The Long Game (Jon Ward)

Jonathan Rauch's 2016 Atlantic cover story, "How American Politics Went Insane," argued that we've reformed our politics into dysfunction. We talk about how telling people to vote or participate in the process is not, on its own, going to solve our problems. We need people to either get involved in political parties or delegate authority to them. The irony, he says, is that "an unmediated, direct democracy, is less democratic and less representative than mediated democracy.” 

Episode 1 explained how I got interested in the topic of institutions by asking myself why the Republican Party was powerless to stop Donald Trump. Episode 2 explored the question, “What are institutions and why are they important?” Episode 3 looked at ways in which institutions can be harmful. This 4th episode is the first of a few that will look closely at the specific institution of political parties. 

Opening Clip: From The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Opening Music: "Power" by Kanye West 

Books/Articles by Jonathan Rauch

• "Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought" 
• "Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America"
• "Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul" 
• "Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy"
• "How American Politics Went Insane," The Atlantic 
• "More Professionalism, Less Populism: Why Voting Makes Us Stupid and What To Do About It"

Other books or articles mentioned:

• "The Futility of Nostalgia and the Romanticism of the New Political Realists: Why Praising the 19th Century Political Machine Won't Solve the 21st Century's Problems" - by Thomas Mann and EJ Dionne
• "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman
• "How We Got Here: The 70's: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse)" by David Frum

Closing Music: "Rita" by Madeline Kenney

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He thinks machine politics is a distraction. Norm Ornstein has a different take from Jonathan Rauch and Elaine Kamarck on why our politics is broken. Ornstein believes increasing voter participation and reducing the role of money in politics are better goals, and that the Republican Party is far more of a culprit in creating dysfunction than are the Democrats. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a book late last year with Thomas Mann and EJ Dionne called "One Nation After Trump."

Show Notes:

Opening and closing song: "Mass Appeal" by Gangstarr. 

Norm's book from 2012, co-written with Thomas Mann and EJ Dionne, updated in 2016: "It's Even Worse Than It Looks Was: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism."

Norm's book from 2006, co-written with Thomas Mann: "The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track."

The paper by Jonathan Rauch and Ben Wittes from May 2017: "More professionalism, less populism: How voting makes us stupid, and what to do about it."

Rauch & Wittes were responding in part to this paper from June 2015, by Mann and Dionne: "The futility of nostalgia and the romanticism of the new political realists."

And here's Elaine Kamarck's paper from April 2017: "Re-inserting peer review in the American presidential nomination process."

The exchange between Ornstein and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, at the beginning can be viewed here, and you can read about it here.

My profile from December on Warren Throckmorton, the evangelical professor who turned against 'reparative therapy' for gays.

My profile from September on Jemar Tisby, an African-American Christian living in the Deep South whose outlook on racial reconciliation darkened after the election of Donald Trump.

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It is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. I just finished watching the ceremony in France, where they honored WWII vets who still live, and those who never came home. It was incredibly moving. 

But we can't just look back and grow emotional during inspiring video montages. We must think about how to avoid the paths of division that could send future young men and women to similar fates. We can honor those brave WWII vets further — now — by listening to those who are trying to help us remember how to resolve our differences peacefully, rather than through violence or force. Yuval Levin is one of those people. My interview with him about his new book, out next week, "American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- And Could Again."

Yuval's argument is that our Constitution is more than a legal document, though it is that. The Constitution is also a blueprint, a map, which lays out how our nation was intended to solve problems and resolve disagreements.

James Madison, the nation's fourth president, was one of the chief architects of our constitutional system. And our system has a psychology of sorts, Yuval's book says. This system defines unity as acting together even when we don’t agree. Madison and others designed an architecture of checks and balances and disparate power centers that are intended to pull and push us into engagement with those who are different and think different. It is that action together which creates common purpose and cohesion, a unity of "peace but not quiet," as Yuval writes.

"Politics is haggling, or it is force," he quotes Daniel Bell as saying. He adds: "We have forgotten that the only real alternative to a politics of bargaining and accommodation in a vast and diverse society is a politics of violent hostility."

Many Americans despair that we can repair our divisions. But Levin rejects that despair. He calls his book "hopeful" but says that does not mean he is necessarily optimistic. "Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, because they are both invitations to passivity," he writes. "Hope is a virtue, and so it sits between those vices. It tells us that things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worth of it happening."

The way we move toward this unity of "peace but not quiet" is by thinking more carefully about how our system is structured, and what kind of behavior it incentivizes: cooperation across difference as the Constitution intended, or pulling apart, demonizing the other side and fearing those who disagree, and performative outrage.

We keep looking at our broken political system — the politicians who show up on our TV's and our phones, the lawmakers who end up in Congress, and the general lack of solutions to our biggest problems — and we shake our head. We promise to vote the bums out. We vow to drain the swamp. We pledge to overturn the plutocracy.

But we don't think about our assembly line, the system that gives us the choices we are presented with.

Remember Lee Drutman's line? "Who chooses the choices?"

That's the right question. When we show up to the toy store, and don't like our choices, we're not asking who is making the decision to limit us to these options. We simply keep buying from their limited selection, hoping for a different outcome.

