Peter Pomerantsev visited Penn State at the end of March, when he was just back from a trip to Ukraine. He joins "Democracy Works" to discuss what he saw there, as well as how American media is covering the war. He also talked about the similarities between Ukraine and the United States when it comes to being vulnerable to Russian disinformation — and how both countries can strengthen democratic media.
When Imre Huss talks about why he believes democracy is worth fighting for, he doesn't start with a civics textbook. He starts with his mother, who left Poland alone at 17, after helping distribute newspapers during a period of authoritarian rule there. Huss grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, hearing those stories, and he says they planted a seed: that pro-democracy organizing was something an ordinary person, even a teenager, could actually do.
That seed grew into Govvy, an AI-powered civic technology platform Huss co-founded to close the gap between residents and local government. It emerged from two experiences during his junior year of high school. The first was organizing a hyperlocal campaign (alongside neighbors in their 60s and 80s) to stop a development that threatened a green space in his city. Petitions, yard signs, and an op-ed in the local paper moved the needle some, Huss said, but what actually stopped the project was a single phone call from a retired judge in the neighborhood to a friend on the planning commission. The second was watching, as a youth advisor to his congresswoman, how constituent mail got triaged by interns before it ever reached her desk, even as her social media comments and DMs went unanswered.
"There was this intent to engage, but in practice, there weren't really the tools to do so," Huss said.
Govvy started out ambitious. Huss said he originally tried to design for every gap he saw across local, state and federal government before narrowing to focus on local elections and day-to-day civic information. He's headed to the University of Virginia this fall on a full scholarship through the Jefferson and Echols Scholars Program, and he's bringing Govvy's mission with him, carefully. A team will keep building it back home in Cleveland, but Huss says he won't import the platform into Charlottesville before he understands what the community actually needs.
"They [tools] should be grounded in the needs of the community, in the interests of the community," he said. "If that doesn't match the needs of the community, then I wouldn't want to bring it there."
That instinct to start local, then scale carefully, shapes how Huss thinks about a contentious debate in the democracy reform space: whether the path forward runs through local organizing or national media. He's landed on both. National media moves faster, he said, but local conversations tend to leave partisan labels at the door. He pointed to a recent trip to the Indiana Civic Summit, in a state that's grown reliably red, where he found real energy for expanding civics education, not because it polled as partisan, but because nobody had attached a party to it yet.
"If you put a D or an R next to that, at the national level, you're all supposed to agree on those things," he said. "But there is a lot of nuance within a political party."
That caution carries into how Huss talks about the council's broader mission. He argues one of the group's first jobs is repairing the word "democracy" itself, which he says has become so politically coded that it shuts down conversation before it starts. His approach: find organizations that don't see themselves as democracy groups like corporations, civic associations, sports leagues, and build buy-in one shared value at a time, without forcing a partisan frame onto it.
"We need to figure out how we connect with organizations that hold power," he said, "and then, through those connections, try to communicate a vision of democracy that is greater than just the word democracy."
It's a theory that runs through how Huss responds to a generational refrain he hears often - that young people are "the future" of democracy, tasked with fixing what older generations broke. He calls the sentiment well-intentioned but incomplete. "It's easy to say this is your responsibility as a young person," he said. "But it's very easy to say something like that without actually putting in the effort to foster those young voices and turn them into young actions."
Asked what he wants people to do - not just feel - after encountering his story, Huss didn't point to an app or a campaign. He pointed to the grocery store line.
"Talk to somebody at the grocery store. Start up a conversation. Talk to your neighbors," he said. "We try to separate ourselves, we try to become so individual, and we lose those connections we have across our society."
Kristina Becvar is the executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Combating disinformation at home and abroad