The Daily sat down for a Q&A with political science Prof. Anna Galland, who teaches a seminar titled “U.S. Democracy in Crisis: Perspectives on the Path.” Outside Northwestern, she works as an independent organizer and consultant. She was previously the executive director of MoveOn, a digitally connected organizing group devoted to progressive issues, for over seven years.
ANNA GALLAND: I am an organizer who spent time in the trenches before coming into the classroom. I spent a number of years leading a progressive and pro-democracy mass organization called MoveOn that runs campaigns, both civic and electoral, to strengthen the democracy and make it deliver for regular people better.
AMY L. WONG: That’s political science Prof. Anna Galland. Galland was previously the executive director of an organizing group advancing progressive issues. She now teaches a seminar at Northwestern about democracy in crisis for the second time after teaching it last fall.
From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Amy L. Wong. This is What’s New at NU, a podcast about everything from mainstage NU issues and events to those hidden in the nooks and crannies of campus.
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Prof. Galland, thank you for being here. Could you give us a brief overview of your career before coming to Northwestern?
ANNA GALLAND: I have done things like organize protests with hundreds of thousands of people. I have sent messages to millions of people about democracy issues, which actually doesn’t qualify me for anything except being a mass emailer. But I have been in dialogue in some form with large and diverse communities of Americans who are deeply concerned about an issue of the moment, whether it be the rights of immigrants, whether it be access to health care, whether it be a future climate that we can live in, but I have been a sort of person who has worked at the juncture of multiple different issues.
And it’s my experience over time as an organizer at the national level that made me so deeply concerned, even before the 2024 election, about some of the risks and threats of this moment to not just particular policy outcomes, but the rule of law itself, our protections for press, our protections for every diverse community in this country to be able to live without fear.
AMY L. WONG: Were there any topics that you were hesitant to include in the seminar?
ANNA GALLAND: If anything, I feel that the challenge we face now is so vast, the biggest challenge to me was not trying to cover too much ground in one short quarter.
We spend quite a bit of time in the course talking about the dynamics of attention and the dynamics of our sort of AI-accelerated, Internet-contained attention economy, and how that’s affecting our politics. Is that affecting our ability to focus together on — in a cross-partisan, broad-based, open-armed way — tackling the threats that we face to our fundamental freedoms?
And that tech aspect, that question of the structure of media, the way that our collective attention is shaped by social media streams and by the entrance of AI technologies in a number of different places, that doesn’t necessarily seem like something you would put into a democracy course, but I think it’s pretty central to what’s both potentially driving us further into a challenging place and getting a better handle on how to navigate it as a pro-democracy movement is going to be essential to getting us out.
AMY L. WONG: Have there been any moments of key discussion where people got angry or heavily disagreed with each other?
ANNA GALLAND: I can’t say that so far in this quarter that we’ve had heated disagreement, we have wrestled together with the power of individual actions in the context that is so vast. So, “What can any one person do?” is a question that has come up that we’ve wrestled with, but I would say the tone there was less, “You’re wrong,” and more earnest wrestling with how hopeful to be about different strategies.
For example, does it help to take an action which is just you to address the loneliness crisis, for example, if you believe that that’s a feeder of our political challenges, that people are so disconnected from one another that they’re more liable to be pulled into a kind of authoritarian political coalition?
The question came up, “Is one strategy to address loneliness to call a friend?” And I think, rightly, students pushed back and said that’s dramatically insufficient, like individual actions to address a structural and systemic challenge. That’s not enough. We need to challenge ourselves to find more.
AMY L. WONG: What themes have shown up across the different classes with various speakers?
ANNA GALLAND: The severity of the political crisis that we are living through is a common theme that speakers from a diverse range of backgrounds have gotten to, that what we are experiencing is not normal. It’s not just what happens in the everyday course of politics.
It’s not that it’s exceptional in our own history. The Jim Crow South comes to mind as an era of racial authoritarianism in our own country, and it’s not exceptional in the world context, countries like Hungary, Turkey, and others in recent years, including Brazil, which then kind of came back from the brink a bit, have experienced a kind of authoritarian breakthrough and a strong man rule that we can learn from.
But in the US, in our lifetimes, what we’re living through is profound. It is broad-based, and it is not okay and not normal. And that’s why the headline of the class, the topic of the class is “Democracy in Crisis.” We’re trying to be very clear that what we’re living through is important and that, as we discussed on the first day of class, a crisis is a context where change is required. It’s not a stable situation. It will change in one direction or another. And I think that has been a through line that wherever you come from in your assessment of what is to be done, that what we are experiencing is acute and requires rigorous engagement is a common throughline.
AMY L. WONG: Many people have lost confidence and trust in American democracy. What would you say to them?
ANNA GALLAND: We have had a number of really wonderful speakers, and one of them was Stacey Abrams, who’s a voting rights advocate, and she shared the story, which was, look, one of my grandparents or great-grandparents, you know, lived their life in this country in an intolerable, we would recognize that today as morally atrocious conditions. And they, through persistent, sustained organizing, movement building and struggle, lived to see changes in their conditions, and then their granddaughter, great granddaughter was able to be the minority leader of the Georgia statehouse.
Like change happens. We know this, and we can psych ourselves out by only seeing the crisis in front of our faces. But again, the nature of a crisis is that it is not static, and history moves because people push in one direction or another. And in a context like this, where we’re in a class studying possibilities, what I want people to see is that nothing is static that is before us. It is acute. It is alarming. It is troubling. It’s also inspiring to see the ways in which people from so many different places are taking action. And I do hope that Northwestern students in my class and in other contexts will feel their own agency as scholars, as writers, as perhaps organizers, as participants in civic life in whatever way it may be.
AMY L. WONG: Is there anything else you would like to add?
ANNA GALLAND: The heart of this course is an assertion that democracy is precious, that it’s valuable, that it’s a powerful technology, almost for self-governance and for determining outcomes for many hundreds of millions of people in a highly technological world. And that in this moment, that precious technology is threatened, and that there is something that we can learn from many different angles about what is making it possible for us to be on the brink or over it, and that there is something to be done by a range of actors in society, that it’s not narrowly a political science question, actually. It’s also a social and cultural and technological question, and that I really hope that it will be a launching pad for people to think and act in more ways.
The nice thing about democracy is it’s kind of the whole thing that we are living inside, so there’s lots of ways to be constructive about building a country where everyone can thrive. There’s not only one thing to do. There are many.
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AMY L. WONG: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Amy L. Wong. Thanks for listening to another episode of What’s New at NU. This episode was reported and produced by me, Amy L. Wong and Finian Hazen.
The Audio Editor is Finian Hazen. The Multimedia Managing Editors are Sydney Gaw, Christina Lin and Sarah Serota. The Editor in Chief is Emily Lichty.
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