The motto of Dialogues with Richard Reeves is "thinking together in relationship". This podcast features in-depth, lively conversations with leading thinkers on the big questions facing modern societies. dialoguespod@gmail.com @richardvreeves
Episodes
Monday Nov 29, 2021
Monday Nov 29, 2021
Anne-Marie Slaughter is an optimist, and a patriot, and an advocate for both personal and national renewal. We talk about the difference between renewal and both reinvention (out with the old) and restoration (back in with the old), and what it means for our politics. We also discuss her work on women, men, families and equality, almost a decade on from her famous essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”; the need for more grace in both our public and private life; why we should be “calling in” in private, rather than “calling out” in public; the lessons in leadership from her role as head of the New American think-tank; the past and future of feminism; our long overdue reckoning on racial justice; how to prepare for the 250th birthday of our country; and the unique power of women after the menopause. Enjoy!
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of New America and Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2009–2011, she served as director of policy planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Prior to her government service, Anne-Marie was the Dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School) from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994-2002.
In 2012 she published the article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in the Atlantic, which quickly became the most read article in the history of the magazine and helped spawn a renewed national debate on the continued obstacles to genuine full male-female equality. Her books include Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family (2015), The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World (2017), and her latest, Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics (2021). Foreign Policy magazine named her to their annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. She received a B.A. from Princeton, and M.Phil and DPhil in international relations from Oxford.
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Nov 22, 2021
Monday Nov 22, 2021
My guest today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is one of the most important intellectuals working today on issues of free speech, human rights, feminism and foreign policy. She is no stranger to either controversy or danger, not least because of her fierce criticism of Islam and Islamic culture. We discuss her own journey from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, via asylum in Holland to escape an arranged marriage, and finally to an academic career in the U.S. We also trace her psychological journey from a tribal mindset to a zealous religious worldview, and finally to a fiercely-held liberalism. We discuss the limits of Islamic liberalization, the contest for free speech, critical race theory, the state of intellectual and academic debate, the risks of self-censorship, and much more besides. We also discuss her latest book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021). We don’t agree on everything, of course, but as she says: “That’s the whole point!”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan is a former Member of the Dutch Parliament (2003-2006) and is now a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Founder of the AHA Foundation. She has written several books including Infidel (2007); Nomad (2010); Heretic (2015); and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her newest book Prey is available now. She also has her own podcast, the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast.
More Ayaan
- Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021)
- See this NYT profile, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Muslim Men and Western Women”
- In January 2020, Ayaan spoke at The Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on “The Market for Victimhood”
Also Mentioned
- We talked quite a lot about Mustafa Akyol’s views on liberalizing Islam. Listen to my dialogue with him here (Apple) or here (Spotify).
- If you’re interested in truth and truthfulness, you might enjoy my essay for Aeon, “Lies and honest mistakes”
The Dialogues Team
My guest today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is one of the most important intellectuals working today on issues of free speech, human rights, feminism and foreign policy. She is no stranger to either controversy or danger, not least because of her fierce criticism of Islam and Islamic culture. We discuss her own journey from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, via asylum in Holland to escape an arranged marriage, and finally to an academic career in the U.S. We also trace her psychological journey from a tribal mindset to a zealous religious worldview, and finally to a fiercely-held liberalism. We discuss the limits of Islamic liberalization, the contest for free speech, critical race theory, the state of intellectual and academic debate, the risks of self-censorship, and much more besides. We also discuss her latest book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021). We don’t agree on everything, of course, but as she says: “That’s the whole point!”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan is a former Member of the Dutch Parliament (2003-2006) and is now a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Founder of the AHA Foundation. She has written several books including Infidel (2007); Nomad (2010); Heretic (2015); and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her newest book Prey is available now. She also has her own podcast, the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast
More Ayaan
- Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021)
- See this NYT profile, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Muslim Men and Western Women”
- In January 2020, Ayaan spoke at The Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on “The Market for Victimhood”
Also Mentioned
- We talked quite a lot about Mustafa Akyol’s views on liberalizing Islam. Listen to my dialogue with him here (Apple) or here (Spotify).
