The Vital Center

We all have an opinion about charismatic leaders — but do we really know what “charisma” means? Molly Worthen, in her new book Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, points out that charismatic leaders historically haven't always been distinguished for their charm or compelling oratory. Rather, charismatic leaders are those who enter into a mutual exchange with their followers, in which the leader “draws back the veil on an alternative world in which followers find that they have secret knowledge, supernatural promise, and special status as heroes.” Worthen, who is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is also a renowned writer on religion for the New York Times and other media outlets, further observes that charismatic leaders and their followers blur the line between politics and religion: “Even in contexts that seem to have nothing to do with religion, charisma describes something like a liturgical act, a drama performed together, in which the parties join to consecrate a new reality that all, for their own reasons, prefer to the old one.”Worthen distinguishes between five types of charismatic leaders who have appeared across the centuries of American history: Prophets, Conquerors, Agitators, Experts, and Gurus. Some were builders, who created new institutions and left enduring legacies; others were destroyers, who dismantled structures that stood in the way of the path they promised their followers would lead to salvation. Donald Trump, in Worthen's typology, is a Guru, one who channels the deeply rooted myth of the hero-entrepreneur, and who offers his followers the opportunity to take part in a story of America's return to greatness. “Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion,” Worthen notes. “Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual.”In this podcast discussion, Worthen discusses not only her studies of charismatic leaders but also her previous work on religious belief, the Grand Strategy program at Yale, and her own conversion to evangelical Christianity.  

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced the imposition of his “Liberation Day” tariffs against most of America's global trading partners in April 2025, he seemed to harken back to a centuries-old form of economic nationalism known as mercantilism, which sought prosperity through restrictive trade practices. Opponents of mercantilism from the eighteenth century onward, such as Adam Smith and John-Baptiste Say, became known as classical liberals. In the fullness of time, classical liberalism gave rise to the political philosophy we now know as libertarianism.When most people think of libertarianism, they typically have in mind a small number of figures — including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises — who were generally associated with the American political right in the mid-twentieth century. But in fact libertarianism was born in the nineteenth century (not the twentieth), and was first developed in Britain and France (not the United States). And as Matt Zwolinski emphasizes in his monumental intellectual history of libertarianism, The Individualists (co-authored with John Tomasi), libertarianism is better thought of as a cluster of related concepts than a unitary doctrine. It's true that most libertarians historically have been concerned with the defense of individual autonomy, property rights, free markets, and personal liberty against state coercion. But the first individual to self-identify as a “libertarian” was the nineteenth-century French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque, and libertarianism as it developed often took radical and left-leaning forms, particularly through its association with the abolitionist movement in America in the years before the Civil War. In this podcast conversation, Matt Zwolinski (a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego) discusses his investigations into the intellectual history of libertarianism as well as his analysis of the longstanding tensions between radical and reactionary elements within the philosophy. He describes post-Cold War “third wave libertarianism” taking both right-wing expression (in the form of paleolibertarianism) as well as more radical forms (including left-libertarianism and “bleeding-heart libertarianism.”) And he suggests reasons why many libertarians see more potential in combating poverty through Universal Basic Income grants rather than through more traditional government-administered antipoverty programs.

The most important U.S. political trend of the 21st century, according to most observers, is the increasing tendency of college-educated voters to support the Democratic Party and for non-college-educated voters to support the Republican Party. In many ways, the two parties have swapped their historic bases. When John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, Democrats still considered themselves to be a working-class party. Kennedy carried white voters without college degrees by a two-to-one margin but lost college-educated whites by an identical margin. Now those ratios are reversed, as Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024 won college-educated voters by a comfortable margin but lost bigly to Trump among non-college-educated voters — with notable declines among non-college-educated minority voters compared to 2020.Political scientists Matt Grossmann and Dave Hopkins are the co-authors of a recent book that examines not just the fact of this educational polarization but also its broader implications. Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics demonstrates how Democrats increasingly are absorbing the cultural liberalism and social values of the college-educated class, while Republicans more and more define themselves as a party tilting against establishments, elites, experts, and intellectuals.In this podcast discussion, Grossmann and Hopkins argue that educated liberals are winning the culture war, particularly with regard to the secularization of American public life and increasing social acceptance of single parenthood, gay marriage, racial and ethnic diversity, and other left-leaning values. But they also believe that these victories for liberalism don't necessarily translate into electoral victories for the Democratic Party, or for other liberal parties around the world. On the contrary, the backlash against these changes has empowered populist revolts in many countries and led to a widespread collapse in public trust toward most social institutions. But the result has been that Republicans under Trump have what Hopkins and Grossman term “power without credibility”: the power to destroy institutions without the ability to reorient them in a more conservative direction or to halt the movement in public opinion toward cultural liberalism.

In the first few months of the second Trump administration, the White House in effect declared war on the nation's colleges and universities, and particularly the most selective and prestigious among them. Vice President JD Vance had famously declared in 2021 that “the universities are the enemy,” but conservative antipathy against higher education for its alleged role as the breeding ground of progressive ideology goes back at least to the 1960s. In that turbulent decade, the universities became entangled in national debates over the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and the counterculture. The present-day controversies over political activism on college and university campuses echo the debates of the 1960s in important ways.Neil L. Rudenstine has been a key observer and participant in the shaping of American higher education since the 1960s. He served as President of Harvard University from 1991 to 2001, after decades of teaching and administrative experience that included service as Dean of Students, Dean of the College, and Provost at Princeton University. His career in academic administration began by chance in the fall of 1967, when as a junior professor of English at Harvard he came across a left-wing student group “imprisoning” a recruiter from the Dow Chemical Company in protest against the company's complicity in the Vietnam war. His intervention was credited with helping to bring the protest to a peaceful resolution, and led to his involvement as an academic administrator in later campus debates over subjects including identity politics, climate change, and America's global role. In his new memoir, Our Contentious Universities: A Personal History, Rudenstine draws upon his experiences to explain why universities have become increasingly fractious institutions and why they have come to be at the center of the country's culture wars. In this podcast interview, the former Harvard president discusses the sources of student and faculty radicalization in the 1960s, the parallels between the ‘60s campus protests and those of today, and the financial and institutional difficulties that beset many of the country's leading universities. He suggests ways that the universities can respond to the political attacks against them from the Republican Party, and also how they can attempt to restore public trust and better serve the needs of the nation and the world.

Jonathan Rauch would seem to be an unlikely defender of American Christianity. The eminent author, Brookings senior fellow, and Atlantic magazine contributing editor is a gay Jewish atheist — “I won the marginalized trifecta,” he observes — who grew up deeply suspicious of Christianity and its potential for (and past history of) oppression. As he describes in his recent book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, his attitude began to change at college, when his freshman year roommate was a Christian believer who exemplified the best aspects of the religion. But Rauch also came to appreciate that as the country has become increasingly secular — with the percentage of Americans identifying as “practicing Christians” down by half since 2000 — the religious impulse has found expression in other channels, including an increasingly toxic partisanship and polarization. And Rauch also came to appreciate that while the Founders rejected the establishment of a state religion or any other formal church-state alliance, they believed that republican government would be impossible without the underpinnings of religion and morality. In Rauch's words, “Christianity turned out to be a load-bearing wall in our democracy, and right now it is caving in.”In this podcast discussion, Jonathan Rauch argues that Protestantism in America increasingly has taken on forms that ended up importing religious zeal into secular politics and exporting politics into religion. One of these forms is what he calls “Sharp Christianity,” in which white Evangelicalism (in particular) increasingly has taken the form of conservative culture warfare and partisan politics. Another is “Thin Christianity,” in which mainline Protestant churches have lost cultural and theological distinctiveness and become akin to a consumer choice. But Rauch is hopeful about the potential for what he calls “Thick Christianity,” in which sincere Christian believers support rather than oppose constitutional pluralism, for theological and spiritual reasons rather than merely strategic or expedient ones. In the unexpected form of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rauch finds a religion that seeks to base itself on a theology of “how Christ wants us to behave in our public and political relations. And how is that? It's patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation.” And he's hopeful that Christians who follow this path will enter into good-faith negotiations with Americans who do not share their beliefs, “and look for solutions that will expand the space for us to get along together.”Jonathan Rauch would seem to be an unlikely defender of American Christianity. The eminent author, Brookings senior fellow, and Atlantic magazine contributing editor is a gay Jewish atheist — “I won the marginalized trifecta,” he observes — who grew up deeply suspicious of Christianity and its potential for (and past history of) oppression. As he describes in his recent book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, his attitude began to change at college, when his freshman year roommate was a Christian believer who exemplified the best aspects of the religion. But Rauch also came to appreciate that as the country has become increasingly secular — with the percentage of Americans identifying as “practicing Christians” down by half since 2000 — the religious impulse has found expression in other channels, including an increasingly toxic partisanship and polarization. And Rauch also came to appreciate that while the Founders rejected the establishment of a state religion or any other formal church-state alliance, they believed that republican government would be impossible without the underpinnings of religion and morality. In Rauch's words, “Christianity turned out to be a load-bearing wall in our democracy, and right now it is caving in.”In this podcast discussion, Jonathan Rauch argues that Protestantism in America increasingly has taken on forms that ended up importing religious zeal into secular politics and exporting politics into religion. One of these forms is what he calls “Sharp Christianity,” in which white Evangelicalism (in particular) increasingly has taken the form of conservative culture warfare and partisan politics. Another is “Thin Christianity,” in which mainline Protestant churches have lost cultural and theological distinctiveness and become akin to a consumer choice. But Rauch is hopeful about the potential for what he calls “Thick Christianity,” in which sincere Christian believers support rather than oppose constitutional pluralism, for theological and spiritual reasons rather than merely strategic or expedient ones. In the unexpected form of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rauch finds a religion that seeks to base itself on a theology of “how Christ wants us to behave in our public and political relations. And how is that? It's patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation.” And he's hopeful that Christians who follow this path will enter into good-faith negotiations with Americans who do not share their beliefs, “and look for solutions that will expand the space for us to get along together.”