The point of Nick's Troiano's book, The Primary Solution, is that we have to change the way we choose our choices. This means getting rid of party primaries, which have become a weapon used by ideologues and zealots to turn our politics into a bloodsport rather than something that serves its citizens.

Nick's book is an explanation of how that came to be, why it should be changed, and how we can change it. 

You can also read a series of four Substack posts on the book here. 

Yuval Levin, one of the most plugged in, influential conservative intellectuals in the country, joins me to talk about how modern Americans often think of institutions as platforms for self-promotion rather than molds that form us "into human beings who are capable of being free men and women, who will choose to do the right thing, generally speaking, and so can be left free to choose, and don’t have to be coerced into being responsible.”

President Trump, Levin says, is a vivid example of someone who views institutions this way, and as a result, has hindered his ability to be successful. Trump has behaved not as a president would, but as a "performance artist," Levin says. 

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Dan Koch, host of the Depolarize podcast, joins me to talk about his thoughts while reading "How to Think," by Baylor literature professor Alan Jacobs.

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Aurelian Craiutu is the author of Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals.

Craiutu is the chair of Indiana University's political science department. He is reclaiming a word and idea — moderation — that is typically despised and criticized as weak and cowardly. This is a misunderstanding of what moderation is, he insists.

Moderation is not for the weak or the indecisive, Craiutu says. Instead, it is a fighting creed which requires courage, strength, and savvy. It's not for everyone, he says. In other words, the implication is that some people don't have what it takes to be a moderate, because it's much easier to be a radical, or a purist, or an ideologue.

"Maintaining our civilization is an endless and complex task," (23) Craiutu writes.

Moderates do not look for silver bullets to perform this task. They recognize that it is an ongoing, never-fully-solved challenge. And they have a "willingness to exist inside open-ended situations that do not come full circle and cannot be unequivocally settled" (72).

In other words, moderates are fighters who aren't looking for an easy way out or for a vacation from the ongoing and ever present task of maintaining an open and free society.

"When politicians can't get anything done, it breeds distrust. It breeds anger ... The weakening of parties ... most people think it's a good thing," Elaine Kamarck says. But, she warns that "the weakening of parties has meant the weakening of government. People don't like that, but very few people see the connection between political parties and government." Kamarck, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and a Democratic National Committee member and superdelegate, talks about her proposal to have a party gathering prior to the presidential primary to vote on potential candidates. But she says she doesn't care if superdelegates go away. She also says she doesn't fault Reince Priebus for not doing more as RNC Chairman to block Donald Trump from the nomination.

Resources:

• "Re-inserting peer review in the American presidential nomination process," by Elaine Kamarck
• "Primary Politics: How Presidential Candidates Have Shaped the Modern Nominating System," by Elaine Kamarck
• "20 of America's top political scientists gathered to discuss our democracy. They're scared." - Sean Illing, Vox
• "How Autocracy Rises: What Institutional Failure Really Means," Umair Haque
• "Is the American Idea Doomed?" Yoni Applebaum, The Atlantic

 

• Opening music: "Safe If We Don't Look Down (Imagined Herbal Flows Remix)" - Mutemath
• Closing music: "Changes" - Mutemath

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Major Garrett is chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, and as he told me in our conversation, he is an "accidental television journalist" who "never imagined" working in TV and "never wanted it." He was a print reporter for 17 years before entering the world of television. Since then, he's proven to be one of the most formidable, best prepared interviewers in journalism. This dude is rigorous, smart, and fun! And you know what? Damn it, he cares.

Major is the host of The Takeout podcast and author of five books, including The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie, and Mr. Trump's Wild Ride: The Thrills, Chills, Screams, and Occasional Blackouts of an Extraordinary Presidency.

Major read Amusing Ourselves to Death in the 1990's. He then soon after became a TV reporter for CNN, where he spent two years before moving to the then-nascent Fox News, where he became a Washington fixture as White House correspondent. That's where he was when I met him during my time as a White House correspondent for The Washington Times.

I was glad, as I told him, that Major has a textured view of Postman's work. I didn't want a cheerleader. But Major talks about the impact of the work on him, his views of its shortcomings, and its lasting value.

John Inazu's new book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. John teaches on criminal law, law and religion and the First Amendment at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert on religious freedom. And he is a senior fellow with Interfaith America. He is also a former Air Force officer who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11 when a hijacked airliner hit the other side of that massive building. And finally, he is the son of Japanese-American father who was born in an internment camp during World War II, where his American citizen grandparents were incarcerated for three years simply because of their ethnic heritage. 

John's book is structured around the rhythm of a law school year. The reason, he says, is because he thinks the law has something to teach us about how to approach disagreement.

We talk here about why he thinks his book has surprising advice. We also spend a lot of time talking about the protests on college campuses about the war in Gaza, which have reached a fever pitch over the past week, and what his book offers to that incredibly intense disagreement. We actually kept coming back to the issue of American universities and their purpose and mission.

