Zooming In at The UnPopulist

Welcome to Zooming In. I’m Shikha Dalmia, and my guest today is Francis Fukuyama, whom his friends call Frank. He’s quite simply one of the most serious intellectuals of our time. He has studied and worked with some of the biggest and most brilliant names in modern political thought: Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield, Samuel Huntington and Seymour Martin Lipset, even Jacques Derrida, briefly in Paris.What makes him so unusual is that his thinking has been shaped not just by deep study of political philosophy, but by hands-on experience of statecraft and policy implementation. That includes analyzing Soviet policy at RAND, serving at the State Department, and advising governments on how to build states that actually work, including, apparently, Muammar Gaddafi.He’s now a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Frank’s first book, The End of History and the Last Man, made him about as close to a household name as anyone who writes about thymos can possibly get. Its argument was that with the collapse of communism, liberal democracy had emerged as the final form of human government with no serious ideological rival left standing.When the original essay ran in The National Interest in 1989, legend has it that copies at one Washington newsstand outsold everything, pornography included. But what I admire most about Frank is something rarer than fame. He’s willing to rethink his core assumptions and do so openly.Few intellectuals of his stature ever admit they got something wrong. But Frank does it to a fault, because of his deep intellectual humility. Frank is also a dear family friend. I met him through my husband, who, like Frank, studied under both Bloom and Mansfield. Frank has also been a friend of ISMA and The UnPopulist right from the start, and he is a LibCon veteran. He’s a man of eclectic passions: woodworker, furniture maker, computer builder, amateur coder, photographer, and drone pilot.Since Trump arrived on the scene, Frank has been among the staunchest defenders of liberal democracy against the rising tide of authoritarianism, both at home and abroad. All of which brings us to his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man. It traces his intellectual journey across five decades.It begins with his family history, including his Japanese American relatives’ internment during World War II, and moved through his years with Allan Bloom, his time in government, the end of history moment, and his break with conservatism after the Iraq War. It ends with his reflections on why liberal democracy is under siege. It is such a rich account, touching on so many big ideas, that when I sat down to prepare for this conversation, I genuinely didn’t know where to begin. So we'll begin with the news. Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTubeGuest host Jonathan Rauch talks with Alexandre Lefebvre, a political philosopher at the University of Sydney and author of Liberalism as a Way of Life, about his argument that liberalism has become far more than a political system. Its core values of freedom, fairness, and reciprocity, Lefebvre contends, now shape how many secular people live, love, and understand themselves, and they are rich enough to answer most of what people look for in a moral tradition. The two discuss the postliberal critique from figures like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, whether liberal values can sustain a life without religion, and Lefebvre’s Rawls-inspired “spiritual exercises” for helping liberals live up to their creed. Rauch argues that the Founders saw liberalism as dependent on outside sources of virtue, above all religious faith, and that American Christianity’s drift from liberal democratic values is a big part of today’s crisis. The conversation closes with Lefebvre’s next project, The Good Life State, which examines how governments in Hungary, China, India, Israel, and the United States are getting back into the business of promoting a vision of the good life.Thanks for checking out The UnPopulist! Subscribe to support our project.© The UnPopulist, 2026Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTubeWe welcome Radley Balko to Zooming In. Radley publishes The Watch, an excellent newsletter that does deep dives not just into individuals mistreated by the criminal justice system, but also into the abuses being perpetrated in the name of immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term.Thanks for checking out The UnPopulist! Subscribe to support our project.Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTubeBerny Belvedere: Renée DiResta, thanks for joining us on Zooming In, our flagship podcast here at The UnPopulist. You’ve been on before a couple of times. You’ve done podcasts with us, you’ve spoken at LibCon—in fact, during our first LibCon, LibCon 2024, your book generated intense interest. It seemed to be the book of the summer. You remember that?Renée DiResta: I do, thanks so much.Belvedere: It felt like at every other session, some panelist would say something like, “and to explore this further, I really recommend Renée DiResta’s new book, which is just wonderful.” Right? I don’t know why I did that in a nerd voice. Your endorsers are wonderful people.But Renée, welcome again. I want to dive right in. You have a new report out. It’s put out by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was written by you and two co-authors, Rachel Kleinfeld and Margot Treadwell. That’s a powerful lineup. We’ve run Rachel’s work in