“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.

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Richard V. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is internationally recognized for his scholarship on equality of opportunity, with a focus on divisions of social class and race. But in recent years, he has become concerned about a less-scrutinized axis of inequality: the myriad ways in which boys and men are falling behind girls and women educationally, economically, and on many indicators of social well-being. In his new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Reeves examines the difficulties that millions of boys and men are having in school, at work, and in the family. As an advocate for gender equality, who has devoted considerable study to closing the pay gap for women, Reeves rejects right-wing calls to repeal feminism. But he also contends with those on the left who believe that focusing on men’s problems distracts from the challenges still faced by girls and women. “We can hold two thoughts in our head at once,” he writes in his new book. “We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.” And the problems of boys and men falling behind — in absolute terms as well as relative to women — are real and serious. For example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students. The wages of most men are lower today (in real terms) than they were in 1979. One in five fathers is not living with their children. Single and divorced men account for hugely disproportionate numbers of drug-related deaths. In this podcast discussion, Reeves discusses his experience as a father of three boys, the reasons why he came to write Of Boys and Men, and how it relates to his earlier studies of inequality, including his 2017 book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It. He talks about his growing up in the middle-class English town of Peterborough, his education at Oxford, and his work with Tony Blair’s Labour government as well as for Liberal Democrat leader (and self-proclaimed “radical centrist”) Nick Clegg. He also shares some of his proposed policy solutions to address problems boys and men are facing. These include: “redshirting” boys by having them start school a year later than girls; recruiting more men (especially African-American men) as teachers; and generally getting more men into what are now largely female-dominated jobs in health, education, administration, and literacy while continuing to increase women’s participation in STEM fields. What he is ultimately working toward, in his words, is not only better outcomes for men but also “a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.”

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.

What is moderation? The term is used both positively and pejoratively in today’s political discourse but rarely is it defined. Aurelian Craiutu is a professor of political science at Indiana University in Bloomington who has, perhaps more than anyone else, tried to define moderation and its manifestations in politics and philosophy over the past several centuries. He is the author of major works on moderation, including A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830, and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. In this podcast discussion, Aurelian discusses his historical research into moderation and his theoretical analyses of moderation and its relation to different varieties of liberalism. He considers the political, economic, moral, legal, and religious aspects of liberalism and why liberalism (as well as moderation) is under threat from both left and right. And, he reminds us, the leading challengers to both liberalism and moderation today do not come from hostile regimes like Russia or China but from within Western democracies. Unlike some of liberalism’s defenders, he concedes that conservative critics of liberalism respond to real problems in contemporary societies. Aurelian was born in communist Romania during the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and he discusses how the absence of key liberal and moderate values in that society made him appreciate both the fragility of liberal civilization and the importance of moderation as an antidote to zealotry and fanaticism. He sketches some of the political and ethical components of moderation, including an aversion to fanaticism and epistemological arrogance. He also discusses some thinkers who embodied aspects of moderation, including French sociologist Raymond Aron and Polish activist Adam Michnik. He calls for moderates to resist the temptation to turn opponents into enemies, for people on both the left and the right to “read across the aisle,” and for Republicans and Democrats to foster “a climate that promotes dialogue, humility, moderation, compromise, [and] anything that opposes fanaticism.”

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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.