The Long Game

Jon Ward
  • 4.7 (143)
  • CHRISTIANITY
  • UPDATED MONTHLY
The Long Game

Americans don't know how to solve problems. We've lost sight of what institutions are and why they matter. The Long Game is a look at some key institutions, such as political parties, the U.S. Senate, the media, and the church.

  1. MAR 28

    My conversation with Jonathan Rauch about his new book "Cross Purposes"

    Jonathan Rauch is an important voice for our time. He was for free speech and free thought way before it was cool. In 1993, he published a book called Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. It was while reading his latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain With Democracy, in preparation for this interview, that I realized that Jonathan's work over the past few years has been in pursuit of one overarching goal. Jonathan is one of the most prescient voices trying to prevent a return to a pre-Enlightenment society.

    1h 2m

  2. 10/09/2024

    Eliza Griswold's new book Circle of Hope is a cautionary tale about placing too much hope in your church

    Eliza Griswold's new book Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church is about a church in Philadelphia that was started by a couple who became dramatic converts to Christianity in the 1970's. They became Jesus people. And unlike many others in that movement, they stayed pretty radical. Griswold's book tells the story of this couple's attempt to hand the church off to the next generation. It doesn't go well.  I thought the book was an example of something I’ve lived, experienced and observed: placing far too much hope in what a local church can do and provide. Griswold is a contributing writing for The New Yorker and directs the Program in Journalism at Princeton University. Her 2018 book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, won the Pulitzer Prize.

    38 min

  3. 08/23/2024

    Major Garrett talks about Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

    Major Garrett is chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, and as he told me in our conversation, he is an "accidental television journalist" who "never imagined" working in TV and "never wanted it." He was a print reporter for 17 years before entering the world of television. Since then, he's proven to be one of the most formidable, best prepared interviewers in journalism. This dude is rigorous, smart, and fun! And you know what? Damn it, he cares. Major is the host of The Takeout podcast and author of five books, including The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie, and Mr. Trump's Wild Ride: The Thrills, Chills, Screams, and Occasional Blackouts of an Extraordinary Presidency. Major read Amusing Ourselves to Death in the 1990's. He then soon after became a TV reporter for CNN, where he spent two years before moving to the then-nascent Fox News, where he became a Washington fixture as White House correspondent. That's where he was when I met him during my time as a White House correspondent for The Washington Times. I was glad, as I told him, that Major has a textured view of Postman's work. I didn't want a cheerleader. But Major talks about the impact of the work on him, his views of its shortcomings, and its lasting value.

    1 hr

  4. 07/30/2024

    Moderates Keep Fighting & Don't Look for the Easy Way Out, with Aurelian Craiutu

    Aurelian Craiutu is the author of Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals. Craiutu is the chair of Indiana University's political science department. He is reclaiming a word and idea — moderation — that is typically despised and criticized as weak and cowardly. This is a misunderstanding of what moderation is, he insists. Moderation is not for the weak or the indecisive, Craiutu says. Instead, it is a fighting creed which requires courage, strength, and savvy. It's not for everyone, he says. In other words, the implication is that some people don't have what it takes to be a moderate, because it's much easier to be a radical, or a purist, or an ideologue. "Maintaining our civilization is an endless and complex task," (23) Craiutu writes. Moderates do not look for silver bullets to perform this task. They recognize that it is an ongoing, never-fully-solved challenge. And they have a "willingness to exist inside open-ended situations that do not come full circle and cannot be unequivocally settled" (72). In other words, moderates are fighters who aren't looking for an easy way out or for a vacation from the ongoing and ever present task of maintaining an open and free society.

    40 min

  5. 06/06/2024

    Yuval Levin's "American Covenant" is a blueprint for peace-making and effective governance