our pages before and it’s top notch. The report is fantastic. It did not disappoint. For anyone interested in how the broader world of news and opinion discourse works today, it’s immediately one of the most useful resources to pick up. And it’s especially useful for practitioners, for people who work in the space, like we do.But to help with some scene setting, can you tell us about the report in broad brushstrokes? We’ll then narrow in from there.DiResta: So I think about this as report part two. Last year, in September, almost one year to the day, we put out a provocation saying: “institutions need to change how they communicate in order to compete in the new media environment.” And we wrote a framing on why that was, on how social media was no longer this niche thing that those people over there did. If you wanted to reach the public, this is where people are—and you have to reach them where they are and in a manner that they find appealing. The way that you communicate is just different now.That attracted a lot of attention and it got us a ton of inbound, particularly from philanthropy, because we were also telling philanthropists you have to change how you think about outputs and outcomes that matter. For a lot of academics and others, participation in the public conversation is, if not discouraged, it’s not really encouraged. It doesn’t move the needle for your tenure committee, that sort of thing. How could philanthropists shift the thinking on why communicating to the public actually was critical? We got a ton of inbound on it and the question we got most often was: “How?”This report is the how. The basic premise is that most Americans now get their information and form their opinions through creators, podcasts, Substacks, group chats. Most traditional institutions have only minimal engagement or presence in those spaces. So that ecosystem runs on a very different model of legitimacy. People are following people, not institutions. They’re following people that they find appealing or relatable. Somebody coming to you from their kitchen. Credentials and institutional polish actually can read as almost a sort of distance now.Those are the elites saying that stuff from over there, whereas this person is just talking to me in their kitchen. They’re real.We write about how fact-based institutions have often thought about this shift to social as a repackaging job. “All right, how do I take my massive PDF”—and, by the way, this report is a massive PDF—“how do I take that and put out a couple screenshots on social media or generate a reel?” They see it more as engaging when you have something to release, when you have just put something out. So it’s very self-serving. They’re not using social media as a communicator in an ongoing conversation where they’re having a back and forth with their audience. They’re using it as a broadcast tool and they’re reformulating the thing that they wanted to broadcast into a format that nominally works but is missing that dialogue.So our guide argues that it’s a strategy problem—and that CEOs and boards have to own this. They have to think about it, not as the thing that happens after you’ve done your work, but as an active part of your ongoing relationship to the public. We framed the report as a series of questions to guide that thinking. We did a bunch of case studies, really spanning the communication ecosystem we have. How Jon Haidt turned some of his work into a movement. We have how Turning Point became a juggernaut. We have some of the Mamdani campaign stuff. Not endorsing any position there—but saying, “here’s some interesting stuff that you can learn from how this group strategically chose to engage the public through these means.”Belvedere: I thought the guide did a really great job of bringing in real world examples. You also brought up David French and the reception he received. His case is a fascinating one because of what it represents and what it says about the subcommunity that he had that parting of the ways with, and the way they gate-kept him from continued access to it.But I want to pick up on something that you mentioned in passing just now in your broad overview. There’s a line in the report that really struck me as I was reading it. As you put it, credentials and institutional polish—the CV virtues—now read as distance and disconnect rather than authority, which is what it used to read as. Do you think that’s a permanent rewiring of how trust just works now?DiResta: It’s an interesting question. Trust and authoritativeness are distinct. You trust your neighbor without necessarily thinking they’re an authority. You just find them a trustworthy person. You would give them your keys. They can feed your dog, that sort of thing. And it doesn’t matter what they do or what their professional credentials are. What matters is just that you have a relationship. You feel that this person is somebody who would support you if you need it, that they’re going to level with you. They’re going to tell you the truth, even if you might not want to hear it.That’s the idea of trust as something that is deeper than expertise. Sure, it goes hand in hand with it at times. We would like it to be tightly coupled. We want people to trust experts, but the idea of relatability instead is: “Why would this person who seems just like me lie to me? Why would they deceive me? What do they get out of it?” Whereas people sincerely believe that elite institutions are working to serve their own agenda, and that is often seen as being at odds with the average, everyday