The Vital Center

In 1989, in the wake of Republican president Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection, political scientists Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston issued a wake-up call to the Democratic Party. It came in the form of a widely discussed paper entitled “The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency,” which called upon Democrats to bring their party back to the political center. “The Politics of Evasion” became the intellectual and political manifesto for the moderate New Democrat movement and its organizational base, the Democratic Leadership Council. In 1992, the DLC’s president, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, won the presidency by running on a New Democrat platform. In February of this year, with moderate Democrats worrying anew that the party has drifted too far from the political center, Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston issued a paper entitled “The New Politics of Evasion: How Ignoring Swing Voters Could Reopen the Door for Donald Trump and Threaten American Democracy.” Once again, Kamarck and Galston warn Democrats that they are evading political reality in ways that may lead to durable Republican majorities. This time around, they write, Democrats have fallen under the sway of three persistent myths: the myth that people of color think and act in the same way, that economics always trumps culture, and that a progressive majority is emerging. But the stakes are much higher than they were 33 years ago. If the new politics of evasion leads to another era of Republican dominance under Donald Trump’s populist-authoritarianism, the result this time could be the end of American democracy. In this episode, podcast host Geoff Kabaservice talks with Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution about “The New Politics of Evasion” and what Democrats need to do to regain electoral competitiveness with much of the American working class, including Hispanic voters. The episode also explores Elaine Kamarck's career in the Clinton White House when from 1993 to 1997 she created and managed the National Performance Review, also known as the Reinventing Government Initiative. The conversation surveys the achievements of that initiative and raises the question of what needs to be done to reinvent government under the present circumstances.

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Henry Chauncey Jr. – better known as Sam – became a dean at Yale during the 1950s when he was still a college senior. He has been affiliated Yale in various capacities ever since. From 1964 to 1971 he was special assistant to Kingman Brewster Jr., Yale’s controversial 17th president, who transformed and modernized the university along meritocratic lines while holding the institution together during the turmoil of the 1960s. Chauncey also served as secretary of the university from 1971 to 1981. In this podcast interview, Sam discusses his father, Henry Chauncey Sr., who was a pivotal figure in the history of meritocracy and one of the central characters in Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 bestseller The Big Test. The elder Chauncey founded the Educational Testing Service in 1947, the entity that still administers the SAT to college-bound high school seniors. Sam also analyzes the changes in American society that impacted higher education during the 20th century, the shifting composition and priorities of university students and leaders at selective institutions, the threats to free speech on campuses today, and the qualities of effective administrators.

For decades, Mona Charen has been one of the most prominent authors and political commentators on the right. A speechwriter for such Republican luminaries as Nancy Reagan and Jack Kemp, she worked in the Reagan White House and has written a nationally syndicated column since 1987. But while she has held fast to the principles that made her a star in the conservative movement, she believes that Donald Trump has “utterly discredited” conservatism. She is now policy editor of The Bulwark (one of the leading lights on the Never-Trump right) and host of the Beg to Differ Podcast. Mona Charen has long been critical of leftist dogma, especially what she views as modern feminism’s undermining of the family and other key supports of American society. But she was also one of the contributors to National Review’s January 2016 “Against Trump” symposium, noting that Trump “represents every stereotype the left has brought forth about what conservatism is really like.” Unlike nearly all other contributors to that issue, she has consistently criticized Trump — and the hypocrisy that her erstwhile comrades in the conservative movement have shown toward Trump and other bad actors on the far-right. Today, Mona Charen is still critical of the left but believes that Trump and his movement represent a more significant existential threat to American democracy. She has moved toward moderation and demonstrated a commitment to civic dialogue and civil disagreement in her writings and podcasting. Join us as we discuss her career and efforts to articulate a realistic, reasonable, responsible conservatism.

Has America lost its mojo? In this episode of the Vital Center podcast, we speak with the Niskanen Center's vice president Brink Lindsey about how the American government no longer seems capable of accomplishing significant, important undertakings — and how that failure is endangering liberal democracy both at home and abroad. Brink describes his personal journey as a "recovering libertarian," from a vice president at the Cato Institute to an advocate for robust social insurance and strong, capable government as a necessary complement to free-market capitalism. In particular, he offers an in-depth explanation of the thinking behind his recent manifesto for Niskanen's new State Capacity Project. He describes how suspicion of centralized state power — shared, ironically, by both the political left and right — led to a degradation in the American government's ability to carry out ambitious undertakings and even to fulfill its basic responsibilities toward its citizens. The result was what he calls "the often-hapless Leviathan we behold today: an American state whose vaulting ambitions are all too frequently mocked by its faltering follow-through." The failure of government institutions during the Covid-19 pandemic was a paradigmatic example of the consequences of declining state capacity. This failure, combined with other recent crises such as the 2007-08 financial crisis, is shaking public trust in liberal democracies around the globe. In this interview, Brink lays out a way to strengthen liberal democracy by bolstering state capacity and laying down the intellectual preconditions for constructive problem-solving. Whether this approach can succeed politically in overcoming the forces of populist reaction and what he calls "civilizational rot" remains to be seen. Photo credit: iStock https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/pennsylvania-avenue-leading-up-to-the-united-states-capitol-gm171350531-20768993?clarity=false

