Megan Brown
Staff Writer
While Jonah Goldberg and Jonathan Rauch closed Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Four, their lecture merely marked the beginning of the collaboration of Chautauqua and American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution.
“This week, and your response to the week, inspired further conversation with both organizations,” said Senior Vice President and Chief Program Officer Deborah Sunya Moore. “You had an immediate response, you have written to us, called us, we have heard you, and we are changing a theme for next year. This morning, I’m excited to announce that we will partner again with AEI and Brookings for a week in 2026.”
Week Four’s theme of “The Future of the American Experiment — A Week in Partnership with American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution” covered America’s current state and what steps experts from AEI and Brookings believe America needs to take moving forward. At 10:45 a.m. Friday in the Amphitheater, Goldberg and Rauch dialogued about America’s affective and political polarization, critiqued direct democracy and Congress, and discussed the future of the Democratic Party.
Moore sparked the lecture with the question “Is America coming apart?”
Ever the journalist, Rauch “couldn’t resist” polling the Amp audience on its opinion on that question.
A senior fellow of Governance Studies at the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings, Rauch also contributes to The Atlantic and has published numerous books throughout his career. At Brookings, he frequently writes and researches about topics such as political parties, marijuana legalization, LGBT rights and religious liberty.
Rauch’s snap polling of the Amp audience deduced that around 60% agreed America is coming apart, 30% disagreed and 10% were unsure.
Rauch agreed with the majority, pointing to two schools of thought: America is in a bad cycle, but it’s just a cycle, or “this is the worst that it’s been since the unpleasantness in 1861.” Rauch falls into the latter camp.
While Goldberg agreed with Rauch’s description, he took issue with his wording.
Goldberg is a senior fellow and Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at AEI. A three-time New York Times bestselling author, Goldberg researches U.S. politics and culture, the conservative movement and the progressive movement.
For Goldberg, the word “cycle” removes the aspect of human agency in America.
“Cycle implies some sort of natural thing that, by its own purposes through some iron law, we’ll pull out of this mess. And that’s not true,” Goldberg said. “Things can get worse, and things can get better. But what is required is human will.”
Both researchers of American polarization, Goldberg and Rauch focused on how the introduction of primaries and political spending reform have increased polarization.
To first define affective polarization, Goldberg described his favorite New Yorker cartoon. In the cartoon, two dogs in business suits sit in a bar. The dog holding a martini says, “It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.”
“A huge part of our politics is more about cats must also fail than even dogs succeeding. Right?” Goldberg said. “The definition of succeeding is making the other side lose — which is not a healthy way to run a government.”
The impetus for such polarization, Goldberg said, is weak parties and strong partisanship.
“We are the first and still basically the only modern industrialized democracy in the world whose parties voluntarily gave up the ability to pick their own candidates. Instead, we have shopped it out to the primary system,” Goldberg said, “and through campaign finance reform, deprived the parties of the ability to control the purse strings to pick and support legitimate, decent candidates who can win in general elections.”
Goldberg cited both the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as examples. Sanders pushed the Democrats in 2020 to the left, and “registered Democrat on the last day possible before the primary,” Rauch added.
“Parties used to punish people who behaved like that,” Rauch said. “… Because parties are so weak, institutions do party work for them. Say what you will about the NRA, Planned Parenthood, they do more party work — voter education, voter mobilization, all of that kind of thing. And because they have a vested interest with their own donors to take 100% positions, they’re much less interested in compromising for the sake of the broader party coalition.”
Because interest groups and institutions push for more extreme views, they also encourage “extreme” people to vote in the primaries, which often see less voter turnout in general.
To combat people from the far left or far right running for president or for positions in Congress, Rauch said that the regulations on political party spending need to be changed. By doing so, political parties can decrease the number of primary winners who represent the fringes of the parties.
This will allow political parties to say, “if you’re a loyal member of the party, you’re going to get more financing. If you’re not, maybe you run for school board instead of Senate,” Rauch said. “It’s a different way to think about politics.”
Goldberg believes its Congress’ role to fix some of the issues occurring in America, a role that it’s not stepping into.
“When Congress sits on the sidelines and refuses to assert its privileges and its power, at least over the control of purse strings, then all of a sudden, you stick this district judge in Boston with some crazy policy stuff and he’s like, ‘Well, it’s clearly unconstitutional and lawless. But it’s not my job to say so,’ ” Goldberg said, referring to U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin’s case on birthright citizenship.
One of the issues that Goldberg and Rauch want Congress to act on is immigration.
“It’s a laugh line, or it used to be, but my position for immigration for 30 years now, when people ask me my preferred immigration policy, my answer is to have one,” Goldberg said.
“That’s right,” Rauch said. “My answer is whatever they can pass.”
Goldberg mourned how he now sounds more like Rauch.
“I much prefer the days when I used to say, ‘Every time Alan Dershowitz takes Viagra, he gets taller,’ ” Goldberg said.
To help Congress regain some of its strength, and to help Goldberg sound less like Rauch in his commentary, Goldberg said Congress needs to hire young people to work on legislation and learn how to work to pass legislation in Congress.
With weak political parties and a weak Congress, Rauch has been studying what the future of the Democratic Party looks like — and he’s hopeful. On Friday, The New York Times published “The Seeds of Democratic Revival Have Already Been Sown” by Rauch and co-author Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.
In their research, they asked participants two questions: “What kind of agenda can appeal to the American public and be a spring board for a comeback for the Democrats?” and “On the culture, what do Democrats need to do to show the public that they are not out of touch, untrustworthy, or strange?”
The survey results surprised Rauch.
“Yes, the party is in a terrible spot right now,” Rauch said. “But it is laying the groundwork for renewal in an important sense.”
The Democratic Party is moving toward an abundance agenda with political pundits such as Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein in their book Abundance spearheading that discussion. On the other side of the aisle, Trump and MAGA Republicans are emphasizing scarcity.
Goldberg can only give one-and-a-half to two cheers for the abundance agenda.
“Part of my frustration is that my kind of conservatives — public choice theory, libertarian-minded, free-market economics — we have been saying red tape and government bureaucracy stands in the way of prosperity for 70 years. And we have gotten nothing but eye rolls from people,” Goldberg said.
Nevertheless, Goldberg hopes that this change in the Democratic Party works.
“I want a healthy Democratic Party, because I’ve decided that until there’s a healthy Democratic Party, there won’t be a healthy Republican Party. You need two sane parties. If one party is going crazy, the other will,” Goldberg said. “And I want virtuous competition.”
