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Enjoy this episode of Banter, part of the AEI Podcast Network. For more episodes of Banter, find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. This episode was first released on March 11, 2020.

During the later years of the George W. Bush administration and throughout the presidency of Barack Obama, a group that came to be known as “reformocons” began arguing that the Right needed to update its policy agenda; formulated to address the circumstances of the late 1970s, it had since gradually hardened into a set of dogmatic slogans. Family, community, traditional religion, civil society, and civic republicanism needed protection and support, they argued. But taking these social concerns seriously did not mean abandoning the Right’s affinity for market economics; it meant putting that affinity to use in the service of empowering working families.

What has come of this agenda? How does the presidency of Donald Trump relate to it? And will reform conservatism be a force in the future? To discuss these questions and more, we were joined by Dr. Yuval Levin.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI. The founding and current editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to National Review. Dr. Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”

You can subscribe to Banter on iTunes, Stitcher, or Spotify, and archived episodes can be found at www.aei.org/tag/aei-banter. This is Banter episode #403.

Related links:

The next coalition of the right

“The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left”

“The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World”

Taxes, poverty, and equality