Why can't America do big things anymore? Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, addresses this question in his new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back. The book's inspiration came from his thinking about the now-vanished Pennsylvania Station, formerly New York City's majestic gateway, which was one of the most beautiful buildings in the country and a monument to metropolitan greatness. Its closure and demolition in the early 1960s amounted to what a New York Times editorial called a “monumental act of vandalism,” made more painful by the ugliness and disfunctionality of the modern facility that replaced it. New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, starting in the early 1990s, made it his top legislative priority to build a new train hall in the nearby neoclassical post office building. Moynihan was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and one of the most powerful Democratic politicians in the land, and he secured agreement and funding from all of the relevant stakeholders — but still he could not get the new station built. The Moynihan Train Hall would not open until 2021, after nearly three decades of delays and setbacks. Marc Dunkelman for many years commuted into the seemingly unfixable Penn Station and wondered why New York's Democratic leaders were unable to make any progress in replacing it. The stagnation struck him as a vivid contrast to Robert Moses, the towering urban planner and public official, who had run roughshod over all opposition in mid-20th-century New York in the course of his massive redevelopment of the city, as described in Robert Caro's 1974 bestseller The Power Broker. When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back. In this podcast discussion, Dunkelman analyzes the historic roots of these opposing impulses and explains how progressives ever since the 1960s have swung too far toward the Jeffersonian extreme. He describes how progressives lost working-class support by rendering government unable to deliver public goods like abundant and cheap housing, energy, and infrastructure. And he warns that incompetent government inevitably plays into the hands of populists who vilify government and claim: “I alone can fix it.”

Many Democratic voters — and not a few pundits — have found the 2024 presidential election outcome to be profoundly puzzling and disorienting: How could so many minorities and working-class Americans have voted for Donald Trump? One observer who found Trump's showing with these groups to be unsurprising is Steve Bumbaugh. Ever since the 1990s, he has worked on issues involving college access, upward mobility, race, and class. For some of that time, he worked with large organizations such as the College Board, which is the one of the key institutions that has shaped the modern meritocracy through college entrance tests such as the SAT and Advanced Placement courses and exams. At other points in his career, he worked directly with young people from disadvantaged communities. His work with students in a deeply impoverished inner-city neighborhood in Washington D.C. during the early 1990s, when the city was known as the nation's “Murder Capital,” is described in the documentary Southeast 67.      In this podcast conversation, Bumbaugh discusses the rise and fall of public school integration efforts in America — an arc whose impact he experienced personally as well as professionally. He describes current criticisms of meritocracy, particularly at the level of selective college admissions, and the ways in which the elite universities could do more to make the system more representative as well as more truly meritocratic. Bumbaugh reflects on the working-class anger and frustration that helped drive Trump's reelection in 2024, much of which was invisible to the Democratic Party as it transformed into a predominantly college-educated, managerial- and professional-class party. And he concludes that the Democrats “don't have the ability to communicate on the same level as Donald Trump. They had better do something.”

The 2024 U.S. election was to a large extent driven by voter frustrations with what seems to many to be a sluggish economy and dysfunctional government that no longer delivers for its citizens as it used to. But similar frustrations are felt in developed countries all around the world, and perhaps nowhere more acutely than in Great Britain. Its economy has stagnated for fifteen years, with the lowest rates of productivity registered over such a span since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Child poverty levels have risen to record levels, prisons are dangerously overcrowded, sewage spills increasingly pollute the country's lakes and rivers, rail service is increasingly chaotic, and dissatisfaction with almost all public services is rife. Even Rishi Sunak, the former Conservative prime minister, complained while in office that “Politics doesn't work the way it should. … [O]ur political system is too focused on short-term advantage, not long-term success. Politicians spend more time campaigning for change than actually delivering it.”Sam Freedman, who writes the UK's leading politics Substack with his father Lawrence, has a new book with the blunt title Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It. Unusually for books of this type, his analysis spends little time on individual politicians or ideologies and looks at the underlying systemic factors responsible for Britain's crisis. He draws inspiration from W. Edward Deming's famous observation that “A bad system will beat a good person every time” and points to key critical changes over the past half-century that have made it nearly impossible even for competent, governing-minded prime ministers to do their jobs effectively. A critical factor in this governance crisis has been the UK's drive toward excessive centralization, which has led the government to attempt to do too much while working through institutions that lack the capacity to handle increasingly complex problems. In an attempt to compensate for this lack of capacity, the government increasingly has relied upon outsourcing what once were public services to a handful of powerful private companies, which continue to reap massive public contracts despite scandalous failures. Worse still, these developments have taken place against a backdrop of an accelerating media cycle. Decisions have to be taken faster and under greater pressure, which gives politicians destructive incentives and increasingly leads them to make disastrous decisions, which they then attempt to excuse away through public-relations spin.In this podcast episode, Sam Freedman discusses how Britain's combination of hypercentralization, executive dominance of an overly large and complex state, and a superfast media cycle have combined to produce toxic politics and something like national paralysis. He concludes that this governance crisis will end as other crises have before it: “Eventually the challenges of a given era get so bad that a dam breaks and a way of doing things that has become accepted as inevitable or too hard to change gets washed away.”

Norman Holmes Pearson, who in the middle years of the twentieth century was a professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, is now a largely forgotten figure — and someone who was never that well known during his lifetime. But Duquesne University professor Greg Barnhisel, in his intriguing new biography of Pearson, sees him as a critical figure in several important areas of American life and culture. Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power, demonstrates how Pearson was an important force in legitimizing American modernism (particularly in literature) as a significant cultural enterprise and subject of academic study. During World War II, Pearson was a prominent agent working for the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) as head of Anglo-British counterintelligence operations. And Pearson also was a key player in establishing American Studies as an academic discipline and helping to promulgate its study overseas as part of a larger effort to promote American interests abroad during the Cold War.  In this podcast discussion, Barnhisel discusses how Pearson's physical disability — what was then called a defect or deformity — may have given him greater receptivity toward the cultural dissidents of the modernist movement, certainly compared to other members of his Puritan-descended WASP class. Barnhisel focuses on Pearson's close relationships with authors including W. H. Auden and especially H.D., one of the handful of women poets who were important in pre-World War I avant-garde circles and who has come to be recognized as a central figure in the history of modernist literature.Pearson forged a relationship with H.D. and her partner, the English novelist Bryher, when he was stationed in London during World War II as head of the X-2 counterintelligence agency. Barnhisel analyzes what made humanist academics like Pearson effective as intelligence agents and how their influence carried over to academia after the war. Barnhisel also discusses the creation of the American Studies discipline, its relationship to the Cold War, and how Pearson's view of the importance of institutions would become increasingly marginalized within the discipline as it moved leftward following the 1960s. Ultimately, Barnhisel feels that Pearson's experiences and consideration of his Puritan background marked him as a man of the Vital Center: “As a neo-Puritan, Pearson felt that the stability and meaning provided by institutions had to be balanced with the dynamism and fertility of the creative individual mind. He was wary of the conformity that an organization-dominated society engendered.”

America's founders deeply mistrusted political parties. James Madison decried “the mischief of faction” while George Washington, in his farewell address, warned that “the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension” might lead to despotism. But the disunity that Washington warned that parties would bring has always been present in America, and still is. What political parties can do at their best is to make disunity manageable by facilitating compromise and preventing political conflict from turning into violence.Sam Rosenfeld (an associate professor of political science at Colgate University) and Daniel Schlozman (an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University) have together written the new book The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. It is, essentially, a historical narrative of American politics as told through its parties, using the techniques of social science. Schlozman and Rosenfeld argue that American parties historically had been highly successful at organizing political choices and political conflict, and providing a way of organizing collective action toward collective goals.But in recent decades, they assert, both the Republican and Democratic parties have become hollow: unable to organize themselves internally (in terms of making party decisions) or externally (in terms of shaping conflict in the broader political arena). They have lost critical core functions — including voter mobilization, fundraising, ideological advocacy, and agenda setting — to para-party organizations that Schlozman and Rosenfeld term “the party blob.” So even as political polarization has in many ways reinforced Americans' partisan identities and strengthened party leaders' command over rank-and-file legislators, the parties have become less and less capable of fulfilling their proper functions.In this podcast discussion, Schlozman and Rosenfeld discuss how the hollowing-out of the Republican Party has made it vulnerable to Donald Trump's hostile populist takeover; the stronger party establishment of decades past did a better job of erecting guardrails against right-wing extremism and would have prevented the party's nomination from going to a personalist leader like Trump. A similar process of hollowing-out in the Democratic Party has rendered it largely ineffectual in important ways; it has become what Schlozman describes as “a party that has been less than the sum of its parts and that has been unable to figure out its post-New Deal purpose.” But the two authors describe ways that party politics have strengthened the American experiment in the past and hold out hope for party renewal in the future.

Yair Zivan is a young British-Israeli who for the past decade has served as foreign policy advisor to Israel's Opposition Leader, Yair Lapid, head of the centrist party Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”). He is the editor of a new collection of essays entitled The Center Must Hold: Why Centrism Is the Answer to Extremism and Polarization. Contributors include leaders and commentators from around the globe including former British prime minister Tony Blair, former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and some forty other essayists. In this volume, Zivan and the other contributors make the case that centrism is a distinct ideology that seeks to “create a constant balance between the contradictions of modern life,” and one that draws good ideas from both left and right but cannot be reduced to merely a midpoint between the two. In this podcast interview, Zivan analyzes both the pragmatic foundations of centrism but also its underlying ideological framework, which rests particularly on an unswerving commitment to liberal democracy and its institutions. He discusses the time that his centrist party was in power and the lessons learned from that experience, along with his speculations on why many established center-right and center-left parties the world over have been losing ground to populist and extremist parties. He makes the case that centrism can succeed when it is defended with passion and intensity, rooted in liberal patriotism, and pointed toward a realistic but hopeful view of human nature and the future. At a time when politicians trading in fear and anger seem to be on the march, Zivan argues that centrism is the best counter to populist extremes of left and right.

