On the penultimate day of June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 to overturn race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions. Chief Justice John Roberts, in the opinion issued by the Court’s conservative members, declared that the racially determined admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protections Clause of the 14th Amendment. Roberts wrote that while the stated goals of those universities’ admissions policies were “commendable,” including training future leaders and exposing students to diverse outlooks, these were “not sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny.”

For decades, Richard Kahlenberg has been the country’s leading advocate for replacing race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action. Kahlenberg, who until recently was a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, laid out his position in the 1996 bestseller The Remedy and has consistently adhered to it ever since. Inspired by the example of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, he has called for “a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism.”

Toward that end, Kahlenberg has written a new book about the housing policies that, in his view, have harmful effects on education and life chances for students of all colors from less advantaged backgrounds. Largely invisible zoning laws and regulations often dictate which socioeconomic grounds can live where. The most liberal and well-educated communities deploy these practices to keep the working class out. As Kahlenberg writes in his new book Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See, “exclusionary zoning is one of America’s most damaging and pervasive forms of class discrimination.” And the extent to which left-leaning communities practice it contributed to his growing recognition “that liberalism — the political ideology I was raised in and still am most generally attracted to — has a serious elitism problem that needs correcting.”

In this podcast interview, recorded just before the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Harvard and UNC case, Kahlenberg discusses his long advocacy for class-based affirmative action and his more recent view that decisions by housing authorities are often more consequential for students than the decisions of school boards. He describes how zoning laws often result in “state-sponsored economic discrimination” and suggests how to reform them. He also talks about what is good and bad about meritocracy, the different ways that elites and the general public perceive issues like class-based affirmative action, and ways that the Democratic party may go about trying to improve its standing among working-class voters.

For decades, the public’s approval ratings for Congress have been abysmal. Even members of Congress struggle to justify and defend the value of their institution — or even seek applause by attacking and denigrating it. And yet the Framers intended the legislature to be the pillar of the American constitutional system, allocating it more power and responsibility than any other branch of government. How did Congress get so dysfunctional — and unpopular? Why did it devolve so many of its powers to the executive and judicial branches? And what are the costs to America when the country lacks a properly functioning Congress? 

Philip Wallach ponders these questions in his valuable new book, Why Congress. He is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and served as a fellow with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in 2019. His inside view of congressional attempts at self-reform, combined with his deep scholarship and analysis of the history and workings of Congress, gives urgency to his case for understanding the critical importance of the institution and its need for reform. However much Americans disagree with other, he writes, “we must find ways to accommodate each other in addressing the biggest problems of the day, and Congress is the place we must do it...Our legislature’s diminishment impairs our ability to make good policy. Even more importantly, it threatens the vitality of our politics, contributing to the pervasive sense that our nation is coming apart at the seams.”

In this podcast interview, Wallach discusses the importance of what he calls the “manyness” of our republic in James Madison’s vision of representation and factionalism in American politics and how it conflicts with what he calls the Wilsonian impulse to make Congress a more orderly and less independent institution in which the big questions are decided within ideologically uniform and disciplined political parties. He describes the problems that arise when both left and right prefer a parliamentary system, with a much more powerful chief executive, to our constitutional order as it actually exists. He goes through the history of Congress’ involvement with the civil rights struggle in the 1960s and why he thinks the filibuster was useful in that historic drama. And he analyzes the rise of today’s leadership-driven Congress, in which rank-and-file legislators have little meaningful involvement with shaping legislative agendas, and what the prospects might be for significant reform.

Why does government so often fall short of its goals — or even fail catastrophically? Jennifer Pahlka, in her important new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, offers what is perhaps the most incisive explanation yet for government failure, particularly in the realm of technology. This is a book that every policymaker should read and take to heart. 

In Pahlka’s view, declining state capacity has resulted from a political culture that prioritizes politics and policymaking over implementation. And government especially falls short of its potential for good when well-intentioned policymakers fail to understand technology, pay attention to citizens who suffer the consequences of poor delivery of government services, or emphasize outcomes over processes. She writes, “When systems or organizations don’t work as you think they should, it is generally not because the people in them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren’t obvious from the outside.”

