The Vital Center

Jonathan Rauch would seem to be an unlikely defender of American Christianity. The eminent author, Brookings senior fellow, and Atlantic magazine contributing editor is a gay Jewish atheist — “I won the marginalized trifecta,” he observes — who grew up deeply suspicious of Christianity and its potential for (and past history of) oppression. As he describes in his recent book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, his attitude began to change at college, when his freshman year roommate was a Christian believer who exemplified the best aspects of the religion. But Rauch also came to appreciate that as the country has become increasingly secular — with the percentage of Americans identifying as “practicing Christians” down by half since 2000 — the religious impulse has found expression in other channels, including an increasingly toxic partisanship and polarization. And Rauch also came to appreciate that while the Founders rejected the establishment of a state religion or any other formal church-state alliance, they believed that republican government would be impossible without the underpinnings of religion and morality. In Rauch’s words, “Christianity turned out to be a load-bearing wall in our democracy, and right now it is caving in.”In this podcast discussion, Jonathan Rauch argues that Protestantism in America increasingly has taken on forms that ended up importing religious zeal into secular politics and exporting politics into religion. One of these forms is what he calls “Sharp Christianity,” in which white Evangelicalism (in particular) increasingly has taken the form of conservative culture warfare and partisan politics. Another is “Thin Christianity,” in which mainline Protestant churches have lost cultural and theological distinctiveness and become akin to a consumer choice. But Rauch is hopeful about the potential for what he calls “Thick Christianity,” in which sincere Christian believers support rather than oppose constitutional pluralism, for theological and spiritual reasons rather than merely strategic or expedient ones. In the unexpected form of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rauch finds a religion that seeks to base itself on a theology of “how Christ wants us to behave in our public and political relations. And how is that? It’s patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation.” And he’s hopeful that Christians who follow this path will enter into good-faith negotiations with Americans who do not share their beliefs, “and look for solutions that will expand the space for us to get along together.”Jonathan Rauch would seem to be an unlikely defender of American Christianity. The eminent author, Brookings senior fellow, and Atlantic magazine contributing editor is a gay Jewish atheist — “I won the marginalized trifecta,” he observes — who grew up deeply suspicious of Christianity and its potential for (and past history of) oppression. As he describes in his recent book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, his attitude began to change at college, when his freshman year roommate was a Christian believer who exemplified the best aspects of the religion. But Rauch also came to appreciate that as the country has become increasingly secular — with the percentage of Americans identifying as “practicing Christians” down by half since 2000 — the religious impulse has found expression in other channels, including an increasingly toxic partisanship and polarization. And Rauch also came to appreciate that while the Founders rejected the establishment of a state religion or any other formal church-state alliance, they believed that republican government would be impossible without the underpinnings of religion and morality. In Rauch’s words, “Christianity turned out to be a load-bearing wall in our democracy, and right now it is caving in.”In this podcast discussion, Jonathan Rauch argues that Protestantism in America increasingly has taken on forms that ended up importing religious zeal into secular politics and exporting politics into religion. One of these forms is what he calls “Sharp Christianity,” in which white Evangelicalism (in particular) increasingly has taken the form of conservative culture warfare and partisan politics. Another is “Thin Christianity,” in which mainline Protestant churches have lost cultural and theological distinctiveness and become akin to a consumer choice. But Rauch is hopeful about the potential for what he calls “Thick Christianity,” in which sincere Christian believers support rather than oppose constitutional pluralism, for theological and spiritual reasons rather than merely strategic or expedient ones. In the unexpected form of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rauch finds a religion that seeks to base itself on a theology of “how Christ wants us to behave in our public and political relations. And how is that? It’s patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation.” And he’s hopeful that Christians who follow this path will enter into good-faith negotiations with Americans who do not share their beliefs, “and look for solutions that will expand the space for us to get along together.”

In a riveting discussion, Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University and author of 'Why Nothing Works', explores the stagnation in American progress and governance. He reflects on the tragic fate of Pennsylvania Station as a symbol of lost ambition. His journey highlights the decline of middle-tier relationships in communities, the bureaucratic failures behind iconic projects like the Woolman Rink, and the urgent need for progressives to redefine their strategies to rebuild public trust and address complex societal issues.

Many Democratic voters — and not a few pundits — have found the 2024 presidential election outcome to be profoundly puzzling and disorienting: How could so many minorities and working-class Americans have voted for Donald Trump? One observer who found Trump’s showing with these groups to be unsurprising is Steve Bumbaugh. Ever since the 1990s, he has worked on issues involving college access, upward mobility, race, and class. For some of that time, he worked with large organizations such as the College Board, which is the one of the key institutions that has shaped the modern meritocracy through college entrance tests such as the SAT and Advanced Placement courses and exams. At other points in his career, he worked directly with young people from disadvantaged communities. His work with students in a deeply impoverished inner-city neighborhood in Washington D.C. during the early 1990s, when the city was known as the nation’s “Murder Capital,” is described in the documentary Southeast 67.      In this podcast conversation, Bumbaugh discusses the rise and fall of public school integration efforts in America — an arc whose impact he experienced personally as well as professionally. He describes current criticisms of meritocracy, particularly at the level of selective college admissions, and the ways in which the elite universities could do more to make the system more representative as well as more truly meritocratic. Bumbaugh reflects on the working-class anger and frustration that helped drive Trump’s reelection in 2024, much of which was invisible to the Democratic Party as it transformed into a predominantly college-educated, managerial- and professional-class party. And he concludes that the Democrats “don’t have the ability to communicate on the same level as Donald Trump. They had better do something.”

In this thought-provoking discussion, Sam Freedman, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and author of 'Failed State,' analyzes the governance crisis facing Britain and the US. He reveals alarming statistics on child poverty and institutional dysfunction, emphasizing the need for long-term solutions over short-term political gains. Freedman explores the impact of social media on governance and draws parallels between the political landscapes of the UK and US. He critiques outsourcing in public services, spotlighting the Post Office scandal as a case of institutional failure.

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.”

Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman are political science professors and co-authors of 'The Hollow Parties,' exploring the disarray within American political parties. They delve into how both the Republican and Democratic parties have become 'hollow,' losing their core functions like voter mobilization. The speakers discuss the rise of para-parties, the impact of Trumpism, and the need for local civic engagement to combat polarization. Their insights connect historical narratives with modern challenges, offering a fresh perspective on party dynamics in American politics.

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.

Join Renée DiResta, a writer and former research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, along with Baron Soga, the founder of Tech Freedom, as they dive into the online misinformation epidemic. DiResta shares her transformative activism journey triggered by the 2014 Disneyland measles outbreak. They discuss how social media alters public trust and amplifies misinformation, the rise of fake news in political contexts, and the challenges institutions face in combating these issues. The conversation also touches on the gladiatorial nature of social media and its implications for user engagement.

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.”

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.