In late December 2014, several visitors to Disneyland fell ill with measles, a disease that supposedly had been eliminated in the United States more than a decade earlier. Over the next month, the outbreak spread to more than 120 people in California, including a dozen infants; nearly half of the infected weren't vaccinated. The outbreak was a predictable outcome of the state's having allowed parents to opt out of having their school-age children vaccinated because of “personal belief” unconnected to medical or religious reasons.  Renée DiResta was then a mom looking for preschool programs in San Francisco. Her discovery that some schools had vaccination rates for routine childhood shots that were lower than in some of the planet's least developed countries, combined with the shock of the Disneyland outbreak, led her to become active in the movement to eliminate the personal-belief exemption. But her background in finance and venture capital only hinted at how anti-vaccine misinformation increasingly was spreading across social networks. Her attempt to counter the anti-vaccine movement gave her what she called “a first-hand experience of how a new system of persuasion — influencers, algorithms, and crowds — was radically transforming what we paid attention to, whom we trusted, and how we engaged with each other.”In this podcast discussion, DiResta relates how the viral qualities of social media have transformed right-wing influencers into what she calls, in the title of her new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. She discusses how her experience with the online anti-vaccine movement led her to become active in projects assessing how foreign adversaries were influencing Americans via social media and the internet, and eventually drew her into other controversies, including COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies and Trump supporters' 2020 election denialism. In the process, her adversaries created a firestorm of false allegations against her, charging that she was a CIA operative running a global scheme to censor the internet — allegations that were eagerly received and acted upon by bad-faith members of Congress. DiResta's story illustrates the malign nature and vast scale of emerging online threats to the democratic process, and also offers some suggestions for how governments, institutions, and civically engaged citizens can combat those threats. 

Edward C. Banfield (1916-99), the conservative political scientist who spent most of his career at Harvard University, was one of the most eminent and controversial scholars of the twentieth century. His best-known work, The Unheavenly City (1970), was a deeply informed but unsparing criticism of Great Society-era attempts to alleviate urban poverty. His New York Times obituary observed that Banfield “was a critic of almost every mainstream liberal idea in domestic policy,” who argued that “at best government programs would fail because they aimed at the wrong problems; at worst, they would make the problems worse.” In many respects, he was one of the first neoconservatives.Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has studied Banfield's writings closely. (He is also married to one of Banfield's granddaughters.) He was the force behind the recent republication of Banfield's first book, Government Project (1951), which had been out of print for decades. Government Project is about a New Deal plan to help destitute agricultural workers during the Depression by resettling them on a newly constructed cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona. The Casa Grande Valley Farms, as the project was known, recruited some sixty families to live there and provided them with land and a government-created community complete with new homes, roads, and farm buildings. For a few years, the cooperative farm flourished, but ultimately it failed because the residents, unable to establish mutual trust, could not cooperate.In this podcast discussion, Kosar describes how Banfield's study of Casa Grande made him begin to doubt the efficacy of government planning, and eventually turned him from a committed New Dealer to a skeptic of government's ability to induce people to cooperate. This skepticism was strengthened by his subsequent study of village life in southern Italy — the basis for his 1958 classic The Moral Basis of a Backward Society — where he found that the inhabitants' distrust of anyone outside their immediate family made collective governance all but impossible. Kosar also describes Banfield's work on highly cooperative Mormon communities in southern Utah, Democratic machine politics in Chicago and other large American cities, and the shortcomings of urban programs such as the War on Poverty. Kosar concludes that Banfield came to believe that problems like crime or poverty ultimately were “the output of individual behaviors — and that means fixing those problems means changing the individual. And he was just very skeptical that a government program could change an individual.”

In the 1990s, Mike Madrid was a student at Georgetown University writing his senior thesis about Latino voting patterns and trying to predict how this group might change American politics in the future. The prevailing interpretation at the time was that Latinos were likely to become a permanent underclass, would almost certainly vote Democratic as a bloc for the foreseeable future, and would express themselves largely through oppositional, anti-establishment grievance politics. A contrasting conservative interpretation, advanced by Linda Chavez and a few other dissenters, was that Latinos would mostly follow the upwardly mobile path of previous immigrant groups. Recent immigrants, with little education or ability to communicate in English, undoubtedly would struggle. But the second and third U.S.-born generations of Latinos would meet increasing success in their pursuit of the American Dream and would choose to join the mainstream of American society. They might even vote Republican.After graduating from Georgetown, Mike Madrid returned to his native California to become a Republican political consultant with a particular focus on Latino voters. Over the next three decades, he became one of the country's best-known political strategists, whose opposition to the nativist and populist direction of the Republican Party under Donald Trump led him to become a co-founder of the Lincoln Project. Now he has written The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, which aims to answer the questions about Latinos and their American future that he first wrote about thirty years ago as a Georgetown student.Madrid believes that American politics, society, and culture will be profoundly transformed by the country's demographic transformation as U.S.-born Latinos as a group continue to grow in size and impact. Latinos will “reinvigorate the American experiment” with their youth, comfort with pluralism as a people who combine European and Indigenous ancestry, and optimism about America and its institutions. Madrid emphasizes that “Latinos aren't understood by either party, but the one that is able to define itself as the party of an aspirational multiethnic working-class party will dominate American politics for a generation.”In this podcast discussion, Madrid discusses his upbringing as a third-generation Mexican American, his unique experiences as a Latino political consultant on both sides of the aisle, and his analysis of the rise of the Latino voting demographic — including his prediction that the Latinization of America will contribute to a feminization of America, given Latina women's outsized contributions in education, public service, and community leadership. Ultimately he believes that Latinos may help both the Democratic and Republican parties “get their groove back” by moving past the politics of angry tribalism into a more hopeful and pluralistic democratic future. 

When the Soviet Union came into being in 1917, some American left-wing intellectuals hailed the establishment of the new “workers' paradise” as the model for the United States (and indeed the rest of the world) to follow. Some even traveled to Russia to pay homage to the communist dictatorship – as for example journalist Lincoln Steffens, who upon returning from Moscow and Petrograd infamously declared: “I have seen the future, and it works.” In later years, some American leftists saw similar visions on their visits to left-wing authoritarian regimes such as Mao's China and Castro's Cuba.But this fascination with foreign autocrats also had its counterpart on the conservative side, as veteran journalist Jacob Heilbrunn explains in his fascinating new book America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Other commentators have noticed the contemporary American right's embrace of figures such as Hungary's Victor Orbán — the Conservative Political Action Conference held its third annual gathering in Budapest in May 2024 — and Vladimir Putin, whose “genius” and “savvy” Donald Trump praised after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But Heilbrunn writes that such attitudes are merely the latest manifestation of a conservative tradition that traces back to the First World War, “when intellectuals on the Right displayed an unease with mass democracy that manifested itself in a hankering for authoritarian leaders abroad.” This tradition continued with right-wing praise for Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy during the interwar years, and for Franco's Spain and Pinochet's Chile during the Cold War.In this podcast interview, Heilbrunn discusses the ways in which the Old Right's preoccupations have returned to the modern American conservative movement as well as the ways in which the New Right's founder, William F. Buckley Jr., used the hatreds unleashed by Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist crusade as a political weapon. He explains why paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan liked the neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick's distinction between right-wing authoritarians and totalitarians, and also why Buchanan is not so much an isolationist as an advocate for a kind of internationalism rooted in conservative values, whiteness, and cultural pessimism about liberal democracy.  

Probably all of us have, at one time or another in our younger years, been told to stand up straight. If you're part of Generation X or the early Millennial cohort, you probably had to undergo an exam during middle school for scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine. If you're a Baby Boomer, you might have had to take a posture test upon entering college — or even to pass one before you could graduate. But where did this concern for proper posture come from? Beth Linker, a historian and sociologist of science at the University of Pennsylvania, explores this question in her new book Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.Linker finds that the modern scientific and medical obsession with poor posture emerged in the wake of Charles Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species, which posited that what truly differentiated humankind from apes was not intellect but bipedalism. By the turn of the twentieth century, many scientists and public health officials worried that slouching would lead to degeneration and disease. A famous 1917 study found that nearly four-fifths of Harvard's freshman class had poor posture, which sparked the widespread adoption of posture exams in schools, workplaces, and the military, along with public and commercial efforts to correct deficient stances. Poor posture became what Linker calls “a sign and signal for everything from sexual deviancy and racial degradation to unemployability and chronic disease… Posture examinations became a way for government officials, educators, and medical scientists to evaluate not only overall health but also moral character and capabilities at the individual and population levels.”In fact, what Linker calls the “posture panic” wasn't based on any real connection between a person's posture and their morality, their abilities, or their long-term health — although she argues that scientific study of the effectiveness of posture correction was inhibited by the 1990s scandal over the Ivy League's past practice of taking nude posture photographs of entering freshmen. In this podcast, Linker discusses the history of posture panic, the widespread adoption of student posture exams that later excited public speculation about nude photos of George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham (among others), the way that the disability rights movement and the demise of in loco parentis ended the practice of university posture exams, and how we ought to regard posture science in hindsight.

If you spend enough time in Washington D.C., you come to realize that activists of left and right, for all their mutual enmities, unanimously agree on the need for radical and even destructive change. They agree that gradualism is boring, compromise is betrayal, and that the finest thing in life is, as the notable political philosopher Conan the Barbarian once observed, to crush your enemies and drive them before you. But as Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox argue in their terrific 2023 book Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age, bold and sweeping policy proposals rarely come to pass and usually fail when they do. What does succeed is unsatisfactory but pragmatic compromise and gradual, sustained change. As the authors put it, “Over time, incremental reforms can add up to something truly transformative.”Berman and Fox came to this view over the course of decades of work in criminal justice reform, principally in New York City. They witnessed first-hand how homicides fell by 82% between 1990 and 2009, while the rate of car thefts plummeted by 93% -- not because of heroic leadership or sweeping reforms but because of incremental and often small-scale changes that, over time, made New York into one of the safest big cities in America. They identify a similar dynamic at work in the evolution of the Social Security program, which when it was created during the 1930s lacked the popular appeal of contemporary proposals for radical reform but developed in ways that would make it the country's most popular government program. The cautious and small-scale initial approach of Social Security's architects allowed them to learn from their mistakes and correct them. And the method of funding the program through a payroll tax meant that it paid little in the first years of its existence but gained long-term sustainability since workers came to see it as a benefit they had earned through lifetime contributions, not big-government welfare.In this podcast discussion, Berman and Fox talk about how radical change is sometimes necessary — as with the abolition of slavery — but that modest changes are likelier to succeed in the long run in a country as polarized and partisan as our own. They talk about why the “Secret Congress” makes our national legislature more successful than most observers usually realize, why implementation matters as much or more than policy conception, and why supporting gradual but sustained change is not at all (as radicals frequently claim) mere acceptance of the status quo. 