Jennifer Pahlka comes to her granular understanding of government failures through long experience with the digital delivery of government service at the federal, state, and local levels. In 2009, she founded Code for America to attract technology experts to work on public problems. In 2013, she became the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. She played a significant role in rescuing the healthcare.gov website after its botched rollout and helped to create the U.S. Digital Service. In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed her to a task force to salvage the state’s unemployment insurance program when it collapsed under the weight of a tenfold increase in claims during the Covid pandemic. 

In this podcast interview, Pahlka discusses the complexity of government computer systems that become unworkable through decades of layering-on of technologies and policies, policymakers’ failure to understand why they pass laws that can’t be implemented, and the dilemma of civil servants caught between contradictory pressures to deliver outcomes while also adhering to the rigid processes on which their jobs depend. She describes how the government is caught in a hierarchical “waterfall model” of program management while the software industry has moved on to a decentralized model of agile development, and how technological developments are doomed by unworkable technical requirements that aren’t actually mandated by government policy — even though bureaucrats and contractors have come to believe that they are. And although listeners will share Pahlka’s evident frustration at the many examples of government failure that she cites, she also shares numerous examples of courageous leaders who have overcome structural obstacles and outdated thinking to deliver results and show what government can be at its best.

In 2002, sociologist Ruy Teixeira (and co-author John Judis) published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a diagnosis and prescription for the Democratic Party that the New York Times later called “one of the most influential political books of the 21st century.” The book argued that the United States was changing demographically, economically, and ideologically in ways that could benefit Democrats electorally. All too often, however, the book’s thesis was interpreted as a “demographics is destiny” argument, positing that population growth among a left-leaning “rising American electorate” — including young people, minorities, college-educated professionals, and single women — inevitably would lead to Democratic landslides. Teixeira, however, maintained that this winning Democratic coalition would only be possible if the party retained a strong level of white working-class support. 

Over time, and particularly after the 2016 election, Teixeira continued to insist that the Democrats, as they tilted toward college-educated voters, were repelling their working-class supporters by embracing cultural leftism and racial identitarianism as well as writing off all of Trump’s working-class voters as irredeemable racists and xenophobes. Such criticism was increasingly unwelcome in Democratic circles and Teixeira’s employment at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, where he had been a fellow since 2003, became untenable. In 2022 his departure from CAP, and his subsequent hiring at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, made national headlines. 

In this podcast episode, Teixeira discusses his founding of The Liberal Patriot, which has recently expanded from a newsletter into an online publication and nonprofit organization, and the tough-love criticism he has continued to offer to the Democratic Party. Teixeira believes that the Democrats’ long-term electoral viability depends upon their being able to regain at least some level of rural and working-class support by moving to the center on cultural issues, promoting an abundance agenda, and embracing patriotism and liberal nationalism. Teixeira is no fan of the current inception of the Republican Party, which he says no longer has any real idea of what it needs to do in order to be a successful conservative party again. But, he adds, “it also became the case over time that the Democrats lost track of what it would take to be a successful and productive liberal party, and how to be the actual party of the ordinary America, which is their historical brand and where they've had the greatest success.”

Many Americans whose beliefs are somewhere in the great political middle are tired of the false dichotomies of left and right. What would a radical centrist agenda — a purple-state alternative to the ideologies forced upon populations in deep-red and deep-blue states — look like? 

Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, took on this assignment with her 2018 book The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation. Her agenda includes "policies that are better aligned with American values and responsive to people's actual day-to-day needs," with a focus on "the value of work and the importance of jobs and wages." She attempts to thread the divide between a Democratic Party that has "dozens of good policy ideas but a values framework that is sometimes out of step with the country's" and a Republican Party that emphasizes widely shared values (such as personal responsibility) but has abandoned its former commitment to pragmatism and limited but effective government. 

