The Vital Center

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.

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.