Episodes
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.” - Show more