Seth Masket is the chair of the political science department at the University of Denver. He has dared to say what few will: that for party primaries and maybe all of American politics to be more productive and functional, it might need to be a little less democratic. He and fellow academic Julia Azari wrote a New York Times op-ed in December titled: “Is the Democratic Party Becoming Too Democratic?”

Seth is the author of two books. His most recent is called “The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and how they Weaken Democracy.”

The text of my introduction to the show, along with all the links below, is posted on my Medium page devoted to this podcast. Seth’s bio is here.  Here are Seth’s two books:

• No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures, by Seth Masket
• The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How They Weaken Democracy, by Seth Masket

“How to Improve the Primary Process? Make It Less Democratic,” by Seth Masket, Pacific Standard Magazine, August 11, 2017

"Is the Democratic Party Becoming Too Democratic?” by Julia Azari and Seth Masket, The New York Times, December 11, 2017

“Here’s How a Responsible GOP Might Behave,” by Seth Masket, Pacific Standard Magazine, February 28, 2017

Seth referenced this paper: The Losing Parties Out-Party National Committees, 1956-1993, by Philip A. Klinkner

We talked about the big idea in this book, and how the 2016 election did not adhere to this theory: “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform,” by Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel

"Weak parties and strong partisanship are a bad combination," by Julia Azari, Vox, November 3, 2016

I wrote this at the 2016 Republican convention: "The Cleveland convention is ratifying the GOP’s loss of party power."

My piece on The Centrist Project from April 2017 is here.

Seth wrote about The Centrist Project in June 2017. That piece is here.

My more recent piece on Unite America, the new name of what used to be The Centrist Project, is here.

MUSIC:

• Intro: “Handshake Drugs” by Wilco 
• Transition: “St Tom’s Lullaby” by The Welcome Wagon 
• Outro: “For the Sake...

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Jemar Tisby is one of the more compelling figures I am aware of when it comes to race and Christianity in America. He is the president of the Reformed African American Network, and is obtaining a PhD in the history of race and religion at the University of Mississippi. Jemar is on a "journey to figure out how … social justice and historic Christian faith connect: how faith catalyzes justice." And while he believes his faith identity transcends skin color, he rejects the idea that white and black Christians -- in particular -- should avoid or bypass the hard conversations that need to take place about racial justice and white supremacy in America today. I wanted to get his take on institutions early on in this podcast to help us think critically about the topic. We may need to regain an appreciation for the good institutions can do, but we need to remain clear-eyed about the injustice that can also be perpetrated through them as well.

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I'm introducing a new feature to The Long Form podcast, where I'll post short interviews with friends and public figures about the book that they are in the middle of. I don't want polished hot takes about a book someone has finished and fully digested. I want mid-process description of what sparks are flying around people's heads midstream through the book. And I love to know the backstory of how and why people start books. What intrigued them? What attracted them? And what are they getting out of it right now? 

I'm starting out with a look at one of the books I'm reading, "12 Rules for Life" by Jordan Peterson. He's a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who has developed a cult following particularly among young men. I think after listening to this you'll have a better understanding of why. 

Show Notes:

Anthony Bradley tweet thread on why young men are into Peterson. 

"The Voice Evangelical Men Wish They Had," by Anthony Bradley in Fathom Magazine. 

"The Jordan Peterson Moment," by David Brooks in The New York Times

Peterson interview with Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News

James K.A. Smith tweet about Peterson's "manhood-under-attack" "myth"

Vice segment on Peterson: "Jordan Peterson Is Canada's Most Infamous Intellectual"

Extended clip of Jay Kang interview with Peterson. 

Video of Peterson's complain about the Vice interview. 

"What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?" by Tom Bartlett in The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Steven Levitsky is professor of government at Harvard University. He has spent most of his life studying Latin American politics and history, with a focus on political parties, authoritarianism and democratization, and weak and informal institutions. In 2018, he and fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt, an expert on democracy in Europe, wrote a book called "How Democracies Die." Here, Steven and I discuss what he means when he calls political parties the "gatekeepers of democracy," and why the Democrats reduction of superdelegates in their presidential primary may have unintended negative consequences. 

“How Democracies Die," by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Steven Levitsky's personal page at Harvard is here. 

Reviews of the book by Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times and by Yuval Levin in The Weekly Standard. 

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In this inaugural, introductory episode, I tell the story of standing on the floor of the Republican convention in Cleveland as the GOP squashed an anti-Trump rebellion. It caused me to start thinking about the role of institutions like political parties. I explain why this podcast exists, how I'm going to structure it, and how I got interested in the topic. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis recently said that the biggest threat to the country is not ISIS or Russia or terrorism, but "the lack of political unity in America." The disunity we are now experiencing is increasing the massive distrust of institutions that in many ways is what brought us to this point. The question is, where do we go from here? We can't go back in time, but what lessons does our history hold for us?

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Tim Schultz is president of the First Amendment Partnership, a group whose core mission is to advocate for religious freedom for all faiths and rights of conscience.

