In this podcast discussion, Howard offers qualified approval of the Abundance movement that he in some ways anticipated by decades. But he insists that the pruning of excessive rules and procedures must also be accompanied by restoring a role for human judgement: “It’s not simply having less to comply with. It’s actually re-empowering everybody — the teacher in the classroom, the principal, the head of the school, whoever it happens to be — empowering them to do what’s right.”

By the same token, he criticizes Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative for focusing on cutting the things government does but squandering the opportunity to change how the government does things: “There was not even a pretense that they had an idea about how things would work better the day after DOGE. It was just, ‘Look at how much we've cut,’ and then they wildly exaggerated how much they’d cut. Of course, it was all counterproductive…”

Howard resists political categorization and his Common Good organization has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations alike, but his tradition of civic liberalism is increasingly homeless in contemporary politics. He acknowledges that some rules and regulations are essential, but he hopes for a government that can restore space for human judgement in a way that can restore both American dynamism and public trust in government efficacy. 

Sargeant agrees with feminist critiques from the left that many institutions and structures in society treat women as “defective men,” including the medical research that tests only male patients and the car safety devices that protect male bodies while accidentally injuring female bodies. But she also is critical of a kind of corporate capitalism that sees workers only as economic inputs, and a politics that denies the neediness, vulnerability, and interdependence of humanity.

In this podcast discussion, Sargeant lays out the thesis of The Dignity of Dependence. She describes her conversion to Catholicism and the ways in which her experiences as a wife and mother inform her cultural politics. She touches on the global fertility crisis and the paradoxical ways in which it may be driven by prosperity. She further addresses the struggles that many young people have nowadays in dating and forming families, and suggests that they may be helped by social policies (including the Child Tax Credit and baby bonuses) as well as by a greater understanding of the difference between “capstone” and “cornerstone” marriages. And she distinguishes her approach to feminism from other perspectives on both the left and right. She makes clear that as a pro-life feminist she has considerable differences with mainstream feminism, but nonetheless believes it to be “a good-faith tradition of trying to struggle with what it means to be just to women in a world that is often male-normed. It's a tradition that I think has made some serious mistakes and won some significant victories.”

Brink Lindsey, senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, has written a visionary new book addressing Keynes’ conundrum. In The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, Lindsey ponders the paradox that people in developed countries live in conditions of unparalleled wealth, health, and technological progress — and yet most people feel disappointment rather than gratitude at the results. We enjoy an abundance of material goods, yet most people are missing out on the sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging that define human flourishing.

In this podcast discussion, Lindsey describes the “triple crisis of capitalism” that has brought material prosperity but also social disintegration, sputtering dynamism, and dysfunctional politics. But he also sees encouraging signs that point toward how mass flourishing might be accomplished in developments that include new technological breakthroughs and the growing Abundance movement. Ultimately he hopes for a future in which people will have closer relationships with each other as well as the natural world, and in which humanity’s drive to explore and understand will reach into the larger universe. “Our destiny is up to us,” he concludes, “and therefore we should make the most of that chance. We ought to aim high.”

But a new generation of historians argues that this reading shortchanges many of the Democratic politicians active in the 1970s and the years that followed, particularly the New Liberals. These were the people who wanted the Democratic Party to regain its political momentum by reforming liberalism as well as the party. The New Liberals included intellectuals like Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner, business figures like Felix Rohatyn and Robert Rubin, and politicians including Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and of course Bill Clinton, who arguably brought the New Liberal project to fruition by winning the presidency in 1992. 

Henry Tonks, a historian at Kenyon College, has written a dissertation reevaluating the New Liberals. He argues that while they did pave the way toward the modern Democratic Party, they didn’t capitulate to Reaganism or repudiate their New Deal heritage. Rather, they tried to reinvent liberalism by adapting it to an economy that was becoming more globalized as well as less industrial and more reliant upon financial services and advanced technology. They embraced industrial policy and worried about whether America was falling behind its commercial rivals, particularly Japan. Tonks argues that while New Liberals didn’t correctly diagnose the changes to the economy in all of its particulars, their policy vision retains considerable relevance to today’s politics — and particularly the discussion around the Abundance movement.

Among these opponents were the conservatives around William F. Buckley Jr., who attempted to portray liberalism as a combination of militant secularism and socialism or even communism; while a majority of Americans didn’t buy this definition, Buckley and his confreres succeeded in equating liberalism with leftism, to the point that more than half of Americans tell pollsters that the Democratic Party has become “too liberal.” But actual left-wing critics felt that, on the contrary, postwar liberals had betrayed the radical potential of the New Deal and smothered American society in corporate capitalism and conformist consensus. Black civil rights activists, for their part, came to feel that white liberals were treacherous allies, unwilling to push for true equality if it would threaten their own power and position. 

