The Liberalism.org Show

What if democracy’s crisis has less to do with facts than with friendship? IHS Senior Program Manager Michael Brodrick talks with Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, about his new book, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. They discuss how Arendt’s combative, demanding friendships shaped her political thought, why she saw respect rather than agreement as the bond of civic life, what she meant by insisting there is no truth in politics, and where the limits of friendship lie.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

When every headline feels like bad news, dystopian fiction can offer catharsis, a warning, or a little of both. Host Aaron Ross Powell welcomes back Sarah Skwire, Senior Program Officer at Liberty Fund and a Liberalism.org Fellow, to talk about what the genre has to say about the current political moment. They discuss why resistance stories like The Hunger Games feel so different from the totalizing world of 1984, what fueled the 2010s boom in young adult dystopias, and why novels that trace a society’s gradual slide from freedom into tyranny may teach the most about how political change actually happens. 

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

Every political alliance asks its members to set some disagreements aside, but what happens to our ideas when we stop raising them? Host Aaron Ross Powell talks with Janet Bufton, a Contributing Fellow at Liberalism.org and co-founder of the Institute for Liberal Studies, about her article "Tribes, Coalitions, Parties." They discuss what Ronald Coase's theory of the firm reveals about why people organize politically, how loose coalitions, parties, and movements like the civil rights movement differ in what they gain and give up, and why liberals should keep arguing with the allies they need.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

• Is It Really Socialism? — Matt Zwolinski

Young men are drifting right and young women are drifting left, but the more revealing divide may be who is sitting in the college classroom and who isn't. Host Aaron Ross Powell talks with Josh Zingher, associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University, about his article "Educational Polarization and the Politics of Young Men." They discuss why the Gen Z gender gap increasingly functions as a proxy for the diploma divide, how the pool of competition for elite positions doubled once women gained real agency over their own choices, and why Zingher reads the reactionary internet as a symptom rather than a cause.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln endorsed the Corwin Amendment, which would have permanently barred the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed; had it been ratified, that would be the Thirteenth Amendment we know today. Host Aaron Ross Powell talks with Damon Root, senior editor at Reason and author of Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment, about the four years that turned a proslavery amendment into an abolitionist one. They discuss the three competing readings of slavery in the Constitution that divided Calhoun, Garrison, Douglass, and Lincoln; the enslaved men who walked into Fortress Monroe in 1861 and pushed Union policy toward emancipation from the bottom up; and why Root disputes the claim, associated with Angela Davis and Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th, that the amendment's exception clause was a deliberate loophole.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

Most of us assume the rules governing American healthcare were written for our safety — and that the system, whatever its flaws, basically works. In this episode, host Aaron Ross Powell talks with Lauren K. Hall, professor of political science and associate dean of academic affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Alicia Plemmons, director of the Knee Regulatory Research Center at West Virginia University, about what that heavily regulated system quietly costs us. They discuss how stacked regulations centralize care in hospitals and crowd out alternatives, why many licensing rules grew from professional protectionism rather than patient safety, the shift from telling providers what they're permitted to do toward letting them do everything they're trained for, and where reform is already taking hold — from interstate licensing compacts to direct primary care.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

• Why Liberalism Needs the Family — Lauren K. Hall

Most conservatives don't see themselves as opponents of democracy — they see a democracy that has drifted from the values that make it legitimate. On this episode, Aaron Ross Powell talks with Scott Warren of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and Morgan Ramsey-Elliot of ReD Associates about their Liberalism.org essay "Can Democracy Survive if We Stand on Different Foundations?" and the ethnographic study behind it, for which researchers embedded for weeks in conservative communities in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina. They discuss why "save democracy" messaging so often fails to land, the moral foundation of faith, family, freedom, and place against which these citizens judge their institutions, how everyday encounters with institutional failure erode trust from the local level upward, and the harder work of building institutions that people standing on genuinely different moral foundations can still recognize as legitimate.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

• Conservative Values, Trust, and the Prospects for Democratic Renewal — Emily Chamlee-Wright

Institutions of bigotry, racism, and social control were supposed to be decades into retreat. Instead they have come roaring back from the top-down. In this special joint release of The Liberalism.org Show and The UnPopulist's Zooming In, recorded live at the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism's "Liberalism for the 21st Century" conference, host Aaron Ross Powell sits down with New York Times columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French and Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen. They discuss the apparent return of open bigotry and illiberalism to American politics, debate whether it is a Trump-specific phenomenon or a durable coalition that will outlast him, and consider why so much of it is driven from the top rather than by the public.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

• Conservative Values, Trust, and the Prospects for Democratic Renewal — Emily Chamlee-Wright

Why does every new technology spark the same recurring fight, with utopian boosters on one side and doomers on the other, and what would a more productive conversation look like? On this episode (recorded live at the Institute for Humane Studies’ Flourishing House at SXSW) host Aaron Ross Powell talks with Troy Cross, Professor of Philosophy at Reed College and a Senior Fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and Karim Farhat, Assistant Director of the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech.

They explore why identity and storytelling distort our judgment about new tools, what the Bitcoin energy debates reveal about motivated reasoning, how markets have quietly solved earlier trust problems like online authentication, and why a liberal society in the age of AI has room for both data centers and the Amish family next door.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org

It started with a blog post. When the Trump administration invoked emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs, law professor Ilya Somin suggested in passing that someone ought to challenge it in court — and then found himself co-counsel in the case that reached the Supreme Court.

In this episode, Aaron Ross Powell talks with Somin, professor of law at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School and the Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, about how V.O.S. Selections v. Trump came together, why the Court held that the IEEPA doesn't authorize tariffs at all, and what the major questions and nondelegation doctrines mean for presidential power. They also explore what should count as a genuine "emergency," why the courts alone can't restrain executive overreach, and how litigation and ordinary politics have to work together to keep power in check.

Further Reading

More from Liberalism.org