- If you’re interested in truth and truthfulness, you might enjoy my essay for Aeon, “Lies and honest mistakes”
The Dialogues Team
- Creator: Richard Reeves
- Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
- Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
- Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
- Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Nov 15, 2021
Monday Nov 15, 2021
If you find yourself saying, perhaps of a political speech, “Well, that’s just rhetoric”, you are getting things exactly wrong. That’s according to my guest today, Philip Collins, former chief speechwriter to Tony Blair and author of “When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World - and Why We Need Them”. Phil is an old friend of mine and irritatingly good at very many things: he’s a philosopher, lecturer, policy wonk, journalist (now for both the New Statesman and the Evening Standard), and much else besides. I think of him now as “Mr. Rhetoric”. Phil believes that rhetoric is essential to the functioning of democracy and, now, to its saving. We talk about Donald Trump, Tony Blair, Boris Johson, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Pericles, sophistry, the role of emotion in political persuasion, the need for enchantment - and the importance of paying our respects.
Philip Collins
Philip Collins is a British journalist, author and academic. He served as the chief speechwriter for Prime Minister Tony Blair from 2004-2007, after serving as the director of The Social Market Foundation, an independent think tank in the UK. Collins is the founder and writer-in-chief at The Draft, a writing and rhetoric agency, and he also teaches a course on rhetoric at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. He is a contributing editor at The New Statesman, and a columnist for the Evening Standard.
More Collins
- We discussed Collins’ vastly interesting book, “When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World - and Why We Need Them”
- He also authored “Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics” and “The Art of Speeches and Presentations,” among other books.
- You can follow more of his work on Twitter: @PhilipJCollins1
Also Mentioned
- I mentioned the book, “The Liberal Mind,” written by Kenneth Minogue
- Collins mentioned JP Stern’s book “Hitler: The Führer and the People”
- Collins also referred to the book “How Democracies Die” written by Levitsky and Ziblatt
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Nov 08, 2021
Monday Nov 08, 2021
I’ll be honest. I didn’t expect a book from someone leading a university to say anything terribly interesting. Maybe my view of higher education has become too cynical. I rather like the description from Clark Kerr, builder of the University of California system, of the modern American university as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” But my guest today (from whom I learned that quote) proved me wrong. He is Ron Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins University, and author of the new book What Universities Owe Democracy. Daniels argues “the fates of higher education and liberal democracy are deeply, inextricably intertwined”, not just in the sense of universities needing democracy, but the other way round.
Daniels is the son of Jewish refugees to Canada before World War II, and a committed educationalist and institutionalist. We talk about his family background and how it has influenced his views of liberalism, democracy and education, and then discuss the four main contributions of universities: social mobility, democratic education, the production of knowledge, and dialogue across differences. We spend some time on his decision, at first quietly and then proudly, to end the practice of legacy preferences at Hopkins, and whether more colleges and universities will follow suit. We discuss his ideas on reforming admissions; on instituting a democracy requirement for college graduation; on the need for more openness and humility in academic research; and on ways to promote what he calls purposeful pluralism, including fostering more debates rather than just lectures, and the importance of allowing roommates to be random, rather than chosen.
Ron Daniels
Ronald J. Daniels is president of The Johns Hopkins University. He has previously served as vice-president and provost at the University of Pennsylvania, and dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Daniels received his B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, and his LL.M. degree from Yale Law School. In December 2016, Daniels was invested into the Order of Canada at the grade of Member. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018 and is also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the author of What Universities Owe Democracy (Johns Hopkins Press, 2021).
Also Mentioned
- I’m reading this biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas (a touch over-written in places for sure but still a great narrative)
- Amherst College just ended legacy preferences in college admissions
- I’ve written a fair amount about legacy preferences, including in my last book Dream Hoarders and this Brookings piece.
- Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions is a book edited by Richard Kahlenberg (Brookings, 2010)
- “Getting In” by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker (2005) contrasts college applications and admissions in Canada and the US
- There is a campaign to end legacy preferences, #LeaveYourLegacy run by EdMobilizer
- Ron and I both raved about Jonathan Rauch’s new book impressive new book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings, 2021). Check out my podcast with Jon too: Spotify https://spoti.fi/3pr13KG; Apple https://apple.co/3fWHExX
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Nov 01, 2021
Monday Nov 01, 2021
“People should not underestimate Donald Trump’s abilities as a retail politician", says my guest today, fellow Brit-American Fiona Hill. "He knows how to connect with people, he knows how to get people riled up, he knows how to pit people against each other so that they can’t push back against what he’s doing”. Fiona is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. In November 2019, she testified in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. In very personal terms, we discuss the class system and social mobility in the UK, and her childhood in the North East of England, which lost its economic heart as coal mining collapsed; as well as her experience in the Soviet Union and Russia, American academia, and the White House. Fiona compares and contrasts the authoritarian style of Trump and Putin (with some discussion of Erdogan too); the need for more aggressive social and economic policy for places devastated by the shift away from industry; and the real and present danger posed to so many nations by political populism. We conclude, as her book does, with a discussion of what we can do as individuals and our own communities to build a stronger infrastructure of opportunity.
Fiona Hill
Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. She is a foreign policy expert on Russian and European affairs, and has served under three presidents: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. Hill is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held numerous positions directing research at Harvard University, where she obtained her PhD in History.
More Hill
- Hill’s book, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, is an exceptionally honest tale of dwindling opportunity in the UK and the US.
- You can read more of her work at Brookings, the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and Politico
- Her testimony at Trump’s first impeachment trial is also worth watching (starting at 3:08:43)
Also Mentioned
- I mentioned Joseph Fishkin’s book, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, which if you haven’t read by now, you really should!
- Fiona mentioned The Fifth Risk, written by Michael Lewis and Angrynomics co-authored by Mark Blythe.
- I quoted G.A. Cohen, “social justice isn't just found in structures and institutions, it's found in the thick of everyday life,” in his book If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?
- Fiona also mentioned the group Wider Circle and Dress for Success
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Oct 25, 2021
Monday Oct 25, 2021
“Residential segregation not only affects opportunity, it alters politics”. That’s one of the claims of my guest today, Georgetown scholar Sheryll Cashin. In this episode, we discuss Cashin’s new book, titled White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality. She describes her own upbringing as a daughter of civil rights activists and how this has animated her own work; how affluent white spaces are not only separate to low-poverty areas, but require them; the group of people she calls Descendants, whose ancestors were enslaved, and who live today in low-opportunity spaces; and what it means for white people to have “cultural dexterity”. We end up talking about what love has to do with pretty much all of this.
Sheryll Cashin
Sheryll Cashin is a Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University working on topics including race relations and inequality in the United States. She is the author of several books and numerous articles including commentary for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and is currently serving as a contributing editor to Politico. Cashin is also a board member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. Previously, she was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and worked in the Clinton administration as an advisor on urban and economic policy.
More Cashin
- In this episode, we discuss Cashin’s new book, titled “White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality”
- Cashin is a contributing editor of Politico Magazine, and she recently wrote a piece on this same topic, titled “It’s Time to Dismantle America’s Residential Caste System”
- She is also the author of Loving, Place Not Race, The Failures of Integration, and The Agitator's Daughter.
- You can follow more of Cashin’s work on her website or on her twitter, @SheryllCashin
Also mentioned
- Cashin referenced Richard Rothstein’s book, “The Color of Law”
- We discussed the work of Raj Chetty that looks at the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods. This paper on housing vouchers illuminates the issue: “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children”
- We mentioned the work of bell hooks, particularly her book “All About Love”
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Oct 18, 2021
Monday Oct 18, 2021
What does “cancel culture” really mean, and how big a problem is it? Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason, has given these questions more thought than most. Nick is one of the leading lights of libertarian public intellectual life, and just wrote an essay, “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” that we dig into here. Nick is worried about the shift towards censorship in politics, in our organizations, including corporations, and in our own lives. We differ on whether the problem is more personal or political, but in the end we do agree that a healthy liberal culture is one that welcomes a robust exchange of diverse views. Along the way, we get into Nick’s particular beef with Facebook, some similarities in our backgrounds as journalists, and how his view of the world has some Marxist traces.
Nick Gillespie
Nick is an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine and host of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. “Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock ‘n’ roll, the quintessence of its outlaw spirit,” wrote Robert Draper in The New York Times Magazine.
A two-time finalist for digital National Magazine Awards, Nick is co-author, with Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America (2012).