person. You see this in politics when people ask, “Why is this politician talking about this thing, performing this action, when I just care about putting food on the table for my family?” You see that gap in what lands and resonates with people versus what people in elite or institutional positions want to talk about.Sometimes this is a disconnect that gets lamented in liberal spaces, particularly as, “well, if only they listened, they would understand that my policy proposal for this thing does help them 10 degrees and five years later.” But in the immediate here and now, it’s that question of: Do I trust the person who’s speaking to me? Do they seem just like me?I had this experience when I was a new mom. I was one of the first in my friend group to have kids. I didn’t know what to do. I was living across the country from my family and didn’t have much support. So I turned to the internet, right? Who are the people who are going to help me understand what I’m supposed to do with this baby? How do I make him sleep? How do I make him eat? How do I not screw this up? I think it’s a very personal experience that a lot of people have where that sense that reading a PDF on an institutional website is not the same thing as somebody sitting there with you taking the time. There’s a phrase that I think it was Jeff Jarvis who once said to me in conver… Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

Welcome to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. “Populism” is one of those words that gets used constantly, but it’s rarely pinned down. Everyone agrees we’re living in a populist era, but almost no one agrees on what that means or how you’d measure it. For the past two years, ISMA, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, has been trying to do exactly that: a national survey built around specific, testable definitions of populist attitudes, first fielded on the eve of the 2024 election, and now repeated in June of 2026.The second round results just came back, and the headline finding is a bit of a surprise. Trump’s hardcore populist base has shrunk by about a third.To walk through what the survey found and what it tells us, ISMA policy fellow and The UnPopulist's senior editor, Andy Craig, is joined by the man who designed and ran it, Tom Shull, editor at large of The UnPopulist and ISMA’s director of survey research.Thanks for checking out The UnPopulist! Subscribe to support our project.© The UnPopulist, 2026Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTubeWelcome to this special live (of sorts) joint episode of the liberalism.org show and Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I am Aaron Ross Powell, senior director of liberal projects at the Institute for Humane Studies, and I’m joined today by this esteemed panel. We have two of the most thoughtful columnists at The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie and David French. And we have Harvard University’s Danielle Allen.© The UnPopulist, 2026Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy. Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

In this episode of Zooming In, The UnPopulist's editor-in-chief, Shikha Dalmia, talks with Greg Sargent of The New Republic about whether America has truly turned against immigration—or whether Trump's 2024 victory has been badly misread. Sargent argues that the election reflected a thermostatic, economy-driven backlash rather than a durable cultural shift, and that the past year and a half of mass deportations, ethnic purges, and high-profile cases like Kilmar Abrego Garcia's has snapped majorities back toward a consensus favoring legal pathways, humane treatment, and border security—but not Stephen Miller's vision of ethnic homogeneity. Along the way, Dalmia and Sargent dig into the thwarted history of comprehensive immigration reform, why a radical minority in the GOP has repeatedly blocked it, and the split among Democrats between the "salience bros" who counsel silence on immigration and those who see an opening to win the argument on favorable terms. They examine how figures like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico make the connection between immigration and authoritarianism in different registers, take apart David Frum's "if liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will" thesis, and close on why both believe the country's pro-immigrant, "shining city on a hill" ethos runs deeper than the populist rage of the last decade.© The UnPopulist, 2026Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

Welcome to Zooming In. I’m Berny Belvedere for The UnPopulist. The World Cup is finally here! It’s hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s the largest World Cup in history. On Thursday, Mexico kicked off the competition by beating South Africa 2-0, and the U.S. followed that up the next day with possibly its best-ever performance in the World Cup, a thoroughly convincing smackdown of Paraguay. Both Mexico and the U.S. started really strong and have their fanbases dreaming of World Cup glory.On Wednesday, the eve of the cup, I sat down with León Krauze, contributing columnist at The Washington Post and host of the Boca de León podcast, to discuss the great tournament. Our focus wasn’t so much the soccer aspect of it all—but rather how this World Cup, thanks to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant maximalism, has in some key ways betrayed its own promise.What makes León the perfect guest for this episode is that not only has he extensively covered the sport of soccer, including the history of Mexican soccer—but he’s also a leading commentator on U.S.