Reforming our way to dynamism, with Philip K. Howard

Philip K. Howard is a New York-based lawyer and civic reformer, who across his public career has tilted against the accumulating layers of procedural law and bureaucratic rule that have made it increasingly difficult for Americans to exercise individual initiative, judgment, and accountability. Since the 1995 publication of his bestselling first book, The Death of Common Sense, he has pointed out that the urge to make decision-makers accountable by subjecting them to highly specified rules has paradoxically produced a system that is both unaccountable and paralyzed. In his most recent book, Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America, Howard argues that legal micromanagement has sapped the sources of American dynamism and effective government, fueling populist resentments.  In this podcast discussion, Howard offers qualified approval of the Abundance movement that he in some ways anticipated by decades. But he insists that the pruning of excessive rules and procedures must also be accompanied by restoring a role for human judgement: “It’s not simply having less to comply with. It’s actually re-empowering everybody — the teacher in the classroom, the principal, the head of the school, whoever it happens to be — empowering them to do what’s right.” By the same token, he criticizes Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative for focusing on cutting the things government does but squandering the opportunity to change how the government does things: “There was not even a pretense that they had an idea about how things would work better the day after DOGE. It was just, ‘Look at how much we've cut,’ and then they wildly exaggerated how much they’d cut. Of course, it was all counterproductive…” Howard resists political categorization and his Common Good organization has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations alike, but his tradition of civic liberalism is increasingly homeless in contemporary politics. He acknowledges that some rules and regulations are essential, but he hopes for a government that can restore space for human judgement in a way that can restore both American dynamism and public trust in government efficacy. 

Leah Libresco Sargeant is a Senior Policy Analyst in Family Economic Security at the Niskanen Center as well as a writer and journalist whose work focuses on religion and family policy. She is the author of three books, of which the most recent is The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. In her book, Sargeant argues that liberal feminism — and American culture more generally — champions an ideal of freedom based in autonomy that is poorly suited to human beings as they are. Instead, she advocates for a culture that sees dignity in mutual dependence. Sargeant agrees with feminist critiques from the left that many institutions and structures in society treat women as “defective men,” including the medical research that tests only male patients and the car safety devices that protect male bodies while accidentally injuring female bodies. But she also is critical of a kind of corporate capitalism that sees workers only as economic inputs, and a politics that denies the neediness, vulnerability, and interdependence of humanity. In this podcast discussion, Sargeant lays out the thesis of The Dignity of Dependence. She describes her conversion to Catholicism and the ways in which her experiences as a wife and mother inform her cultural politics. She touches on the global fertility crisis and the paradoxical ways in which it may be driven by prosperity. She further addresses the struggles that many young people have nowadays in dating and forming families, and suggests that they may be helped by social policies (including the Child Tax Credit and baby bonuses) as well as by a greater understanding of the difference between “capstone” and “cornerstone” marriages. And she distinguishes her approach to feminism from other perspectives on both the left and right. She makes clear that as a pro-life feminist she has considerable differences with mainstream feminism, but nonetheless believes it to be “a good-faith tradition of trying to struggle with what it means to be just to women in a world that is often male-normed. It's a tradition that I think has made some serious mistakes and won some significant victories.”

Since our species first emerged on the planet some 300,000 years ago, the overriding problem for most humans has been the struggle for food and shelter. But in 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes foresaw that economic growth (despite the Great Depression) would mean that in a century, the vast majority of people in developed societies would enjoy mass plenty and only a small number of unfortunates would still struggle with material deprivation. This would mean that “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” But Keynes worried that transitioning to this new problem would present huge difficulties for humanity: “there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without dread.”Brink Lindsey, senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, has written a visionary new book addressing Keynes’ conundrum. In The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, Lindsey ponders the paradox that people in developed countries live in conditions of unparalleled wealth, health, and technological progress — and yet most people feel disappointment rather than gratitude at the results. We enjoy an abundance of material goods, yet most people are missing out on the sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging that define human flourishing.In this podcast discussion, Lindsey describes the “triple crisis of capitalism” that has brought material prosperity but also social disintegration, sputtering dynamism, and dysfunctional politics. But he also sees encouraging signs that point toward how mass flourishing might be accomplished in developments that include new technological breakthroughs and the growing Abundance movement. Ultimately he hopes for a future in which people will have closer relationships with each other as well as the natural world, and in which humanity’s drive to explore and understand will reach into the larger universe. “Our destiny is up to us,” he concludes, “and therefore we should make the most of that chance. We ought to aim high.”