Schultz and others say this bill gives something to both gay rights groups and to religious conservatives. It's a compromise, a tradeoff. On the left, there are some activists who say it doesn't do enough, but by and large they say they want it to pass anyway. On the right, there are a lot of prominent religious conservatives who say it doesn't give enough to their side, but they also say that they still wouldn't support the legislation even if it did give their side more.

Specifically, LGBTQ groups are looking for assurances that if the Supreme Court's ruling in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage is somehow repealed in the future, marriage licenses issued since then would still be valid. And the bill also says that states where gay marriage is not recognized, gay couples would be protected under law and their marriages recognized if their license was issued in another state.

Religious conservatives are looking for protections that will allow them and their institutions to adhere to the belief that marriage is between men and women, and to live out that belief in various settings. The text of this legislation as it pertains to religious freedom requires some interpretation, so that is where the debate gets complicated. Hopefully this conversation gives some insight from an advocate who says it does provide protections for religious conservatives.

Read my article on the issue here.

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I have never cared all that much about the debate over evolution. But I grew up in an evangelical home and church. So in my world, the origins of the species were definitely up for question.

To me, it all seemed rather silly. I didn't see any conflict between evolution and the Christian faith, or even between evolution and the Bible.

But I have known others who said quite openly that if they ever came to believe that evolution was true, they feared they would lose their faith. Most evolution skeptics aren't quite as blunt or bleak. There is a wide range of evolution skepticism, from those who simply aren't sure what to believe to those who are adamant opponents.

I had never really thought, however, about the ways that skepticism of evolution was one of the foundations of an anti-expertise, anti-science frame of mind that really does permeate evangelicalism. We saw it more clearly than ever during the COVID pandemic. But we've also seen it on the issue of climate change. The consensus of scientific evidence is clear, but religious conservatives reject it, or say we can't know what's true.

Janet Kellogg Ray is a biology professor at the University of North Texas. She was raised a creationist, and has written two books now about the issue of evolution and evangelicals. The first, Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark? The Bible and Modern Science and the Trouble of Making It All Fit, came out in 2021. The second came out this month. It's called The God of Monkey Science: People of Faith in a Modern Scientific World.

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In American politics, we saw the latest sign of total dysfunction in Congress, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted for daring to pass a bipartisan solution last week to avoid a government shutdown.

Many people are desperate for a new kind of politics, and Joel Searby has dedicated the last several years of his life to that cause.

Joel worked on the Evan McMullin presidential campaign in 2016, and since then has been involved in numerous efforts to find a new middle way for the many Americans who are deeply frustrated with our politics. Most recently, Joel was executive director of The Forward Party, which is building state parties around the country to give people a way to build a movement from the ground up. Joel recently left that role and we talk about what he's up to now. He remains invested in and hopeful about the future of The Forward Party.

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This interview is with Matthew D. Taylor, who wrote and created a recent podcast series called "Charismatic Revival Fury." Taylor is the Protestant Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, in Baltimore.

We know about the Proud Boys, and the Big Lie, and former President Trump's role in spreading it and deceiving millions of Americans into believing the 2020 election was stolen from them.

But there was an element in the crowd spurred on to radical anti-democratic lawlessness by something more than politics. It was "revival fury."

That's the phrase created by Taylor, who has studied a sub-culture of American evangelicalism — called the New Apostolic Reformation — and mapped its 30-year history as well as its many links to the January 6 insurrection.

Taylor's extensive historical research provides a depth of context to a shocking revelation: the Trump White House itself was in touch with key NAR leaders in the weeks after the 2020 election and leading up to the attack on the Capitol.

In fact, one key NAR leader said "government leaders" asked him to conduct a tour of churches after the 2020 election to energize and mobilize Trump supporters to support the effort to overturn the election results. This NAR leader, Dutch Sheets, had already been part of a Trump White House outreach effort in 2019 led by Trump faith adviser Paula White Cain.

The Sheets tour turned into a whirlwind tour of seven swing states over a month's time, in which roughly two-dozen self-proclaimed prophets whipped large crowds into a frenzy of religious fervor mixed with apocalyptic and violent imagery of defeating demonic forces, which were attributed to Democrats and President Biden.

He calls it "charismatic revival fury" and has produced a podcast series by that name. Many of these NAR followers believed that if Trump were reinstated it would spark a religious revival leading to the conversion of a billion people to not just Christianity, but their brand of the faith.

Taylor draws a distinction between personal "spiritual warfare" — a fairly standard belief held by many Christians in America and around the world — and the kind of hyper-radicalized version of "strategic spiritual warfare" promoted by NAR that risks pushing its adherents into the kind of violence we saw on January 6.

Taylor also cautions that political figures on the right are playing with rhetoric that risks further radicalizing religious supporters, and that these remarks fall on a spectrum. On the most extreme, you have former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn literally calling former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a "demon."

But other Republicans are also toying with such ideas. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has quoted a passage from the Bible where he replaces "the devil" with "the left." And former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley this week said that debates over how to teach children in schools about gender "is absolutely spiritual warfare."

Taylor's research shows that talking about these topics requires a deftness and precision that avoids painting all conservative Christians with such a broad brush that it risks pushing them closer to extremist radicals, rather than bringing them into a broader conversation that can serve as a moderating force.

