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Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev examine what the country’s founding ideals mean on its 250th anniversary.
Ivan Krastev is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the advisory and governing boards of several international organizations, including the European Investment Bank, the International Crisis Group, and GLOBSEC.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss what the 250th anniversary of the United States reveals about America’s crisis of self-confidence, whether America and Europe are converging rather than diverging, and how competition with China will reshape American identity in the decades ahead.
We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.
That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.
This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Charles Fain Lehman explore how strategic policing drove the decline in violent crime—and why Baltimore was left behind.
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, where he covers crime, policing, and urban policy.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Charles Fain Lehman discuss why Baltimore failed to follow the crime declines that transformed other American cities, what the evidence tells us about why strategic policing works, and how focused deterrence breaks cycles of retaliatory violence.
Watch the conversation below—the full video is behind the paywall on this page!
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk debate whether progressives have abandoned the working-class voters they once claimed to represent.
Will you be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday July 15? I will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about how liberalism should respond to the postliberal threat. Find out more and get your free ticket here! —Yascha
In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk examine why center-left parties are losing ground across democracies, whether structural forces or strategic failures are to blame, and what lessons from Canada, Australia, and the UK might offer a path forward for the left.
Matthew Yglesias is the founder and author of Slow Boring, a Substack newsletter focused on policy and politics. He is the author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger and a longtime commentator on economics, housing, and Democratic Party strategy.
Claire Ainsley is Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute. A British political strategist and policy expert, she previously served as Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and as a senior adviser in the Labour government of Keir Starmer.
Note: This episode was recorded on June 3, 2026.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Mark Leonard discuss how the West can defend itself without America.
Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think–tank. His latest book is Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Mark Leonard discuss why Europe is behind, the global impact of China’s rise, and whether Europe can learn to defend itself without the United States.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Curtis Yarvin, Minna Salami, and Yascha Mounk discuss whether we can ever be free in a liberal society in a discussion moderated by Roger Hearing.
In this special episode of The Good Fight, recorded at the How The Light Gets In Festival, Roger Hearing moderates a debate between Curtis Yarvin, Minna Salami, and Yascha Mounk on whether liberalism can ever be neutral, what a truly free society would look like, and whether liberalism’s heyday is over. Find out more about the Institute of Arts and Ideas—and book tickets to this year’s How The Light Gets In Festival in September—here. Watch the video of the debate here.
Roger Hearing is a broadcaster and journalist with over 30 years experience presenting and reporting for BBC News and Bloomberg.
Minna Salami is an award-winning Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish author, cultural critic, and independent scholar based in London. She is the author of Can Feminism Be African?: A Most Paradoxical Question.
Curtis Yarvin is a political blogger and software developer.
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Sam Moyn also discuss whether some people deserve to have more votes than others.
Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, The Last Utopia, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and many other publications.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sam Moyn discuss whether a truly fair democracy might weigh different citizens’ votes differently, whether the emphasis on human rights have got us into the mess we’re in today, and to what extent our democracy is in danger from populism.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and David Bau delve into the emerging science of AI interpretability and what we can learn from billions of neural signals.
David Bau is Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and Director of the National Deep Inference Fabric, researching the emergent internal mechanisms of deep generative networks in both Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Bau discuss how AI models actually produce their results and reflect about problems, whether the “thinking” process that models show users reveals their authentic thought processes, and how researchers can decode the internal representations of neural networks to understand what information they contain and use.
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Rebecca Haw Allensworth examine how professional licensing has become America’s most important—and most restrictive—regulatory institution.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Steve Stewart-Williams examine what science reveals about biological and psychological differences between men and women.
Steve Stewart-Williams is a professor of Psychology at the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia campus and runs The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter. His latest book is A Billion Years of Sex Differences.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Steve Stewart-Williams discuss why women and men are more similar than is often thought and what the real sex differences between men and women are, from casual sex to career choices.
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Jeremiah Johnson examine the disconnect between economic data and public sentiment about young Americans’ prospects.
Jeremiah Johnson is the co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism. He hosts the New Liberal Podcast and writes at Infinite Scroll.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jeremiah Johnson discuss why young Americans think the economy is worse than it actually is, whether social media has made us permanently pessimistic about institutions, and how elite failures are now exposed in real time.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Paige Harden discuss twin studies, heritability research, and why genetic influence varies across different traits and populations.