Kevin G. Schultz, a professor of History, Catholic Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has researched the descent of liberalism’s reputation across the latter half of the twentieth century and up to the present. Why, he wonders, “have so many people come to hate white liberals, including, perhaps, even white liberals themselves?” He describes this history in his new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals). In this podcast discussion, he concedes that liberalism set itself up for criticism in many ways, but nonetheless concludes that liberalism did not fall of its own weight – it was “assassinated,” as he put it, by its political opponents, who “recognized they could defeat liberalism in America… not by attacking its politics or policies, which generally remained popular,” but instead by “giving it meanings no self-respecting liberal would accept but from which they couldn't successfully escape.” And by mocking the people who upheld that philosophy, the white liberals, the critics gave the word “liberal” so much baggage that the concept of liberalism could no longer be defended — to the point that Schultz now feels the very term should be abandoned. 

Three years later, Germany has a new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He succeeded in amending Germany’s constitution to lift the so-called “debt brake,” which means that the country will spend significantly more on defense as well as hundreds of billions on related infrastructure over the next ten years. But will it be enough to allow Germany to deter Russian aggression against Europe — particularly if the United States under Trump withdraws from its post-1945 role as the guarantor of European security? Can Germany develop a defense industry that can deliver under wartime conditions? Can Germany take on the leadership role in Europe that it long has been reluctant to assume — and will other countries accept Germany in this role?

Jan Techau is a director with the Eurasia Group’s Europe team, covering Germany and European security. He is also a senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis. From 2020 to 2023, he served in the German government as head of speechwriting for three ministers in the German Ministry of Defense. In this podcast interview, he discusses the European reaction to Trump’s reelection, the likelihood of Germany’s being able to make the physical and psychological adjustments it would need in order to become the principal provider of conventional deterrence in Europe, the rise of anti-Americanism in Germany on both the left and right, and whether Europeans are capable of keeping peace on the continent without the help of the Americans. He also explains his 2016 diagnosis of what he called “sophisticated state failure,” which long before the Abundance movement was dreamed of predicted that highly developed countries would find it increasingly difficult to get anything done, and that this paralysis would provide an opening for populist uprisings all over the world. “The only lasting way out of sophisticated state failure,” he concluded, “is for responsible politicians to worry less about getting re-elected and start risking their political careers for things that need to be done.”

Michael Kimmage further relates his experience of serving as director of the Kennan Institute, a program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which was liquidated in January 2025 by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), and the consequences of the government cutting itself off from international exchange and expertise in the development of U.S. foreign policy. He also expresses his belief that institutionalists — the people who believe in the value of institutions and operate in them — have to do a better job of explaining and justifying what they do: “If the population feels that these institutions are elitist and out of touch and misguided and unnecessary, then it doesn't matter how much somebody like me values them, it’s not going to work.”

Steve Grove is the publisher and CEO of the Minnesota Star Tribune. For many years, he had been a high-flying executive in Silicon Valley, working for firms like Google and YouTube. Then in 2018, he and his wife — who worked for a venture capital firm investing in startups outside of the coasts along with AOL founder Steve Case and now-Vice President JD Vance — decided to return to Minnesota, where Grove had grown up. His recent book, How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention, is about leaving the global hub of innovation for what’s often disparaged as “flyover country.” It’s also a story of recommitting to civic and political involvement, as Grove went to work for Minnesota governor (and future Democratic vice-presidential nominee) Tim Walz as head of the state’s departments of economic and workforce development. He was in this role when the pandemic struck the state, making him the principal liaison with a business community struggling to cope with restrictions meant to stem the spread of COVID.

In this podcast conversation, Grove discusses his personal experience of moving from Silicon Valley back to Minnesota, the benefits and tradeoffs of relocating there, and what he learned from having moved between the worlds of high tech, government, and publishing. He describes his experiences with finding both resistance and innovation in state and local government, and the perspective that gave him on Elon Musk’s DOGE attempt to reinvent government along Silicon Valley lines. (Grove believes that “If you're going to reboot government in a more powerful way, starting local has a lot better shot than starting national.”) He discusses the challenges of heading the Safe Reopening Group during the pandemic, which he frankly characterizes as a “deeply uncomfortable exercise in social engineering.” And he also describes his work since 2023 in attempting to reimagine the venerable Star Tribune at a time of severe challenges for print journalism and the news media more generally. 

