The Vital Center

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Lori Sturdevant, a progressive Republican, discusses Minnesota's Republican tradition of fiscal prudence and social conscience. Topics include the changing dynamics of politics and journalism in Minnesota, the meaning of 'Minnesota Nice' and the state's history, the erosion of local establishment and civic elites, building civic leadership capacity, and the decline in comedy and partisan reactions.

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.