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.

In the first few months of the second Trump administration, the White House in effect declared war on the nation’s colleges and universities, and particularly the most selective and prestigious among them. Vice President JD Vance had famously declared in 2021 that “the universities are the enemy,” but conservative antipathy against higher education for its alleged role as the breeding ground of progressive ideology goes back at least to the 1960s. In that turbulent decade, the universities became entangled in national debates over the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and the counterculture. The present-day controversies over political activism on college and university campuses echo the debates of the 1960s in important ways.

Neil L. Rudenstine has been a key observer and participant in the shaping of American higher education since the 1960s. He served as President of Harvard University from 1991 to 2001, after decades of teaching and administrative experience that included service as Dean of Students, Dean of the College, and Provost at Princeton University. His career in academic administration began by chance in the fall of 1967, when as a junior professor of English at Harvard he came across a left-wing student group “imprisoning” a recruiter from the Dow Chemical Company in protest against the company’s complicity in the Vietnam war. His intervention was credited with helping to bring the protest to a peaceful resolution, and led to his involvement as an academic administrator in later campus debates over subjects including identity politics, climate change, and America’s global role.

In his new memoir, Our Contentious Universities: A Personal History, Rudenstine draws upon his experiences to explain why universities have become increasingly fractious institutions and why they have come to be at the center of the country’s culture wars. In this podcast interview, the former Harvard president discusses the sources of student and faculty radicalization in the 1960s, the parallels between the ‘60s campus protests and those of today, and the financial and institutional difficulties that beset many of the country’s leading universities. He suggests ways that the universities can respond to the political attacks against them from the Republican Party, and also how they can attempt to restore public trust and better serve the needs of the nation and the world.

Why can’t America do big things anymore? Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, addresses this question in his new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back. The book’s inspiration came from his thinking about the now-vanished Pennsylvania Station, formerly New York City’s majestic gateway, which was one of the most beautiful buildings in the country and a monument to metropolitan greatness. Its closure and demolition in the early 1960s amounted to what a New York Times editorial called a “monumental act of vandalism,” made more painful by the ugliness and disfunctionality of the modern facility that replaced it.

New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, starting in the early 1990s, made it his top legislative priority to build a new train hall in the nearby neoclassical post office building. Moynihan was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and one of the most powerful Democratic politicians in the land, and he secured agreement and funding from all of the relevant stakeholders — but still he could not get the new station built. The Moynihan Train Hall would not open until 2021, after nearly three decades of delays and setbacks.

Marc Dunkelman for many years commuted into the seemingly unfixable Penn Station and wondered why New York’s Democratic leaders were unable to make any progress in replacing it. The stagnation struck him as a vivid contrast to Robert Moses, the towering urban planner and public official, who had run roughshod over all opposition in mid-20th-century New York in the course of his massive redevelopment of the city, as described in Robert Caro’s 1974 bestseller The Power Broker.

When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back.

In this podcast discussion, Dunkelman analyzes the historic roots of these opposing impulses and explains how progressives ever since the 1960s have swung too far toward the Jeffersonian extreme. He describes how progressives lost working-class support by rendering government unable to deliver public goods like abundant and cheap housing, energy, and infrastructure. And he warns that incompetent government inevitably plays into the hands of populists who vilify government and claim: “I alone can fix it.”

Many Democratic voters — and not a few pundits — have found the 2024 presidential election outcome to be profoundly puzzling and disorienting: How could so many minorities and working-class Americans have voted for Donald Trump?

One observer who found Trump’s showing with these groups to be unsurprising is Steve Bumbaugh. Ever since the 1990s, he has worked on issues involving college access, upward mobility, race, and class. For some of that time, he worked with large organizations such as the College Board, which is the one of the key institutions that has shaped the modern meritocracy through college entrance tests such as the SAT and Advanced Placement courses and exams. At other points in his career, he worked directly with young people from disadvantaged communities. His work with students in a deeply impoverished inner-city neighborhood in Washington D.C. during the early 1990s, when the city was known as the nation’s “Murder Capital,” is described in the documentary Southeast 67.

In this podcast conversation, Bumbaugh discusses the rise and fall of public school integration efforts in America — an arc whose impact he experienced personally as well as professionally. He describes current criticisms of meritocracy, particularly at the level of selective college admissions, and the ways in which the elite universities could do more to make the system more representative as well as more truly meritocratic. Bumbaugh reflects on the working-class anger and frustration that helped drive Trump’s reelection in 2024, much of which was invisible to the Democratic Party as it transformed into a predominantly college-educated, managerial- and professional-class party. And he concludes that the Democrats “don’t have the ability to communicate on the same level as Donald Trump. They had better do something.”