Sir Angus Deaton is a British-American economist, and one of the world's most eminent in his profession. He was the sole recipient of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, principally for his analysis of consumer demand, poverty, and welfare. But he is also among the world's most famous (perhaps even notorious) economists for the work he has done to shine a light on inequality in America.He is perhaps best known for his influential 2020 bestseller, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, co-authored with his wife Anne Case, who is likewise an eminent economist at Princeton University, where both are emeritus professors. They coined the term “deaths of despair” to highlight the rising mortality rates among white non-elderly Americans, a change largely due to a rise in drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.These rising mortality and morbidity rates, Case and Deaton further documented, accompanied increasing divergences between less-educated and well-educated Americans on other indicators of well-being including wages, labor force participation, marriage, social isolation, obesity, and pain – all of which, they concluded, pointed toward a rise in despair that was linked to broad social and economic trends.In this podcast discussion, Sir Angus Deaton discusses his new book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. He talks about his education in Britain, the work that led to his Nobel Prize, the impact of the Nobels on the economics profession, and the principal questions he has wrestled with as an economist in his adoptive country, the United States. He also discusses his theory that what has led the U.S. to become an outlier among developed countries in terms of its declining life expectancy (as well as other indications of a failure of social flourishing) rests principally with the decline in jobs for less-educated Americans. And, he posits, this decline has come about in response to globalization and technological change, exacerbated by what he calls “the grotesquely exorbitant cost of our healthcare system” as well as the country's fragmentary safety net.

In the early 1960s, colleges and universities in the United States had been politically quiescent for over a decade, following the changes and controversies that had roiled higher education in the 1930s and the post-World War II years when the G.I. Bill had paid the tuitions of large numbers of returning veterans. The demonstrations that erupted on campus by the later 1960s are usually associated with the causes of the political left, including the civil rights, antiwar, countercultural, and feminist movements. But for a while in the early part of the decade it was possible to think that a wave of conservatism would sweep American higher education. Books like M. Stanton Evans' 1961 Revolt on the Campus chronicled how organizations like Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) had a sizable and growing presence at colleges and universities across the country. Students on the right as well as the left shared an impatience with what they considered the boring conformity and unaccountable establishments of the 1950s. Both the youthful left and right also embraced an ethos of individualism, freedom, authenticity, and rebellion.Of course, the universities were not taken over by rebellious conservatives in the 1960s. But as Lauren Lassabe Shepherd points out in her new book Resistance from the Right: Conservatives & the Campus Wars in Modern America, developments at colleges and universities during the late ‘60s were extremely important in forming the New Right of the 1970s, as well as having a lasting impact on the conservative movement and the Republican Party in decades to come. Conservative students who were active on campuses from 1967-70 included future GOP and movement leaders such as Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Morton Blackwell, William Barr, and Jeff Sessions. These future leaders' resistance to campus leftism during their student activist years provided formative lessons in organization and ideology that they would use in their careers as politicians, institution-builders, and influencers. And, as Shepherd argues in this podcast discussion, conservative student activism in the late ‘60s also shaped laws, policies, and precedents that continue to determine the course of higher education in the present day.

February 24 will mark the second anniversary of Russia's brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Although Vladimir Putin's dictatorial power made the invasion possible, it's still unclear to many observers why the Kremlin's leader took this fateful decision. One of the more persuasive explanations is that since Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, his domestic and foreign policy increasingly has been shaped by Eurasianism. It's a socio-political movement animated by the idea that Russia is a distinctive civilization, neither European nor Asian, rooted in absolutism, and aligned with China and the Global South in opposition to Western liberal hegemony.According to a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Eurasianism displaced Russia's halfhearted movement toward liberalism in the early post-communist era and “achieved the status of a semiofficial ideology. Putin uses Eurasianist phrases, the army's general staff assigns a Eurasianist textbook, and popular culture has embraced its ideas and vocabulary. … Eurasianism, like Stalinism, carries the banner of anti-imperialism, claiming to unite the world under Russian leadership in order to liberate it from Western cultural colonialism.”Although Eurasianism is more than a century old, its most prominent Russian exponent in recent decades has been the far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. His variation on Eurasianism emphasizes Russian patriotism and Orthodox faith, and sees the country as locked in apocalyptic combat against America and its values including liberalism, capitalism, and modernism. Dugin has harbored a particular animus against independent Ukraine, which he sees as having betrayed the Russian linguistic and cultural world of which it is an inseparable part. He called for a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine months before it took place in 2014 and has insisted that Russia must wage war against Ukraine even more ruthlessly.Alexandar Mihailovic, in his recent book Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia, examines Dugin and other leading far-right Russian intellectuals alongside corresponding figures in the United States, such as Steve Bannon. Mihailovic, a professor emeritus of comparative literature and Russian at Hofstra University, notes similar patterns among illiberal intellectuals in both countries, particularly in their approaches to gender, race, and national memory. In this podcast discussion, Mihailovic explains that although there are some personal connections between Russian and American ethnonationalists, they are more united by the shared notion that conservative intellectual elites should lead their respective countries in the direction of populist authoritarianism and empire.

Many Americans would agree with Henry Ford's famous statement that “History is bunk.” Do the events of a century and a half ago really have any relevance to our daily lives in the twenty-first century? Fergus Bordewich, in his new book Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, argues that America's critical missed turning point in the 1860s and ‘70s continues to haunt the present. In the wake of the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War in 1865, federal forces attempted to rebuild the post-slavery South as an industrial, biracial democracy. The policy of this Reconstruction was made in Washington by a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans — members of the Republican Party who were committed to a thoroughgoing transformation of the South. Former Union general Ulysses S. Grant, elected as president on the Republican ticket in 1868, was equally committed to this revolutionary transformation. But Reconstruction increasingly was thwarted by the Ku Klux Klan – a secret paramilitary group formed in late 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee – which morphed into what Bordewich calls “the first organized terror movement in American history.” The Klan used threats, abuse, arson, rape, torture, and lynching to terrorize African Americans into servility and to destroy the Republican Party in the South. In this podcast discussion, Bordewich discusses how Grant pushed Congress to grant him the powers he needed to combat the Klan, and how he used these powers to shatter the “Invisible Empire.” But Grant's efforts were largely undone by members of his own party who formed the so-called Liberal Republican faction, largely because they distrusted strong central government. In the aftermath of Grant's presidency, the Klan faded away because Democratic-controlled legislatures in the South increasingly were able to enforce white supremacy on the region through legal means. One of the lessons from this episode of history, in Bordewich's view, is “the danger of politically crippling what is necessary for government to do to sustain what's best in society and to sustain the rights and protections of Americans.”

In 1951, Milton Friedman received the John Bates Clark Medal, a highly prestigious prize given to an American economist under the age of 40 who has made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. As Jennifer Burns points out in her monumental new study of Friedman — the first full-length, archivally researched biography to have been published — the academic economic profession viewed Friedman as a promising young pioneer in the fields of statistics and mathematics at the time. Ironically, at that very moment, Friedman redirected his intellectual interests toward the seemingly outdated and even retrograde studies of the quantity of money, the consumption function, and other ideas outside of the mainstream. For the next two decades, many economists would regard Friedman as, at best, an eccentric and, at worst, a dangerous reactionary. However, as Burns describes in Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, with the coming of stagflation — the combination of inflation and stagnation — that afflicted the American economy in the early 1970s, and which seemingly was impossible according to the conventional academic wisdom, Friedman came to be perceived a visionary. Over time, his views on capitalism, free markets, and limited regulation came to be adopted by both parties — but his influence was powerful in the Republican Party, where they helped define modern conservatism. In recent years, however, progressives have condemned the Friedman-influenced ideas of neoliberalism. At the same time, “National Conservatives” on the right have embraced the idea of using state power against their enemies in Big Business.  In this podcast discussion, Burns discusses Friedman's life and times and how her biography is also a history of economic thought and development in the twentieth century. She explains why Friedman continues to matter and why some of his more abstract theories fail to adequately explain human behavior and account for the impact of government investment. And she makes the case why the generally conservative Chicago School of Economics, of which Friedman was the most famous representative, was not as hostile to moderation as it has usually been portrayed.

On January 20, 1981, Minnesota Republican Senator David Durenberger sat with his colleagues outside the U.S. Capitol to watch Ronald Reagan's inauguration as America's fortieth president. Durenberger considered himself a progressive Republican, which he defined as a combination of fiscal prudence and social conscience. He was a pioneer in legislative efforts to combat climate change and also a champion of charter schools; his other priorities included equal rights for women and minorities, high-quality public education, affordable health care, accountable government, and what he called "a fair, business-friendly tax code to pay for it all." At the time of Reagan's inauguration, Durenberger counted himself as one of seventeen progressive Republican senators. By the time he retired in 1995, there were only four. Soon, these also left office. Durenberger was one of the last of his kind. In 2018, Senator Durenberger co-authored his memoir, When Republicans Were Progressive, with Lori Sturdevant, an editorial writer and columnist for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. In this podcast interview, Sturdevant talks about how she wrote the book with Durenberger and how it serves as his memoir and a history of Minnesota's bygone progressive Republican tradition. It's a tradition that reaches back to Harold Stassen, who became a national figure as Minnesota governor during the 1930s by creating an effective and compassionate Republican response to the Great Depression, and it carried through to later moderate and progressive Republicans in Minnesota into the 1990s. Sturdevant discusses the factors that made Minnesota's political culture conducive to fairness, compromise, and civility - and how that culture has been shaken in recent years by the nationalizing forces of political polarization and changes in the media and developments within the Republican Party. Senator Durenberger died in early 2023 at the age of eighty-eight, making When Republicans Were Progressive in some sense his last political testament. Lori Sturdevant explores the factors that underlay Durenberger's faith in progressive Republicanism and why this seemingly obsolete political philosophy might matter again.