    It is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. I just finished watching the ceremony in France, where they honored WWII vets who still live, and those who never came home. It was incredibly moving.  But we can't just look back and grow emotional during inspiring video montages. We must think about how to avoid the paths of division that could send future young men and women to similar fates. We can honor those brave WWII vets further — now — by listening to those who are trying to help us remember how to resolve our differences peacefully, rather than through violence or force. Yuval Levin is one of those people. My interview with him about his new book, out next week, "American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- And Could Again." Yuval's argument is that our Constitution is more than a legal document, though it is that. The Constitution is also a blueprint, a map, which lays out how our nation was intended to solve problems and resolve disagreements. James Madison, the nation's fourth president, was one of the chief architects of our constitutional system. And our system has a psychology of sorts, Yuval's book says. This system defines unity as acting together even when we don’t agree. Madison and others designed an architecture of checks and balances and disparate power centers that are intended to pull and push us into engagement with those who are different and think different. It is that action together which creates common purpose and cohesion, a unity of "peace but not quiet," as Yuval writes. "Politics is haggling, or it is force," he quotes Daniel Bell as saying. He adds: "We have forgotten that the only real alternative to a politics of bargaining and accommodation in a vast and diverse society is a politics of violent hostility." Many Americans despair that we can repair our divisions. But Levin rejects that despair. He calls his book "hopeful" but says that does not mean he is necessarily optimistic. "Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, because they are both invitations to passivity," he writes. "Hope is a virtue, and so it sits between those vices. It tells us that things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worth of it happening." The way we move toward this unity of "peace but not quiet" is by thinking more carefully about how our system is structured, and what kind of behavior it incentivizes: cooperation across difference as the Constitution intended, or pulling apart, demonizing the other side and fearing those who disagree, and performative outrage.

    59 min

  6. 04/29/2024

    Higher ed has lost sight of mission and purpose, John Inazu says

    John Inazu's new book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. John teaches on criminal law, law and religion and the First Amendment at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert on religious freedom. And he is a senior fellow with Interfaith America. He is also a former Air Force officer who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11 when a hijacked airliner hit the other side of that massive building. And finally, he is the son of Japanese-American father who was born in an internment camp during World War II, where his American citizen grandparents were incarcerated for three years simply because of their ethnic heritage.  John's book is structured around the rhythm of a law school year. The reason, he says, is because he thinks the law has something to teach us about how to approach disagreement. We talk here about why he thinks his book has surprising advice. We also spend a lot of time talking about the protests on college campuses about the war in Gaza, which have reached a fever pitch over the past week, and what his book offers to that incredibly intense disagreement. We actually kept coming back to the issue of American universities and their purpose and mission.

    41 min

  7. 03/01/2024

    We Are Not Powerless: American Politics is "Entirely Fixable" says Nick Troiano in his new book "The Primary Solution"

    We keep looking at our broken political system — the politicians who show up on our TV's and our phones, the lawmakers who end up in Congress, and the general lack of solutions to our biggest problems — and we shake our head. We promise to vote the bums out. We vow to drain the swamp. We pledge to overturn the plutocracy. But we don't think about our assembly line, the system that gives us the choices we are presented with. Remember Lee Drutman's line? "Who chooses the choices?" That's the right question. When we show up to the toy store, and don't like our choices, we're not asking who is making the decision to limit us to these options. We simply keep buying from their limited selection, hoping for a different outcome. The point of Nick's Troiano's book, The Primary Solution, is that we have to change the way we choose our choices. This means getting rid of party primaries, which have become a weapon used by ideologues and zealots to turn our politics into a bloodsport rather than something that serves its citizens. Nick's book is an explanation of how that came to be, why it should be changed, and how we can change it.  You can also read a series of four Substack posts on the book here.

    54 min

  8. 02/05/2024

    What is a Christian politics? Michael Wear's new book argues it's mostly about who we are

    Break the system.   That's what one New Hampshire voter, a 58-year old retired Army officer, said he wants the president to do, in an interview with Politico Magazine.   It's only the most obvious example of many of us tend to do from time to time. We pretend, or actually believe, that politics is a form of magic.   In other words, we think we can elect a person, or pass a law — as if we were waving a wand — and this will fix our problems.   But Michael Wear argues in The Spirit of Our Politics that a politics of magic is like trying to take a shortcut, and it won't work.   "Our society, politics, and churches are hampered by a technological conceit — that we can attain the kind of society we seek without coming to terms with the kind of people we are and without becoming a different kind of people," (147) he writes.   "Our society produces mass shootings at an unparalleled rate and scale, for instance, not in spite of the kind of people we are, but because of the kind of people we are."   What is needed, Michael argues, is a resurrection of spiritual formation.   "Spiritual formation is not a question for Christians alone," (137) he says.

    53 min
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About

Americans don't know how to solve problems. We've lost sight of what institutions are and why they matter. The Long Game is a look at some key institutions, such as political parties, the U.S. Senate, the media, and the church.

Information

  • Creator
    Jon Ward
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2025
  • Episodes
    43
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    The Long Game

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