When most people think about the 1970s, they’re likely to conjure up images of Watergate, oil shortages, disco, and outrageous hairstyles. When academic political historians have thought about the 1970s, they have tended to see the era largely as one in which the forces of conservatism gained strength, setting the stage for Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 and the subsequent decades of “neoliberalism,” in which both parties tended to agree that market forces needed to be liberated from the heavy hand of government. But a new generation of historians argues that this reading shortchanges many of the Democratic politicians active in the 1970s and the years that followed, particularly the New Liberals. These were the people who wanted the Democratic Party to regain its political momentum by reforming liberalism as well as the party. The New Liberals included intellectuals like Robert Reich and Ira Magaziner, business figures like Felix Rohatyn and Robert Rubin, and politicians including Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and of course Bill Clinton, who arguably brought the New Liberal project to fruition by winning the presidency in 1992. Henry Tonks, a historian at Kenyon College, has written a dissertation reevaluating the New Liberals. He argues that while they did pave the way toward the modern Democratic Party, they didn’t capitulate to Reaganism or repudiate their New Deal heritage. Rather, they tried to reinvent liberalism by adapting it to an economy that was becoming more globalized as well as less industrial and more reliant upon financial services and advanced technology. They embraced industrial policy and worried about whether America was falling behind its commercial rivals, particularly Japan. Tonks argues that while New Liberals didn’t correctly diagnose the changes to the economy in all of its particulars, their policy vision retains considerable relevance to today’s politics — and particularly the discussion around the Abundance movement.

From the 1930s through the early 1960s, roughly half of Americans described themselves as liberals. But in the decades that followed, liberalism has suffered near-continuous reputational decline. The critics, rivals, and enemies of liberalism sought to redefine its public image downward, and nearly all succeeded. Among these opponents were the conservatives around William F. Buckley Jr., who attempted to portray liberalism as a combination of militant secularism and socialism or even communism; while a majority of Americans didn’t buy this definition, Buckley and his confreres succeeded in equating liberalism with leftism, to the point that more than half of Americans tell pollsters that the Democratic Party has become “too liberal.” But actual left-wing critics felt that, on the contrary, postwar liberals had betrayed the radical potential of the New Deal and smothered American society in corporate capitalism and conformist consensus. Black civil rights activists, for their part, came to feel that white liberals were treacherous allies, unwilling to push for true equality if it would threaten their own power and position. Kevin G. Schultz, a professor of History, Catholic Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has researched the descent of liberalism’s reputation across the latter half of the twentieth century and up to the present. Why, he wonders, “have so many people come to hate white liberals, including, perhaps, even white liberals themselves?” He describes this history in his new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals). In this podcast discussion, he concedes that liberalism set itself up for criticism in many ways, but nonetheless concludes that liberalism did not fall of its own weight – it was “assassinated,” as he put it, by its political opponents, who “recognized they could defeat liberalism in America… not by attacking its politics or policies, which generally remained popular,” but instead by “giving it meanings no self-respecting liberal would accept but from which they couldn't successfully escape.” And by mocking the people who upheld that philosophy, the white liberals, the critics gave the word “liberal” so much baggage that the concept of liberalism could no longer be defended — to the point that Schultz now feels the very term should be abandoned. 

On February 27, 2022, three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Olaf Scholz, who was then the Chancellor of Germany, gave a speech to an emergency session of the German parliament at which he described the attack as a Zeitenwende – an historic turning point. This watershed moment, he declared, meant “that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before. The issue at the heart of this [change] is whether power is allowed to prevail over the law: whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the nineteenth century and the age of great powers, or whether we have it in us to keep warmongers like Putin in check. That requires strength of our own.” He announced a major restructuring of the country’s cautious defense policy, including billions for modernization of the military and a promise that defense spending would exceed 2 percent of Germany’s GDP, a level of spending that Scholz’s party (the Social Democrats) traditionally had opposed. Three years later, Germany has a new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He succeeded in amending Germany’s constitution to lift the so-called “debt brake,” which means that the country will spend significantly more on defense as well as hundreds of billions on related infrastructure over the next ten years. But will it be enough to allow Germany to deter Russian aggression against Europe — particularly if the United States under Trump withdraws from its post-1945 role as the guarantor of European security? Can Germany develop a defense industry that can deliver under wartime conditions? Can Germany take on the leadership role in Europe that it long has been reluctant to assume — and will other countries accept Germany in this role?Jan Techau is a director with the Eurasia Group’s Europe team, covering Germany and European security. He is also a senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis. From 2020 to 2023, he served in the German government as head of speechwriting for three ministers in the German Ministry of Defense. In this podcast interview, he discusses the European reaction to Trump’s reelection, the likelihood of Germany’s being able to make the physical and psychological adjustments it would need in order to become the principal provider of conventional deterrence in Europe, the rise of anti-Americanism in Germany on both the left and right, and whether Europeans are capable of keeping peace on the continent without the help of the Americans. He also explains his 2016 diagnosis of what he called “sophisticated state failure,” which long before the Abundance movement was dreamed of predicted that highly developed countries would find it increasingly difficult to get anything done, and that this paralysis would provide an opening for populist uprisings all over the world. “The only lasting way out of sophisticated state failure,” he concluded, “is for responsible politicians to worry less about getting re-elected and start risking their political careers for things that need to be done.”