Andrew Holter recently has brought to publication the first collection of Kempton’s writings to appear since the 1990s. The anthology, entitled Going Around, offers a selection of Kempton that extends from his student journalism during the New Deal to his criticisms during the ‘80s and ‘90s of figures like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (of whom he wrote that “Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock’s feathers”). In this podcast discussion, Holter talks about how he became interested in Kempton’s work, how Kempton’s writings provide an overview of and window into American life in the twentieth century, and why he wanted to make Kempton’s work available to a new generation of readers. He explains how his research led him to rediscover long out-of-print writings along with previously unpublished work (including Kempton’s uncompleted memoirs). He also describes why Kempton’s model of “going around” – beat reporting and direct interactions with people in the streets and in the community – is a necessary corrective to much received opinion and analysis today. 

The power of Postrel’s prophecy is evident from even a cursory examination of current politics, in which debates over issues like trade, immigration, housing construction, energy production, and environmental conservation inevitably produce odd-bedfellows coalitions of left and right. Postrel generally approves of center-left advocates of abundance like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — since, as she puts it, they share “the convictions that more is better than less, and that a good society is not zero-sum.” But she recently criticized the Klein-Thompson bestseller Abundance for its essentially technocratic mindset, in which change proceeds from central planning without what Postrel regards as sufficient feedback from market mechanisms or public input. She envisions a more libertarian-inflected version of abundance characterized by what she calls “a more emergent, bottom-up approach, imagining an open-ended future that relies less on direction by smart guys with political authority and more on grassroots experimentation, competition, and criticism.”

In this podcast conversation, Postrel analyzes different approaches to what she considers to be the linked causes of abundance and progress — although she notes that progress “tends to code a little right and tends to be more libertarian, more Silicon Valley people” — along with the basic political division between advocates of stasis and dynamism. She talks about her South Carolina origins and her study of the Renaissance, “when dynamism was invented.” She points out that her analysis of dynamism in some measure derived from her love of — and worries about — her adoptive state of California. She discusses some of the thinkers who influenced her analysis, including innovators like Stewart Brand, writers like Jonathan Rauch, Daniel Boorstin, and Henry Petroski, and economists including Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polyani, Mancur Olson, and Paul Romer. And she describes how her interests in dynamism and human invention relate to her interests in textiles, design, fashion, and aesthetics. 

Alan Ehrenhalt, who has been a longtime writer and editor at Governing magazine, in 1995 explored this question in his classic study, The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s. Ehrenhalt investigated three communities in Chicago in that era: St. Nicholas of Tolentine, a working-class Catholic parish on the city’s Southwest Side; Bronzeville, the heart of Black Chicago in that era of segregation; and Elmhurst, a split-level suburban community eighteen miles west of downtown, which experienced explosive growth in the 1950s. Ehrenhalt found that Chicago’s citizens in the 1950s were subjected to what most Americans now would regard as excessively powerful and intrusive authority — including the authority of the political machine during the regime of Mayor Richard Daley, religion, employers, tradition, and the community itself — but that authority enforced an order that made possible a deep sense of community that has largely vanished from American urban life, for which many Americans remain deeply nostalgic.

In this podcast discussion, Alan Ehrenhalt discusses that loss of community and the way it has played into American politics, particularly during the Trump era; the individualism of the baby boom and the way that many young people of that era chafed against the restraints of the 1950s; and the cultural matrix that produced the first American pope, Leo XIV, who (as Robert Prevost) grew up in a community similar to St. Nicholas of Tolentine during the 1950s. He analyzes what both the contemporary political left and right miss about that time, but acknowledges the difficulty of recovering communitarian values in the present era. 

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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. 

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.”

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. 

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.”

• 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.  

In this era of deepening polarization and intensifying tribalization, Americans have fewer and fewer contacts and communication across partisan lines. Philippa Hughes is a Washington, D.C.-based social sculptor and creative strategist who has long attempted to bridge our divisions by bringing people together for meaningful conversations about art and our shared American identity.

But she has discovered that finding common ground among people from different backgrounds and perspectives is increasingly difficult as our cultural and political wars intensify. Art can divide us as well as emphasize our common humanity, and Philippa has experienced difficulties even in communicating with her own family — including with a cousin who headed ICE under Trump.

Join us as we discuss Philippa Hughes’ “Looking for America” project, her thoughts on social media and the epidemic of loneliness, and efforts by individuals and cultural institutions to shore up our eroding social infrastructure.