Marshall here, welcome back to the realignment. My guest today is Jeff Cabo Service,

Vice President of Political Studies at the Niscanin Center. He's the author of, among other things,

2012's Rural and Ruin, The downfall of moderation and the destruction of the

Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. Rural and ruin was one of the

first major books I've read on the history of the American Right and it really kicked off an

interest that's driven my work up to the present. Jeff was also one of the first authors

Sakura and I reached out to for coffee back when we got to DC in 2015 so it was great to chat with him today almost 10 years later.

This is about the 500th episode of the realignment.

So as I think about the next 500 I'll make clear that it

really feels like so many of the themes and dynamics that defined the last eight

years are coming to a close. The realignment is real of course, but it just doesn't look

quite the way we thought it would be when we were looking at the American and international scene in

2015,2016.

So in this episode and over the next few years I hope we can keep pulling on the major

threads and help everyone see what's coming next.

With that in mind, here are a couple of topics we're going to cover in today's wide-reaching

episode, The Evolution of the Republican Party, since Obama B. Romney in 2012, the rise of what

the New York Times David Leuenhart calls the new

centrism or neo-populism, what a different form of moderation that accounts

for moderation strengths and weaknesses can look like, the case for a more pragmatic governance-focused

politics, aka a better version of centrism, and why we are so excited about the abundance

agenda. A bunch of the pieces mentioned are linked in the

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