More Gillespie
- “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” (Sep 2021)
- The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie (including his latest here with Steven Pinker)
- “A Different Approach to Anti-Racism” (Nov 2021)
- “From Russiagate to the MyPillow Guy, Let's Stop With Electoral Conspiracy Theories” (Sep 2021)
Also mentioned
- My Guardian essay, “Capitalism used to promise a better future. Can it still do that?”
- The narrator of Adam Thirlwell’s 2015 novel Lurid and Cute exclaims of capitalism: “‘Late? It had only just got started!” (I quote the line here).
- Nick’s podcast with Steven Pinker in how “Rationality Has Made Us Richer, Kinder, and More Free”
- I mentioned Abigail Shrier’s controversial 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze. (Nick’s had Abigail on his podcast).
- Nick mentioned Common Sense with Bari Weiss, on Substack
- I referred to MIT’s cancelation of University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot who was to give the prestigious Carlson Lecture, which is devoted to 'new results in climate science'. Now Princeton is hosting it online instead.
- I quoted John Stuart Mill from On Liberty: ““Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.””
- Nick mentioned Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, published in 1975.
- I mentioned Bernard Williams’s last book: Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (2004); I also wrote an essay in truthfulness drawing heavily on Williams, “Lies and honest mistakes” (July 2021)
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Oct 11, 2021
Monday Oct 11, 2021
What have genes got to do with inequality? It’s a thorny question. But it one that Kathryn Paige Harden squarely addresses in her book and in this episode of Dialogues. She explains the new science of genetics and how it can help understand outcomes like college completion. Along the way we discuss the importance of the disability rights movement, the nature of meritocracy, what luck has to do with it, designer babies, regional inequality, and how one byproduct of her Christian upbringing is an appreciation for the unique and equal value of every person.
Kathryn Paige Harden
Kathryn Paige Harden is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, where she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and co-directs the Texas Twin Project. Harden is also a fellow at the Jacobs Foundation. Having received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Virginia, her work has focused on genetic influences on complex human behavior, including child cognitive development, academic achievement, risk-taking, mental health, sexual activity, and childbearing.
More Harden
- Her thought-provoking new book, The Genetic Lottery, can be purchased here.
- Harden’s previous New York Times op-ed is a great starting place for learning more on this topic.
- Read her recent profile in the New Yorker, “Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?”
- For more, check out her website and follow her on twitter: @kph3k
Also mentioned
- I referred to my paper “The Glass Floor: Education, Downward Mobility, and Opportunity Hoarding”.I write a NYT oped on the same theme, too.
- I mentioned Joseph Fishkin’s book, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity
- Harden referred to the work of Pamela Herd, specifically on the topic of Genes, Gender Inequality, and Educational Attainment
- I referred to Caroline Hoxby’s work of mapping cognitive skills by region in the United States.
- Harden mentioned a study by Abdel Abdellaoui on the geographic distribution of genetics in the United Kingdom. (See Twitter thread here).
- Harden referred to Dan Belsky’s study in Dunedin, New Zealand.
- I mentioned an article written by Toby Young, the son of Michael Young, and what he calls “Progressive Eugenics”
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Oct 04, 2021
Monday Oct 04, 2021
What made America into a tinderbox, ready for Donald Trump's spark? That's the question Evan Osnos, staff writer for the New Yorker, set out to answer in his book Wildland: The Making of America's Fury. Having lived overseas for many years, mostly in China, Evan returned to the U.S. in 2013 and felt something of a stranger in his own land. The events of the next few years added to this sense. So he set out to find out what had happened to make his home country feel so foreign, by returning to the places he knew best: Greenwich CT, where he grew up, Clarksburg WV where he started his reporting career, and Chicago where he covered city politics for the Tribune. The book is already a bestseller and being heaped with critical acclaim. The story is of a country that was ever more divided by class and geography and politics, but ever more connected by the ties of the modern economy. Evan and I talk about the financialization of the economy, and the transformation of the culture of his home town of Greenwich into the hedge fund capital of the country; the battles over the coal industry; the rise of Trump; the potential for Joe Biden to bring the nation back together; the cleavages of race and wealth in cities like Chicago. Although he is worried about what he calls the "seclusion of mind" of many of America's tribes, Evan ends on an optimistic note: that the pandemic has shown that whether we like it or not, we're all in together.