Seth D. Kaplan gained an international reputation early in his career as an expert in fixing fragile states — lawless places around the globe with deeply flawed political, economic, and legal structures. The United States is not a fragile state in that sense. But it is a fragile society in which too many areas (rich and poor alike) are suffering from anomie and decay, the symptoms of which include family disintegration, rising rates of loneliness and depression, the opioid crisis, and deaths of despair. In his new book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, Kaplan applies lessons learned from his work overseas to revitalizing American society at the local level. While American popular culture valorizes the lone hero, Kaplan emphasizes that our country's success has not been rooted in rugged individualism and self-interest but instead has been “the product of cooperation, collective action, and dense social bonds embedded within robust structures.” In his book, Kaplan suggests that by rebuilding and renewing local institutions — and the social ties that hold them together — we can restore neighborhoods as places where families and communities can thrive. In this podcast discussion, Kaplan delves into the real-life examples of individuals and organizations he encountered throughout his research that succeeded in hyperlocal renewal by focusing their efforts on supporting communities, schools, families, churches, and physical habitats. He talks about former lawyer Dreama Gentry, whose organization works with leaders and educators in rural Appalachia to instill students with local pride as well as education and job skills, and pastor Chris Lambert's gradual realization, during his effort to create a community hub in Detroit, that the hard work of building social trust had to come before the provision of good works. Kaplan's analysis explains why so many American neighborhoods are in trouble even amid material affluence and points out how Americans can reunite and repair their fragile society.

David Leonhardt, a senior writer for the New York Times, has tracked the U.S. economy for decades. Starting in the late 2000s, he began to notice that the statistical evidence was telling him a disheartening story about the decline of the American dream. Whether it was stagnating wages for most workers, the decreasing likelihood of children born into each generation to economically outperform their parents, technological slowdowns, or the life expectancy of Americans relative to other high-income countries — by every indicator, the United States as a whole seemed to be losing the sense of inevitable progress that had long defined it.  In his magnificent new history, Ours Was the Shining Future, Leonhardt examines how America succeeded in delivering "the most prosperous mass economy in recorded history" starting in the 1940s and how the American Dream receded for most citizens in the 1980s and beyond. Using both economic analysis and deep historical research, Leonhardt uncovers the critical ways in which "democratic capitalism" characterized the U.S. during the presidencies from the 1940s through the 1970s, a period that spanned the terms of Democratic presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson but also Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. A combination of circumstances, policies, and attitudes brought about what historian James Truslow Adams (who coined the term "the American Dream" in the 1930s) envisioned as "a better, richer, and happier life for Americans of every rank."  In this podcast episode, Leonhardt discusses how the critical factors of political power, enlightened corporate culture, and government investment operated in a virtuous cycle during the four decades after the end of World War II to bring about widespread prosperity. But after 1980, a reversion to what Leonhardt calls "rough-and-tumble capitalism" meant that these critical factors moved the country into a vicious cycle instead. Leonhardt emphasizes that "the Great Stagnation" of the past four decades — as the working class and lower middle class have experienced it, at any rate — can be overcome. But failure to do so will mean that "every problem we have in our society becomes much harder to solve if we don't solve that."

In 2013, Katherine Gehl was a young CEO when she crossed paths with Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, who revolutionized corporate strategy with his famed “Five Forces” analysis. Through working with Porter on efforts to revive U.S. economic competitiveness, Gehl — who describes herself as “politically homeless” — realized that the same Five Forces analysis could be applied to the business of politics. Looking at politics through this lens helped explain why the current political primary system produces polarization and paralyzed government. In particular, she was struck by how the Republican and Democratic parties, for all their differences, act as a duopoly in preventing new entrants into the field.  The result was Gehl and Porter's 2020 book The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. Based on her research, Gehl realized that the most powerful and achievable reform to change our broken political paradigm was Final Five Voting. In this system, closed partisan primaries are replaced with nonpartisan open primaries that send the top five finishers to the general election, in which a single candidate is elected through ranked choice voting. In this podcast discussion, Gehl describes how she went through what she calls “the five stages of political grief” to arrive at her conviction that Final Five Voting was the reform American politics needed most. She describes how such a system was enacted in Alaska, how it works in practice, and how it shifts the selection power in our democracy from primary voters to general-election voters. As a result, this reform made Alaskan politicians more responsive to the electorate as a whole (instead of a small group of highly partisan primary voters) and more willing to strike deals with political opponents to solve public problems. Gehl discusses other states that are considering Final Five Voting, the opposition that reformers face from both parties and how Final Five Voting can lead to better candidates and governing outcomes.

In decades past, most Americans married, and most American children were raised within two-parent families. But now marriage rates have fallen; 40% of American children are born outside of wedlock, and approximately a quarter live in single-parent homes. The United States has by far the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households — more than three times the global average. Melissa Kearney, who is an economics professor at the University of Maryland and Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, investigates the reasons for this sea change in American family formation and its consequences in her important new book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Kearney finds overwhelming evidence that children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. And she also finds that since college-educated parents have largely continued to have and raise children in two-parent homes, the move away from marriage and two-parent families is worsening inequality and widening the class divide between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans.  In this podcast discussion, Kearney analyzes the reasons for the decline of marriage and the rise of single parenthood, along with the significant variance in two-parent households among different ethnic and racial groups. She also talks about why academics have been reluctant to publicly discuss the impact of single parenthood on kids' outcomes, the reasons why both the political left and right have criticized her analysis, and some potential policy solutions to the social dynamics that are “disadvantaging children and will perpetuate across generations if we don't immediately do something about it.”

What do we mean when we talk about freedom? Jefferson Cowie, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, addressed this question in his monumental work Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, which won this year's Pulitzer Prize for History. The book focuses on Southern white resistance to federal authority — in the name of freedom — over two centuries in Barbour County in southeastern Alabama (particularly in its largest town, Eufaula). The tale begins in the early nineteenth century with the efforts by whites to illegally seize and settle lands retained by the Muscogee Creek Nation — a conflict that, ironically, forced the Creeks to rely for protection on federal forces sent by President Andrew Jackson, despite his notorious hostility toward Native Americans. In the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, Barbour County whites resisted federal efforts to impose a biracial democracy, culminating in an 1874 massacre of African-American citizens attempting to vote. Jim Crow segregation prevailed in Barbour County for the better part of the following century. Elite rule and white supremacy were enforced not just through sharecropping and disenfranchisement but also through the brutal actions of convict leasing and lynching. Finally, with the coming of the civil rights era of the 1950s and ‘60s, Alabama Governor George Wallace – a Barbour County native – fought federal integration efforts and vowed to uphold “segregation forever!” Wallace's successes in Democratic presidential primaries — well beyond the South — in 1968 and 1972 showed the populist potency of combining racial resentment with opposition to federal power. In all of these episodes, Cowie demonstrates that white Alabamians defined freedom, not just in terms of individual liberty and civic participation, but also of their freedom to enslave and dominate. This latter conception of freedom frequently pitted local and state authorities against federal authority. In this podcast discussion, Cowie acknowledges that federal authority frequently fell far short of its stated aims and principles. Nevertheless, it was the only hope for those who sought political rights and equality before the law. Although the successes of the civil rights struggle in the American South have been uneven and partial, Cowie emphasizes that “you do everybody a disservice if you call a mixed bag a failure.”

Presidential aides were in a state of nervous anticipation in the weeks leading up to the publication of Franklin Foer's new book, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. The book is the first insider account of President Joe Biden's first two years in office, based on nearly 300 deep background interviews. Politico Playbook reported that "In Washington, the book will be a test for how a generally leak-proof White House grapples with the first detailed excavation of its successes and failures from the Inaugural through the midterms," and added that "In recent days Biden aides have been scrambling to secure a password-protected PDF of the book." Franklin Foer is a longtime Washington, D.C. journalist and staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. He was for many years a staff writer at The New Republic, along with briefer stints at Slate and New York magazine, and twice served as editor of The New Republic. He is the author of several books, including How Soccer Explains the World and World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. In this podcast episode, Foer discusses why he thinks Biden "is inherently more interesting than the public or pundits assume he is," how he came to write the book, and why he chose to focus on episodes from the early Biden presidency including the administration's response to the ongoing COVID pandemic, the disastrous military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the struggle to pass critical legislation, particularly the Build Back Better bill that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act. Foer also talks about why Biden is a difficult boss who nonetheless inspires fierce loyalty from his closest circle of aides, the tradeoffs involved with Biden's age, the question of whether Biden can accurately be described as a moderate or centrist, and why Biden has struggled with public perceptions of his presidency.

For many years, millions of Americans across the political spectrum have been asking: What is going on with the Republican Party? The answers, to the extent they can be determined, are caught up with the party's relationship with the conservative movement and developments on the broader political Right. Matthew Continetti explores these questions in his monumental study The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, recently released in paperback.   Continetti, who was a co-founder of the online newspaper the Washington Free Beacon and is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been a conservative movement insider for two decades. He joined the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine in 2003 when it was at the zenith of its influence inside the George W. Bush administration and the conservative movement; the magazine's longtime editor-in-chief, William Kristol, is now Continetti's father-in-law.  In this podcast discussion, Continetti talks about the principal themes of The Right, including the proliferation of different varieties of politics that have appeared in right-wing intellectual and activist circles over the past century, the ongoing struggle for influence between the libertarian and traditionalist factions of conservatism, and the tensions between populist outsiders and governing-minded insiders. He analyzes the present political moment and the intellectual attempt to "reverse-engineer" Donald Trump's impulses and instincts into a coherent ideology through institutions like the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College as well as the National Conservative movement. Continetti also describes the reasoning behind his decision to begin his account with the 1920s, the end of the Cold War's impact on the conservative movement, and the reasons why he thinks the political center-right and its institutions are following the same pattern of decline that the center-left underwent a decade ago.

