The Vital Center

The contested meaning of American freedom, with Jefferson Cowie

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...

Joe Biden as "The Last Politician," with Franklin Foer

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 d...

The century-long war for American conservatism, with Matthew Continetti

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 ...

Slouching towards Utopia, with Brad DeLong

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...

How elites use zoning and NIMBYism to keep the working class out, with Richard Kahlenberg

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 “comme...

Why Congress needs to be revitalized, with Philip Wallach

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 ...

How government can succeed in the digital age, with Jennifer Pahlka

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 prior...

A long-term success strategy for Democrats, with Ruy Teixeira

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 destin...

An economic agenda for a divided nation, with Isabel Sawhill

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 "policie...

How Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War

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...

How the John Birch Society radicalized the American Right, with Matthew Dallek

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, ...

Los Angeles in 1974 and the politics of culture, with Ronald Brownstein

“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 ...

Tackling immigration reform in a divided Washington, with Kristie De Peña

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 ...

The GOP’s Faustian bargain with far-right extremism, with David Corn

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...

Imagining a better future for American democracy, with Suzette Brooks Masters

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 cons...

The paradoxical life of J. Edgar Hoover, with Beverly Gage

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 Un...

Larry Hogan’s GOP Alternative, with Mileah Kromer

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...

Reclaiming Libertarianism with Andrew Koppelman

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.

America’s unfinished civil war, with Jeremi Suri

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 c...

The 1990s origins of today’s Trumpian politics, with Nicole Hemmer

Why men and boys are falling behind, with Richard V. Reeves

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 I...

Homophobia in the mid-20th century, with James Kirchick

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...

Rising political violence in the U.S. and the threat to U.S. democracy, with Rachel Kleinfeld

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 de...

Michael Mazarr on American decline and possible revival

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 societa...

The rise of the Ripon Society and moderate Republicanism, with Emil Frankel

“Moderate Republicanism” seems to many people today to be a contradiction in terms. But during the 1960s and ‘70s, not only were moderate Republicans a force in electoral politics, but moderate Republicanism also became a significant political movement. The leading moderate Republican activist group of that era was the Ripon Society. Emil Frankel co-founded the Ripon Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962. In this podcast discussion, he relates how he modeled the organization after the Bow...

Reckoning with the deep structural problems in our democracy, with Greg Sargent

Greg Sargent is one of America's most prolific and insightful political opinion journalists. He is co-author of the Washington Post's The Plum Line blog (along with Paul Waldman) and is the author of the 2018 book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in An Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics. Although his columns tend to respond to the most heated and prominent issues of the moment, his column is notable for drawing upon a wide range of experts who help connect the polit...

Will the American conservative movement ever value liberty and virtue again? (with Stephanie Slade)

The post-Trump era has been a time of extraordinary political ferment on the right. Stephanie Slade, senior editor of Reason magazine, has had a front-line view of these new political developments. She is both a libertarian and a Catholic, and has written extensively for both libertarian publications and for religious publications, such as the Jesuit magazine America. She covers the intersection of religion and politics as well as the growing illiberalism of the New Right, evident in such new mo...

Can conservatism ever become sensible again? (with Joshua Tait)

For decades, the standard history of conservative intellectuals in the United States in the 20th century has been George Nash’s magisterial The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. Now, a young scholar, Joshua Tait, has produced a study of conservative intellectualism that compares favorably to Nash’s in its depth of research and acuity of analysis. In this podcast discussion, Josh talks about his 2020 Ph.D. dissertation, “Making Conservatism: Conservative Intellectuals and ...

The leading challengers to liberalism and moderation come from the West, with Aurelian Craiutu

What is moderation? The term is used both positively and pejoratively in today’s political discourse but rarely is it defined. Aurelian Craiutu is a professor of political science at Indiana University in Bloomington who has, perhaps more than anyone else, tried to define moderation and its manifestations in politics and philosophy over the past several centuries. He is the author of major works on moderation, including A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-...

Abraham Lincoln as a Pragmatist and Peacemaker, with John Avlon