"We need to be able to see the diversity within these movements, not paint with such a broad brush that says anyone who holds some theological idea or participates in some theological meme is therefore an extremist," Taylor told Yahoo News. "I think we really need to focus on people who actually behave in extreme ways and say extreme things."

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Back in the summer of 2017 when I started this podcast, my first guest was Yuval Levin. And over the years, Yuval has been one of my most consistent conversation partners, in informal lunches and on this podcast.

Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). This is his fifth time on this show now. Each time has been a really rich and deep conversation, and this time is no different.

I found myself wondering what Yuval would think about the battle last week in the House of Representatives over the Speakership. All week as the fight raged on the House floor, I kept seeing some of the pioneering work that Yuval has done represented in the ways that observers and pundits thought about and talked about what was happening.

Back in April of 2018, Yuval gave a series of three lectures at Princeton University called, "Why Institutions Matter: Three Lectures on Breakdown and Renewal." These lectures became the basis of the book "A Time to Build," which was released at the beginning of 2020.

One of the fundamental insights of those lectures and that book was that so many of us today think of institutions as platforms, rather than molds. A platform is something you stand on top of, for self-promotion. A mold is something you go inside of, which shapes you. I had, like Yuval, been thinking a lot after the 2016 election about why our institutions were so broken, and his arguments were incredibly penetrating in helping me think more clearly about the problem.

So plenty of people were pointing out that Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and some others were basically just opposing McCarthy to make themselves more famous. Yuval's thinking has helped a lot of people see this more clearly.

But I wondered what Yuval was seeing now that the rest of us might not be. And when we sat down, it was another moment of feeling like someone was giving us a mirror to look around the corner, not at what will be, but at what could be.

We talk about a lot here, and if you have any interest in American politics, or Congress, you'll find this of great interest. But I think those who really know politics well, or who work in Congress, will find this of extreme interest.

In short, Yuval agrees that the Speakership fight was chaotic, but that this was not necessarily a bad thing. He's written a New York Times op-ed this week explaining why to some degree, but he talks at much greater length here about his thinking.

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The 1950's and 60's were an age of widely shared prosperity in the U.S. — across class and economic lines — that have never quite returned. Things were improving for all parts of society during the post-war period, and for all groups including Black Americans, despite the real presence of racial bias and discrimination against them. And things have not improved equally in recent decades. Things have improved since then. But the rate of steady and ongoing improvement and progress has slowed in many ways, and stalled in some.

All this is the subject of today's episode, an interview with journalist David Leonhardt of the New York Times. You may know David from the daily newsletter for the Times that he writes, which is the Times' flagship newsletter, The Morning. David's new book is called "Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream." It was recently named one of the year's top 10 books by The Atlantic magazine.

"The economy has grown more slowly than it did in the postwar decades," Leonhardt writes, "producing less bounty for the population to share." And, he adds, "the economy has become more unequal, with a declining share of that bounty available to most Americans, because it is flowing to a relatively small percentage of affluent households" (xxiii).

This is a problem for democracy, Leonhardt writes. His book is one of several recently that are, together, sending a loud signal to Democrats that they have become too strident and purist in ways that alienate large numbers of voters who they need to win elections. These books are imploring Democrats to focus on helping working class voters economically and to cast a wider and more tolerant tent on social and cultural issues.

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This is a Builders conversation. I'm doing these about once a month to highlight people who are not just cursing the darkness but are also building up their local community — and the country — through making something beautiful, through problem-solving, and by stitching together places of belonging and meaning. (Thank you Joy Moore for the inspiration!)

This past summer, we took our kids to visit WERU in Maine, which is near Acadia National Park. The station's General Manager, Matt Murphy, gave us a tour, and he even had our two youngest daughters do a brief on-air announcement in support of the station. We saw the floor to ceiling shelves of CD's and records, the small studio, and the kitchen, also filled with music.

I wanted to interview Matt for my Builders series because, as he says: “There's so much in the world that's challenging ... and all the hard times can have a certain degree of paralysis to them."

"And there's a lot of things in the world that I can't do anything about, but I can do a lot about making community radio a good environment for people to do their thing and serve the community," he told me. "So having something to do, that you feel can help make even a little bit of a difference, is really important."

That's exactly it. Having something to do to make even a little bit of difference is the cure for the ways that the bigger, broader world can make all of us feel hopeless and powerless sometimes.

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I interviewed Russell Moore on the podcast this week about his new book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, which is out next Tuesday, July 25.

In his book, Moore refers to the "post-2016 era" as an "apocalypse."

Now, you hear that word, and you might think Zombies!

Both those reactions to the word "apocalypse" have to do with the end of the world.

Yet that's not how Moore is using the term. "Apocalypse literally means unveiling and revelation,” Moore told me.

“And I think that's what happened in the post 2015 era. A a lot of things were revealed," Moore said of the last eight years. "We could see patterns of behavior that were preexisting but weren't really all that clear.”

