The Vital Center

By The Niskanen Center

Making sense of the post-Trump political landscape…

Both the Republican and Democratic parties are struggling to defend the political center against illiberal extremes. America must put forward polic... more

4.9

4141 ratings

Download on the App Store

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

FAQs about The Vital Center:

How many episodes does The Vital Center have?

The podcast currently has 85 episodes available.

The Vital Center episodes:

October 12, 2022 The 1990s origins of today’s Trumpian politics, with Nicole Hemmer
...more
1h 11min
September 28, 2022 Why men and boys are falling behind, with Richard V. Reeves
Richard V. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is internationally recognized for his scholarship on equality of opportunity, with a focus on divisions of social class and race. But in recent years, he has become concerned about a less-scrutinized axis of inequality: the myriad ways in which boys and men are falling behind girls and women educationally, economically, and on many indicators of social well-being. In his new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Reeves examines the difficulties that millions of boys and men are having in school, at work, and in the family.
As an advocate for gender equality, who has devoted considerable study to closing the pay gap for women, Reeves rejects right-wing calls to repeal feminism. But he also contends with those on the left who believe that focusing on men’s problems distracts from the challenges still faced by girls and women. “We can hold two thoughts in our head at once,” he writes in his new book. “We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.” And the problems of boys and men falling behind — in absolute terms as well as relative to women — are real and serious. For example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students. The wages of most men are lower today (in real terms) than they were in 1979. One in five fathers is not living with their children. Single and divorced men account for hugely disproportionate numbers of drug-related deaths.
In this podcast discussion, Reeves discusses his experience as a father of three boys, the reasons why he came to write Of Boys and Men, and how it relates to his earlier studies of inequality, including his 2017 book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It. He talks about his growing up in the middle-class English town of Peterborough, his education at Oxford, and his work with Tony Blair’s Labour government as well as for Liberal Democrat leader (and self-proclaimed “radical centrist”) Nick Clegg. He also shares some of his proposed policy solutions to address problems boys and men are facing. These include: “redshirting” boys by having them start school a year later than girls; recruiting more men (especially African-American men) as teachers; and generally getting more men into what are now largely female-dominated jobs in health, education, administration, and literacy while continuing to increase women’s participation in STEM fields.
What he is ultimately working toward, in his words, is not only better outcomes for men but also “a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.”
...more
1h 12min
August 31, 2022 Homophobia in the mid-20th century, with James Kirchick
Gays and lesbians have been part of America and its politics since the country’s foundation. Still, historically the stigma attached to homosexuality meant that any person whose alternative desires became publicly known was immediately banished from politics as well as mainstream society. James Kirchick has written an epic narrative history, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which examines American politics alongside and through the experiences of gays and lesbians in Washington, from the New Deal through the end of the 1990s. In this podcast episode, Kirchick discusses the multiple dimensions in which homosexuals and homophobia impacted American politics, particularly in the mid-20th-century “Lavender Scare,” the purge of gay employees from federal service which took place alongside (and outlasted) the Red Scare. “Even at the height of the Cold War, it was safer to be a Communist than a homosexual,” Kirchick writes. “A Communist could break with the party. A homosexual was forever tainted.”

The podcast also focuses on Frank Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer who was fired from the Army Map Service for his sexuality in 1957 and became the first person to challenge his termination on those grounds in court. Kameny formed the Mattachine Society in 1961 to agitate for full civil rights for gays and lesbians. He organized the first picket outside the White House for gay rights in 1965, and was instrumental in getting homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973. Kameny, in Kirchick’s telling, comes across as a radical moderate: radical in the sense that the full participation of gays and lesbians in American society was beyond the conception of even political progressives for most of the 20th century, but moderate in that his crusade sought the fulfillment of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, to be achieved through a politics of respectability rather than liberation.

