The Vital Center

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.”

Franklin Foer, author of 'The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future,' discusses why Biden is more interesting than assumed, challenges of writing the book, episodes from the early Biden presidency including the COVID response and Afghan withdrawal, and the potential benefits of the chips act.

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

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

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

Philip Wallach, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of 'Why Congress', dives into the alarming dysfunction of the U.S. Congress. He discusses the historical significance of the legislature and its current devaluation, highlighting its role in fostering social cohesion. Wallach reveals the challenges of modern governance and shares insights from his experience with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. He argues for urgent reforms to ensure Congress effectively addresses America’s pressing issues, emphasizing the need for bipartisan collaboration.

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

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

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

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