The Long Game

One of the dominant themes of the last several years, and especially the last year, is the loss of shared truth, a sense in the country that it's increasingly difficult to talk to one another when we disagree. Because increasingly, it seems like people don't know what is true and what is false, and then public debate just becomes a matter of tribalism, where our identity shapes what we believe rat...

Duke Kwon is a minister in Washington, D.C., at Grace Meridian Hill, which is part of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA). Gregory Thompson pastored for 20 years — most of it in Charlottesville, Va. — in that same denomination, which is decidedly on the conservative side of American Christianity in terms of its theology. The PCA itself was formed by congregations who objected to the civil rig...

American politics is being held hostage, says a group of reformers with growing access to big-donor money who define their mission as trying to set it free.   The hostage-takers, to hear them tell it, are the small group of voters who decide party primaries. Only about 10 percent of American voters choose about eight out of ten members of Congress, says a new report out Tuesday from Unite America,...

You would think that most people would agree that we should try to make voting secure and accessible, that we should have confidence in the results and that we should make it possible for as many people as possible to cast a ballot. But Republicans increasingly are seeking to make it harder to vote. There has been a rush in state legislatures to crack down on mail-in voting, to restrict early voti...

David Blankenhorn is co-founder of Braver Angels, which now has 70 chapters around the country, and has hosted more than 1,400 meetings, Blankenhorn said. The mission of Braver Angels is to get Americans to talk to one another, and to have honest conversations about their views on politics. The practice they preach is to get their members to listen to one another, rather than try to persuade each...

Adam Kinzinger, 42, has been in Congress since 2010. He's an Air National Guard pilot who flew over 100 combat missions on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He never said much about Trump prior to the election, and has been a reliable conservative vote. But since the election, he's been everywhere. He's been the most outspoken Republican elected official to publicly call out the constant lying...

Tom Malinowski, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey who was working on a resolution last year condemning the Qanon conspiracy cult, when suddenly he became a target of the cult himself, with the help of the Republican party establishment.  Malinowski is now involved in trying to come up with legislative solutions to the problem of disinformation and like my last guest, Peter Pomerantsev, he's...

Peter Pomerantsev is one of the best thinkers on online disinformation. He's the author of two books, " This is Not Propaganda : Adventures in the War Against Reality," and "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia." He is also senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics' Institute of Global Affairs, and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute...

Gerrymandering is a major problem. But it's not the only structural cause of radicalization, extremism and polarized politics. I talked with Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, about some other reform ideas that he's working on with other members of Congress. First, they want to introduce ranked choice voting. Second, they want to have members of Congress serve in multi-member districts, rat...

Russell Moore is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in America, with 15 million or so members in its 47,000 or so congregations. Moore was one of the most prominent evangelical critics of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, but after Trump was ele...

Brendan Buck worked for two Republican Speakers of the House: John Boehner and Paul Ryan. He's now a partner at the strategic comms shop Seven Letter. I first met him when I was writing about the rise of the Tea Party a decade ago, which feels like much longer than that. We talk about some of the ways that American politics is structured to make it hard for politicians to do what they know is righ...

John Dickerson is a correspondent for 60 Minutes, a political analyst for CBS News, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and one of the three hosts of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast, which incredibly has been going for 15 years. He was previously the host of "Face the Nation" and a co-host on "CBS This Morning." John's most recent book " The Hardest Job In the World: The American Presidency...

Matthew Sheffield fought against liberal bias in the news media for years. He grew up in a fundamentalist Mormon family, one of 10 children. His street preacher father watched CBS News. And in the late 90's Matthew started getting into blogging, as we called it then, mostly pointing out examples of media biased. He started a site called Rather Biased, inspired by CBS News' famous broadcaster. And...

One of the most common defenses of President Trump's attempts to overturn the election results is that he was undermined for much of his presidency by the media and the so-called "deep state," primarily through the Russia investigation. In essence, it's revenge, and if millions of Americans are deceived into thinking that the election was stolen and that American democracy is destroyed -- despite...

John Fetterman is the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, and the former mayor of Braddock, PA, which is just outside Pittsburgh. He and his wife Gisele and he have long been involved in community work, helping those who are in need, and that ethic characterized their time in Braddock, where they still live. Fetterman stands out, and always has. He's 6'8", bald, goateed, tatooed, and usually wear...

The purpose of this episode is to help us think about how do we talk to people who are either confused by conspiracy theories or committed to them. How do we interact with family members who are in one of these categories. In just the last week I've had confronted these circumstances in my own life. I don't think I did very well. One of my biggest mistakes was trying to argue over text and email r...

 "Applying conservative principles doesn't mean just keep flipping through the 1980 playbook until you find the right tax cut," said Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass.  Cass, 37, is an up and coming conservative thinker who got his start in politics on Mitt Romney's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Cass was an associate at Bain and Company, where Romney had worked before start...

Tim Alberta is chief political author at Politico and author of the 2019 New York Times Bestseller, "American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump." We talk about what comes next for the Republican party in the wake of an election where it showed promising trends for the future, but in which the party's leader and the sitting president told lie af...

Mindy Belz has been with World Magazine since its founding in 1986. It's a publication aimed at evangelical Christians, started by her brother in law, Joel Belz. Emily Belz, Mindy's daughter, is also at World now, and has worked at the New York Daily News and The Indianapolis Star. Mindy has spent 20 years covering the plight of Christians in Iraq and Syria. This is a story that truly did get over...

Charlie Camosy is a professor of theology and social ethics at Fordham University, and has written several books on the issue of abortion and the politics of abortion. What I appreciate about Charlie is that his main theme, or one of them, is that there is nowhere near as much disagreement among a broad majority of Americans on what to do about abortion politically as we think.  Charlie was on the...

Kim Wyman is the Secretary of State in Washington state, which is one of five states that conducts its elections entirely by mail and has been doing so since 2011.  I talked with Wyman about two main things: the robust controls that they have in Washington for verifying that ballots are legitimate and not fraudulent, and what she says about concerns that millions of ballots go missing every electi...

"I've been looking at polling places for 38 years as part of my duties and passion for [the] Republican party doing well in elections. We've been looking for fraud and I know what evidence is available, and there's not anything like enough evidence to make the bold assertion that our elections are rigged and fraudulent. And it is a perilous thing for a president of the United States to be saying t...

Judy Wu Dominick comes to the issue of race from a decidedly Christian perspective. As she explains in the first portion of our conversation, she came to this work of writing about race and faith and justice essentially as a second career. She studied medicine and worked in that field for many years. Her work is something she has built over time and it's highly sophisticated and full of wisdom. I...

Eddie Glaude is the chair of Princeton University's African American Studies program and is a regular fixture on the set of "Morning Joe." Eddie has written several books over the years, such as "Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul," and "In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America." Eddie's latest book is "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its...

Stacey Abrams is president of Fair Fight Action and was House Minority Leader in the Georgia legislature from 2011 to 2017. In 2018, she ran for governor of Georgia, losing a closely contested race to Republican Brian Kemp and alleging afterward that Kemp, who oversaw the election from his post as Georgia's top elections official, had suppressed the vote to win. Abrams has worked on voting rights...