The Vital Center

Did U.S. President Ronald Reagan end the Cold War? Or did the war end because Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev abandoned it? William Inboden argues forcefully for the former interpretation in his new book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. Reagan's strategy in dealing with the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War involved reviving the U.S. economy, restoring American self-confidence, rebuilding American military might, and working closely with our democratic allies. He then pressured the Soviet Union into an economically unsustainable arms race, engaged in proxy battles with them around the globe, and waged a successful propaganda war that pitted the political, religious, and economic liberties of the “free world” against the bankruptcy and tyranny of the “evil empire.” But when liberalizing Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in 1985, Reagan saw sooner than most of his advisors that here was a reformer with whom he could work to bring peace.  William Inboden is the Executive Director and William Powers Jr. Chair of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously held senior positions with the State Department and in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. In this podcast, Inboden describes his work on Capitol Hill, his graduate study that focused on both U.S. diplomatic history and American religious history, his service in the Bush White House as well as with the Legatum Institute in London, and his return to academia. He details the factors that inspired him to write The Peacemaker, the declassification of Reagan-era documents that enabled him to arrive at new historical insights into the Reagan presidency, and his own change in perspective that led him from being intensely critical of Reagan (particularly with regard to his support of authoritarian anti-communist regimes and insurgencies in Central and South America) to holding a more favorable assessment of his legacy.  Inboden also discusses how former Republican president Dwight Eisenhower exerted a more significant influence on Reagan than most historians have recognized, how Reagan’s conception of the Cold War differed profoundly from that shared by his predecessors, how the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka “Star Wars”) was at the heart of his strategic vision of a world without nuclear weapons, and why he is confident that the Reaganite tradition in the Republican Party can be revived. Inboden also argues for the value and relevance of history for policymakers, as well as why he believes that public universities need to uphold their end of the implicit social contract they have long maintained with American society.

In October 1958, Robert Welch, a wealthy retired businessman with extreme anti-communist beliefs, held a secret meeting in Indianapolis with eleven like-minded men to found the John Birch Society, named after a young American missionary and intelligence officer killed by Mao’s Communist troops in 1945. Welch and his confederates detested not only liberals but also mainstream conservatives. They held particular animus toward President Dwight D. Eisenhower; although Ike was a moderate Republican, Welch believed him to be a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” At its peak in the 1960s, the Birch Society consisted of some 60,000 to 100,000 members organized in secret cells around the country.  Although much of the country dismissed the Birchers as a lunatic fringe, historian Matthew Dallek, in his new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, argues that the group exercised an outsized influence on the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Blending violent and apocalyptic conspiracy theories with grassroots activism, business skills, and the power of alternative media, the Birch Society proved, in Dallek’s words, “that the supercharged activism of thousands of diehards could outmatch the votes of millions of citizens and over time transform the GOP.” In this podcast discussion, Dallek describes the history of the Birch Society as well as dynamics that made it a significant political force and an enduring influence on the contemporary American right. He points out that much of the responsibility for the continuing vitality of Birch-style extremism lies with Republican leaders who thought they could harness the activism of the Birchers without allowing their paranoia and hatred to define the party.  Instead, according to Dallek, “The GOP establishment’s efforts to court this fringe and keep it in the coalition allowed it to gain a foothold and eventually cannibalize the entire party.”

“Let me make the songs of a nation,” the Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher once declared, “and I care not who makes its laws.” The eminent political journalist Ronald Brownstein makes a similar case in his recent book Rock Me on the Water — 1974: The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics. Brownstein’s narrative history traces the spectacular cultural pinnacles achieved in Los Angeles in 1974 in the separate industries of movies, music, and television — though often the artists responsible for those breakthroughs were working only blocks apart. These achievements helped Los Angeles in that year to exert “more influence over popular culture than any other city in America,” according to Brownstein, and indeed “the city dominated popular culture more than it ever had before, or would again.” Ultimately the breakthroughs that took place in LA in 1974 would not only transform the culture industries, they would act as a conduit channeling the radical ideas of the 1960s into the American mainstream. In this podcast interview, CNN senior political analyst and Atlantic senior editor Brownstein discusses the creative summits achieved in LA in 1974. In Hollywood, these included the release of “New Wave” masterpieces such as Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, and The Conversation, along with the filming of other notable works including Nashville and Jaws. On television, 1974 was the only year that CBS broadcast the Saturday night lineup often considered “the greatest night in television history,” which included such breakthrough series as All in the Family, MASH, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show. And in music, 1974 saw the release of career-defining albums from principal creators of the Southern California sound including Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The art across all these industries, according to Brownstein, “was socially engaged, grappling with all the changes and critiques of American life that had rumbled through society during the 1960s: greater suspicion of authority in business and government, more assertive roles for women, more tolerance of premarital sex, greater acceptance of racial and sexual minorities.” LA’s culture industries in 1974 were at the forefront of the clash between an ascending Baby Boom generation bent on change and older generations opposing that change. In the short term, conservative politics triumphed. But Brownstein argues that the clear lesson for today’s political-cultural clash of generations is that “while voices resistant to change may win delaying battles in politics, they cannot indefinitely hold back the future.”

