The Vital Center

We all have an opinion about charismatic leaders — but do we really know what “charisma” means? Molly Worthen, in her new book Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, points out that charismatic leaders historically haven’t always been distinguished for their charm or compelling oratory. Rather, charismatic leaders are those who enter into a mutual exchange with their followers, in which ...

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced the imposition of his “Liberation Day” tariffs against most of America’s global trading partners in April 2025, he seemed to harken back to a centuries-old form of economic nationalism known as mercantilism, which sought prosperity through restrictive trade practices. Opponents of mercantilism from the eighteenth century onward, such as Adam Smith and John-Baptiste Say, became known as cla...

The most important U.S. political trend of the 21st century, according to most observers, is the increasing tendency of college-educated voters to support the Democratic Party and for non-college-educated voters to support the Republican Party. In many ways, the two parties have swapped their historic bases. When John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, Democrats still considered themselves to be a working-class party. Kennedy c...

In the first few months of the second Trump administration, the White House in effect declared war on the nation’s colleges and universities, and particularly the most selective and prestigious among them. Vice President JD Vance had famously declared in 2021 that “the universities are the enemy,” but conservative antipathy against higher education for its alleged role as the breeding ground of progressive ideology goes back at lea...

Jonathan Rauch would seem to be an unlikely defender of American Christianity. The eminent author, Brookings senior fellow, and Atlantic magazine contributing editor is a gay Jewish atheist — “I won the marginalized trifecta,” he observes — who grew up deeply suspicious of Christianity and its potential for (and past history of) oppression. 

As he describes in his recent book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democr...

Why can’t America do big things anymore? Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, addresses this question in his new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back. The book’s inspiration came from his thinking about the now-vanished Pennsylvania Station, formerly New York City’s majestic gateway, which was one of the most beautiful buildings in the c...

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

One observer who found Trump’s showing with these groups to be unsurprising is Steve Bumbaugh. Ever since the 1990s, he has worked on issues involving college access, upward mobility, race, and class. For s...

The 2024 U.S. election was to a large extent driven by voter frustrations with what seems to many to be a sluggish economy and dysfunctional government that no longer delivers for its citizens as it used to. But similar frustrations are felt in developed countries all around the world, and perhaps nowhere more acutely than in Great Britain. Its economy has stagnated for fifteen years, with the lowest rates of productivity registere...

Norman Holmes Pearson, who in the middle years of the twentieth century was a professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, is now a largely forgotten figure — and someone who was never that well known during his lifetime. But Duquesne University professor Greg Barnhisel, in his intriguing new biography of Pearson, sees him as a critical figure in several important areas of American life and culture. Code Name Purit...

America’s founders deeply mistrusted political parties. James Madison decried “the mischief of faction” while George Washington, in his farewell address, warned that “the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension” might lead to despotism. But the disunity that Washington warned that parties would bring has always been present in America, and still is. What political parties can do at their best is to make disunity manageable by...

Yair Zivan is a young British-Israeli who for the past decade has served as foreign policy advisor to Israel’s Opposition Leader, Yair Lapid, head of the centrist party Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”). He is the editor of a new collection of essays entitled The Center Must Hold: Why Centrism Is the Answer to Extremism and Polarization. Contributors include leaders and commentators from around the globe including former British prim...

In late December 2014, several visitors to Disneyland fell ill with measles, a disease that supposedly had been eliminated in the United States more than a decade earlier. Over the next month, the outbreak spread to more than 120 people in California, including a dozen infants; nearly half of the infected weren’t vaccinated. The outbreak was a predictable outcome of the state’s having allowed parents to opt out of having their scho...

Edward C. Banfield (1916-99), the conservative political scientist who spent most of his career at Harvard University, was one of the most eminent and controversial scholars of the twentieth century. His best-known work, The Unheavenly City (1970), was a deeply informed but unsparing criticism of Great Society-era attempts to alleviate urban poverty. His New York Times obituary observed that Banfield “was a critic of almost every m...

In the 1990s, Mike Madrid was a student at Georgetown University writing his senior thesis about Latino voting patterns and trying to predict how this group might change American politics in the future. The prevailing interpretation at the time was that Latinos were likely to become a permanent underclass, would almost certainly vote Democratic as a bloc for the foreseeable future, and would express themselves largely through oppos...

When the Soviet Union came into being in 1917, some American left-wing intellectuals hailed the establishment of the new “workers’ paradise” as the model for the United States (and indeed the rest of the world) to follow. Some even traveled to Russia to pay homage to the communist dictatorship – as for example journalist Lincoln Steffens, who upon returning from Moscow and Petrograd infamously declared: “I have seen the future, and...

Probably all of us have, at one time or another in our younger years, been told to stand up straight. If you’re part of Generation X or the early Millennial cohort, you probably had to undergo an exam during middle school for scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you might have had to take a posture test upon entering college — or even to pass one before you could graduate. But where did this conce...

If you spend enough time in Washington D.C., you come to realize that activists of left and right, for all their mutual enmities, unanimously agree on the need for radical and even destructive change. They agree that gradualism is boring, compromise is betrayal, and that the finest thing in life is, as the notable political philosopher Conan the Barbarian once observed, to crush your enemies and drive them before you. But as Greg B...

Sir Angus Deaton is a British-American economist, and one of the world’s most eminent in his profession. He was the sole recipient of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, principally for his analysis of consumer demand, poverty, and welfare. But he is also among the world's most famous (perhaps even notorious) economists for the work he has done to shine a light on inequality in America.

He is perhaps best known for h...

In the early 1960s, colleges and universities in the United States had been politically quiescent for over a decade, following the changes and controversies that had roiled higher education in the 1930s and the post-World War II years when the G.I. Bill had paid the tuitions of large numbers of returning veterans. The demonstrations that erupted on campus by the later 1960s are usually associated with the causes of the political le...