Kathryn Paige Harden is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and serves as Director of Clinical Training. Her latest book is Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Paige Harden discuss why twin studies reveal the substantial influence of genetics on human behavior, how genetic effects actually increase rather than decrease over a person’s lifetime, and why acknowledging genetic influences shouldn’t be seen as incompatible with progressive politics.
Watch this conversation on our YouTube Channel!
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and H.W. Brands discuss the first U.S. president’s life and legacy.
H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of more than a dozen biographies and histories. His latest book is American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and H. W. Brands discuss why Washington’s reputation has endured despite the controversial legacies of other founding fathers, how his frontier upbringing shaped his character, and what Washington’s voluntary relinquishment of power reveals about leadership and ambition.
Watch this conversation on our YouTube Channel!
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and James Traub examine how progressive teaching methods are producing citizens who can't think critically.
James Traub is a journalist, author and scholar. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Institute For The Humanities and the Society of American Historians.
In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and James Traub discuss why progressive pedagogy is failing American students, how classical schools are achieving better outcomes through traditional teaching methods, and whether learning facts versus critical thinking represents a false choice in education.
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Marc Lipsitch also discuss how worried we should be about Hantavirus and Ebola.
Marc Lipsitch is the Berberian Professor at Stanford University, with appointments in Infectious Diseases, Biology, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Marc Lipsitch discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of gain-of-function research, how scientific incentives may be encouraging risky experimentation—and the recent outbreaks of hantavirus and ebola.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Amanda Ripley, Jesse Singal, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Yascha Mounk explore Trump’s failed cultural revolution.
In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Amanda Ripley, Jesse Singal, and Thomas Chatterton Williams explore whether Trump has succeeded in remaking American culture in his image, the rise of white identity politics and its psychological drivers, and how America might break free from cycles of political revenge and backlash.
Amanda Ripley is the founder of Good Conflict. Her latest book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.
Jesse Singal is the co-host of Blocked and Reported and the author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is Summer of Our Discontent.
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Al Roth discuss what we miss when we separate economics from human emotion.
Alvin E. Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. His latest book is Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Al Roth discuss the impact of moral disgust on solving economic problems, whether we should allow financial payments for organ donation, and what the rise of OnlyFans tells us about changing attitudes towards the self and economic transactions.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Timothy Garton Ash discuss how Britain’s shift toward populism reflects broader European trends.
Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Homelands: A Personal History of Europe and writes the newsletter History of the Present. His upcoming book, Europe in 7½ Chapters, will be published in October 2026.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Timothy Garton Ash discuss the crisis of Labour and rise of Reform, why Europeans are struggling to adapt to a new political, cultural, and technological age, and the future of the war in Ukraine.
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Laurenz Guenther discuss why ordinary voters and political elites disagree on immigration, crime, and social issues.
Laurenz Guenther is a political economist at the Toulouse School of Economics and a Fellow at the Institute for European Policymaking at Bocconi University. His research and Substack focus on representation, populism, and immigration in Western democracies.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Laurenz Guenther discuss why there’s a massive representation gap between political elites and voters on cultural issues, how this explains the rise of populist parties like the AfD in Germany, and whether new parties can successfully occupy the economically left but socially conservative political space.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and Lant Pritchett discuss why development requires building state capability, not just charitable interventions.
Lant Pritchett is a development economist from Idaho. Having now thrice retired, he is currently a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in the School of Public Policy and the co-founder and Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP).
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Lant Pritchett discuss why the traditional foreign aid approach to development is fundamentally misguided, how countries actually achieve prosperity through organic national transformation, and whether the classic path to development remains viable in the 21st century.
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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.
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Yascha Mounk and David Bromwich discuss grade inflation, political conformity, and the crisis of trust in higher education.
David Bromwich has taught literature at Yale University since 1988. His books include Hazlitt: the Mind of a Critic, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, How Words Make Things Happen, and Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Bromwich discuss why Americans have lost faith in universities, how grade inflation and political conformity undermine academic credibility, and whether the opacity of elite admissions processes can be reformed.
Note: David Bromwich asked us to be clear that the views he expresses are his own and not those of any institution or group within an institution.
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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.
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