Kirchick discusses how the politics around homosexuality played a key role during the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. He also considers whether the tremendous gains in both legal equality for and public acceptance of homosexuality in recent years are likely to be reversed by Supreme Court decisions or populist agitation by Republican politicians like Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
...more
1h 14min
August 17, 2022Rising political violence in the U.S. and the threat to U.S. democracy, with Rachel Kleinfeld
In the wake of the FBI's search of former President Donald Trump's private residence in Florida, right-wing social media erupted with violent threats against law enforcement and political opponents. One enraged Trump supporter launched an armed attack against an FBI office in Ohio. A New York Times article on the rise of political threats and actual violence in the year and a half since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob quoted Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict, and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence in developing countries as well as in the United States, pointed to three critical ways that ordinary people can come to embrace violence:
Setting political aggression in the context of war.
Describing it as a defensive action against a belligerent enemy.
Persistently framing an adversary as irredeemably evil or less than human.
"The right, at this point," she observed, "is doing all three things at once."
In this Vital Center discussion, recorded before the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Rachel Kleinfeld unpacks her scholarship on rising political violence in the United States and how she became one of the leading experts in this field. She touches on her research and experiences in violent societies like rural India and post-Soviet Russia, her role as co-founder of the Truman National Security Project to develop progressive alternatives to Republican national security policies, and her efforts to bolster democracy at home as well as in post-civil-conflict societies abroad. She also talks about how political polarization and factionalization open the door to authoritarianism and how to reverse the trend toward rising political violence.
...more
55min
August 03, 2022 Michael Mazarr on American decline and possible revival
As the United States faces a new era of competition with Russia and China, many analysts and observers have urged the country to respond by making more significant investments in military capabilities and strategic technologies and strengthening its overall global defense posture. But Michael Mazarr, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, believes that the lesson of history is that what ultimately determines success in global competition boils down to a handful of critical societal factors. As he puts in his important new study, The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness, “the factors that ultimately govern success are societal ones, qualities that reflect the kind of country that a nation is rather than the things it builds or does.” And unfortunately, this analysis concludes that America is losing many of the attributes that accounted for its success.
Michael Mazarr is a Washington-based writer and policy expert with long experience in government, academia, and the think tank world, specializing in U.S. defense and national security issues. The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness was commissioned by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, the Defense Department’s in-house think tank, and carried out by Mazarr and a team of RAND researchers, along with the contributions of outside historians. The far-reaching survey of history’s most successful nations and civilizations concludes that their critical shared attributes are:
- National ambition and will.
- Unified national identity.
- Shared opportunity.
- An active state.
- Effective institutions.
- A learning and adaptive society.
- Competitive diversity and pluralism.
The study concludes that while the U.S. retains considerable strengths in these areas, it also “displays characteristics of once-dominant powers on the far side of their peak of competitiveness.”
While the report is descriptive rather than prescriptive, it suggests that America can rejuvenate its competitive dynamism if it can recover and build upon those societal qualities that made it great — but that partisan polarization and social fragmentation may prevent this from happening. Mazarr’s study contains grounds for optimism but also points to the magnitude of the challenge confronting Americans who hope to reverse our national decline.
...more
1h 10min
July 20, 2022 The rise of the Ripon Society and moderate Republicanism, with Emil Frankel
“Moderate Republicanism” seems to many people today to be a contradiction in terms. But during the 1960s and ‘70s, not only were moderate Republicans a force in electoral politics, but moderate Republicanism also became a significant political movement. The leading moderate Republican activist group of that era was the Ripon Society.

Emil Frankel co-founded the Ripon Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962. In this podcast discussion, he relates how he modeled the organization after the Bow Group in Britain, which was a pragmatic research and policy group of young Conservatives. He describes how young Republicans in his era were influenced both by Dwight Eisenhower’s moderation and John F. Kennedy’s youth and energy. The sometimes contradictory impulses of the era came together in the formation of the Ripon Society. Ripon, named for the Wisconsin town that historically has been considered the birthplace of the Republican Party, also played a leading role in Republican support for civil rights legislation during the 1960s. This set it against the conservative movement led by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.

