The Vital Center

Richard V. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, discusses the challenges faced by boys and men in education, work, and family. He explores disparities in education, wages, fatherhood dislocation, and deaths of despair. The chapter touches on his personal journey, growing up in Peterborough, and the impact of missing anchors on men. It also explores redshirting boys in school and the need for male representation in teaching.

Gays and lesbians have been part of America and its politics since the country’s foundation. Still, historically the stigma attached to homosexuality meant that any person whose alternative desires became publicly known was immediately banished from politics as well as mainstream society. James Kirchick has written an epic narrative history, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which examines American politics alongside and through the experiences of gays and lesbians in Washington, from the New Deal through the end of the 1990s. In this podcast episode, Kirchick discusses the multiple dimensions in which homosexuals and homophobia impacted American politics, particularly in the mid-20th-century “Lavender Scare,” the purge of gay employees from federal service which took place alongside (and outlasted) the Red Scare. “Even at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual,” Kirchick writes. “A Communist could break with the party. A homosexual was forever tainted.” The podcast also focuses on Frank Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer who was fired from the Army Map Service for his sexuality in 1957 and became the first person to challenge his termination on those grounds in court. Kameny formed the Mattachine Society in 1961 to agitate for full civil rights for gays and lesbians. He organized the first picket outside the White House for gay rights in 1965, and was instrumental in getting homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973. Kameny, in Kirchick’s telling, comes across as a radical moderate: radical in the sense that the full participation of gays and lesbians in American society was beyond the conception of even political progressives for most of the 20th century, but moderate in that his crusade sought the fulfillment of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, to be achieved through a politics of respectability rather than liberation. Kirchick discusses how the politics around homosexuality played a key role during the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. He also considers whether the tremendous gains in both legal equality for and public acceptance of homosexuality in recent years are likely to be reversed by Supreme Court decisions or populist agitation by Republican politicians like Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

In the wake of the FBI's search of former President Donald Trump's private residence in Florida, right-wing social media erupted with violent threats against law enforcement and political opponents. One enraged Trump supporter launched an armed attack against an FBI office in Ohio. A New York Times article on the rise of political threats and actual violence in the year and a half since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob quoted Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict, and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence in developing countries as well as in the United States, pointed to three critical ways that ordinary people can come to embrace violence:Setting political aggression in the context of war.Describing it as a defensive action against a belligerent enemy.Persistently framing an adversary as irredeemably evil or less than human."The right, at this point," she observed, "is doing all three things at once."In this Vital Center discussion, recorded before the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Rachel Kleinfeld unpacks her scholarship on rising political violence in the United States and how she became one of the leading experts in this field. She touches on her research and experiences in violent societies like rural India and post-Soviet Russia, her role as co-founder of the Truman National Security Project to develop progressive alternatives to Republican national security policies, and her efforts to bolster democracy at home as well as in post-civil-conflict societies abroad. She also talks about how political polarization and factionalization open the door to authoritarianism and how to reverse the trend toward rising political violence.  

As the United States faces a new era of competition with Russia and China, many analysts and observers have urged the country to respond by making more significant investments in military capabilities and strategic technologies and strengthening its overall global defense posture. But Michael Mazarr, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, believes that the lesson of history is that what ultimately determines success in global competition boils down to a handful of critical societal factors. As he puts in his important new study, The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness, “the factors that ultimately govern success are societal ones, qualities that reflect the kind of country that a nation is rather than the things it builds or does.” And unfortunately, this analysis concludes that America is losing many of the attributes that accounted for its success. Michael Mazarr is a Washington-based writer and policy expert with long experience in government, academia, and the think tank world, specializing in U.S. defense and national security issues. The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness was commissioned by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, the Defense Department’s in-house think tank, and carried out by Mazarr and a team of RAND researchers, along with the contributions of outside historians. The far-reaching survey of history’s most successful nations and civilizations concludes that their critical shared attributes are: - National ambition and will. - Unified national identity. - Shared opportunity. - An active state. - Effective institutions. - A learning and adaptive society. - Competitive diversity and pluralism. The study concludes that while the U.S. retains considerable strengths in these areas, it also “displays characteristics of once-dominant powers on the far side of their peak of competitiveness.” While the report is descriptive rather than prescriptive, it suggests that America can rejuvenate its competitive dynamism if it can recover and build upon those societal qualities that made it great — but that partisan polarization and social fragmentation may prevent this from happening. Mazarr’s study contains grounds for optimism but also points to the magnitude of the challenge confronting Americans who hope to reverse our national decline.

