New American Politics Podcasts

Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessarily map onto partisan affiliation. What explains this drastic shift? Patrick J. Charles charts the rise of gun rights activism from the early twentieth century through the 1980 presidential election, …

Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warning systems were not enough to avert the COVID-19 disaster. In The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough (Georgetown UP, 2023), Erik J. Dahl demonstrates that understanding how int…

Is feminism compatible with progress? Reactionary feminist Mary Harrington thinks not. In this interview, she discusses the history of feminism, her own journey from proponent to radical opponent of progress, the impact of technology on women and society, and, of course, her new book, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery, 2023). Mary Harrington is a …

As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the clash between two major points of view. On one side, some believed labor should accept and apply the ascendant tenets of scientific…

Writer and educator Marcus Gilroy-Ware (After the Fact?, Filling the Void) speaks with Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner about their new book You Are Here. Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the la…

With the Supreme Court poised to potentially outlaw race-conscious admissions, Affirmative Action may soon be on the chopping block. What will be the legacy of this half-century-old policy? Jason Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, discusses affirmative action's impact both on the black communit…

What is the American Right, where does it come from, and how has it changed over time? Journalist and author Matthew Continetti discusses his recent book: The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. Continetti is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and was formerly the founding editor and the editor-in-chief of the Wa…

The overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a flurry of commentary and wondering, "Where next?" But, it also begs deeper questions: what is the history of abortion and sex-positivity within the feminist movement, and how did Roe affect our views on sex? Feminist legal scholar Dr. Erika Bachiochi is the founder and director of the Wollstonecraft Proje…

With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in higher education finance. Beth discusses the issue of student debt, and what the Biden relief plan will and will not achieve. You can find more information about Dr. …

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women involved in massive resistance. The book focuses on segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Charleston, South Caroli…

Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard built a national and international movement of women that campaigned for prohibition, women's rights, economic justice, and numerous other social jus…

What are American conservatives trying to conserve? What is Natural Law, and how can we know it? Is there a single "good life"? Robert P. George, Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, joins the show to answer these questions and others in the Season One finale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f…

Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony ('86) discusses the Enlightenment, the American Founding, his latest book: Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and Conservatism's past and future. Dr. Hazony is the President of the Herzl Institute, based in Jerusalem, and the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute based in Washington…

In the final episode of this series, Brandon Terry, political theorist and African American Studies scholar at Harvard discusses the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. Terry is the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK, published in 2018 by MIT Press and Boston Review and co-edited To Shape a New World, alongside Tommie Shelby, which was published i…

Kathryn McGarr’s City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (U Chicago Press, 2022) explores foreign policy journalism in Washington during and after World War II—a time supposedly defined by the press’s blind patriotism and groupthink. McGarr reveals, though, that D.C. reporters then were deeply cynical about gove…

Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life's necessities, those basic conditions for the "pursuit of happiness." For others, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace--nothing more. As Mark Paul exp…

Incommunicados is a collection of unanswered letters to public officials and other notable figures from iconoclasts Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein. The project was edited by Francesco Desantis, Outreach Coordinator at the Center for Study of Responsive Law. This booklet and Ralph Nader’s introduction meticulously document the self-ruinous disdain by Co…

Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine that costs $1 trillion operate. Yet time and time again, the US government gets it wrong on critical issues. So what can be done? Enter bestselling author Thom Shanker and defense expert Andrew Hoehn. With decades of national security experti…

The COVID-19 lab leak theory went from being dismissed as mere misinformation, to now a credible matter of debate amongst media, scientific, and intelligence organizations. What’s changed, and what does this teach us about science journalism and science communication? Is it time to let go of our obsession over “misinformation”? First, Jacobin staff…

In this series of interviews from The MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today. In this episode Carol A. Stabile discusses her book The Broadcast 41 (published in April of last year by Goldsmiths Press.) In her book, Carol traces the his…

America’s religious and political public forum is no longer confined to debates between liberals (be they Catholics or Protestants) and socially conservative evangelicals and traditional Catholics—with atheists condemning all of the above. There is now among some Catholic intellectuals and academics a movement called integralism that calls for the …

How do we explain the rise of populism, extremism, and conspiracy theory in the Americas and Europe? Why do members of a society come to feel this strong sense of discontent with their political system – so deep and broad that they believe the system to be irreparably broken? Scholars have explained these phenomena using two main models. The first …

On September 23, 2021, the James Madison Program and the Ethics and Public Policy Center hosted a discussion of Robert P. George and Ryan T. Anderson's 2019 National Affairs essay, "The Baby and the Bathwater." George and Anderson delivered remarks and then spoke with Alexandra DeSanctis and Antonin Scalia about the central themes of the essay, and…

Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) explores the origins of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean. It investigates these government-sponsored programs as the unexplored consequence of the history of enslaved labor, Japanese American incarceration, the New …

Did the sexual revolution create identity politics? Why are young men and women so unhappy? Mary Eberstadt, Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center and Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute, joins the show to answer these questions and others and discuss her new book, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Re…

In 1943, three books appeared that changed American politics forever: Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Together, they laid the groundwork for what became the modern libertarian movement. Even more striking were the women behind these books: Paterson, a brilliant …

