The Vital Center

For many decades, practitioners and scholars of foreign policy used to refer to “the West,” but today, for the most part, they don’t. What happened to the idea of “the West”? Michael Kimmage, a professor of history at Catholic University, wrote The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy to trace the rise and decline of this concept from the late nineteenth century through the present day. In this podcast discussion, Kimmage discusses the idea of the West — as a geopolitical and cultural concept rather than a geographic place. He analyzes how it developed intellectually, with the widespread adoption of neoclassical architecture and Western Civilization curricula in American universities, and geopolitically as the U.S. rose to global leadership after World War II and during the Cold War. Kimmage also addresses critiques of the West (and its legacy of racism and imperialism) as advanced by critics like W. E. B. Du Bois and Edward Said. He argues that concept of “the West,” despite its flaws, still matters, and explains why he’s concerned about the tendency to erase or discard the Western tradition entirely rather than engaging with it critically.   

Michael Kimmage further relates his experience of serving as director of the Kennan Institute, a program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which was liquidated in January 2025 by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), and the consequences of the government cutting itself off from international exchange and expertise in the development of U.S. foreign policy. He also expresses his belief that institutionalists — the people who believe in the value of institutions and operate in them — have to do a better job of explaining and justifying what they do: “If the population feels that these institutions are elitist and out of touch and misguided and unnecessary, then it doesn't matter how much somebody like me values them, it’s not going to work.”

This podcast was recorded in late August 2025. Much has occurred since then, both in Minnesota and nationally, and listeners are asked to consider the episode’s treatment of politics and current events in the context of the time in which it was recorded.

Steve Grove is the publisher and CEO of the Minnesota Star Tribune. For many years, he had been a high-flying executive in Silicon Valley, working for firms like Google and YouTube. Then in 2018, he and his wife — who worked for a venture capital firm investing in startups outside of the coasts along with AOL founder Steve Case and now-Vice President JD Vance — decided to return to Minnesota, where Grove had grown up. His recent book, How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention, is about leaving the global hub of innovation for what’s often disparaged as “flyover country.” It’s also a story of recommitting to civic and political involvement, as Grove went to work for Minnesota governor (and future Democratic vice-presidential nominee) Tim Walz as head of the state’s departments of economic and workforce development. He was in this role when the pandemic struck the state, making him the principal liaison with a business community struggling to cope with restrictions meant to stem the spread of COVID.

In this podcast conversation, Grove discusses his personal experience of moving from Silicon Valley back to Minnesota, the benefits and tradeoffs of relocating there, and what he learned from having moved between the worlds of high tech, government, and publishing. He describes his experiences with finding both resistance and innovation in state and local government, and the perspective that gave him on Elon Musk’s DOGE attempt to reinvent government along Silicon Valley lines. (Grove believes that “If you're going to reboot government in a more powerful way, starting local has a lot better shot than starting national.”) He discusses the challenges of heading the Safe Reopening Group during the pandemic, which he frankly characterizes as a “deeply uncomfortable exercise in social engineering.” And he also describes his work since 2023 in attempting to reimagine the venerable Star Tribune at a time of severe challenges for print journalism and the news media more generally. 

Murray Kempton (1917-97) was one of the greatest American journalists of the twentieth century. His career extended across seven decades, during which he produced somewhere around 11,000 columns, essays, and pamphlets, nearly all of them marked by his distinctive dry wit, insight, and stylistic elegance. He wrote about government and politics but also the civil rights movement (of which he was one of the earliest and most incisive white chroniclers) and a range of subjects that included jazz, sports, the arts, religion, history, and philosophy. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1985 but was not widely known to readers outside of New York, where he wrote for newspapers including the New York Post, the World Telegram and Sun, and New York Newsday. But he was a hero and role model for many of the leading journalists of his era including Garry Wills, Joan Didion, David Remnick, Molly Ivins, Darryl Pinckney, and David Halberstam. And although he always identified with the political left, some of his greatest admirers included conservative journalists like William F. Buckley Jr. and George F. Will.

Andrew Holter recently has brought to publication the first collection of Kempton’s writings to appear since the 1990s. The anthology, entitled Going Around, offers a selection of Kempton that extends from his student journalism during the New Deal to his criticisms during the ‘80s and ‘90s of figures like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (of whom he wrote that “Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock’s feathers”). In this podcast discussion, Holter talks about how he became interested in Kempton’s work, how Kempton’s writings provide an overview of and window into American life in the twentieth century, and why he wanted to make Kempton’s work available to a new generation of readers. He explains how his research led him to rediscover long out-of-print writings along with previously unpublished work (including Kempton’s uncompleted memoirs). He also describes why Kempton’s model of “going around” – beat reporting and direct interactions with people in the streets and in the community – is a necessary corrective to much received opinion and analysis today. 