"What I'm trying to say to people is, 'Yes, we're in a place of disruption and of loss. That is always the way that God works in terms of creating something new," Moore said. "And so the primary thing is to say to people, 'Don't panic about the sense of homelessness that you feel. Don't panic about the bewilderment that you feel.' That actually can be a sign of grace."

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James K.A. Smith discusses his new book, "How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now," which released September 20, 2022, from Brazos Press.

We discuss:

1. the role of history in helping us learn discernment and live faithfully
2. the ways that many Christians think they are living out ancient truths that are actually modern inventions
3. how many Christians who "deconstruct" and end up leaving the faith are actually "rejecting the minority report" of the faith
4. how Christian nationalism has "forgotten something very, very fundamental about what the Christian expectation of kingdom come looks like, which is precisely that it is not something that is engineered by us."
5. how gardening helps us embrace our temporality and "experience God seasonally"

Also check out James' book "You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit"

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The topic of Christian nationalism has been much in the news recently. Republican politicians like Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia both have claimed the term as their own, and Boebert in particular has loudly proclaimed that she does not believe in the separation of church and state. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk,” she said. “The church is supposed to direct the government; the government is not supposed to direct the church.”

Perhaps the most aggressive Christian nationalist, despite his protestations about the term, is Pennsylvania's Doug Mastriano, a state senator who is the Republican nominee for governor in that state. Listen to Mastriano's comments in a 2021 zoom call a week before the January 6 insurrection, in which he baptizes conspiracy theories and his political will to power in the language of spiritual righteousness.

That call was organized by a man named Jim Garlow, who is reportedly influential in something called the New Apostolic Reformation, which is a loosely connected network of men and women who call themselves apostles and prophets. These self-proclaimed divine emissaries claim that God speaks to them uniquely, and they claim authority over other people based on these grounds.

Here's another example of the growing fusion throughout the country between religion and politics, in a way that confuses the two as one and the same rather than understanding them as separate but enhanced by one another if cross-pollinated in healthy ways. This is audio of an event this past July 1 in Atlanta, Georgia, in which two major figures in the NAR -- Lance Wallnau and Dutch Sheets, along with two other men, Mario Murillo and Hank Kunnemman, according to Jennifer Cohn of the Bucks County Beacon -- lead an audience in a vow to take over the U.S. government and impose a theocracy.

Philip S. Gorski is an expert on Christian nationalism. He is the author of "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy," along with Samuel L. Perry, a professor at Oklahoma University. Gorski is a sociology professor at Yale University and is the author of American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump and American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.

Gorski has written this of Christian nationalism: it is "political idolatry dressed as religious orthodoxy."

We talk about the ways that sometimes the term is used imprecisely to condemn anyone who is a Christian, and I ask him to help us explain the ways that political extremism, especially the growing willingness to discard democracy and pursue authoritarianism, can be motivated by this belief system.

You can also check out David French's interview with Paul D. Miller about this topic here.

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I don't know if I've ever read a book quite like John Blake's "More than I Imagine."

The subtitle is: "What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew"

John is a senior writer at CNN. In this conversation, John and I talk about:

• his very difficult childhood growing up in West Baltimore in the 60's and 70's
• how he grew up disliking white people even though his mother was white, in part because he was told after his mom disappeared that her family disliked black people
• how meeting his mother at age 17 for the first time began to broaden his understanding of racial difference
• his view that facts don't change people, relationships do
• the point that an emphasis on relationships does not mean policy changes aren't necessary, or that everything can be fixed through relationships or interpersonal kindness
• his wild ghost story
• his roller coaster faith journey, and how interracial churches were the demonstration of faith's reality he needed to believe in Christianity
• how there was a "golden age" of racial integration in America's schools from the early 70's to the late 80's, but how America believed a lie that it wasn't working and how we have now resegregated to 1968 levels, much of that due to our own choices
• how he believes racial integration is crucial to how our country grows stronger, and how our pulling apart and into racial segregation is causing many of our problems

This book is a great, great read. John is a great writer, and his story is incredibly personal and well told. It's riveting.

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I've interviewed Yascha Mounk about his book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which was released this week.

"Mounk has told the story of the Great Awokening better than any other writer who has attempted to make sense of it," The Washington Post wrote in a review.

Yascha's book says that we can reach across our differences and understand one another, and that we need to make the effort to do so, through conversation, debate, and relationship. I was not aware of the degree to which some progressive writers and intellectuals have argued that such mutual understanding is not even possible, and so they have discouraged the pursuit.

It's hard for me to imagine a world in which we do not at least try to understand and appreciate one another, even those with whom we have profound differences. That effort is at the heart of a free and prosperous society, in my mind.

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I talked last week with Yuval Levin about the House Speaker fight and what lessons we might draw from it. This week I've got a different angle on the problems in Congress, and how they might be fixed.

House Republicans who blocked Kevin McCarthy’s ascension to the speakership repeated a mantra during the four-day leadership fight that ended after several rounds of dealmaking: Congress is “broken,” they said.

It can sound like a talking point, one that’s been recycled year after year to bash the other side. It's a reliable fundraising tactic.

But as the right-wing Republicans stood under the bright glare of the TV lights on the House floor each day, a dozen other House members sat scattered around the room, having just spent four years working to address some of the same problems.

