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Taxes & the Price of Democracy | First Draft with Susan Demas & author Vanessa S. Williamson
If we want to rebuild democracy, we have to rebuild the tax system that sustains it.
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Tax identity shapes who Americans believe belongs in the political community.
Anti-tax politics has long served as a tool for undermining democratic power.
Starving government of revenue is a deliberate strategy to weaken public institutions.
Susan Demas and Vanessa Williamson open a conversation that cuts through the myths surrounding taxation and democracy, spotlighting how fiscal choices reveal who a country is actually built to serve. Their exchange underscores that treating “the taxpayer” as a badge of virtue has always masked deeper questions about belonging, power, and who gets counted as part of the polity. What becomes unavoidable is the way taxation functions not as an accounting exercise but as an architecture of democracy—one that is deliberately weakened when authoritarian movements want to keep public institutions too poor to challenge private dominance. The history they interrogate shows that when opponents of democracy fear the public’s voice, they don’t just suppress votes; they drain the revenue that makes self-government real.
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Tune in for the full discussion and get Vanessa’s new book The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History, out now!
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