The Reason Roundtable

Frank talk about evolution, feminism, politics, and why we don't want to acknowledge social progress.

Few topics inspire more anxiety, anger, and confusion than sex differences between men and women. If you believe in evolution, you believe that sex differences between men and women are real and persistent. If you believe in libertarian values of individualism and freedom, you want everyone to be treated equally under the law, in the workplace, and in social settings.

On today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Christina Hoff Sommers and Debra Soh about our constantly evolving understanding of gender roles, how biology and culture shape our expectations, the successes and excesses of contemporary feminism, what today's sexism looks like, and how best to measure progress. Both were in New York to speak at a panel titled "Who's Afraid of Sex Differences?" organized by the Independent Women's Forum.

Sommers is a resident scholar at Washington, D.C.'s American Enterprise Institute, the author of such well-known books as Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys, and co-host (with Danielle Crittenden) of the Femsplainers podcast. Soh is a Toronto-based psychologist who writes frequently on gender and science issues for The Globe and Mail and Playboy, and co-hosts (with Jonathan Kay) a podcast called Wrongspeak for the website Quillette.

Reason editors Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Stephanie Slade assess the Bernie Sanders candidacy for president.

How an independent helped shape the Democratic policy agenda.

Episode 2 of Free Speech Rules by UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh

For his new book, Timothy Carney toured parts of the country that are working and parts that are not. What he found is deeply disturbing.

"The American Dream is dead," declared Donald Trump in 2015 when he announced he was running for president. "If I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better than ever before."

One of the most interesting outcomes of the 2016 election is that about 10 percent of people who voted for Barack Obama ended up voting for Trump. Such switch voters, many of whom lived in rural parts of contested states in the Midwest, helped him eke out a victory. They voted for Obama in 2008 because they wanted change they could believe in. In 2016, they were still looking for change, this time from a New York billionaire.

Timothy P. Carney does a deep dive on many of the places that voted first for Obama and then for Trump. It's a powerful, provocative, and deeply reported look at a contemporary political and social landscape in which much of the traditional social fabric of marriage, family, and work has been worn away and replaced by distant, "overcentralized" bureaucrats and businesses.

For today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Carney, commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, about the causes of social breakdown, the policies that can help struggling people, and the limits of any president's power to revive the American dream.

Q&A with economist Veronique de Rugy.

"The American tradition of political idealism, writes Noah Rothman in his new book Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, "is imperiled by a growing obsession wit the demographic categories of race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—the primary categories that are now supposed to constitute 'identity.'"

While phrases such as social justice and identity politics are usually identified with the progressive left, Rothman, an associate editor at Commentary and a contributor to MSNBC argues provocatively that rise of Donald Trump shows that claiming "victimization has bipartisan appeal."

In today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talk with the 37-year-old journalist about the roots of identity politics, the rise of street violence among alt-right and antifa types, and how we might restore belief in an inclusive, forward-looking America built around common ideals rather than bitter enmity.

Noah Rothman says the right and the left are using appeals to victimization and identity politics to gain political power.