Ashbrook Center

New episode out today. Adam Smith is one of the most quoted and least understood thinkers in modern history. On The American Idea, host Jeff Sikkenga sits down with Professor Bri Wolf of Michigan State's James Madison College to mark the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations and unpack what Smith actually argued about markets, morality, and the cooperative nature of commerce. If you've ever assumed Smith was a champion of pure self-interest or cutthroat competition, this conversation will reframe everything.

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Adam Smith is one of the most quoted and least understood thinkers in modern history. This week on The American Idea, host Jeff Sikkenga sits down with Professor Brie Wolf of Michigan State's James Madison College to mark the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations and unpack what Smith actually argued about markets, morality, and the cooperative nature of commerce. If you've ever assumed Smith was a champion of pure self-interest or cutthroat competition, this conversation will reframe everything.

Episode drops on Wednesday.

Machiavelli is mostly remembered for The Prince, but his more searching work argued that republics decay unless their citizens periodically return to first principles. The American founders took that warning seriously. So did Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and Reagan, each in their own way. Is the United States in another such moment right now? Jay Cost of the American Enterprise Institute joins the new episode of The American Idea to make the case.

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A new episode of The American Idea is out today. Most people assume the founders were united on religious liberty — and on the core principle, they largely were. But beneath that agreement lay real disagreements about what the principle required: whether government could fund religion for civic purposes, whether religious tests for office protected the republic or violated it, and whether a regime of legal exemptions was workable at all. Notre Dame scholar Vincent Philip Muñoz walks through the founding debate in full, and explains why the unresolved questions from 1776 keep showing up in American courtrooms and legislatures today.

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In April, the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais that quietly rewrote the rules connecting race, redistricting, and the Voting Rights Act. Sixty years of legal architecture, the kind that runs underneath every congressional map in the country, just shifted.

This week's episode of The American Idea unpacks how a 1965 civil rights law became the framework for drawing legislative districts, the unlikely political coalition that produced the maps we know today, and what the Court is now asking states to do. The full effects will not be visible for a few election cycles, which makes this a good moment to understand what actually happened.

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Most people assume school choice is a recent policy experiment. The actual history stretches back centuries — to colonial communities that funded religious schools with pooled resources, to the Supreme Court cases that affirmed parents' authority over their children's education, to the unlikely bipartisan coalition that launched the first voucher program in Milwaukee in 1990. Today's episode covers all of it, including why COVID accelerated the movement and what 220,000 Texas families on a waiting list tells us about where things are headed. Link in comments.

The American Revolution is central to how Americans understand themselves. In Britain, it's barely taught at all — omitted from school guidelines, absent from the national conversation, and quietly set aside as a chapter that doesn't fit the preferred story. Today's episode of The American Idea explores what the Revolution looked like from London rather than Philadelphia: why the colonists' victory shook the foundations of the British Empire, how the two countries have been defining themselves against each other ever since, and what it means to share a history that only one side finds it useful to remember. Link in comments.

New episode out now. The Declaration of Independence didn't sit quietly on parchment after 1776. It became the most contested document in the fight over racial equality in America. Professor Peter Myers joins us to walk through the whole arc: abolition societies forming within years of the signing, Frederick Douglass reclaiming the Constitution as a liberty document, Lincoln refusing to let "all men are created equal" be reduced to "some men," and the sharp disagreements over what the Declaration's promises actually require that continue right now in 2026. Drop your reaction in the comments after you listen.

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New episode dropping this week. The Declaration of Independence didn't just announce a new nation. It launched a 250-year argument over who gets to share in its promises. Professor Peter Myers joins us to trace that argument from the first wave of abolition in the 1770s through Frederick Douglass's fierce defense of the Constitution, Lincoln's insistence that "all men" really does mean all men, and the competing visions of civil rights that still shape our politics today. If you've ever wondered whether the founding actually planted the seeds of equality or just paid it lip service, this one is for you.

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From "A Time for Choosing" in 1964 to his farewell address in 1989, Ronald Reagan made a consistent argument: that the Declaration of Independence wasn't a historical relic but the most reliable guide to self-government ever produced. Host Jeff Sikkenga and political scientist Gregory McReer trace that conviction through Reagan's domestic policy, his Cold War foreign policy, and his little-discussed warning about the dangers of uninformed patriotism.

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