Nearly eight months ago, we began the Lincoln Project podcast by asserting that American politics was in crisis, we still are in a crisis, but in several ways we are in a very different place today. Donald Trump was defeated at the ballot box and Joe Biden is the president of the United States. That's a huge win for democracy. But the storming of the Capitol building on January 6th provided a gut wrenching reminder that the fight for the soul of our democracy is not over.

Many of the same problems that allowed such a man to win the Republican nomination and the presidential election are still plaguing our country today. Over the course of this podcast, and especially since the election, many of you have asked us to dive into the deeper problems we face as a nation. It has become a truism that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. But what does that mean? What is he a symptom of? What is our disease? We need to understand the people and places in America that are hurting, fighting, angry, overlooked, misunderstood.

Why does the United States produce brilliant, dedicated health care workers and also domestic terrorists? We need to understand the social forces that drove the election of a wannabe dictator. We need to locate the cracks in our democracy and we need to figure out how to fix them. So that's what we've decided to do, we set out to defeat Trump at the ballot box in 2020, and with your dogged, tireless support, we have achieved that goal. But the work of understanding and rebuilding our democracy is just beginning.

In light of this shift. My team and I have created a new podcast right here on the same feed with the intention of working together to answer the question, where do we go from here? We're still going to bring you the same episodes you love will break down the top news of the week and provide expert political knowledge from behind the scenes. But politics in America is transforming, and even politicos will not be able to keep up without gaining a deeper understanding of who we are, how we got here, what we are really fighting each other about, and most importantly, how we, the people, rebuild without repeating the mistakes of the past.

To do this, we are going to need to broaden our view of what politics is. Politics is not an exclusive game reserved for elected officials and professional political staffers. In fact, you're already engaged in politics even when you're not thinking about it. Because politics touches every part of our lives. It affects the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe. It builds the towns and cities we love. It serves or hurts the people we know and the people we don't.

We have all learned the painful lesson of how damaging it is to get trapped in an echo chamber. So we're going to bring other voices in. We're going to talk about America's political present and our political future with academics and cultural experts and scientists and doctors, behavioral economists, social psychologists, politicos, demographers, dialogue experts and philosophers and anthropologists, comparative historians, journalists and poets and storytellers, to name just a few. As the insurrection at the Capitol made clear, this is a new time for America.

We live in the longest surviving democracy in the world and we've been fighting just to keep it alive. It's time to make sure this democracy not only survives, but that it grows healthy, that it begins to reflect a set of values worth protecting, like honesty, integrity, character, justice and truth.

It's been a difficult four years. We are tired, anxious, angry, grieving, hurt, but we are hopeful and determined. We all know deep down that our work is just beginning and that there is no way things get better until we figure out how to make this republic work for all of us. And we are ready for launching February 3rd. This new podcast is an effort to do just that, to make this republic work together. This is politics without the blinders.

This is a new field for a new age. I'm Ron Suslow and this is political.