In this podcast conversation, Isabel Sawhill discusses her experiences in "growing up in a time when there weren't a lot of opportunities for women," and how she came to work on policy with Brookings and other think tanks as well as in government; during the Clinton administration, she served as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget, responsible for the oversight of nearly all of the federal government's social programs. She describes her relations with eminent policy-world figures such as Alice Rivlin and Richard Reeves, with whom she co-authored the 2020 study A New Contract with the Middle Class. She also talks about her work with Bush White House veteran Ron Haskins to identify the key correlates of upward mobility, which they famously popularized as "the success sequence," in which about three-quarters of Americans reach the middle class provided that they:

1. Graduate from high school;

2. Maintain a full-time job or have a partner who does; and

3. Have children (if they choose to become parents) after age 21 and while married or in a committed partnership. 

She analyzes the factors that have made many Americans feel "left behind" and discouraged about the country's future. According to Sawhill, possible policy remedies include an expansion of vocational education, opportunities for workers adversely impacted by new developments in technology and trade to retrain or relocate, a social insurance system focused on lifelong education and family care in addition to retirement, and ways to repair the culture through national service. She also discusses her recent analysis of emerging threats to democracy and her reasons for remaining optimistic about the fate of the American experiment.

Did U.S. President Ronald Reagan end the Cold War? Or did the war end because Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev abandoned it? William Inboden argues forcefully for the former interpretation in his new book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. Reagan's strategy in dealing with the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War involved reviving the U.S. economy, restoring American self-confidence, rebuilding American military might, and working closely with our democratic allies. He then pressured the Soviet Union into an economically unsustainable arms race, engaged in proxy battles with them around the globe, and waged a successful propaganda war that pitted the political, religious, and economic liberties of the “free world” against the bankruptcy and tyranny of the “evil empire.” But when liberalizing Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in 1985, Reagan saw sooner than most of his advisors that here was a reformer with whom he could work to bring peace. 

William Inboden is the Executive Director and William Powers Jr. Chair of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously held senior positions with the State Department and in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. In this podcast, Inboden describes his work on Capitol Hill, his graduate study that focused on both U.S. diplomatic history and American religious history, his service in the Bush White House as well as with the Legatum Institute in London, and his return to academia. He details the factors that inspired him to write The Peacemaker, the declassification of Reagan-era documents that enabled him to arrive at new historical insights into the Reagan presidency, and his own change in perspective that led him from being intensely critical of Reagan (particularly with regard to his support of authoritarian anti-communist regimes and insurgencies in Central and South America) to holding a more favorable assessment of his legacy. 

Inboden also discusses how former Republican president Dwight Eisenhower exerted a more significant influence on Reagan than most historians have recognized, how Reagan’s conception of the Cold War differed profoundly from that shared by his predecessors, how the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka “Star Wars”) was at the heart of his strategic vision of a world without nuclear weapons, and why he is confident that the Reaganite tradition in the Republican Party can be revived. Inboden also argues for the value and relevance of history for policymakers, as well as why he believes that public universities need to uphold their end of the implicit social contract they have long maintained with American society.

In October 1958, Robert Welch, a wealthy retired businessman with extreme anti-communist beliefs, held a secret meeting in Indianapolis with eleven like-minded men to found the John Birch Society, named after a young American missionary and intelligence officer killed by Mao’s Communist troops in 1945. Welch and his confederates detested not only liberals but also mainstream conservatives. They held particular animus toward President Dwight D. Eisenhower; although Ike was a moderate Republican, Welch believed him to be a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” At its peak in the 1960s, the Birch Society consisted of some 60,000 to 100,000 members organized in secret cells around the country. 

Although much of the country dismissed the Birchers as a lunatic fringe, historian Matthew Dallek, in his new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, argues that the group exercised an outsized influence on the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Blending violent and apocalyptic conspiracy theories with grassroots activism, business skills, and the power of alternative media, the Birch Society proved, in Dallek’s words, “that the supercharged activism of thousands of diehards could outmatch the votes of millions of citizens and over time transform the GOP.”

In this podcast discussion, Dallek describes the history of the Birch Society as well as dynamics that made it a significant political force and an enduring influence on the contemporary American right. He points out that much of the responsibility for the continuing vitality of Birch-style extremism lies with Republican leaders who thought they could harness the activism of the Birchers without allowing their paranoia and hatred to define the party.  Instead, according to Dallek, “The GOP establishment’s efforts to court this fringe and keep it in the coalition allowed it to gain a foothold and eventually cannibalize the entire party.”

“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.”