The Vital Center

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

In September 1787, an onlooker is said to have asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government he and the other delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall had given the United States. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” Can we still keep it? That’s the question at the heart of Tom Nichols’ provocative new book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. Nichols, a professor at the United States Naval College, joins Geoff Kabaservice to discuss how responsibility for our eroding democracy ultimately rests with America’s citizens themselves. Nichols ticks off the factors that, in his view, have made American democracy increasingly unsustainable: citizens’ willingness to embrace illiberalism and conspiracy theories, the ingrained culture of complaint and its corresponding neglect of civic virtues and civic responsibilities, the degradation of public life and public service, and the social atomization that accompanies the spread of social media. At the same time, he cautions against the dangers of nostalgia for a bygone era of American greatness that never really existed, at least not as many Americans choose to selectively remember it. And while Nichols worries about the ways that the dystopic novels Brave New World and 1984 are coming to fruition in today’s America, he also offers hope that Americans can bridge a widening civil-military gap and shore up the foundations of democracy through collective action. Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln’s warning that “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The threat to American democracy over the next few years, in his view, comes not only from populist Republicans' inclinations toward authoritarianism but from Democrats’ failure to respond seriously to the reality that “we are in an existential crisis of government that requires an emergency response from a broad coalition of pro-democracy voters.” His message comes as a rallying cry to both center-left and center-right to recognize the dangers that confront us and respond accordingly. Photo by Samuel Branch on Unsplash.

In this era of deepening polarization and intensifying tribalization, Americans have fewer and fewer contacts and communication across partisan lines. Philippa Hughes is a Washington, D.C.-based social sculptor and creative strategist who has long attempted to bridge our divisions by bringing people together for meaningful conversations about art and our shared American identity. But she has discovered that finding common ground among people from different backgrounds and perspectives is increasingly difficult as our cultural and political wars intensify. Art can divide us as well as emphasize our common humanity, and Philippa has experienced difficulties even in communicating with her own family — including with a cousin who headed ICE under Trump. Join us as we discuss Philippa Hughes’ “Looking for America” project, her thoughts on social media and the epidemic of loneliness, and efforts by individuals and cultural institutions to shore up our eroding social infrastructure.

Red tape rules America. Philip K. Howard joins Geoff Kabaservice to discuss how thousands of nonsensical laws hamper any good the government can do. Years-long environmental review harms the environment because it means that infrastructure isn’t updated. Regulations intended to protect people destroy small businesses And America isn’t about to change because partisanship encourages the tangled web of inefficiency. Democrats and Republicans refuse to work together to craft meaningful policies and break down harmful regulations. Republicans seem to be driven by the policies that line their pockets rather than sensible reforms that align with conservative principles. And Democrats, while professing to be interested in helping minorities, conserving the environment, etc., often jump straight into government expansion without addressing the myriad of inefficiencies that come with it. Can America untangle itself from the red tape and break out of its partisan gridlock?

What accounts for the increasing extremism of the Republican Party, and the polarization that has resulted from it? It at least partly stems from what many may view as an unlikely source: a decline in leadership by large American corporations, a group Mark Mizruchi refers to as the American corporate elite. Here, Mizruchi joins Geoff Kabaservice to provide a detailed history of the role of the corporate elite in stabilizing American politics, and how elites have gradually abdicated that role.

Laura K. Field’s work in political theory didn’t used to focus on today’s political arena, but when prominent conservative intellectuals started backing the authoritarian, populist messages of Donald Trump in 2016, she began looking into the intellectual roots of conservative thinkers. She joins Geoff Kabaservice today to discuss how today’s “reactionary conservatives” have rejected liberal democratic principles (after mischaracterizing the values of liberal democracy), and breaks down how they’ve combined the ideas of Aristotle, Leo Strauss, and others, as well as a scepticism of Democratic institutions to develop the line of thinking that characterizes the Intellectual Right today.