How are hiring and admissions decisions made in the hard sciences if not by merit? What are the risks of allowing science to be politicized? Professors Dorian Abbot (University of Chicago), Anna Krylov (University of Southern California), David Romps (University of California, Berkeley), and Bernhardt Trout (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), …

What did Aristotle and Shakespeare mean to Harry Jaffa, and what might they mean to America? Can extremism be prudent? What is the nature of the crisis facing the West today? Glenn Ellmers, senior fellow with the Claremont Institute, joins the show to discuss his new book, The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America. Learn more a…

Americans are told that they are divided and polarized, but is it true? No Politics, No Religion?: How America's Code of Conduct Conceals Our Unity (Political Animal Press, 2022) put this proposition to the test - with surprising results. "No Politics, No Religion" is a common saying that discussions of politics and religion should be avoided at th…

Questions about the nature of the American founding undergird our fraught political discourse: was the American Revolution justified? How religious were the Founding Fathers? How should we deal with the fact that they owned slaves? What is Christian Nationalism? Mark David Hall, current Garwood Visiting Fellow with us at the James Madison Program a…

In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement—than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. The…

Is libertarianism a progressive doctrine, or a reactionary one? Does libertarianism promise to liberate the poor and the marginalized from the yoke of state oppression, or does talk of "equal liberty" obscure the ways in which libertarian doctrines serve the interests of the rich and powerful? Through an examination of the history of libertarianism…

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.--and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us …

Conor Rose reads from Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism. This extract, taken from the opening of the book, offers insight into the Black Lives Matter movement as well as new forms of predatory policing, informed by the 2008 financial crash. In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary inc…

Steve Fainaru and his brother Mark Fainaru-Wada wrote a bestselling and award-winning book (and accompanying PBS documentary series) about the NFL coverup of concussion trauma, League of Denial. This conversation inaugurates an occasional Recall this Book series on collaborative work: who does it well, what makes it succeed, why can't grumpy isolat…

Recent racist anti-immigration policies, from the border wall to the Muslim ban, have left many Americans wondering: How did we get here? In White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall (Beacon Press, 2021), Dr. Reece Jones reveals the painful answer: although the US is often myth…

In Co-Illusion, writer and critic David Levi Strauss, tracks the rise of Donald Trump and the media landscape that warped around him. In this interview he discusses the language of Trump, the forthcoming election, and the changing relationship between image and truth. The political crisis that sneaked up on America--the rise of Trump and Trumpism--…

What is academic freedom for? What are the greatest threats to academic freedom today? Should Critical Race Theory be taught on college campuses? What about in K-12 classrooms? Keith Whittington, Chairman of the Academic Freedom Alliance's Academic Committee and the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, joins the sh…

The Emergence of Arthur Laffer: The Foundations of Supply-Side Economics in Chicago and Washington, 1966–1976 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) explores the origins of Arthur Laffer’s economic theories and how they became a part of mainstream economic policy. Utilizing interviews and archival material, Laffer’s life is traced from his early education thro…

Robert P. George is the indispensable man of American social conservatism. The Princeton professor is a scholar of such intellectual power that he almost single-handedly rescued the anti-abortion movement from the fringes of the American sociopolitical and legal landscape in the 1990s when the secular left assumed that the reign of abortion on dema…

Is the Declaration of Independence unique? Does the Declaration prescribe a form of government? What is the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution? Allen C. Guelzo, Director of the James Madison Program's Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, joins the show to answer these questions and more. Guelzo's essay "Harry and me" can…

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough” were the infamous words U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in 1927. In Buck v. Bell, an almost unanimous Court upheld a Virginia law allowing the sterilization of people the state found to be “socially inadequate” and “feebleminded.” This landmark decision allowed the eugenics move…

What does the future hold for the Republican Party? What are the greatest challenges facing America today? How many pull-ups should a young man be able to do? Congressman Mike Gallagher joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

Helen Andrews, senior editor at The American Conservative, joins Madison's Notes to discuss her new book, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesAf New Books Network

What is the relationship between America's Founding principles and her foreign policy? What are unalienable rights and how do we know they exist? How have other nations responded to the final report of the U.S. Department of State's Commission on Unalienable Rights? Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and Mary Ann Glendon, Chair of the Commission …

What made George Washington the "greatest man in the world"? What is his legacy outside the United States? What did "honor" mean to America's Founding Fathers, and why was it so important to them? Craig Bruce Smith, author of American Honor: The Creation of the Nation's Ideals During the Revolutionary Era, joins the show to answer these questions a…

From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracke…

America was born in an age of political revolution throughout the Atlantic world, a period when the very definition of 'nation' was transforming. Benjamin E. Park traces how Americans imagined novel forms of nationality during the country's first five decades within the context of European discussions taking place at the same time. Focusing on thre…

John Cribb is the author of Old Abe, an historical novel which former Vice President Mike Pence says is the "best book on President Lincoln" he has ever read. John joins to show to discuss the book, the importance of heroes, the "great man" approach to history, Facebook's attempts to "cancel" his book, and more! You can find Cribb's essay "Facebook…

"In other words, like David Foster Wallace — who celebrates McCain for his display of “‘moral authority’” and commitment to “‘service’ and ‘sacrifice’ and ‘honor’” — Clinton responds to the extremes of free-market ideology by imagining that “American community” can be rebuilt through the practice of what he calls “old values,” or what Hillary Clint…