars, journalists, activists, and public figures, the series investigates how authoritarian movements are reshaping law, politics, and culture, eroding civil liberties, and exploiting systemic crises of inequality and representation. At the same time, the series seeks to imagine new pathways toward an egalitarian, multiracial democracy—one capable of realizing the unfulfilled promises of freedom, justice, and shared power.