Since we launched Listen To This two weeks ago, I’ve been sifting through your dozens of podcast recommendations for us to review. One commenter mentioned The Good Fight with Ben Wikler, a podcast powered by MoveOn.org. At first, I was skeptical – it reminded me of the hundreds of activist emails piled up in my inbox. But this show, I quickly found, is no guilt trip. It's funny and stimulating. Its stories offer road signs through political issues that seemed permanently blocked. It’s young, launched in November 2013, with just 26 episodes and a growing average of 25,000 downloads per episode. First, I’ll tell you why it’s worth a listen. Then read my interview with Wikler, its host and founder.
When you’re ready, you can download some episodes on iTunes here.
Why it’s great
Wikler was close friends with the free-information pioneer Aaron Swartz, who took his life last January – he was facing up to 50 years in prison for allegedly downloading millions of copyrighted academic articles. Wikler and Swartz began The Good Fight’s predecessor, a radio show called the Flaming Sword of Justice, meant to spotlight people making real progressive changes, in January of 2012. Wikler now hosts the show alone, but each episode still evokes Swartz’s quest to empower people and to fight the status quo.
The premise of The Good Fight is that every progressive political win has a powerful story behind it. Wikler and his team (Zach Young, Harum Helmy, and Amy Velazquez) don't just tell these stories; they give listeners next steps for moving the fight forward. Most importantly, The Good Fight works against our cultural assumption that issues like gun control and corporate power in politics are deadlocked, by highlighting creative ways people have been working around them. Think of it this way: 96% of Americans think it’s important to reduce the influence of money in politics, but 91% believe it could never happen. Turns out, we’re wrong. It could happen, and it’s happening.
What you should know
The show is made up of 30-50 minute episodes organized into two parts: one is a win report, where Wikler sits down with MoveOn.org’s Garlin Gilchrist to tally up the week’s wins and losses in different progressive fights. The other is an edited, NPR-style story that includes narration, interviews, audio of original news clips and a few goofy sound effects.
Where you should start
Without a doubt, start with episode 25: Lawrence Lessig, Aaron Swartz, and the Super Pac to end Super Pacs. Then, check out episode 17: the Nanny Uprising, about a group of women who fought to give nannies and other domestic workers basic labor rights they didn’t already have, and episode 26: Pulitzer winner. Undocumented. American, where journalist Jose Antonio Vargas tells his story of coming out as public representative for other undocumented migrants living in America.
In Ben Wikler’s words
What made you start The Good Fight? What does it do that other podcasts don’t?
When you read political news or listen to political journalism, there’s often coverage of who won and who lost, or who’s up and who’s down, and what the impact of the decisions will be – but there’s very little reporting on the amazing stories about epic fights behind those outcomes. It’s as if we were to read the post-game analysis and scores from sports events, but never actually watch the games.
Every summer blockbuster is a story of some ragtag bunch of misfits facing impossible odds to save the world, and actually, there are fights exactly like that happening all around us all the time. But the stories are never really told. So that’s the mission of the show.
We try to bring people inside the fight for a behind-the-slingshot view of David v Goliath battles. The goal is to make those stories really interesting to people who may not otherwise know or care about them, and also to inspire them to get involved in stuff that really counts. And to do it with joy, not lecturing.
Tell us about the moment when you realized you needed to make this podcast.
There was a moment in 2010 when I was with at the Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear, organized Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It was amazing having 200,000 people crowded on the Washington mall. But it was a few days before an incredibly important election, and there was no word about it from the stage. And at the end of it, everyone was sent home. This was a group of people that was ready to get involved in the fight!
I was there in DC with Aaron [Swartz]. He and I started talking about this very intensively. We wanted to create a show that could actually call people to action in a moment like that. He wound up launching the original show with me – he was actually indicted the second week we were working on the first prototype version of it together.
Over the next spring, we got a spot on a local radio station in DC, and we did live shows on Sunday mornings from my apartment in Brooklyn. Our only sponsor was La Bagel Delight, my neighborhood bagel place. They were thrilled with the low price of sponsorship. And Aaron and I had so much fun doing it that I decided to really give it a shot.
You say you want to cover these fights with joy and not with lecturing. Do you think a lecturing tone is a problem in activism?
In life, there are ought-tos and want-tos. If The Good Fight does its job right, it’s a want-to, not an ought-to. I had to unsubscribe from the Economist because it was this incredibly heavy ought-to to look at these stacks of issues sitting there. I know I would be a smarter and better informed person if I read it, but … I didn’t. But there is so much joy and real emotion and surprising information and just fun to be had in all these fights, and we want to bring that forward. I think activists and people that are deeply committed to something can wind up alienating people who don’t already feel that way. And, in fact, there are ways into all of the world’s most important issues that don’t feel heavy. That’s what we look for.
How do you consistently find stories of people changing the world in ways you think are worth featuring? Do you have a list? Do you worry you’ll run out?
When I look through a newspaper or even just look around, I see the results of amazing untold battles. Like, whenever you fill up your car with “unleaded gasoline”, that’s the result of a decade-long struggle against the lead industry that was won in part because scientists tested the soil in the backyards of members of Congress and showed them that their kids were getting poisoned by the lead coming out of their car’s exhaust pipes.
And thanks to that fight, thousands of people’s lives have been saved. That kind of thing is everywhere. It’s sort of like Freakonomics. Once you start looking at the world through the lens of, What are the epic battles that led to this thing we see? you see fights like it all over the place. The hard part is figuring out which stories to tell and how best to tell them.
I used to live near a hamburger joint that had a sign that said, “Quality is never an accident, it’s always the result of deliberate effort.” The same idea applies to politics and changing the world.
What is an example of an episode you created that came from pinpointing a win?
An episode that I love is “The plot to bring democracy to America”. It’s about a very wonky campaign to end the way the electoral college currently works, and that would allow Americans to elect the US president with a popular vote, just like every other democracy. There’s a way to do that without having to pass a constitutional amendment. The idea is to get enough states to agree that whoever wins the national popular vote gets all of their electoral college votes. If enough of them agree to do it, suddenly it becomes true.
In preparing for a debate, I learned the backstory of this idea: a dogged behind the scenes campaign that is actually winning state after state. So I interviewed Hendrick Hertzberg, a New Yorker writer who has made this his extracurricular cause. This thing could end the era of red states and blue states and make every person’s presidential vote count the same. And that could change the way democracy works in this country.
What is the fight that keeps you up at night?
Global warming. Climate change can overwhelm people. There are people that pretend it’s not happening, and there are a lot of people who look at it and just get freaked out and shut down. So the challenge is to find the characters, stories and strategies that actually can earn peoples’ hope and belief. Because the only way that we move forward on this is if we see a path to actually being able to make a difference. I think the fatalism is as toxic as denialism for climate change.
Credible hope is at the core of what the Good Fight is about, and climate change is where it’s most sorely needed.
What podcasts do you listen to?
I really like Criminal, a small independent podcast. I also love the vulnerability of some of the freeform interviewing that you especially hear on comedy shows, like WTF and You Made it Weird.
Can I tell you my guilty pleasure? It’s the podcast version of the #1 fan fiction series of all time, and that’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It’s the Harry Potter saga retold so that Harry is not just an amazingly gifted wizard, but also a scientist and a rationalist. It’s told with enormous gusto, and with emotional insight into that kind of mind, that actually reminds me a lot of Aaron, who had a similar incredulous skepticism and excitement about everything he saw.
