The first few months of the Trump administration have proven not just how willing much of America was to embrace and celebrate fascism, but how crucial careful, clear-eye, and thoughtful reporting and analysis are to building and sustaining a r...

As we've talked about a fair amount on the show, gender is at the center of the ideological clashes defining our political moment. Trumpism is, at its heart, a misogynistic movement, and the fractious coalition of philosophies within the Trumpi...

Many very rich men who support Trump fancy themselves heroes from the novels of Ayn Rand. I've never done an episode of this show on Rand's ideas, because I'm not a Randian, and don't think about political questions through anything like an Obj...

I wanted to try to do a hopeful episode. The world look pretty grim right now, and many of us feel discouraged. The unlawful and authoritarian actions of the Trump administration keep coming at a relentless pace, and it can be difficult to see ...

The right-wing ideologies we see most active in the world right now aren't intellectual by any stretch of the imagination. But there is a rich tradition of conservative political and social philosophy and, as liberals, it's important to underst...

How we navigate the new political environment the voters thrust upon on, and the new regime that seeks to tear up the very foundations of our liberal society, is a matter of ethics. And ethics is bigger than just political questions. It's about...

We talk a lot on this show about the benefits of free and open markets and, given the growing hostility to economic freedom, not just from the Trump administration, but from populist governments around the world, we'll continue to do so....

The information environment in which Americans form and discuss their political views has gotten weird. Walter Cronkite is gone. The editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have lost influence to podcaste...

Last fall, I had the extraordinary opportunity to travel to Delhi, India, to give a talk to young Indian liberals. The topic was the connection between Buddhist philosophy and liberalism. If you’re a regular reader of my work, or listen to my p...

The rise of Trump is, in many ways, a story about status. Plenty of Americans feel like their relative status has fallen in recent decades, and they believe Trump, both as an embodiment of their identity and values and as a wielder of vast powe...

In this conversation, Aaron Ross Powell and Anthony L. Fisher (Senior Editor at MSNBC Daily) discuss the political landscape following Trump's second inauguration, focusing...

We've talked a lot about gender on this show, in the context of transgender rights, the way declining relative status drives men to the political right, and the broader role gender plays in the political environment. The results of the presiden...

For this first episode to be recorded after the results of the presidential election, I've brought on my friend and former colleague ⁠Walte...

Today's episode was recorded a few weeks before the results of the November presidential election, and before an unrelated change I've made to this podcast. So before we jump into my conversation with Matthew McManus, I wanted to take a moment ...

Unless you're an early access supporter of the show, this is the last episode you'll hear before the presidential election, which will profoundly shape the state, or looming absence, of American democracy.The critical import...

An important theme of this show is the role of rhetoric in politics. It's not just the arguments we make that matter, but when we choose to make them, and how we talk about political issues. And we can learn a lot about the people who disagree ...

We're staring down the barrel of a presidential election, one that highlights deep questions about democracy and political participation. If our goal is radically more freedom, how should we think about democracy's place in achieving that, give...

When Biden dropped out of the presidential race and Harris took over, we witnessed not just a change in candidate, but a change in rhetoric. Harris's campaign began talking in the language of "freedom" and "liberty." Har...

This, as it says on the tin, is a show about liberalism. But teasing out what that term means can be challenging. Not just because it's philosophically complex, but because common usage of terms doesn't always conform to rigorous concep...

A liberal society is necessarily an open and diverse one. When people are free to move and free to choose, a country's population and culture will reflect all those differences in tastes, preferences, and ways of living. And that's part of what...

I'm joined today by Janet Bufton, Program Coordinator & Co-Founder at the Institute for Liberal Studies. I'm a little embarassed it's...

On June 7th, David Boaz died. He was the Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, author of *The Libertarian Mind*, and the most important figure in the libertarian movement in the last half century. He was also my mentor, my close frien...

Politics gets pretty emotional, and we typically view that as bad. The political scene would be better, we suppose, if more people could set aside their emotions and rationally engage with the hard questions.My guest today isn't so s...

Among the various ideologies opposing liberalism that have seen new or renewed prominence in the last decade is Christian nationalism. It motivates quite a lot of the far right in the culture war, played a role in the attempted overthrow of Ame...

Today's conversation is a good one, but I struggle to come up with a straightforward summary for this intro. I brought back on my good friend, and frequent guest, Cory Massimino to discuss anarchism in theory and practice. And that where we sta...