Frankel also talks about his service as Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation and as Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation. He laments the disappearance of the moderate tradition in Republican politics but explains how remaining moderates are making common cause with some of their former conservative foes in the effort to preserve American liberal democracy.
...more
1h 18min
July 06, 2022 Reckoning with the deep structural problems in our democracy, with Greg Sargent
Greg Sargent is one of America's most prolific and insightful political opinion journalists. He is co-author of the Washington Post's The Plum Line blog (along with Paul Waldman) and is the author of the 2018 book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in An Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics. Although his columns tend to respond to the most heated and prominent issues of the moment, his column is notable for drawing upon a wide range of experts who help connect the political stories to a larger social and political reality.
Sargent's work includes a particular focus on the American right and the particular dangers it has come to pose, in an era of Trump-inflected populism, to American democracy. An Uncivil War examines the history of the counter-majoritarian tendencies on the right and concludes that "the plight of our democracy is the result of deep structural factors and problems that go well beyond Trump and long predate him."
In this podcast episode, Greg discusses the deeper significance of recent national stories (including several primary elections and the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings), the shifting bases of both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and the evolving forms of post-liberalism on the right. He raises what he considers the Democrats' "fundamental failure to reckon with the Republican Party of today," and his view of what needs to happen to avert emerging authoritarian threats. He also talks about his education and journalistic experiences before coming to the Post, and reveals the obscure meaning of "The Plum Line."
...more
1h 8min
June 08, 2022 Will the American conservative movement ever value liberty and virtue again? (with Stephanie Slade)
The post-Trump era has been a time of extraordinary political ferment on the right. Stephanie Slade, senior editor of Reason magazine, has had a front-line view of these new political developments. She is both a libertarian and a Catholic, and has written extensively for both libertarian publications and for religious publications, such as the Jesuit magazine America. She covers the intersection of religion and politics as well as the growing illiberalism of the New Right, evident in such new movements as National Conservatism and Catholic integralism.
Most recently, she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on how Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis’ clash with the Walt Disney Company demonstrates the ways that the Republican Party is distancing itself from libertarian conservatism, particularly in the realm of economics. Trump-aligned, populist-leaning Republicans such as DeSantis, Missouri senator Josh Hawley, and Ohio senatorial candidate J. D. Vance show a new willingness to use the power of the state to punish their political enemies, including allegedly “woke” institutions such as colleges, universities, and foundations as well as large corporations such as Disney speaking out against Republican-authored legislation.
Slade believes that what’s at stake in these clashes is the future of fusionism – the commitment to liberty and virtue – as the animating philosophy driving the modern American conservative movement. Unlike many on the New Right, she believes that libertarianism is compatible with religious social thought, like Catholic teachings on subsidiarity, for example. And although (in her estimation) the energy and momentum in intellectual and activist circles on the right are currently with the illiberals, she believes the fusionists have the potential to revive.
...more
1h 3min
May 16, 2022 Can conservatism ever become sensible again? (with Joshua Tait)
For decades, the standard history of conservative intellectuals in the United States in the 20th century has been George Nash’s magisterial The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. Now, a young scholar, Joshua Tait, has produced a study of conservative intellectualism that compares favorably to Nash’s in its depth of research and acuity of analysis.
In this podcast discussion, Josh talks about his 2020 Ph.D. dissertation, “Making Conservatism: Conservative Intellectuals and the American Political Tradition.” He describes his interest in the post-World War II conservative intellectual project. This movement drew together the ideas and philosophies of the right that opposed the prevailing New Deal consensus and built a political coalition and set of institutions that could persuade the public and achieve political power. He discusses his interest in early conservative intellectual movements, including the New Conservatives, the Straussians, the traditionalists, and the libertarians - as well as the ideas and influence of specific figures on the right such as Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, and William F. Buckley, Jr.
Ultimately, Josh believes that the “fusionist” consensus forged around National Review magazine in the 1950s - which united traditionalists and libertarians under the shared banner of anti-communism - was always unstable and was glued together more by shared enemies on the left than by any genuine synthesis. He also describes how the catastrophism of leading conservative intellectuals, including Burnham and Kendall, ultimately made it impossible for conservatives to cooperate with liberals and centrists, thus depriving them of the ability to govern. He believes the conservative intellectual project should turn away from existentialist counter-revolution and seek to recover the prudence and historicism of traditionalist thinkers like Russell Kirk. This would facilitate a return to conservative politics grounded in realism, reform, and continuity.
...more
1h 8min
April 29, 2022 The leading challengers to liberalism and moderation come from the West, with Aurelian Craiutu
What is moderation? The term is used both positively and pejoratively in today’s political discourse but rarely is it defined. Aurelian Craiutu is a professor of political science at Indiana University in Bloomington who has, perhaps more than anyone else, tried to define moderation and its manifestations in politics and philosophy over the past several centuries. He is the author of major works on moderation, including A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830, and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes.
In this podcast discussion, Aurelian discusses his historical research into moderation and his theoretical analyses of moderation and its relation to different varieties of liberalism. He considers the political, economic, moral, legal, and religious aspects of liberalism and why liberalism (as well as moderation) is under threat from both left and right. And, he reminds us, the leading challengers to both liberalism and moderation today do not come from hostile regimes like Russia or China but from within Western democracies. Unlike some of liberalism’s defenders, he concedes that conservative critics of liberalism respond to real problems in contemporary societies.
Aurelian was born in communist Romania during the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and he discusses how the absence of key liberal and moderate values in that society made him appreciate both the fragility of liberal civilization and the importance of moderation as an antidote to zealotry and fanaticism. He sketches some of the political and ethical components of moderation, including an aversion to fanaticism and epistemological arrogance. He also discusses some thinkers who embodied aspects of moderation, including French sociologist Raymond Aron and Polish activist Adam Michnik. He calls for moderates to resist the temptation to turn opponents into enemies, for people on both the left and the right to “read across the aisle,” and for Republicans and Democrats to foster “a climate that promotes dialogue, humility, moderation, compromise, [and] anything that opposes fanaticism.”
...more
1h 17min

FAQs about The Vital Center:

How many episodes does The Vital Center have?

The podcast currently has 85 episodes available.

More shows like The Vital Center

Left, Right & Center by KCRW

Left, Right & Center

5,061 Listeners

Conversations with Bill Kristol by Bill Kristol

Conversations with Bill Kristol

1,943 Listeners

The Gray Area with Sean Illing by Vox

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

10,665 Listeners

Radio Atlantic by The Atlantic

Radio Atlantic

2,244 Listeners

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat by New York Times Opinion

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

6,899 Listeners

Know Your Enemy by Matthew Sitman

Know Your Enemy

1,977 Listeners

The American Compass Podcast by American Compass

The American Compass Podcast

60 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,490 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,503 Listeners

Plain English with Derek Thompson by The Ringer

Plain English with Derek Thompson

2,207 Listeners

Statecraft by Santi Ruiz

Statecraft

36 Listeners

Politix by Politix

Politix

94 Listeners

Good on Paper by The Atlantic

Good on Paper

349 Listeners

The Opinions by The New York Times Opinion

The Opinions

465 Listeners

How to Fix It with John Avlon by The Bulwark

How to Fix It with John Avlon

76 Listeners