The Last Best Hope?

If America is the last, best hope of earth, one reason is the frontier. The frontier has been imagined as the place—or perhaps the process—through which the American character is forged—rugged individualism, the possibility of acquiring land and wealth, where happiness is pursued. For the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1890s, the frontier was what made Americans different. Democracy was not born of a theorists dream, Turner said, nor was freedom something transplanted by Puritans from England, it was forged every time Americans found new frontiers. The frontier gave Americans a restless, nervous energy, a sense of purpose and direction. The frontier was, perhaps above all, a way that Americans, uniquely, could escape the bounds of history, the constraints of resources, of space of land that hampered less favoured nations – it was therefore a way of talking about the future and the endless barrelling forward of their raucous, capitalist, populist society.But where did the myth of the frontier come from? How does it relate to the reality of western expansion, if it does at all? And what of today? How does the optimistic myth of a frontier as a place of possibility fare in a world of ICE agents and border walls. Rather than the endless expansion promised by the myth of the frontier, is America closing in?Adam Smith is joined by two great historians: Patrician Nelson Limerick, professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the founders of the “New Western History” and author of Legacy of Conquest: the unbroken past of the American West. And Greg Grandin, Professor of History at Yale, and the author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2020.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Beneath the chaos of Donald Trump’s second term foreign policy—the bluster, bravado, back-handers and backdowns—is there something else going on? Has the United States reached a turning point in its relationship to the rest of the world?The era in which the United States constructed multilateral alliances to defend western Europe and advance a global free trade agenda appears to be over. Listen to the people around Trump and you will hear them talking in quite different ways – contempt for Western Europe, admiration for the audacity of Putin in reasserting Russia’s regional sphere of influence. It is as if the United States has decided to retrench geopolitically – controlling Greenland, fantasising about annexing Canada, realising total domination of the northern part of the western hemisphere with all its mineral wealth and, with climate change, new strategically vital sea-lanes?But if this is a new American foreign policy, is it one that has more than an echo of the pre-Second World War past? After all, it was a commonplace of nineteenth-century US politicians to make fiery speeches threatening to annexe Canada, and they actually did annexe half of Mexico and threaten much more.So, are there ways in which pre-1941 ideas about the US’s role in the world are relevant to understanding the US’s current geopolitical choices? And what does that tell us about the future?Adam Smith speaks to Daniel Drezner, Distinguished Professor of International Politics and Academic Dean at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University., prolific writer and author, among many other books and article, of The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump teaches us about the modern presidency and to Jay Sexton, President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri, also a prolific writer, among his influential books is The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth Century AmericaThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A hundred years ago, Walter Lippmann, one of the great analysts of democratic life, wrote that the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism. Press barons, Lippmann feared, were so powerful that government based on the consent of the governed was under threat if unregulated media owners could manufacture consent. If the facts were not being made available to the public, how could the public make proper democratic choices? Today, those words ring as true as they ever did. In place of press barons like William Randolph Hearst are corporations that curry favour with an administration that has no compunction about making regulatory decisions based on who the President thinks are his friends. TV networks remove comedians who offend the President for fear of retribution. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire owner of the Washington Post, a newspaper that for a while adopted the slogan “democracy dies in darkness”, prevented the Post from endorsing Kamala Harris and subsequently announced that the opinions page would henceforth only carry pieces that supported free markets and personal liberties. And in an age when most people get their news in two-second bites from social media, how can the governed give meaningful consent?These are of course age-old questions about democracy: what does government of the people, by the people look like? How do we have a functioning democracy if we agree on a common set of facts – and how can journalists do their work if people don’t believe they’re pursuing the truth?Each generation wrestles with these kinds of questions in new ways, not least in the face of new media technology—whether the spread of the millionaire-owned popular press in the early twentieth century, the rise of radio or cable TV or the internet.In this episode, we draw on Walter Lippmann’s 20th-century warnings about the vulnerability of democracy to propaganda, misinformation, and public disengagement, to assess the challenges facing journalism in 2025.Adam Smith speaks to Marty Baron, former Washington Post executive editor between 2013 and 2021 and to Dr Tom Arnold Forster, author of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography, published by Princeton University Press.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's been almost a year since The Last Best Hope aired, and in that time, America has changed dramatically. So in the new series, we’ll be attempting to put Trump’s foreign policy in a historical context, we’ll be discussing the enduring myth of the frontier, and asking how history will judge Joe Biden. And in a special two-part documentary, we’ll return to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, and ask what significance it still has at another moment of national crisis.“Adam Smith is one of the UK’s foremost historians of America, and communicates his expertise with zest, wit and unforced passion. The Last Best Hope? brings him together with fellow scholars to provide a unique insight we can’t do without.”Phil Tinline, BBC radio documentary-maker and author"The Last Best Hope is an absolutely brilliant podcast. Thoughtful, clever, engaging and accessible, Adam Smith always gets the best out of his guests, and I’ve learned an enormous amount from every episode. I love it."Dominic Sandbrook, Historian and co-host of The Rest is History “The must-listen US podcast”Nick Bryant, former BBC Correspondent in New YorkThe Last Best Hope is a podcast produced by the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. The presenter is Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Politics and Political History, and the Producer is Emily Williams. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special episode of The Last Best Hope, we bring you a recording of a live event at the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford on Thursday, November 7. Adam Smith and guests discussed why the election turned out the way it did. The panellists are:Jason Casellas  ABC News election decision desk. Jason Casellas is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. He is an expert in Latino politics and has published widely on state and local politics.Clare Malone New Yorker staff writer. Clare Malone reports on politics, media, and journalism for the New Yorker. She previously covered both the 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns as a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight.Mike Murphy Republican political strategist and media consultant. Mike Murphy has worked on the presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush and John McCain. He also co-hosts the popular politics podcast Hacks on Tap with David Axelrod.Kimberley Johnson John G. Winant Visiting Professor of American Government. Kimberley Johnson is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and an expert on racial and ethnic, and suburban and urban politics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid, and presidents sometimes won massive landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we examine the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and trace the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. In this episode, the election of 2016. The shocking victory of Donald Trump and the final emergence, perhaps, of a new partisan alignment.Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American InstituteGuests:Patrick Andelic of the University of Northumbria, author of Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974-1994, now out in paperbackUrsula Hackett, Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the StateThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming, go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/eventsProducer: Emily Williams. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

