The Future in Context

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Prime-time Politics: Goodnight and Good Luck (Ep. 56) Jun 12, 2022

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The congressional House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol held its first prime-time televised hearing on Thursday evening. Dismissed by critics as show trials, these hearings may test the medium's ability to capture the nation's attention.

20 million US households tuned in.

The question is whether the six televised hearings will make much of a difference in public perceptions of the Trump presidency and its aftermath.

Do Guns Define America? (Ep. 55) Jun 02, 2022

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And so here we are again. Another school shooting. The American slaughter of innocents. Shattered lives, shattered communities. The massacres pile up — Columbine, Blacksburg, Roseburg, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, and literally hundreds more. Aurora, Las Vegas, Orlando, El Paso, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, Sutherland Springs, Boulder.

And so we ask: When's it going to stop? What can we do? Is this who we are?

Competing political narratives about gun violence have not satisfied the yearning for justice after the Uvalde tragedy. Our resident humanities scholar offers four propositions to help us think through a uniquely American and polarizing problem.

Why Does America Have Primaries? (Ep. 54) May 28, 2022

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It's Primary season in America, with all the chaos, expense, and bombast that phenomenon has come to represent in our national political life. The major media now give more attention to off-year primary elections in half a dozen battleground states than they gave to the quadrennial general national election a generation ago. As if they were interpreting the Tarot or reading tea leaves or deconstructing a Papal Encyclical, the myriad pundits hover near the cameras and microphones to pontificate about slight distinctions between in-person day of the election voting, in-person prior to the election voting, mail-in ballots, overseas ballots, military ballots, counts, recounts, automatic recounts, audits, hand recounts, and all the attendant election lawsuits.

With primary season underway, our resident historian examines the origins and role of primary elections in American politics and the intensification of American partisanship.

Teddy Roosevelt and the Surprising NGA Origins Story (Ep. 53) May 14, 2022

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During his presidency, Roosevelt did more to conserve America's natural resources and its places of special beauty than any other president. He convened state executives to aid in the cause, which led him to create the National Governors Association.

Why Americans Do Not Trust Public Institutions (Ep. 52) May 05, 2022

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Public institutions suffer reputational damage when partisan drama Is televised, streamed or leaked. What the public sees is: ill-considered legislation has to be cleaned up by the courts, confirmation processes turn dirty and selective leaking is used in an effort to flip narrow majorities.

Legal scholar, historian and author John Vile points to televised (or streamed) hearings and the failure of Congress to act decisively on difficult issues as contributing to our current state of affairs but insists that partisan drama is not new in our judicial history.

Social Media and the Dangers of Settling for Truthiness (Ep. 51) Apr 30, 2022

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Watergate as Turning Point in the American Century (Ep. 50) Apr 23, 2022

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We are approaching the 50th anniversary of Watergate, the effects of which are still with us today.

We have the movie All The President's Men as a popularized summary of the first draft of that history but historian and journalist Garrett Graff tells Clay that that capsule misses a lot - a weirder, zanier, bigger and different story about how Americans lost faith in the presidency, government and institutions.

The Trouble With Sanctions (Ep. 49) Apr 15, 2022

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Weeks after the U.S. and the G7 countries weaponized the global financial system to impose their harshest-ever sanctions on Russia, fissures are becoming apparent. Countries impose but often backpedal on sanctions against bad actors for a simple reason — a reluctance to go to war.

Why A SCOTUS Seat Matters (Ep. 48) Apr 07, 2022

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This is a bonus installment in a Governing series on the history of the Supreme Court, following the Senate's historic confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson on April 7.

The elevation of Judge Jackson to the nation's highest court will not only make history but help shape America's future, one case at a time.

Making Huck Finn Safe for School Again (Ep. 47) Apr 02, 2022

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"All modern American literature," Ernest Hemingway once proclaimed, "comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Despite such accolades, this masterwork from Twain — the pen name used by Samuel Clemens — has been slowly disappearing from American classrooms, a development primarily driven by the novel's repeated use — 219 times in all — of that uniquely offensive term that we uneasily refer to as the N-word.

Defending an "unteachable" classic of American literature has become the life's work of a Twain scholar, costing him professionally and personally.

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