“Moderate Republicanism” seems to many people today to be a contradiction in terms. But during the 1960s and ‘70s, not only were moderate Republicans a force in electoral politics, but moderate Republicanism also became a significant political movement. The leading moderate Republican activist group of that era was the Ripon Society. Emil Frankel co-founded the Ripon Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962. In this podcast discussion, he relates how he modeled the organization after the Bow Group in Britain, which was a pragmatic research and policy group of young Conservatives. He describes how young Republicans in his era were influenced both by Dwight Eisenhower’s moderation and John F. Kennedy’s youth and energy. The sometimes contradictory impulses of the era came together in the formation of the Ripon Society. Ripon, named for the Wisconsin town that historically has been considered the birthplace of the Republican Party, also played a leading role in Republican support for civil rights legislation during the 1960s. This set it against the conservative movement led by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the struggle for the soul of the Republican Party. Frankel also talks about his service as Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation and as Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation. He laments the disappearance of the moderate tradition in Republican politics but explains how remaining moderates are making common cause with some of their former conservative foes in the effort to preserve American liberal democracy.

Greg Sargent is one of America's most prolific and insightful political opinion journalists. He is co-author of the Washington Post's The Plum Line blog (along with Paul Waldman) and is the author of the 2018 book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in An Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics. Although his columns tend to respond to the most heated and prominent issues of the moment, his column is notable for drawing upon a wide range of experts who help connect the political stories to a larger social and political reality. Sargent's work includes a particular focus on the American right and the particular dangers it has come to pose, in an era of Trump-inflected populism, to American democracy. An Uncivil War examines the history of the counter-majoritarian tendencies on the right and concludes that "the plight of our democracy is the result of deep structural factors and problems that go well beyond Trump and long predate him." In this podcast episode, Greg discusses the deeper significance of recent national stories (including several primary elections and the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings), the shifting bases of both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and the evolving forms of post-liberalism on the right. He raises what he considers the Democrats' "fundamental failure to reckon with the Republican Party of today," and his view of what needs to happen to avert emerging authoritarian threats. He also talks about his education and journalistic experiences before coming to the Post, and reveals the obscure meaning of "The Plum Line."

The post-Trump era has been a time of extraordinary political ferment on the right. Stephanie Slade, senior editor of Reason magazine, has had a front-line view of these new political developments. She is both a libertarian and a Catholic, and has written extensively for both libertarian publications and for religious publications, such as the Jesuit magazine America. She covers the intersection of religion and politics as well as the growing illiberalism of the New Right, evident in such new movements as National Conservatism and Catholic integralism. Most recently, she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on how Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis’ clash with the Walt Disney Company demonstrates the ways that the Republican Party is distancing itself from libertarian conservatism, particularly in the realm of economics. Trump-aligned, populist-leaning Republicans such as DeSantis, Missouri senator Josh Hawley, and Ohio senatorial candidate J. D. Vance show a new willingness to use the power of the state to punish their political enemies, including allegedly “woke” institutions such as colleges, universities, and foundations as well as large corporations such as Disney speaking out against Republican-authored legislation. Slade believes that what’s at stake in these clashes is the future of fusionism – the commitment to liberty and virtue – as the animating philosophy driving the modern American conservative movement. Unlike many on the New Right, she believes that libertarianism is compatible with religious social thought, like Catholic teachings on subsidiarity, for example. And although (in her estimation) the energy and momentum in intellectual and activist circles on the right are currently with the illiberals, she believes the fusionists have the potential to revive.

For decades, the standard history of conservative intellectuals in the United States in the 20th century has been George Nash’s magisterial The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. Now, a young scholar, Joshua Tait, has produced a study of conservative intellectualism that compares favorably to Nash’s in its depth of research and acuity of analysis. In this podcast discussion, Josh talks about his 2020 Ph.D. dissertation, “Making Conservatism: Conservative Intellectuals and the American Political Tradition.” He describes his interest in the post-World War II conservative intellectual project. This movement drew together the ideas and philosophies of the right that opposed the prevailing New Deal consensus and built a political coalition and set of institutions that could persuade the public and achieve political power. He discusses his interest in early conservative intellectual movements, including the New Conservatives, the Straussians, the traditionalists, and the libertarians - as well as the ideas and influence of specific figures on the right such as Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, and William F. Buckley, Jr. Ultimately, Josh believes that the “fusionist” consensus forged around National Review magazine in the 1950s - which united traditionalists and libertarians under the shared banner of anti-communism - was always unstable and was glued together more by shared enemies on the left than by any genuine synthesis. He also describes how the catastrophism of leading conservative intellectuals, including Burnham and Kendall, ultimately made it impossible for conservatives to cooperate with liberals and centrists, thus depriving them of the ability to govern. He believes the conservative intellectual project should turn away from existentialist counter-revolution and seek to recover the prudence and historicism of traditionalist thinkers like Russell Kirk. This would facilitate a return to conservative politics grounded in realism, reform, and continuity.

Aurelian Craiutu, a political science professor at Indiana University and expert on moderation, dives into the complexities of liberalism and its internal challenges. He argues that threats to liberal democracy are emerging from within Western societies, rather than external regimes. Craiutu highlights the importance of political moderation as a counterbalance to extremism, sharing insights from his experience growing up in Romania under communism. He stresses the need for engaging with diverse perspectives and fostering dialogue to defend liberal values in today's polarized climate.