If there is one thing on which Republicans and Democrats can agree these days, it's that the country's current system of immigration isn't working. However, the parties seem too polarized to work together to fix the system. Kristie De Peña, the Niskanen Center's vice president for policy and director of immigration policy, believes that the parties can still find common ground. She recently coauthored a New York Times op-ed pointing out that even some very conservative lawmakers have recognized a need for some level of immigration to address severe labor shortages in the Midwest and other parts of the country. This once was a relatively uncontroversial position within the Republican Party. President Ronald Reagan, for example, emphasized America's tradition of sheltering people fleeing oppression and the importance of offering immigrants to this country a pathway to citizenship. But even now, as Kristie and her coauthors underline, there are ways that red and blue states can lead in welcoming refugees. She adds, "Democratic and Republican governors should also have the opportunity to weigh in on the specific needs of small business manufacturers and families." In this wide-ranging podcast discussion, Kristie De Peña discusses the origins of the Niskanen Center, the ways in which the U.S. immigration system has become outmoded, and the channels through which policy can progress in a divided Washington. The memories of the big immigration reform efforts from earlier decades may need to be "[sent] off on a Viking funeral into the night." Instead, "we need to start talking about not only [the demands for reform] now…but what does migration looks like in this hemisphere…in the next 10 or 20 years?"

What shall it profit a political party if it gains power but loses its own soul? David Corn subjects the Republican Party to this moral test in his new book, American Psychosis, and finds it wanting.  Corn, a journalist with the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine and a regular television commentator on MSNBC, examines the history of the Grand Old Party’s interrelationship with far-right extremism going back to the 1964 Republican presidential nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. In Corn’s view, Goldwater’s refusal to separate himself from the irrational anti-communist paranoia of the John Birch Society – and even the racism of Southern segregationists and the Ku Klux Klan – set the template for the Republican Party’s cultivation of the far right ever after.  The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump’s deluded followers in this sense represented the culmination of a dynamic that had been ongoing for almost seventy years. The Republican Party, Corn writes, “had long played with and stoked the fires of extremism for political advantage. It had encouraged and exploited a psychosis. This sickness reached an apotheosis on that cloudy and chilly winter afternoon. Yet it had been years in the making.” In this podcast discussion, Corn discusses how the Republican Party’s cultivation of far-right extremism has waxed and waned over the decades, but how the ultimate effect of this cultivation was to legitimize and empower forces that proved inimical to the GOP’s ability to govern. He argues that there is no counterpart on the Democratic side to the toleration of violence and conspiracy theories that the Republican Party has regularly indulged, and further that elite actors on the conservative side created a culture of divisiveness and contempt, which changed the Republican base by giving it permission to indulge its darker impulses. Corn calls for a kind of Popular Front between citizens on both left and right against the forces of “American psychosis,” which he sees as “destructive to the American project, to American democracy. And the first priority is keeping them at bay and putting our other arguments somewhat on the back burner for the time being.”

Activists concerned with American democracy typically worry about present-day dysfunctions and the looming threat of authoritarianism. But this essentially negative approach often leads to fatalism and burnout. What if those active in the democracy space gave more consideration to the positive futures they seek to achieve? That’s the premise of a thought-provoking new study, “Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy,” by Suzette Brooks Masters, a social entrepreneur and philanthropic consultant with the Better Futures Project. She interviewed 64 people from a wide variety of backgrounds — including not only democracy activists but also futurists, religious and spiritual leaders, artists, writers, and even game designers and architects — to stimulate more positive thinking about democratic futures. The act of envisioning and articulating better alternatives, in her view, will make it easier to develop strategies to achieve better outcomes and also to inspire more people to become active in such projects. In this podcast discussion, Suzette Brooks Masters discusses hypothetical and real-world examples of how better democratic futures may be possible. Her examples range from the visionary possibilities glimpsed by science fiction writers like Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson to participatory democracy projects like Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, care communities like England’s Frome Medical Project and the Netherlands’ Hogeweyk Dementia Village, and government efforts around the world to incorporate future-oriented perspectives into present-day policymaking.