Misha Chellam, a leader in the Abundance movement and co-founder of the Abundance Network, joins The Vital Center to discuss how YIMBYism, state capacity, and Progress Studies relate to abundance. Chellam analyzes the successful alliances of growth-focused Abundants and good-government moderates in San Francisco. He also envisions future Abundance policies that expand beyond California and adapt to meet local needs and priorities.

Sam Tanenhaus, an esteemed journalist and biographer, joins The Vital Center to discuss his biography of William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley, a towering figure in American conservatism, helped to pave the way for the political realignment that Ronald Reagan accomplished. Tanenhaus exposes Buckley’s darker origins, including his support for racial segregation in the South— a view which he later distanced himself from. Tanenhaus also speaks to Buckley’s personal life and the conversations that led Buckley to select him as his biographer.

The intellectual-political discussion of the so-called abundance movement typically is described as a debate taking place almost entirely on the left. But in fact many of its major themes were being discussed in right-leaning circles decades ago. Virginia Postrel, a libertarian thinker and journalist who was the former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, anticipated much of the current discourse around abundance in her classic 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. Even earlier, in 1990, Postrel was among the first to see that the most important ideological division that was emerging in American politics was not between left and right but between what she called “the proponents of economic dynamism and the advocates of stasis.” 

The power of Postrel’s prophecy is evident from even a cursory examination of current politics, in which debates over issues like trade, immigration, housing construction, energy production, and environmental conservation inevitably produce odd-bedfellows coalitions of left and right. Postrel generally approves of center-left advocates of abundance like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — since, as she puts it, they share “the convictions that more is better than less, and that a good society is not zero-sum.” But she recently criticized the Klein-Thompson bestseller Abundance for its essentially technocratic mindset, in which change proceeds from central planning without what Postrel regards as sufficient feedback from market mechanisms or public input. She envisions a more libertarian-inflected version of abundance characterized by what she calls “a more emergent, bottom-up approach, imagining an open-ended future that relies less on direction by smart guys with political authority and more on grassroots experimentation, competition, and criticism.”

In this podcast conversation, Postrel analyzes different approaches to what she considers to be the linked causes of abundance and progress — although she notes that progress “tends to code a little right and tends to be more libertarian, more Silicon Valley people” — along with the basic political division between advocates of stasis and dynamism. She talks about her South Carolina origins and her study of the Renaissance, “when dynamism was invented.” She points out that her analysis of dynamism in some measure derived from her love of — and worries about — her adoptive state of California. She discusses some of the thinkers who influenced her analysis, including innovators like Stewart Brand, writers like Jonathan Rauch, Daniel Boorstin, and Henry Petroski, and economists including Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polyani, Mancur Olson, and Paul Romer. And she describes how her interests in dynamism and human invention relate to her interests in textiles, design, fashion, and aesthetics. 

Donald Trump’s most resonant political slogan has always been the one he borrowed from Ronald Reagan: “Make America Great Again.” Trump rarely has been pushed to define when exactly he believes America experienced the greatness he promises to recapture. But many of his followers believe that America’s golden age — particularly for its working class — was the 1950s. A 2024 PRRI survey found that some 70 percent of Republicans think that America’s culture and way of life has changed for the worse since the 1950s. But what is it that Republicans miss about the 1950s? 

Alan Ehrenhalt, who has been a longtime writer and editor at Governing magazine, in 1995 explored this question in his classic study, The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s. Ehrenhalt investigated three communities in Chicago in that era: St. Nicholas of Tolentine, a working-class Catholic parish on the city’s Southwest Side; Bronzeville, the heart of Black Chicago in that era of segregation; and Elmhurst, a split-level suburban community eighteen miles west of downtown, which experienced explosive growth in the 1950s. Ehrenhalt found that Chicago’s citizens in the 1950s were subjected to what most Americans now would regard as excessively powerful and intrusive authority — including the authority of the political machine during the regime of Mayor Richard Daley, religion, employers, tradition, and the community itself — but that authority enforced an order that made possible a deep sense of community that has largely vanished from American urban life, for which many Americans remain deeply nostalgic.

In this podcast discussion, Alan Ehrenhalt discusses that loss of community and the way it has played into American politics, particularly during the Trump era; the individualism of the baby boom and the way that many young people of that era chafed against the restraints of the 1950s; and the cultural matrix that produced the first American pope, Leo XIV, who (as Robert Prevost) grew up in a community similar to St. Nicholas of Tolentine during the 1950s. He analyzes what both the contemporary political left and right miss about that time, but acknowledges the difficulty of recovering communitarian values in the present era. 

