Jason Kander is an Afghanistan Veteran, a former Missouri Secretary of State, and a guy who kind of ran for president for a minute. Today, he is the president of national expansion at Veterans Community Project, the co-host of the Majority 54 podcast, a bestselling author, the founder of Afghan Rescue Project, and a men’s amateur baseball player, as well as a little league coach.

In his searing memoir, “Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD” Jason writes about his journey as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan and how he came to terms—wrenchingly, thoughtfully and bravely—with his mental health in the aftermath.

To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade.

Adam and H.W. Brands discourse about Brands’s latest book Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics, which offers readers an incisive look at the perils of partisanship which played not only a key role in our founding but remain foundational to the American experiment in all its messy glory. Enjoy!

Check out H.W. Brand’s Substack: A User's Guide to History

H.W. Brands on Twitter/X: https://x.com/hwbrands

We discussed his latest book, but he has written a healthy handful of incredible reads! Check them out here —> H.W. Brands on Amazon

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Batya Ungar-Sargon, American journalist and author, is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek and the former opinion editor of The Forward. She has written a really powerful book called Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women

Luke Nichter is a professor of History and the James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. Luke joins Adam to discuss his latest book, “The Year that Broke Politics:Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968” which was named one of the top books of 2023 by the Wall Street Journal.

Nichter shows 1968 to be a pivotal year in American politics, but not for the reasons we’ve come to accept. The conventional wisdom of the Republican and Democratic Party rivalry is redrawn to reveal sunrising insights about the cast of presidential candidates in the ‘68 election. It’s been said that history may not repeat but it does rhyme, and “The Year That Broke Politics” is both an astute reassessment of 1968 and something of a cautionary tale for 2024.

Love democracy? Despise the idea of another Trump White House? Well then you are in the right place! If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast and don't miss our Substack-Dirty Moderate Nation.

White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses. Rural voters believe our nation has betrayed them, and to some degree, they’re right. In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why rural Whites have failed to reap the benefits from their outsize political power and why, as a result, they are the most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions. Their rage—stoked daily by Republican politicians and the conservative media—now poses an existential threat to the United States.

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman join Adam to discuss their book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, which has been received with equal parts acclaim and blowback. The New York Times Bestseller has been called a searing portrait and damning takedown of America’s proudest citizens—who are also the least likely to defend its core principles.

Reed Galen is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, host of the Lincoln Project podcast and author of The HomeFront Substack, and a self-proclaimed Cassandra. Reed is an independent political strategist who has spent years advising Fortune 500 companies, and has also worked on several prominent republican campaigns. He joins Adam to assess the Never Trump movement( of which they are both part) from 30,000 feet and the precariousness of democracy. How will Trump’s legal predicaments affect his electoral fate? What percentage of independent/Haley voters does Biden need to win re-election? Is to easier to run against Trump when he is the incumbent than when he is a challenger? Has Biden lost the center over his policies on the border, campus protests and inflation? It’s America or Trump and you can’t have both as Adam and Reed discuss and drive home. Subscribe to Reed's Substack The Home Front here: https://reedgalen.substack.com/ Follow Reed on Social: Twitter/X @reedgalen All things Lincoln Project here: https://lincolnproject.us/

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