-Latin American relations.In our time together, we covered a number of incidents that are quite troubling. A FIFA referee from Somalia was detained at a U.S. airport and sent home. Iran’s federation had its ticket allocation pulled days before their first match—and the squad has had to relocate its base in Mexico. The acting ICE director [Todd Lyons] told Congress he wouldn’t rule out arrests at stadiums, contradicting the assurance that Secretary of State [Marco Rubio] had given Miami’s own host committee a week earlier. And Amnesty International published a report calling the United States, on the eve of the world’s party, a country facing a “human rights emergency.”There was so much to cover we didn’t even get to everything. Iran’s players were issued visas only after being warned not to abuse the system, then ordered off American soil the same day as each of their matches. These are professional athletes that the U.S. is telling: “Don’t stay the night on U.S. soil.” In another instance, a Moroccan player was held up and nearly denied entry at a U.S. airport, reportedly due to his father’s appearance—specifically, his beard. Although DHS says ICE won’t be deployed for immigration enforcement at venues, its new secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said before the cup that “ICE is always going to do immigration enforcement.” Germany’s football federation has actually issued an official advisory to its own players to stay quiet on politics at this tournament. And looming over all of it: FIFA, under Trump’s personal friend Gianni Infantino, invented a “FIFA Peace Prize” out of thin air and handed it to Trump, who was sad over not winning the Nobel Peace Prize.In our conversation, we hope the following comes through: We couldn’t be more excited for our favorite sporting event to get underway, but we couldn’t be more disappointed in how the build up to this tournament has in some ways proceeded in direct contradiction to how it was initially sold.We hope you enjoy.Thanks for reading The UnPopulist! Subscribe to support our project.© The UnPopulist, 2026Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

Welcome to Zooming In. I'm Berny Belvedere, senior editor of The UnPopulist. I'm joined today by Raymond Roberts, author of A Democratic and Republican Faith, a theologically serious and hopeful book that recovers what authentic Christian faith actually demands of its adherents, at precisely the moment when so much of American Christianity has lost the plot. Today we discuss what a genuinely God-centered public theology looks like, why MAGA evangelicalism represents a profound departure from it, and what it might take to find our way back. We hope you enjoy.Thanks for checking out The UnPopulist! Subscribe to support our project.© The UnPopulist, 2026Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe

Our latest installment of The UnPopulist Live took place on Friday, April 24, when senior editor Berny Belvedere sat down with Center for New Liberalism co-founder Jeremiah Johnson and New York City New Liberals political director Tibita Kaneene to discuss NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first 100-plus days in office.What follows is the full video and transcript (lightly edited for flow and clarity) of the conversation. We hope you enjoy.Berny Belvedere: Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Berny Belvedere, senior editor at The UnPopulist. I’m joined by Jeremiah Johnson of the Center for New Liberalism. Jeremiah, tell us about your newsletter.Jeremiah Johnson: I write a blog called Infinite Scroll where I talk about the politics of the social internet—the ways that social media is changing culture and politics and how we discuss things. It’s a little bit unserious nonsense, and a little bit very serious stuff.Belvedere: As all good cultural commentary is, so you’re within the acceptable range. Tibita, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit?Tibita Kaneene: Hi, I’m Tibita Kaneene. I’m the political director of the New York City chapter of the Center for New Liberalism. Belvedere: The topic today is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. As liberals, we’re [naturally] interested in how he’s doing as mayor. I was hoping we could start with something that Mamdani himself said at an event marking his 100 days in office, which was about 10 days ago. I have a quote from Mamdani that sets up the first question I want to think about together with you—on this issue of democratic socialism versus other types of liberalism out there today, like an abundance variant or even more mainstream liberalism.So here are Mamdani’s own words: “On January 1st, I told New Yorkers that City Hall would hold a singular purpose—to make this city belong to more of its people than it did the day before. For 102 days, we have endeavored to do exactly that.” And he cited achievements that he thinks fulfill that claim, such as the opening of new childcare centers and buses running faster. After he did that, he said: “That is the change that government can deliver.” And this is the critical part: “It’s the change that democratic socialism can deliver.” He said: “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist.”Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom Mamdani brought in for that 100-day event, said: “I have been on platforms with hundreds and hundreds of mayors and all kinds of public officials. This is the first time I’ve ever been introduced by someone who talked proudly about democratic socialism.”I want to start on this theme. Thoughts?Kaneene: I think it’s interesting that the two accomplishments he highlighted were delivering actual positive change, abundance type change. More schools, more seats in preschool—the whole idea of abundance is that we should have more good things, and that government should be functional and competent. And then the buses operating better: more and better transit is a pretty fundamental abundance issue. Belvedere: Just to follow up on that point: he promised both faster and free busing, and he’s been able to deliver on one of the two—on “faster,” but not “free.”Kaneene: Yeah. There’s this idea going around: “affordability in the front, abundance in the back.” Affordability is a very popular campaign issue and idea, but it’s also an empirical goal. So once that’s established, to deliver on it you have to focus on consequences as opposed to ideological or rules-based things. You have to actually make the rent cheaper. [It’s not enough] to merely enact policies that can be seen as pro-tenant and anti-landlord—they have to have the effect of making housing better, cheaper, more plentiful. Now that he’s in office, he has to do that. Democratic socialism is a broad idea, but when it gets down to brass tacks and you’re an executive, then you have to actually do things—appoint competent people and enact policies that actually have results. I think that’s what his challenge is, and what he’s doing for the most part.Johnson: The grand rhetorical gestures are what they are, and he has a point of view on how he views the world. I am not a socialist, but if you are going to tell me that I’m going to have a socialist mayor, probably the variant that I would want is what has sometimes been called sewer socialism. This comes from Milwaukee. Generations ago, they had a couple of mayors who called themselves socialist, but rather than focusing on revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, they really focused on civic governance. How do we make the city work better? How do we provide public infrastructure? How do we make the sewers operate without overflowing? And by solving practical problems, they maintained their popularity.That is what I see Mamdani doing, at least in the first 100 days. He’s not been all that focused on the big rhetorical flourishes, the big ideological ideas. He’ll talk about them if he’s asked. He’ll mention it in a speech. But if you’re in New York and you see what’s actually happening and you see the things he’s doing on the ground, a lot of it is just more like: “We’ve got a big sidewalk shed problem and I’m going to tackle it.” Or we had a big multi-week blizzard here in New York and he had a campaign about shoveling the snow faster than it’s ever been shoveled before. Just competent, good governance stuff.I think that’s what’s allowed him to maintain his popularity thus far. The question is, as he moves deeper into his term, past the first 100 days, as he starts to actually focus more and more on the grand ideological projects, the publicly owned grocery stores, the free buses, all these big ideas that he has—are those going to work as well as the more basic stuff has worked? Because no matter what you call it, everybody likes it when city government functions efficiently. What comes after that is not quite as clear.Belvedere: I think a fair assessment of Mamdani would have to include that he is taking a few shots here—not just the kinds of things that might be dismissed as [Band-Aids]. They’ve attempted to put a plan in place for free childcare, and they’re extending that to younger and younger ages—for the first time, two-year-olds are in play for getting free childcare. That’s not a small thing. That’s not like filling a pothole. But he is including enough of that other stuff that makes me think there’s going to be a significant element of incrementalist-style change that he’s going to produce, and then there will be a battle about what is driving that—is some kind of democratic socialist vision driving it, or is this mainstream liberalism or abundance liberalism dressed up as something else?“There’s this idea going around: ‘affordability in the front, abundance in the back.’ Affordability is a very popular campaign issue and idea, but it’s also an empirical goal. So once that’s established, to deliver on it you have to focus on consequences as opposed to ideological or rules-based things. You have to actually make the rent cheaper. [It’s not enough] to merely enact policies that can be seen as pro-tenant and anti-landlord—they have to have the effect of making housing better, cheaper, more plentiful. Now that he’s in office, he has to do that. Democratic socialism is a broad idea, but when it gets down to brass tacks and you’re an executive, then you have to actually do things—appoint competent people and enact policies that actually have results.” — Tibita KaneeneI think all of us invested in the wider Mamdani discourse have to keep a couple of things in mind at all times. First—and this is the thing from which all other evaluative mistakes about Mamdani flow—you have to know that he is committed to the advancement of democratic socialism. It’s not just something he’s flirting with, it’s not something incidental. Time and again, he brings this up. Now, his actions might be different, but we’re just talking about how he’s casting his own story and the… Get full access to The UnPopulist at www.theunpopulist.net/subscribe