EJ Dionne, a distinguished journalist and political commentator, joins David Campbell, an expert on religion in politics, and Kristin Kobes Du Mez, bestselling author and historian. They dive into the evolving identity of evangelicals and their political affiliations, particularly how self-identification often aligns with political values today. The group examines Trump's role as a champion of conservative values, the racial dynamics within evangelicalism, and the shifting landscape of faith and politics in America. It's a thought-provoking discussion on the complexities surrounding evangelical voters.

AGE OF POLARIZATION ELECTION SPECIAL PART 3: 2008The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid, and presidents sometimes won massive landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we examine the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and trace the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. In this episode: The Election of 2008. The election of the first black president of the United States, which seemed at the time to be an utterly transformative moment, but which also fuelled deep currents of racial animosity; the success of a Democratic winning coalition that looked quite different from that which had elected previous Democrats.Presenter: Adam SmithGuests:Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor of History at Boston UniversityDan Rowe, Director of Academic Programmes, Rothermere American InstituteThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AGE OF POLARIZATION ELECTION SPECIAL (PART 2)The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid and presidents sometimes won huge landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we’ll be examining the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and tracing the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. In this episode: 2000 – the election in which Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the presidency after the Supreme Court stopped ongoing recounts in Florida and awarded the electoral college votes to the Republican. A tight but relatively bland election campaign was followed by a bitter aftermath, destroying many people’s faith in the electoral process, generating surging conspiracy theories – a loss of basic trust that Donald Trump would later exploit.Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American InstituteGuests:Patrick Andelicby of the University of Northumbria, author of Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974-1994, now out in paperbackUrsula Hackett, Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the StateThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eugene V. Debs is a reminder of the possibility of a different kind of American politics. Five times the Socialist Party's candidate for president in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Debs argued that the promise of America -- the last best hope of earth -- could be fulfilled only through socialism. Debs lived in an era that, like our own, was characterised by dramatic economic dislocation, extremes of wealth and poverty, and high rates of immigration. So what is his legacy, and why does he still matter? Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American InstituteGuests:Michael Kazin, Professor of History U of Georgetown, the author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 (2017), American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011),The Life of Wm Jennings Bryan (2006), and most recently What it took to win: A history of the Democratic party (2022).Allison Duerk, Director of the Eugene V. Debs Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.