Evan Osnos
Evan Osnos is a staff writer for the New Yorker, contributor to CNN, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution covering politics and foreign affairs. A graduate of Harvard, Osnos started his journalism career in West Virginia and Chicago, before being stationed in the Middle East to report on the Iraq War. He then moved to Beijing for eight years and wrote, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China” which won the National Book Award. He now lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and two children.
More Osnos
- Read his "novelistically gripping" book, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury
- Find more of his writing at The New Yorker
- Follow him on twitter: @eosnos
Also mentioned
- We briefly discussed the book “The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class”, written by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett.
- Osnos referred to Michael Sandel’s work, specifically what he calls "The Skyboxification of American Life"
- We discussed the saga of Varsity Blues, and the very notable quote from Gordon Caplan: “To be honest I'm not worried about the moral issue here.”
- Osnos referred to the documentary-style photography of Walker Evans
- Osnos spoke in depth about Patriot Coal
- I highlighted the racial disparity in wealth pre- and post-recession, which you can learn more about here.
- Osnos mentions a political movement in West Virginia, called WV Can’t Wait
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)
Monday Sep 27, 2021
Monday Sep 27, 2021
Should feminists be pro-life? Should conservatives support more welfare for families? Who is Mary Wollstonecraft? What did RBG get right and wrong? I dug into these questions with my guest today, the legal scholar Erika Bachiochi. Our discussion centers on Erika’s new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, which argues for a form of feminism that takes into account natural differences between men and women, especially in what she calls “reproductive asymmetry” i.e. that having sex and having children carry different implications for men and women. We talk about her journey from a Bernie Sanders supporting kind of feminist to a Roman Catholic kind of feminist, including a strong pro-life moral basis. Her intellectual heroine is the 18th century thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, who had a feminist vision that was about the equal pursuit of the good, which Erika John Stuart Mill’s feminism based on a perfect equality.
We talk about what Ruth Bader Ginsburg got right and wrong, whether conservatives should be supporting President Biden’s big pro-family welfare expansions, the Texas abortion law, family-friendly policy, and much more.
I should say that at the very beginning Erika candidly describes her troubled childhood and early adulthood, which in her darkest hours ever led her to thoughts of suicide.
Erika Bachiochi
Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar specializing in Equal Protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, Catholic social teaching, and sexual ethics. She studied at Middlebury College and got her law degree from Boston University. Erika is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, where she directs the Wollstonecraft Project. She lives in Boston with her husband and seven children.
More Bachiochi
- Bachiochi’s new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, is a thoughtful and provocative read.
- Her previous article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, titled Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights, served as a basis for her book.
- Bachiochi has also written a few op-eds for Newsweek
- Follow her work on twitter: @erikabachiochi
Also mentioned
- Bachiochi quited Mill in On Liberty: “misplaced notions of liberty prevent moral obligations on the part of parents from being recognized, and legal obligations from being imposed”
- She also quoted Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: “A truly benevolent legislator always endeavours to make it the interest of each individual to be virtuous; and thus private virtue becoming the cement of public happiness, an orderly whole is consolidated by the tendency of all the parts towards a common center”
- We referenced my work on the economic and social status of American women.
- We discussed the work of my colleague, Isabel Sawhill, and her book Generation Unbound
- I referenced Scott Winship’s work on the dynamics of marriage and childrearing
- Bachiochi spoke about Mary Ann Glendon, a leading thinker in this space and a professor at Harvard Law.
- She also referenced Joan Williams’ op-ed in the New York Times, titled The Case for Accepting Defeat on Roe.
- I quoted Margaret Mead who wrote, “We won’t get equality between groups by ignoring the differences between them.”
- Earlier this summer, Josh Hawley tweeted that he was against including women in the draft because he didn’t want to “force [service] upon our daughters, sisters, and wives.”
- We mentioned Heather Boushey who currently serves on the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and her work on family policy, for example in her Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict (2016).
- The Mary Wollstonecraft twitter account I referred to seems to have gone quiet lately. As an alternative. As a replacement may I suggest: https://twitter.com/womenpostingws.
The Dialogues Team
Creator: Richard Reeves
Research: Ashleigh Maciolek
Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas
Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves
Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)