It may be news to many Americans that it’s not a partisan idea to think Congress needs fixing. It’s not just ultraconservative Republicans who believe it’s necessary. Democrats do too.

Members of both parties even have some of the same ideas about how to do this — and finding consensus took years and happened away from the spotlight.

I spoke to the two congressman who ran a committee -- the Select Committee on Modernizing Congress -- that ended up issuing nearly 200 recommendations for how to fix Congress. So far, 45 have been fully implemented. Another 87 have been partially implemented.

Rep. Derek Kilmer is from Tacoma, Washington. He's a Democrat and he chaired the committee, after it was created in 2019. Rep. William Timmons was the top Republican on the panel. He's from northwest South Carolina, around Greenville and Spartanburg, which is one the more conservative parts of the state.

So a Democrat from the Seattle suburbs and a Republican from the deep red South somehow figured out how to work with one another. What's everyone else's excuse?

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Paul D. Miller is currently a professor of global politics and security at Georgetown University, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He worked at the National Security Council under Presidents Bush and Obama, and was a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army prior to that.

Miller's book is "The Religion of American Greatness: What's Wrong with Christian Nationalism."

There are all kinds of books out there on Christian nationalism. But what I like about Paul is that he's coming to this topic as someone who has spent most of his life as a conservative Christian. He's making a very robust case for why Christian nationalism is a bad idea, but he's doing so, as he writes in his book, "because of my patriotism and my Christian faith, not despite them."

And because Miller comes from inside evangelical Christianity, he's careful to avoid painting with too broad a brush. He doesn't accuse any Christian involved in political activism of pushing Christian nationalism. And he also doesn't say that someone who supports Christian nationalism, or who believes that America is a Christian nation, is a fascist, an authoritarian, or a theocrat who wants the country to be governed by the 10 commandments.

At the same time, Miller is quite clear in his book that nationalism usually leads to authoritarianism. He takes on nationalism first, and engages in this book with the arguments of the chief proponents of nationalism, such as R.R. Reno and Yoram Hazony. And only after doing that does Miller move on to addressing the beliefs of Christian nationalists.

"Patriotism—an affectionate, open gratitude for the blessings of our political life here—is a virtue, which is why is it so important to distinguish it from the vice of nationalism," Miller writes. "But America is not a chosen nation, it is not the 'nation whose God is the Lord,' (Psalm 33:12) and Americans are not the 'people who are called by my name,' of 2 Chronicles 7:14. All Christians should join in that affirmation."

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Sara Billups is a Seattle-based writer whose book Orphaned Believers is out January 24. "In the wake of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, many young evangelicals found themselves untethered, disillusioned, and—ultimately—orphaned as they grappled with the legalistic, politically co-opted churches of their youth and embarked on a search for a more loving, more biblical expression of the faith and discipleship taught by Jesus," she writes.

You can order the book here.

Sara and I are fellow travelers in some very cool ways. We both grew up in evangelical families, we both questioned a lot about faith and evangelical culture (separate things), we both are fighting to hold on to faith, and we are both putting out books about this journey. And our books are coming out three months apart. Pretty amazing, since we didn't know each other at all before this.

Sara is about as authentic and sincere as they come. She has some challenging things to say to American evangelicals. And often, evangelicals dismiss criticism because they say the person who levied the critique is "deconstructing," or in their view, isn't really even a Christian anymore. Good luck doing that with Sara.

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Journalist Bonnie Kristian joins to discuss her new book, "Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community."

"We've spent forty years dramatically increasing how much information the average person encounters daily, and we've made no effort to equip ourselves to handle that shift," Bonnie writes.

"So now … we have this deep confusion around what is knowable and what is true and who is trustworthy.”

 

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Karen Swallow Prior is the author of multiple books, including On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. Her new book is called The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It's out August 8 from Brazos Press.

She is a professor of English literature and a popular speaker and writer. Karen's new book argues that "so much ... that what evangelicals uncritically assume is 'biblical' turns out to be simply Victorian." She explains here why the Victorian age, in particular, has had such a formative impact on American Christianity.

The book unpacks how numerous major themes, ideas and emphases in American evangelicalism -- such as revival, conversion, rapture, improvement, sentimentality, and empire -- have their roots in the culture and the literature of 19th century Britain.

Karen is a spirited conversation partner and a really joyful champion of reading and writing and language, and she has been evolving herself over the past several years in her views of American evangelicalism and faith itself, and we talk about that as well here.

Karen really does come from inside evangelicalism. She's taught at Liberty University. She's tried extremely hard to be positive and affirming of as much as she can. But she talks here about how there is a tendency inside conservative Christianity to discourage difficult questions or criticism that breeds a "gullibility" that she says provides endless grist for the "evangelical industrial mill."

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Tim Alberta's new book: The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age of Extremism, is a sobering look at the results in history when a religious movement morphs into a political movement, and allows its identity to be taken over by political imperatives and goals.

Alberta's book documents the spread of Christian Trumpism, aided and abetted by conflict profiteers who have made "fear and hatred a growth strategy" inside the evangelical subculture for decades.

