The Vital Center

Has America lost its mojo? In this episode of the Vital Center podcast, we speak with the Niskanen Center's vice president Brink Lindsey about how the American government no longer seems capable of accomplishing significant, important undertakings — and how that failure is endangering liberal democracy both at home and abroad. Brink describes his personal journey as a "recovering libertarian," fro...

Philip Zelikow’s eminent career has spanned academia and public service in a way that makes him a modern-day counterpart to the Wise Men who created the post-World War II global order. He has served at all levels of American government, from holding positions in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon to winning election to his town’s school board. He has taught for the Navy, worke...

Jackie Calmes is one of the country’s foremost political reporters. As the Wall Street Journal’s chief political correspondent, the White House correspondent for the New York Times during the Obama administration, and now a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, she has an unparalleled knowledge of how Congress and American politics have changed in recent decades — particularly on the Republican sid...

Richard Nixon’s legacy will be forever tarnished by the Watergate scandal that led him to become the first and only U.S. president to resign from office. But Nixon was also a political mastermind whose impact continues to resound in both domestic and world politics. John R. Price served on the domestic policy side of the first Nixon administration, eventually becoming Special Assistant to the Pres...

A. B. Stoddard is one of the country's sharpest and best informed political commentators. A former congressional reporter and producer of ABC World News Tonight, as well as a current columnist for RealClearPolitics, she has seen politics from the inside and up close since the 1990s. And when she warns that both parties, and the country, are in a dark place as the 2022 and 2024 elections approach,...

In September 1787, an onlooker is said to have asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government he and the other delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall had given the United States. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” Can we still keep it? That’s the question at the heart of Tom Nichols’ provocative new book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Wi...

In this era of deepening polarization and intensifying tribalization, Americans have fewer and fewer contacts and communication across partisan lines. Philippa Hughes is a Washington, D.C.-based social sculptor and creative strategist who has long attempted to bridge our divisions by bringing people together for meaningful conversations about art and our shared American identity. But she has disco...

Red tape rules America. Philip K. Howard joins Geoff Kabaservice to discuss how thousands of nonsensical laws hamper any good the government can do. Years-long environmental review harms the environment because it means that infrastructure isn’t updated. Regulations intended to protect people destroy small businesses And America isn’t about to change because partisanship encourages the tangled web...

What accounts for the increasing extremism of the Republican Party, and the polarization that has resulted from it? It at least partly stems from what many may view as an unlikely source: a decline in leadership by large American corporations, a group Mark Mizruchi refers to as the American corporate elite. Here, Mizruchi joins Geoff Kabaservice to provide a detailed history of the role of the cor...

Laura K. Field’s work in political theory didn’t used to focus on today’s political arena, but when prominent conservative intellectuals started backing the authoritarian, populist messages of Donald Trump in 2016, she began looking into the intellectual roots of conservative thinkers. She joins Geoff Kabaservice today to discuss how today’s “reactionary conservatives” have rejected liberal democr...

In this episode of The Vital Center, host Geoffrey Kabaservice and Jonathan Rauch discuss the "deliberate, sustained, sophisticated, and very effective attack on the system we rely on to make and obtain knowledge" in our democracy. Fighting back against disinformation involves more than throwing up our hands and wishing it never happened. We have to understand why the attacks on our institutions,...

R.R. “Rusty” Reno is the editor of First Things, an ecumenical and conservative religious journal that seeks to advance what it calls a religiously informed public for the ordering of society. In this episode, Reno joins Geoff Kabaservice to discuss his book “Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West,” religion, ideological passion, and the way forward for Americ...

Political veteran Chris Vance joins host Geoff Kabaservice to offer some insight into his time in the Washington state Republican Party - how they won elections on a local level, what role moderate ideas played in winning elections, and how everything changed once Trump became the Republican nominee for President in 2016. Concerned by the ideological trends in the party and the demand that no Repu...

Liz Cheney has been ousted from the Republican Party...for speaking the truth about election results. Anyone Republican who opposed Trump is also on thin ice, and effectively must worry about being ousted for their views. And when it comes to passing good policy, Democrats don't have all the answers (or the majorities needed to pass legislation) either. Political scientist Rob Saldin makes the cas...

As Republicans embraced anti-elitism under Trump, Democrats reacted by embracing the values of the upper-middle class. The result, according to historian Matt Karp is a party that often - intentionally or unintentionally - distances itself from the working class, which it used to champion. The professional class has made all opposition the "other," embracing a partisan identity politics that says...

"One of the few things that both left and right can agree upon nowadays is that both the "establishment" and the meritocracy ought to be overthrown. But in all of these discussions, there's little awareness that there is a history and a scholarly literature behind these concepts. And all of that in one way or another draws upon the work of the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, who was born in 1915 an...

For years, Democrats have provided training and resources to women looking to run for office through organizations like EMILY's List. Republicans have not, and the current demographics of Congress show the results. That's one of the reasons sisters Kodiak and Ariel Hill-Davis helped to found Republican Women for Progress, which provides policy-minded Republican women with the tools they need to wi...

William F. Buckley was a public intellectual, commentator, and founder of National Review, the magazine that arguably launched the modern conservative movement as we know it today. Would there even be a conservative movement without Buckley's leadership? And if so, is he responsible for the Trumpist turn Republican Party has taken? Does Buckley bear some blame for the direction in which conservati...

During the Trump years, political commentator and strategist Linda Chavez held out hope that the more moderate elements of the Republican Party would make a resurgence. But the widespread denial of the 2021 election results was her breaking point, and she openly left the party. She could no longer associate with a group that embraced conspiracy theories denied the results of a free and fair electi...

What motivated the rioters to buy plane tickets and storm the Captol? Was it a pre-meditated, organized coup or something more spur-of-the-moment? And what's the future of the Republican Party, given that so many base voters still support Trump? The Week's Damon Linker joins Niskanen's Geoffrey Kabaservice to discuss the intellectual, psychological, political, and socio-cultural forces behind the...