For most of our ten thousand years on the planet, the vast majority of humanity endured lives of dire poverty and extreme material deprivation. Most people spent most of their time worrying about securing the bare minimum of food and shelter. The Industrial Revolution began to change that dynamic. Still, the British economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was correct to question in the early 1870s whether “all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.” Soon after, however, the emergence of globalization, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation made possible a rapid upward trajectory in human flourishing and an end to near-universal agrarian poverty. Another British economist, John Maynard Keynes, foresaw in 1930 that the continued progress of science and compound interest could mean that human beings, liberated from pressing economic cares, might find their real challenge to be how to occupy their leisure time and “live wisely and agreeably and well.” But the explosion of productivity and prosperity over the 140 years that followed the takeoff point in 1870 did not see humanity zooming toward Utopia; at best, we slouched fitfully in that direction. Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has written a much-anticipated history of what he calls “the long twentieth century” from 1870 to 2010, entitled Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. In it, he explains how we achieved economic breakthroughs that once would have been considered miraculous — and yet fell short of what that breakthrough promised. And DeLong also explains why he believes that the era of remarkable prosperity, for all its problems and inequities, has now ended. In this podcast discussion, Niskanen's Brink Lindsey and Geoff Kabaservice talk with DeLong about why the material abundance that resulted from the great acceleration after 1870 was unevenly distributed between nations and within them, why developmental social democracy failed its sustainability test, and how the long twentieth century was in a sense a contest between the ideas of the towering thinkers Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. The discussion also covers differing perspectives on “the neoliberal turn,” speculations about how to benefit from the best aspects of neoliberalism and social democracy while avoiding their pitfalls, and a hypothesis as to why capitalism is like the brooms in “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.”

On the penultimate day of June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 to overturn race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions. Chief Justice John Roberts, in the opinion issued by the Court's conservative members, declared that the racially determined admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protections Clause of the 14th Amendment. Roberts wrote that while the stated goals of those universities' admissions policies were “commendable,” including training future leaders and exposing students to diverse outlooks, these were “not sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny.” For decades, Richard Kahlenberg has been the country's leading advocate for replacing race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action. Kahlenberg, who until recently was a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, laid out his position in the 1996 bestseller The Remedy and has consistently adhered to it ever since. Inspired by the example of Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign, he has called for “a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism.” Toward that end, Kahlenberg has written a new book about the housing policies that, in his view, have harmful effects on education and life chances for students of all colors from less advantaged backgrounds. Largely invisible zoning laws and regulations often dictate which socioeconomic grounds can live where. The most liberal and well-educated communities deploy these practices to keep the working class out. As Kahlenberg writes in his new book Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See, “exclusionary zoning is one of America's most damaging and pervasive forms of class discrimination.” And the extent to which left-leaning communities practice it contributed to his growing recognition “that liberalism — the political ideology I was raised in and still am most generally attracted to — has a serious elitism problem that needs correcting.” In this podcast interview, recorded just before the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Harvard and UNC case, Kahlenberg discusses his long advocacy for class-based affirmative action and his more recent view that decisions by housing authorities are often more consequential for students than the decisions of school boards. He describes how zoning laws often result in “state-sponsored economic discrimination” and suggests how to reform them. He also talks about what is good and bad about meritocracy, the different ways that elites and the general public perceive issues like class-based affirmative action, and ways that the Democratic party may go about trying to improve its standing among working-class voters.

For decades, the public's approval ratings for Congress have been abysmal. Even members of Congress struggle to justify and defend the value of their institution — or even seek applause by attacking and denigrating it. And yet the Framers intended the legislature to be the pillar of the American constitutional system, allocating it more power and responsibility than any other branch of government. How did Congress get so dysfunctional — and unpopular? Why did it devolve so many of its powers to the executive and judicial branches? And what are the costs to America when the country lacks a properly functioning Congress?  Philip Wallach ponders these questions in his valuable new book, Why Congress. He is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and served as a fellow with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in 2019. His inside view of congressional attempts at self-reform, combined with his deep scholarship and analysis of the history and workings of Congress, gives urgency to his case for understanding the critical importance of the institution and its need for reform. However much Americans disagree with other, he writes, “we must find ways to accommodate each other in addressing the biggest problems of the day, and Congress is the place we must do it...Our legislature's diminishment impairs our ability to make good policy. Even more importantly, it threatens the vitality of our politics, contributing to the pervasive sense that our nation is coming apart at the seams.” In this podcast interview, Wallach discusses the importance of what he calls the “manyness” of our republic in James Madison's vision of representation and factionalism in American politics and how it conflicts with what he calls the Wilsonian impulse to make Congress a more orderly and less independent institution in which the big questions are decided within ideologically uniform and disciplined political parties. He describes the problems that arise when both left and right prefer a parliamentary system, with a much more powerful chief executive, to our constitutional order as it actually exists. He goes through the history of Congress' involvement with the civil rights struggle in the 1960s and why he thinks the filibuster was useful in that historic drama. And he analyzes the rise of today's leadership-driven Congress, in which rank-and-file legislators have little meaningful involvement with shaping legislative agendas, and what the prospects might be for significant reform.

Why does government so often fall short of its goals — or even fail catastrophically? Jennifer Pahlka, in her important new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, offers what is perhaps the most incisive explanation yet for government failure, particularly in the realm of technology. This is a book that every policymaker should read and take to heart.  In Pahlka's view, declining state capacity has resulted from a political culture that prioritizes politics and policymaking over implementation. And government especially falls short of its potential for good when well-intentioned policymakers fail to understand technology, pay attention to citizens who suffer the consequences of poor delivery of government services, or emphasize outcomes over processes. She writes, “When systems or organizations don't work as you think they should, it is generally not because the people in them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren't obvious from the outside.” Jennifer Pahlka comes to her granular understanding of government failures through long experience with the digital delivery of government service at the federal, state, and local levels. In 2009, she founded Code for America to attract technology experts to work on public problems. In 2013, she became the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. She played a significant role in rescuing the healthcare.gov website after its botched rollout and helped to create the U.S. Digital Service. In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed her to a task force to salvage the state's unemployment insurance program when it collapsed under the weight of a tenfold increase in claims during the Covid pandemic.  In this podcast interview, Pahlka discusses the complexity of government computer systems that become unworkable through decades of layering-on of technologies and policies, policymakers' failure to understand why they pass laws that can't be implemented, and the dilemma of civil servants caught between contradictory pressures to deliver outcomes while also adhering to the rigid processes on which their jobs depend. She describes how the government is caught in a hierarchical “waterfall model” of program management while the software industry has moved on to a decentralized model of agile development, and how technological developments are doomed by unworkable technical requirements that aren't actually mandated by government policy — even though bureaucrats and contractors have come to believe that they are. And although listeners will share Pahlka's evident frustration at the many examples of government failure that she cites, she also shares numerous examples of courageous leaders who have overcome structural obstacles and outdated thinking to deliver results and show what government can be at its best.

In 2002, sociologist Ruy Teixeira (and co-author John Judis) published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a diagnosis and prescription for the Democratic Party that the New York Times later called “one of the most influential political books of the 21st century.” The book argued that the United States was changing demographically, economically, and ideologically in ways that could benefit Democrats electorally. All too often, however, the book's thesis was interpreted as a “demographics is destiny” argument, positing that population growth among a left-leaning “rising American electorate” — including young people, minorities, college-educated professionals, and single women — inevitably would lead to Democratic landslides. Teixeira, however, maintained that this winning Democratic coalition would only be possible if the party retained a strong level of white working-class support.  Over time, and particularly after the 2016 election, Teixeira continued to insist that the Democrats, as they tilted toward college-educated voters, were repelling their working-class supporters by embracing cultural leftism and racial identitarianism as well as writing off all of Trump's working-class voters as irredeemable racists and xenophobes. Such criticism was increasingly unwelcome in Democratic circles and Teixeira's employment at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, where he had been a fellow since 2003, became untenable. In 2022 his departure from CAP, and his subsequent hiring at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, made national headlines.  In this podcast episode, Teixeira discusses his founding of The Liberal Patriot, which has recently expanded from a newsletter into an online publication and nonprofit organization, and the tough-love criticism he has continued to offer to the Democratic Party. Teixeira believes that the Democrats' long-term electoral viability depends upon their being able to regain at least some level of rural and working-class support by moving to the center on cultural issues, promoting an abundance agenda, and embracing patriotism and liberal nationalism. Teixeira is no fan of the current inception of the Republican Party, which he says no longer has any real idea of what it needs to do in order to be a successful conservative party again. But, he adds, “it also became the case over time that the Democrats lost track of what it would take to be a successful and productive liberal party, and how to be the actual party of the ordinary America, which is their historical brand and where they've had the greatest success.”

Many Americans whose beliefs are somewhere in the great political middle are tired of the false dichotomies of left and right. What would a radical centrist agenda — a purple-state alternative to the ideologies forced upon populations in deep-red and deep-blue states — look like?  Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, took on this assignment with her 2018 book The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation. Her agenda includes "policies that are better aligned with American values and responsive to people's actual day-to-day needs," with a focus on "the value of work and the importance of jobs and wages." She attempts to thread the divide between a Democratic Party that has "dozens of good policy ideas but a values framework that is sometimes out of step with the country's" and a Republican Party that emphasizes widely shared values (such as personal responsibility) but has abandoned its former commitment to pragmatism and limited but effective government.  In this podcast conversation, Isabel Sawhill discusses her experiences in "growing up in a time when there weren't a lot of opportunities for women," and how she came to work on policy with Brookings and other think tanks as well as in government; during the Clinton administration, she served as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget, responsible for the oversight of nearly all of the federal government's social programs. She describes her relations with eminent policy-world figures such as Alice Rivlin and Richard Reeves, with whom she co-authored the 2020 study A New Contract with the Middle Class. She also talks about her work with Bush White House veteran Ron Haskins to identify the key correlates of upward mobility, which they famously popularized as "the success sequence," in which about three-quarters of Americans reach the middle class provided that they: 1. Graduate from high school; 2. Maintain a full-time job or have a partner who does; and 3. Have children (if they choose to become parents) after age 21 and while married or in a committed partnership.  She analyzes the factors that have made many Americans feel "left behind" and discouraged about the country's future. According to Sawhill, possible policy remedies include an expansion of vocational education, opportunities for workers adversely impacted by new developments in technology and trade to retrain or relocate, a social insurance system focused on lifelong education and family care in addition to retirement, and ways to repair the culture through national service. She also discusses her recent analysis of emerging threats to democracy and her reasons for remaining optimistic about the fate of the American experiment.