J. Edgar Hoover, who directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972, is one of the central figures in the twentieth-century development of the federal government and the national security state. For decades he was one of the most widely admired Americans, only to become one of the most reviled following revelations of his racism, redbaiting, abuses of power, and persecution of figures like Martin Luther King Jr.  Beverly Gage, a professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, has recently published a monumental biography of the FBI leader entitled G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. While the book follows Hoover from birth to death, focusing on his service under eight U.S. presidents, it also analyzes Hoover as a political actor whose career explains the growth of federal power and Cold War ideology during America’s rise to global preeminence.  Gage highlights the duality that accounted for much of Hoover’s success and popularity. On the one hand, he promoted “conservative values ranging from anti-communism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity.” At the same time, he also embodied faith in progressive government, scientific authority, professionalism, and apolitical expertise. As Gage points out, “Today, when the Republican Party regularly denounces both federal authority and nonpartisan expertise, it can be hard to imagine these ideas fitting together.”   In this podcast discussion, Gage analyzes Hoover’s complexities, which included:  - his allegiance to the Confederate-worshipping Kappa Alpha fraternity along with his FBI operations against the Ku Klux Klan, - and his forty-year marriage-in-all-but-name with the FBI’s number two official, Clyde Tolson, even while he launched the Lavender Scare persecuting homosexuals along with the Red Scare of the mid-twentieth century. Gage says that to look at Hoover, the American Century’s “quintessential Government Man,” is also “to look at ourselves, at what Americans valued and fought over during those years, what we tolerated and what we refused to see.”

Is it possible to envision a different path forward for the Republican Party – one that might allow the GOP to once again become a big-tent, majoritarian party without the excesses of Donald Trump and his imitators? Mileah Kromer, a political scientist and pollster at Goucher College, sees such an alternative in the career of Republican politician Larry Hogan Jr., who served two terms as governor in heavily Democratic Maryland from 2015 to 2022.  Kromer examines the ingredients of Hogan’s success in her new biography, Blue-State Republican: How Larry Hogan Won Where Republicans Lose and Lessons for a Future GOP. She concludes that Hogan’s fiscally conservative, pragmatic approach to government, combined with his rejection of culture-war grievances and Trump-style populism, allowed him to make inroads with groups that Republicans typically struggle to attract, including college-educated voters, women, suburbanites, and racial minorities. Maryland is one of the most diverse states in the country, and African-Americans – a group that has voted overwhelmingly against Republicans for more than 60 years – make up nearly one-third of the population. And yet 28% of black voters in Maryland cast their ballots for Hogan in 2018, even though his Democratic opponent was Benjamin Jealous, a former president of the NAACP.  Hogan’s success in Maryland offers a potential path for the Republican Party to take if it wishes to win popular majorities in a diversifying America. In this podcast interview, Kromer speculates about Hogan’s presidential possibilities for 2024, and concludes that while he would have difficulties in getting through the MAGA-dominated Republican primaries, his independence, authenticity, and ability to reach beyond traditional GOP constituencies might give him a real shot.

A few years ago in Obion County, Tennessee, a homeowner called 911 to report that a trash fire in his backyard had gotten out of control. The operator told him, however, that because he had forgotten to pay his $75 annual fee, the newly privatized city fire department wouldn’t help him. The fire brigade eventually showed up to prevent the blaze from spreading to the property of a paid-up neighbor, but they let the fire consume the debtor’s house.

As America’s partisan divide becomes ever wider, deeper, and angrier, many Americans from both red and blue tribes are increasingly worried about the possibility of a new civil war. Jeremi Suri, a professor of Public Affairs and History at the University of Texas at Austin, says that these worries are in a sense misplaced “because the Civil War never fully ended. Its lingering embers have burst into flames at various times, including our own.” Suri gained his scholarly reputation writing books contemporary politics and foreign policy, but the events of recent years, starting with Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, led him to cast his frame of historical reference back to the Civil War of 1861-65 and its aftermath. The roots of the rage behind the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, in his view, go back to the cataclysmic conflict of the nineteenth century and resistance to the postwar Reconstruction of the defeated South. Through a deep analysis of key individuals during that period, as well as events including President Andrew Johnson’s 1868 declaration of amnesty for Confederates and the disputed presidential election of 1876, he finds parallels and precedents for the rhetoric and actions that run through much of today’s politics. Reconstruction’s end brought a halt to efforts by Republican presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant to create a more racially inclusive democracy. The unfinished work of that second Founding continues to this day, and continues to meet with similar resistance to what was seen in the nineteenth century, including widespread claims of election fraud and a growing willingness to use violence to attain political ends. This podcast discussion also touches on present-day battles over how to teach American history as well as what Suri’s study of the nineteenth century suggests about possible twenty-first-century reforms to remedy flaws in the design of our constitutional structure.