The Vital Center

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.

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.”

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.