Did U.S. President Ronald Reagan end the Cold War? Or did the war end because Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev abandoned it? William Inboden argues forcefully for the former interpretation in his new book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. Reagan's strategy in dealing with the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War involved reviving the U.S. economy, restoring American self-confidence, rebuilding American military might, and working closely with our democratic allies. He then pressured the Soviet Union into an economically unsustainable arms race, engaged in proxy battles with them around the globe, and waged a successful propaganda war that pitted the political, religious, and economic liberties of the “free world” against the bankruptcy and tyranny of the “evil empire.” But when liberalizing Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in 1985, Reagan saw sooner than most of his advisors that here was a reformer with whom he could work to bring peace.  William Inboden is the Executive Director and William Powers Jr. Chair of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously held senior positions with the State Department and in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. In this podcast, Inboden describes his work on Capitol Hill, his graduate study that focused on both U.S. diplomatic history and American religious history, his service in the Bush White House as well as with the Legatum Institute in London, and his return to academia. He details the factors that inspired him to write The Peacemaker, the declassification of Reagan-era documents that enabled him to arrive at new historical insights into the Reagan presidency, and his own change in perspective that led him from being intensely critical of Reagan (particularly with regard to his support of authoritarian anti-communist regimes and insurgencies in Central and South America) to holding a more favorable assessment of his legacy.  Inboden also discusses how former Republican president Dwight Eisenhower exerted a more significant influence on Reagan than most historians have recognized, how Reagan's conception of the Cold War differed profoundly from that shared by his predecessors, how the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka “Star Wars”) was at the heart of his strategic vision of a world without nuclear weapons, and why he is confident that the Reaganite tradition in the Republican Party can be revived. Inboden also argues for the value and relevance of history for policymakers, as well as why he believes that public universities need to uphold their end of the implicit social contract they have long maintained with American society.

In October 1958, Robert Welch, a wealthy retired businessman with extreme anti-communist beliefs, held a secret meeting in Indianapolis with eleven like-minded men to found the John Birch Society, named after a young American missionary and intelligence officer killed by Mao's Communist troops in 1945. Welch and his confederates detested not only liberals but also mainstream conservatives. They held particular animus toward President Dwight D. Eisenhower; although Ike was a moderate Republican, Welch believed him to be a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” At its peak in the 1960s, the Birch Society consisted of some 60,000 to 100,000 members organized in secret cells around the country.  Although much of the country dismissed the Birchers as a lunatic fringe, historian Matthew Dallek, in his new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, argues that the group exercised an outsized influence on the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Blending violent and apocalyptic conspiracy theories with grassroots activism, business skills, and the power of alternative media, the Birch Society proved, in Dallek's words, “that the supercharged activism of thousands of diehards could outmatch the votes of millions of citizens and over time transform the GOP.” In this podcast discussion, Dallek describes the history of the Birch Society as well as dynamics that made it a significant political force and an enduring influence on the contemporary American right. He points out that much of the responsibility for the continuing vitality of Birch-style extremism lies with Republican leaders who thought they could harness the activism of the Birchers without allowing their paranoia and hatred to define the party.  Instead, according to Dallek, “The GOP establishment's efforts to court this fringe and keep it in the coalition allowed it to gain a foothold and eventually cannibalize the entire party.”

“Let me make the songs of a nation,” the Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher once declared, “and I care not who makes its laws.” The eminent political journalist Ronald Brownstein makes a similar case in his recent book Rock Me on the Water — 1974: The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics. Brownstein's narrative history traces the spectacular cultural pinnacles achieved in Los Angeles in 1974 in the separate industries of movies, music, and television — though often the artists responsible for those breakthroughs were working only blocks apart. These achievements helped Los Angeles in that year to exert “more influence over popular culture than any other city in America,” according to Brownstein, and indeed “the city dominated popular culture more than it ever had before, or would again.” Ultimately the breakthroughs that took place in LA in 1974 would not only transform the culture industries, they would act as a conduit channeling the radical ideas of the 1960s into the American mainstream. In this podcast interview, CNN senior political analyst and Atlantic senior editor Brownstein discusses the creative summits achieved in LA in 1974. In Hollywood, these included the release of “New Wave” masterpieces such as Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, and The Conversation, along with the filming of other notable works including Nashville and Jaws. On television, 1974 was the only year that CBS broadcast the Saturday night lineup often considered “the greatest night in television history,” which included such breakthrough series as All in the Family, MASH, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show. And in music, 1974 saw the release of career-defining albums from principal creators of the Southern California sound including Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The art across all these industries, according to Brownstein, “was socially engaged, grappling with all the changes and critiques of American life that had rumbled through society during the 1960s: greater suspicion of authority in business and government, more assertive roles for women, more tolerance of premarital sex, greater acceptance of racial and sexual minorities.” LA's culture industries in 1974 were at the forefront of the clash between an ascending Baby Boom generation bent on change and older generations opposing that change. In the short term, conservative politics triumphed. But Brownstein argues that the clear lesson for today's political-cultural clash of generations is that “while voices resistant to change may win delaying battles in politics, they cannot indefinitely hold back the future.”

If there is one thing on which Republicans and Democrats can agree these days, it's that the country's current system of immigration isn't working. However, the parties seem too polarized to work together to fix the system. Kristie De Peña, the Niskanen Center's vice president for policy and director of immigration policy, believes that the parties can still find common ground. She recently coauthored a New York Times op-ed pointing out that even some very conservative lawmakers have recognized a need for some level of immigration to address severe labor shortages in the Midwest and other parts of the country. This once was a relatively uncontroversial position within the Republican Party. President Ronald Reagan, for example, emphasized America's tradition of sheltering people fleeing oppression and the importance of offering immigrants to this country a pathway to citizenship. But even now, as Kristie and her coauthors underline, there are ways that red and blue states can lead in welcoming refugees. She adds, "Democratic and Republican governors should also have the opportunity to weigh in on the specific needs of small business manufacturers and families." In this wide-ranging podcast discussion, Kristie De Peña discusses the origins of the Niskanen Center, the ways in which the U.S. immigration system has become outmoded, and the channels through which policy can progress in a divided Washington. The memories of the big immigration reform efforts from earlier decades may need to be "[sent] off on a Viking funeral into the night." Instead, "we need to start talking about not only [the demands for reform] now…but what does migration looks like in this hemisphere…in the next 10 or 20 years?"

What shall it profit a political party if it gains power but loses its own soul? David Corn subjects the Republican Party to this moral test in his new book, American Psychosis, and finds it wanting.  Corn, a journalist with the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine and a regular television commentator on MSNBC, examines the history of the Grand Old Party's interrelationship with far-right extremism going back to the 1964 Republican presidential nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. In Corn's view, Goldwater's refusal to separate himself from the irrational anti-communist paranoia of the John Birch Society – and even the racism of Southern segregationists and the Ku Klux Klan – set the template for the Republican Party's cultivation of the far right ever after.  The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump's deluded followers in this sense represented the culmination of a dynamic that had been ongoing for almost seventy years. The Republican Party, Corn writes, “had long played with and stoked the fires of extremism for political advantage. It had encouraged and exploited a psychosis. This sickness reached an apotheosis on that cloudy and chilly winter afternoon. Yet it had been years in the making.” In this podcast discussion, Corn discusses how the Republican Party's cultivation of far-right extremism has waxed and waned over the decades, but how the ultimate effect of this cultivation was to legitimize and empower forces that proved inimical to the GOP's ability to govern. He argues that there is no counterpart on the Democratic side to the toleration of violence and conspiracy theories that the Republican Party has regularly indulged, and further that elite actors on the conservative side created a culture of divisiveness and contempt, which changed the Republican base by giving it permission to indulge its darker impulses. Corn calls for a kind of Popular Front between citizens on both left and right against the forces of “American psychosis,” which he sees as “destructive to the American project, to American democracy. And the first priority is keeping them at bay and putting our other arguments somewhat on the back burner for the time being.”

Activists concerned with American democracy typically worry about present-day dysfunctions and the looming threat of authoritarianism. But this essentially negative approach often leads to fatalism and burnout. What if those active in the democracy space gave more consideration to the positive futures they seek to achieve? That's the premise of a thought-provoking new study, “Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy,” by Suzette Brooks Masters, a social entrepreneur and philanthropic consultant with the Better Futures Project. She interviewed 64 people from a wide variety of backgrounds — including not only democracy activists but also futurists, religious and spiritual leaders, artists, writers, and even game designers and architects — to stimulate more positive thinking about democratic futures. The act of envisioning and articulating better alternatives, in her view, will make it easier to develop strategies to achieve better outcomes and also to inspire more people to become active in such projects. In this podcast discussion, Suzette Brooks Masters discusses hypothetical and real-world examples of how better democratic futures may be possible. Her examples range from the visionary possibilities glimpsed by science fiction writers like Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson to participatory democracy projects like Ireland's Citizens' Assembly, care communities like England's Frome Medical Project and the Netherlands' Hogeweyk Dementia Village, and government efforts around the world to incorporate future-oriented perspectives into present-day policymaking.