For many decades, practitioners and scholars of foreign policy used to refer to “the West,” but today, for the most part, they don’t. What happened to the idea of “the West”? Michael Kimmage, a professor of history at Catholic University, wrote The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy to trace the rise and decline of this concept from the late nineteenth century through the present day. In this podcast discussion, Kimmage discusses the idea of the West — as a geopolitical and cultural concept rather than a geographic place. He analyzes how it developed intellectually, with the widespread adoption of neoclassical architecture and Western Civilization curricula in American universities, and geopolitically as the U.S. rose to global leadership after World War II and during the Cold War. Kimmage also addresses critiques of the West (and its legacy of racism and imperialism) as advanced by critics like W. E. B. Du Bois and Edward Said. He argues that concept of “the West,” despite its flaws, still matters, and explains why he’s concerned about the tendency to erase or discard the Western tradition entirely rather than engaging with it critically.   Michael Kimmage further relates his experience of serving as director of the Kennan Institute, a program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which was liquidated in January 2025 by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), and the consequences of the government cutting itself off from international exchange and expertise in the development of U.S. foreign policy. He also expresses his belief that institutionalists — the people who believe in the value of institutions and operate in them — have to do a better job of explaining and justifying what they do: “If the population feels that these institutions are elitist and out of touch and misguided and unnecessary, then it doesn't matter how much somebody like me values them, it’s not going to work.”

This podcast was recorded in late August 2025. Much has occurred since then, both in Minnesota and nationally, and listeners are asked to consider the episode’s treatment of politics and current events in the context of the time in which it was recorded.Steve Grove is the publisher and CEO of the Minnesota Star Tribune. For many years, he had been a high-flying executive in Silicon Valley, working for firms like Google and YouTube. Then in 2018, he and his wife — who worked for a venture capital firm investing in startups outside of the coasts along with AOL founder Steve Case and now-Vice President JD Vance — decided to return to Minnesota, where Grove had grown up. His recent book, How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention, is about leaving the global hub of innovation for what’s often disparaged as “flyover country.” It’s also a story of recommitting to civic and political involvement, as Grove went to work for Minnesota governor (and future Democratic vice-presidential nominee) Tim Walz as head of the state’s departments of economic and workforce development. He was in this role when the pandemic struck the state, making him the principal liaison with a business community struggling to cope with restrictions meant to stem the spread of COVID.In this podcast conversation, Grove discusses his personal experience of moving from Silicon Valley back to Minnesota, the benefits and tradeoffs of relocating there, and what he learned from having moved between the worlds of high tech, government, and publishing. He describes his experiences with finding both resistance and innovation in state and local government, and the perspective that gave him on Elon Musk’s DOGE attempt to reinvent government along Silicon Valley lines. (Grove believes that “If you're going to reboot government in a more powerful way, starting local has a lot better shot than starting national.”) He discusses the challenges of heading the Safe Reopening Group during the pandemic, which he frankly characterizes as a “deeply uncomfortable exercise in social engineering.” And he also describes his work since 2023 in attempting to reimagine the venerable Star Tribune at a time of severe challenges for print journalism and the news media more generally. 

Murray Kempton (1917-97) was one of the greatest American journalists of the twentieth century. His career extended across seven decades, during which he produced somewhere around 11,000 columns, essays, and pamphlets, nearly all of them marked by his distinctive dry wit, insight, and stylistic elegance. He wrote about government and politics but also the civil rights movement (of which he was one of the earliest and most incisive white chroniclers) and a range of subjects that included jazz, sports, the arts, religion, history, and philosophy. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1985 but was not widely known to readers outside of New York, where he wrote for newspapers including the New York Post, the World Telegram and Sun, and New York Newsday. But he was a hero and role model for many of the leading journalists of his era including Garry Wills, Joan Didion, David Remnick, Molly Ivins, Darryl Pinckney, and David Halberstam. And although he always identified with the political left, some of his greatest admirers included conservative journalists like William F. Buckley Jr. and George F. Will.Andrew Holter recently has brought to publication the first collection of Kempton’s writings to appear since the 1990s. The anthology, entitled Going Around, offers a selection of Kempton that extends from his student journalism during the New Deal to his criticisms during the ‘80s and ‘90s of figures like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (of whom he wrote that “Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock’s feathers”). In this podcast discussion, Holter talks about how he became interested in Kempton’s work, how Kempton’s writings provide an overview of and window into American life in the twentieth century, and why he wanted to make Kempton’s work available to a new generation of readers. He explains how his research led him to rediscover long out-of-print writings along with previously unpublished work (including Kempton’s uncompleted memoirs). He also describes why Kempton’s model of “going around” – beat reporting and direct interactions with people in the streets and in the community – is a necessary corrective to much received opinion and analysis today. 

Misha Chellam, a leader in the Abundance movement and co-founder of the Abundance Network, joins The Vital Center to discuss how YIMBYism, state capacity, and Progress Studies relate to abundance. Chellam analyzes the successful alliances of growth-focused Abundants and good-government moderates in San Francisco. He also envisions future Abundance policies that expand beyond California and adapt to meet local needs and priorities.