Livestream: https://dartgo.org/raskin

Roger S. Aaron ’64 Lecture

Democracy vs. Autocracy in 2024

Jamie Raskin
U. S. Representative (D-MD 8th District)

Moderator: Herschel Nachlis
Senior Policy Fellow and Associate Director, The Rockefeller Center
Research Assistant Professor, Department of Government

Lecture Info:
In 2024, as American democracy undergoes yet another critical trial, which path will we choose? Will the United States embrace our democratic values, or will we move further toward the very autocratic tendencies that the Constitution attempted to prevent? Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Lead House Manager in the second Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, discusses the historic stakes of the 2024 election, and its potential impact on the future of American democracy. The conversation will be moderated by Professor Herschel Nachlis, Associate Director and Senior Policy Fellow of The Rockefeller Center and professor in the Department of Government.

Congressman Jamie Raskin is the U.S. Representative for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District and the lead Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. He served as the Lead House Manager in the second Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, which ended with a 57-43 vote to convict the president for inciting a violent insurrection to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Raskin also served on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and has served on the House Judiciary, Administration and Rules Committees. Prior to Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland—where he was Majority Whip and where he led successful drives to abolish the death penalty, pass marriage equality, restore voting rights to former prisoners, pass the National Popular Vote interstate compact and create the first Benefit Corporation law in the country—and a professor of constitutional law for more than a quarter-century at American University Washington College of Law. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he served as an Editor of the Harvard Law Review. He has authored several books, including We the Students, the Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, and the New York Times #1 best-seller Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy (2022). He is the founder of Democracy Summer, now an official project of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has educated thousands of young people to become Democratic organizers and leaders. 

Professor Herschel Nachlis is Associate Director and Senior Policy Fellow of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth, and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. He studies and teaches public policy, American politics, and law, focusing on health policy, regulation, and political institutions. He received his PhD and MA in Politics and Social Policy from Princeton University and BA in Political Science from Macalester College. His work has been published in journals including JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Studies in American Political Development, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and has been published in public outlets including STAT, The Washington Post, and Health Affairs Forefront, and his media commentary on public health has appeared in outlets including Nature, Vox, and Newsweek.