The Last Best Hope?: Understanding America from the Outside In

When the media talks about the evangelical vote today, what or to whom are they referring? Who are the people who self-identify in this way? Should we understand them as a group defined by their faith, their style of worship, by distinctive theological positions – or has the term evangelical itself become so politicised that in practice it is now most meaningfully understood as shorthand for a group of mainly white voters characterised by their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights?Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American InstituteGuests: EJ Dionne, is a distinguished journalist and author, political commentator, and longtime op-ed columnist for the Washington Post. He is also a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University, and co-author of the recent New York Times bestseller One Nation Under Trump, author of ­Souled Out, and Why the Right Went Wrong, among others. His most recent book, released last year, is Code Red: How Progressives And Moderates Can Unite To Save Our Country.David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative. His research focuses on civic and political engagement, with particular attention to religion and young people. Campbell’s most recent book is Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (with Geoff Layman and John Green), which received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Among his other books is American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (with Robert Putnam), winner of the award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on government, politics, or international affairsKristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

AGE OF POLARIZATION ELECTION SPECIAL PART 3: 2008The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid, and presidents sometimes won massive landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we examine the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and trace the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. In this episode: The Election of 2008. The election of the first black president of the United States, which seemed at the time to be an utterly transformative moment, but which also fuelled deep currents of racial animosity; the success of a Democratic winning coalition that looked quite different from that which had elected previous Democrats.Presenter: Adam SmithGuests:Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor of History at Boston UniversityDan Rowe, Director of Academic Programmes, Rothermere American InstituteThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

AGE OF POLARIZATION ELECTION SPECIAL (PART 2)The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid and presidents sometimes won huge landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we’ll be examining the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and tracing the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. In this episode: 2000 – the election in which Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the presidency after the Supreme Court stopped ongoing recounts in Florida and awarded the electoral college votes to the Republican. A tight but relatively bland election campaign was followed by a bitter aftermath, destroying many people’s faith in the electoral process, generating surging conspiracy theories – a loss of basic trust that Donald Trump would later exploit.Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American InstituteGuests:Patrick Andelicby of the University of Northumbria, author of Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974-1994, now out in paperbackUrsula Hackett, Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the StateThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams.

Eugene V. Debs is a reminder of the possibility of a different kind of American politics. Five times the Socialist Party's candidate for president in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Debs argued that the promise of America -- the last best hope of earth -- could be fulfilled only through socialism. Debs lived in an era that, like our own, was characterised by dramatic economic dislocation, extremes of wealth and poverty, and high rates of immigration. So what is his legacy, and why does he still matter? Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American InstituteGuests:Michael Kazin, Professor of History U of Georgetown, the author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 (2017), American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011),The Life of Wm Jennings Bryan (2006), and most recently What it took to win: A history of the Democratic party (2022).Allison Duerk, Director of the Eugene V. Debs Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

ELECTION SPECIAL (PART 1)The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid and presidents sometimes won huge landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we’ll be examining the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and tracing the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. We begin in this episode in 1992 – the first post- Cold War election, the first to be won by a Democrat since 76, the passing of a generational torch to the 46-year old Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and the ringing declaration on the right that America was now convulsed in a culture war. Presenter: Adam SmithGuests:Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor of History at Boston UniversityDan Rowe, Director of Academic Programmes, Rothermere American InstituteThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

In a special 4-part series for The Last Best Hope? will take a deep dive into the 4 key US elections that have shaped the 2024 race:Bill Clinton’s generational-shift victory in 1992,the drama of 2000 in which Bush beat Gore even while losing the popular vote,the election of the nation’s first black president in 2008,and the norm-shattering rise of reality TV star Donald Trump in 2016 one of the biggest political upsets in US historyWe'll explore the campaigns and the characters and the underlying political dynamics which has created our contemporary age of polarization.

Wealthy Americans have always found ways of spending money on political campaigns in the presumed expectation of a return on their investment. But in 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision ruled that legislation that restricted how much money could be spent on influencing elections was unconstitutional, opening up vast new possibilities for wealthy individuals and corporations to support candidates. The Court's argument was that to stop someone spending as much as they liked to push an agenda or a candidate was a violation of the first amendment right to free speech.  The official campaigns still have to be transparent about how much money they’re raising and from whom, but there are now effectively no limits at all on what people can spend trying to influence the outcome of an election in indirect ways. That’s where so-called “Super PACs” come in (the PACs is an acronym standing for Political Action Committee). It turns out that it’s really easy to hide a political donation by giving it a Super PAC rather than directly to a candidate. So the problem today – in the post-Citizens United world -- is not only the amount of money being spent but that we no longer know who’s spending it.Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American Institute.Guests:Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Brennan Center fellow and professor of law at Stetson University College of Law, where she teaches courses in election law. Her book Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians Hardcover – published by NYU Press- is out in November.Brody Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. He spent nearly two decades covering the intersection of business and politics for The Wall Street Journal. He’s the co-author of The Wolves of K Street The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big GovernmentThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

For as long as there have been elections, there have been those who’ve refused to trust them. But anxiety about elections has peaked at particular moments in American history – in the run-up the Civil War, in the late nineteenth century, in the Civil Rights era, and again today. All periods when sections of the population became convinced that the rules were being bent in ways that robbed ordinary Americans of their political power – by new immigrants, African Americans, or liberal elites. At each moment of anxiety, attempts have been made to purify the electoral process, and all have had mixed and unintended consequences. In this episode, Adam discusses the long history of anxiety about election rigging with Frank Towers of the University of Calgary, an expert on electoral history, and Sarah Henry, the Chief Curator of the Museum of the City of New York, with whom Adam discussed a curious glass ballot box.Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith. The Last Best Hope? podcast is a production of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.