On May 5th, right in the middle of the Hauenstein Center’s Conservative / Progressive summit, three writers and thinkers on the right met with three on the left to discuss the significance of election 2016. What did the victory of Donald Trump, as well as the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left, mean for American politics? Was the center being pulled apart, and could that, in their view, be a good thing?

It comes as no surprise that our panelists, separated ideologically, don’t agree about many points of politics or, as we in fact hear in this episode, culture. Still, they do have in common a critique of the so-called neoliberal center, or at least most of them share a similar distrust for it. They haggle over some of the key differences between their respective positions. They also talk about the opportunities they see in building new coalitions post-2016, and how they go about articulating the alternatives to the political status-quo for which they advocate.

Panelists include:

Sarah Leonard at The Nation

Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin

David Marcus at The Nation

Daniel McCarthy at The American Conservative

Ingrid Gregg at the Archbridge Institute

Winston Elliott III at The Imaginative Conservative