We all have an opinion about charismatic leaders — but do we really know what “charisma” means? Molly Worthen, in her new book Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, points out that charismatic leaders historically haven’t always been distinguished for their charm or compelling oratory. Rather, charismatic leaders are those who enter into a mutual exchange with their followers, in which the leader “draws back the veil on an alternative world in which followers find that they have secret knowledge, supernatural promise, and special status as heroes.” Worthen, who is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is also a renowned writer on religion for the New York Times and other media outlets, further observes that charismatic leaders and their followers blur the line between politics and religion: “Even in contexts that seem to have nothing to do with religion, charisma describes something like a liturgical act, a drama performed together, in which the parties join to consecrate a new reality that all, for their own reasons, prefer to the old one.”

Worthen distinguishes between five types of charismatic leaders who have appeared across the centuries of American history: Prophets, Conquerors, Agitators, Experts, and Gurus. Some were builders, who created new institutions and left enduring legacies; others were destroyers, who dismantled structures that stood in the way of the path they promised their followers would lead to salvation. Donald Trump, in Worthen’s typology, is a Guru, one who channels the deeply rooted myth of the hero-entrepreneur, and who offers his followers the opportunity to take part in a story of America’s return to greatness. “Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion,” Worthen notes. “Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual.”

In this podcast discussion, Worthen discusses not only her studies of charismatic leaders but also her previous work on religious belief, the Grand Strategy program at Yale, and her own conversion to evangelical Christianity.  

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced the imposition of his “Liberation Day” tariffs against most of America’s global trading partners in April 2025, he seemed to harken back to a centuries-old form of economic nationalism known as mercantilism, which sought prosperity through restrictive trade practices. Opponents of mercantilism from the eighteenth century onward, such as Adam Smith and John-Baptiste Say, became known as classical liberals. In the fullness of time, classical liberalism gave rise to the political philosophy we now know as libertarianism.

When most people think of libertarianism, they typically have in mind a small number of figures — including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises — who were generally associated with the American political right in the mid-twentieth century. But in fact libertarianism was born in the nineteenth century (not the twentieth), and was first developed in Britain and France (not the United States). And as Matt Zwolinski emphasizes in his monumental intellectual history of libertarianism, The Individualists (co-authored with John Tomasi), libertarianism is better thought of as a cluster of related concepts than a unitary doctrine. 

It’s true that most libertarians historically have been concerned with the defense of individual autonomy, property rights, free markets, and personal liberty against state coercion. But the first individual to self-identify as a “libertarian” was the nineteenth-century French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque, and libertarianism as it developed often took radical and left-leaning forms, particularly through its association with the abolitionist movement in America in the years before the Civil War. 

In this podcast conversation, Matt Zwolinski (a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego) discusses his investigations into the intellectual history of libertarianism as well as his analysis of the longstanding tensions between radical and reactionary elements within the philosophy. He describes post-Cold War “third wave libertarianism” taking both right-wing expression (in the form of paleolibertarianism) as well as more radical forms (including left-libertarianism and “bleeding-heart libertarianism.”) And he suggests reasons why many libertarians see more potential in combating poverty through Universal Basic Income grants rather than through more traditional government-administered antipoverty programs.

The most important U.S. political trend of the 21st century, according to most observers, is the increasing tendency of college-educated voters to support the Democratic Party and for non-college-educated voters to support the Republican Party. In many ways, the two parties have swapped their historic bases. When John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, Democrats still considered themselves to be a working-class party. Kennedy carried white voters without college degrees by a two-to-one margin but lost college-educated whites by an identical margin. Now those ratios are reversed, as Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024 won college-educated voters by a comfortable margin but lost bigly to Trump among non-college-educated voters — with notable declines among non-college-educated minority voters compared to 2020.

Political scientists Matt Grossmann and Dave Hopkins are the co-authors of a recent book that examines not just the fact of this educational polarization but also its broader implications. Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics demonstrates how Democrats increasingly are absorbing the cultural liberalism and social values of the college-educated class, while Republicans more and more define themselves as a party tilting against establishments, elites, experts, and intellectuals.

In this podcast discussion, Grossmann and Hopkins argue that educated liberals are winning the culture war, particularly with regard to the secularization of American public life and increasing social acceptance of single parenthood, gay marriage, racial and ethnic diversity, and other left-leaning values. But they also believe that these victories for liberalism don’t necessarily translate into electoral victories for the Democratic Party, or for other liberal parties around the world. On the contrary, the backlash against these changes has empowered populist revolts in many countries and led to a widespread collapse in public trust toward most social institutions. But the result has been that Republicans under Trump have what Hopkins and Grossman term “power without credibility”: the power to destroy institutions without the ability to reorient them in a more conservative direction or to halt the movement in public opinion toward cultural liberalism.