But Alberta also writes that, to his surprise, he found evidence that the doomsday industrial complex has been "floundering" more recently and that "somewhere along the line their momentum had stalled."

Alberta details the way that Russell Moore, Curtis Chang, David and Nancy French and others have begun to try to unite, connect and organize the many disparate and isolated members of the American church who do not worship a political leader or give blind allegiance to a political party.

Time will tell if this is accurate and durable. But Alberta's book is a remarkable work of journalism. Tim also tells his own story of loss, heartbreak, and trying to come to grips with the moment in which we find ourselves.

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Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) represents Maryland in the U.S. Senate. He was in the middle of the fight over the debt ceiling in 2011, as a member of the House. That was the first of several fiscal fights over those years. Now, we're back in another debt ceiling showdown, and I talked with Van Hollen mostly about that. If you want to read what I wrote about this interview, you can click here.

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This week's podcast interview (audio above) is with Ruy Teixeira, about his new book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.

It is an argument that both parties have been co-opted by big business. It spends all its time blaming the Democrats for their part in this, but that's because the authors believe the Democrats used to be the party of the working person, and that it can and should be again. They also view the Republican party, or at least large swaths of it, as a threat to democracy.

They are interested in Democrats winning elections, and winning elections is an issue of math. And they believe, based on quite a bit of statistical evidence and history, that the Democratic party has alienated key elements of the country that they need to win elections, both by losing touch with working class people on economics, and on social issues.

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Andrew is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com) at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Here’sAndrew’s Substack

His first book in 2020, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, with Samuel Perry, was a data-heavy sociological book that was, in their words, "the first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States."

Andrew's new book, American Idolatry, is a more personal look at Christian nationalism. It's still written with the rigor of an academic, but it conveys Andrew's personal convictions about what the Christian faith teaches and asks of its adherents, and how Christian nationalism "betrays the gospel and threatens the church."

Andrew is a Christian who writes of his upbringing in small-town conservative America, going to church every week. And he says that when he learned the history of Emperor Constantine, he wondered "was it God's plan all along to win over the most powerful person in the world at that time to ... help Christianity flourish?" And he also wondered, "Why didn't Jesus use this same tactic and embrace imperial power?"

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A new book, "The Big Break" by Washington Post feature writer Ben Terris, is a story of how many institutions in Washington are failing those within them. But it's also a cautionary tale of how the idealism and passion of youth is being squandered in today's politics by our focus on individualism and our deemphasis on institutions.

Ben's book traces the story of several characters over the period of 2021 and 2022, as Washington and the country grappled with the aftermath of the Trump presidency and struggled to understand what was normal now, in a post-Trump politics.

Ben is a fantastic writer who takes us inside the lives of these characters. This book is an incredible illustration of some of the key lessons this podcast has been probing for years. It's out June 6, next Tuesday.

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Shannon Harris is on the podcast this week. We talk about her new book The Woman they Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife

I have a particular interest in this book because it's a behind the scenes look at the culture of the church I grew up in: Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland. There is national relevance for Shannon's story, however, because she was married to Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, for 21 years. Josh's book was a national best-seller and shaped the romantic and sexual lives of countless evangelical Christians. Josh and Shannon divorced in 2019, which was big enough news at the time to be written up by CNN.

I asked Shannon:

• who she wrote the book for
• how she thinks about the idea that some will not listen to anything she says because she doesn't believe everything they do
• the ways in which the church we both spent years in taught us to distrust our intuition and our gut
• about her account of the sidelining and erasure of women in a religious subculture

I read this book very quickly. It's well-written, highly readable, and written in very short chapters. I also think Shannon deals with delicate stories involving other people — especially the leaders from our church — with a deft and tasteful touch.

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Nobody has covered the Stanford free speech incident more closely than David Lat. He's a legal affairs writer at his Substack, Original Jurisdiction.

David is a Harvard undergrad and a Yale law school graduate who has a fascinating backstory. He was originally an assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted federal crimes under former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, who of course went on to become governor of New Jersey and ran for president in 2016.

We talk about the details of the Stanford free speech incident, and why David thinks the defense of free speech by Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez is such a significant milestone, and a potential turning point in the debate.

At the end we discuss whether the "heckler's veto" that Dean Martinez said made the Stanford students unprotected speech might also be a way of thinking about what Peter Pomerantsev has called "censorship by noise." That's the way that authoritarians and bad actors in free societies try to "flood the zone with shit," as Steve Bannon so memorably put it, to make it impossible for truth to be distinguished from falsehood.

You can read my summary of the Stanford incident at Yahoo News here.

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Large numbers of Americans are unhappy with the idea of a Biden vs Trump rematch, polls show, but both the Democratic and Republican parties appear to be paralyzed, unable to do anything about it.There’s a reason why.Both parties are shells of their former selves, and strong political parties are the foundation of a healthy democracy, many political experts agree. For too long Americans have seen political parties as the villains, and individual politicians and voters as the heroes.That thinking has to change if American democracy is going to survive, Lee Drutman argues in a new study.

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