J. Edgar Hoover, who directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972, is one of the central figures in the twentieth-century development of the federal government and the national security state. For decades he was one of the most widely admired Americans, only to become one of the most reviled following revelations of his racism, redbaiting, abuses of power, and persecution of figures like Martin Luther King Jr.  Beverly Gage, a professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, has recently published a monumental biography of the FBI leader entitled G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. While the book follows Hoover from birth to death, focusing on his service under eight U.S. presidents, it also analyzes Hoover as a political actor whose career explains the growth of federal power and Cold War ideology during America's rise to global preeminence.  Gage highlights the duality that accounted for much of Hoover's success and popularity. On the one hand, he promoted “conservative values ranging from anti-communism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity.” At the same time, he also embodied faith in progressive government, scientific authority, professionalism, and apolitical expertise. As Gage points out, “Today, when the Republican Party regularly denounces both federal authority and nonpartisan expertise, it can be hard to imagine these ideas fitting together.”   In this podcast discussion, Gage analyzes Hoover's complexities, which included:  - his allegiance to the Confederate-worshipping Kappa Alpha fraternity along with his FBI operations against the Ku Klux Klan, - and his forty-year marriage-in-all-but-name with the FBI's number two official, Clyde Tolson, even while he launched the Lavender Scare persecuting homosexuals along with the Red Scare of the mid-twentieth century. Gage says that to look at Hoover, the American Century's “quintessential Government Man,” is also “to look at ourselves, at what Americans valued and fought over during those years, what we tolerated and what we refused to see.”

Is it possible to envision a different path forward for the Republican Party – one that might allow the GOP to once again become a big-tent, majoritarian party without the excesses of Donald Trump and his imitators? Mileah Kromer, a political scientist and pollster at Goucher College, sees such an alternative in the career of Republican politician Larry Hogan Jr., who served two terms as governor in heavily Democratic Maryland from 2015 to 2022.  Kromer examines the ingredients of Hogan's success in her new biography, Blue-State Republican: How Larry Hogan Won Where Republicans Lose and Lessons for a Future GOP. She concludes that Hogan's fiscally conservative, pragmatic approach to government, combined with his rejection of culture-war grievances and Trump-style populism, allowed him to make inroads with groups that Republicans typically struggle to attract, including college-educated voters, women, suburbanites, and racial minorities. Maryland is one of the most diverse states in the country, and African-Americans – a group that has voted overwhelmingly against Republicans for more than 60 years – make up nearly one-third of the population. And yet 28% of black voters in Maryland cast their ballots for Hogan in 2018, even though his Democratic opponent was Benjamin Jealous, a former president of the NAACP.  Hogan's success in Maryland offers a potential path for the Republican Party to take if it wishes to win popular majorities in a diversifying America. In this podcast interview, Kromer speculates about Hogan's presidential possibilities for 2024, and concludes that while he would have difficulties in getting through the MAGA-dominated Republican primaries, his independence, authenticity, and ability to reach beyond traditional GOP constituencies might give him a real shot.

A few years ago in Obion County, Tennessee, a homeowner called 911 to report that a trash fire in his backyard had gotten out of control. The operator told him, however, that because he had forgotten to pay his $75 annual fee, the newly privatized city fire department wouldn't help him. The fire brigade eventually showed up to prevent the blaze from spreading to the property of a paid-up neighbor, but they let the fire consume the debtor's house.

As America's partisan divide becomes ever wider, deeper, and angrier, many Americans from both red and blue tribes are increasingly worried about the possibility of a new civil war. Jeremi Suri, a professor of Public Affairs and History at the University of Texas at Austin, says that these worries are in a sense misplaced “because the Civil War never fully ended. Its lingering embers have burst into flames at various times, including our own.” Suri gained his scholarly reputation writing books contemporary politics and foreign policy, but the events of recent years, starting with Donald Trump's election as president in 2016, led him to cast his frame of historical reference back to the Civil War of 1861-65 and its aftermath. The roots of the rage behind the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, in his view, go back to the cataclysmic conflict of the nineteenth century and resistance to the postwar Reconstruction of the defeated South. Through a deep analysis of key individuals during that period, as well as events including President Andrew Johnson's 1868 declaration of amnesty for Confederates and the disputed presidential election of 1876, he finds parallels and precedents for the rhetoric and actions that run through much of today's politics. Reconstruction's end brought a halt to efforts by Republican presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant to create a more racially inclusive democracy. The unfinished work of that second Founding continues to this day, and continues to meet with similar resistance to what was seen in the nineteenth century, including widespread claims of election fraud and a growing willingness to use violence to attain political ends. This podcast discussion also touches on present-day battles over how to teach American history as well as what Suri's study of the nineteenth century suggests about possible twenty-first-century reforms to remedy flaws in the design of our constitutional structure.

Richard V. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is internationally recognized for his scholarship on equality of opportunity, with a focus on divisions of social class and race. But in recent years, he has become concerned about a less-scrutinized axis of inequality: the myriad ways in which boys and men are falling behind girls and women educationally, economically, and on many indicators of social well-being. In his new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Reeves examines the difficulties that millions of boys and men are having in school, at work, and in the family. As an advocate for gender equality, who has devoted considerable study to closing the pay gap for women, Reeves rejects right-wing calls to repeal feminism. But he also contends with those on the left who believe that focusing on men's problems distracts from the challenges still faced by girls and women. “We can hold two thoughts in our head at once,” he writes in his new book. “We can be passionate about women's rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.” And the problems of boys and men falling behind — in absolute terms as well as relative to women — are real and serious. For example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students. The wages of most men are lower today (in real terms) than they were in 1979. One in five fathers is not living with their children. Single and divorced men account for hugely disproportionate numbers of drug-related deaths. In this podcast discussion, Reeves discusses his experience as a father of three boys, the reasons why he came to write Of Boys and Men, and how it relates to his earlier studies of inequality, including his 2017 book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It. He talks about his growing up in the middle-class English town of Peterborough, his education at Oxford, and his work with Tony Blair's Labour government as well as for Liberal Democrat leader (and self-proclaimed “radical centrist”) Nick Clegg. He also shares some of his proposed policy solutions to address problems boys and men are facing. These include: “redshirting” boys by having them start school a year later than girls; recruiting more men (especially African-American men) as teachers; and generally getting more men into what are now largely female-dominated jobs in health, education, administration, and literacy while continuing to increase women's participation in STEM fields. What he is ultimately working toward, in his words, is not only better outcomes for men but also “a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.”

Gays and lesbians have been part of America and its politics since the country's foundation. Still, historically the stigma attached to homosexuality meant that any person whose alternative desires became publicly known was immediately banished from politics as well as mainstream society. James Kirchick has written an epic narrative history, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which examines American politics alongside and through the experiences of gays and lesbians in Washington, from the New Deal through the end of the 1990s. In this podcast episode, Kirchick discusses the multiple dimensions in which homosexuals and homophobia impacted American politics, particularly in the mid-20th-century “Lavender Scare,” the purge of gay employees from federal service which took place alongside (and outlasted) the Red Scare. “Even at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual,” Kirchick writes. “A Communist could break with the party. A homosexual was forever tainted.” The podcast also focuses on Frank Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer who was fired from the Army Map Service for his sexuality in 1957 and became the first person to challenge his termination on those grounds in court. Kameny formed the Mattachine Society in 1961 to agitate for full civil rights for gays and lesbians. He organized the first picket outside the White House for gay rights in 1965, and was instrumental in getting homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders in the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973. Kameny, in Kirchick's telling, comes across as a radical moderate: radical in the sense that the full participation of gays and lesbians in American society was beyond the conception of even political progressives for most of the 20th century, but moderate in that his crusade sought the fulfillment of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, to be achieved through a politics of respectability rather than liberation. Kirchick discusses how the politics around homosexuality played a key role during the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. He also considers whether the tremendous gains in both legal equality for and public acceptance of homosexuality in recent years are likely to be reversed by Supreme Court decisions or populist agitation by Republican politicians like Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

In the wake of the FBI's search of former President Donald Trump's private residence in Florida, right-wing social media erupted with violent threats against law enforcement and political opponents. One enraged Trump supporter launched an armed attack against an FBI office in Ohio. A New York Times article on the rise of political threats and actual violence in the year and a half since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob quoted Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict, and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence in developing countries as well as in the United States, pointed to three critical ways that ordinary people can come to embrace violence:Setting political aggression in the context of war.Describing it as a defensive action against a belligerent enemy.Persistently framing an adversary as irredeemably evil or less than human."The right, at this point," she observed, "is doing all three things at once."In this Vital Center discussion, recorded before the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Rachel Kleinfeld unpacks her scholarship on rising political violence in the United States and how she became one of the leading experts in this field. She touches on her research and experiences in violent societies like rural India and post-Soviet Russia, her role as co-founder of the Truman National Security Project to develop progressive alternatives to Republican national security policies, and her efforts to bolster democracy at home as well as in post-civil-conflict societies abroad. She also talks about how political polarization and factionalization open the door to authoritarianism and how to reverse the trend toward rising political violence.  

As the United States faces a new era of competition with Russia and China, many analysts and observers have urged the country to respond by making more significant investments in military capabilities and strategic technologies and strengthening its overall global defense posture. But Michael Mazarr, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, believes that the lesson of history is that what ultimately determines success in global competition boils down to a handful of critical societal factors. As he puts in his important new study, The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness, “the factors that ultimately govern success are societal ones, qualities that reflect the kind of country that a nation is rather than the things it builds or does.” And unfortunately, this analysis concludes that America is losing many of the attributes that accounted for its success. Michael Mazarr is a Washington-based writer and policy expert with long experience in government, academia, and the think tank world, specializing in U.S. defense and national security issues. The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness was commissioned by the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, the Defense Department's in-house think tank, and carried out by Mazarr and a team of RAND researchers, along with the contributions of outside historians. The far-reaching survey of history's most successful nations and civilizations concludes that their critical shared attributes are: - National ambition and will. - Unified national identity. - Shared opportunity. - An active state. - Effective institutions. - A learning and adaptive society. - Competitive diversity and pluralism. The study concludes that while the U.S. retains considerable strengths in these areas, it also “displays characteristics of once-dominant powers on the far side of their peak of competitiveness.” While the report is descriptive rather than prescriptive, it suggests that America can rejuvenate its competitive dynamism if it can recover and build upon those societal qualities that made it great — but that partisan polarization and social fragmentation may prevent this from happening. Mazarr's study contains grounds for optimism but also points to the magnitude of the challenge confronting Americans who hope to reverse our national decline.