Philip Zelikow’s eminent career has spanned academia and public service in a way that makes him a modern-day counterpart to the Wise Men who created the post-World War II global order. He has served at all levels of American government, from holding positions in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon to winning election to his town’s school board. He has taught for the Navy, worked as a career diplomat in the Foreign Service, directed the 9/11 Commission, and served as a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board for both Presidents Bush and Obama. He has taught and directed research programs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is now the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he has also been dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and directed the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Zelikow’s engagement with both academia and public service has given him unique insights into the successes and failures of government. In his most recent book, The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-17, he overturns a century of conventional historical thinking to show how U.S. President Woodrow Wilson missed the opportunity to broker an early peace between the European combatants in World War I, which Zelikow judges to be “the most consequential diplomatic failure in the history of the United States.” At the same time, his scholarship on the policy-making successes that allowed the U.S. and the Allies to win World War II has given him a highly critical view of the quality of current U.S. policy engineering. In this interview, Philip Zelikow discusses his experiences in and out of government that inform his diagnosis of declining U.S. state capacity. He describes the leadership failures of Woodrow Wilson, the strengths and limitations of the “moderate” perspective in politics and government, and the essence of successful political problem-solving. He explains the business and military cultures that contributed to the country’s successes during World War II and over the following decades, as well as the more recent deterioration in public service training and staff habits. He talks about his current work as director of the COVID Commission Planning Group, and suggests how Americans can rebuild our national competency and regain our global image as the ultimate “can-do” country. Photo credit: iStock https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/usa-flag-american-flag-american-flag-blowing-in-the-wind-gm923981666-253601127

Jackie Calmes is one of the country’s foremost political reporters. As the Wall Street Journal’s chief political correspondent, the White House correspondent for the New York Times during the Obama administration, and now a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, she has an unparalleled knowledge of how Congress and American politics have changed in recent decades — particularly on the Republican side. Her new book Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court is at the same time a revealing biography of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, an in-depth analysis of his controversial 2018 confirmation hearings (and what they left out), and a historical examination of the Republican Party’s radicalization leading to the presidency of Donald Trump. As she writes in the book’s preface, “Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was the logical result of the party’s ever-rightward, populist, and antigovernment evolution, a shift that coincided with my career in political journalism and was its single biggest story.” In this interview, Jackie discusses her four decades in journalism, her studies of the influence of right-wing media on Republican politics, and her writing of Dissent. She covers the influence of Newt Gingrich in shifting the Republican Party toward populist conservatism, the rise of the Federalist Society and its role in conservative battles over court appointments, and Trump’s triumph in the 2016 Republican primaries. She describes the sexual assault allegations leveled against Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford in the confirmation hearings — but also the allegations that the FBI inadequately investigated. She also predicts what Kavanaugh, as the pivotal justice in what’s now a 6-3 conservative-dominated Supreme Court, may rule on contentious issues like abortion and gun rights. Photo credit: iStock

Richard Nixon’s legacy will be forever tarnished by the Watergate scandal that led him to become the first and only U.S. president to resign from office. But Nixon was also a political mastermind whose impact continues to resound in both domestic and world politics. John R. Price served on the domestic policy side of the first Nixon administration, eventually becoming Special Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs. He has written about his experience in a compelling new memoir and history, The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider’s Perspective on Nixon’s Surprising Social Policy. In this interview, Price talks about his background as one of the founding memoirs of the Ripon Society (a moderate Republican activist group in the 1960s), his efforts on behalf of progressive Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits, and his work in the Nixon administration for the eminent Harvard sociologist (and later U.S. Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Price describes his efforts with Moynihan and Nixon to create the Family Assistance Plan, a far-reaching welfare proposal that would have implemented a negative income tax for households with working parents. He makes the case that Nixon was in many ways a liberal — indeed the last liberal Republican president — and that his social welfare program, if it had passed Congress, would have put the country on a different and better trajectory. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

A. B. Stoddard is one of the country's sharpest and best informed political commentators. A former congressional reporter and producer of ABC World News Tonight, as well as a current columnist for RealClearPolitics, she has seen politics from the inside and up close since the 1990s. And when she warns that both parties, and the country, are in a dark place as the 2022 and 2024 elections approach, we should listen. In this interview, A. B. Stoddard talks about her experiences as a woman in the male-dominated news business, her view of how Congress has slid into dysfunction in recent decades, and her assessment of how Donald Trump was able to take over the Republican Party and jettison its loyalty to Ronald Reagan and his once-revered brand of conservatism. She analyzes the Democrats' stumbles in their attempts to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework and the Build Back Better Plan, the tensions between the party's moderate and progressive factions, and the breakdown of the Democratic establishment's control over the legislative process. She also speculates about why the Democratic leadership has failed to grapple with the growing threat of election-nullification efforts by state Republican legislatures and the growing potential for political violence in upcoming elections. Photo by Chris Grafton on Unsplash