The Crisis of Power in America & How to Reclaim Yours with Dr. Nancy Wadsworth
In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Nancy Wadsworth, who is a Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Denver. Dr Wadsworth’s work sits at the intersection of culture, politics, race, religion, and social movements. She's the author of Ambivalent Miracles: Evangelicals and the Politics of Racial Healing and has written for The Washington Post, Vox, and The Denver Post. With a PhD from the New School for Social Research, Nancy brings both deep scholarship and a commitment to combining academic rigor with public discourse—exploring power, identity, and how ordinary people create change.
If you've been feeling overwhelmed by everything going on in the world lately and wondering if there's anything you can actually do about it, you're not alone. I feel this way and have heard this from so many of the patients I've seen, everyone from neighbors to family and friends. That's why I invited Nancy to the show, to talk about what's really going on in America through the lens of power. This is Part 1 of our series on power. We talk about what power actually is, the difference between power and agency, the different forms power takes (power over, power with, and power within), what justifies power, and why so many of us feel frozen right now.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Following your inner calling when your career starts to diverge from your values
Behind the scenes of academia: what’s broken about our institutions
What power actually is
power vs. agency
power over, power with, power within
what puts bounds on power
What power we have as individuals, and as a collective
Dr. Nancy Wadsworth: And so Thomas Hobbes said, the sovereign is the person who comes forward to rule a people, and he embodies the law as one person, like a king, like a monarch, and he protects us. And we just agree, for our security, that he'll protect us, and he agrees to protect us. If he fails to protect us, we can, we have to depose him or have a revolution. So a liberal society says, well, the sovereign is the people. The people decide on representatives to rule, to govern over us. Who those representatives are not listening to their own morality. They're listening to the laws we write, right? And they answer to those laws, and if they fail to do that, to protect our security, then we can vote them out, we can leave, or we can have a revolution to depose them and start a new social contract. But authoritarianism is a style of super concentrated power that answers to itself in order to rule over and it often does emerge when people are feeling insecure.
Listen to the full conversation on the Inner Calling Podcast here.
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