Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Today's episode is an interview with Boston

University's Doug Most, but has recently released book, Launching Liberty, the epic race to build

the ships that took America to war. Launching liberties focused on an under-told part of the

World War II Arsenal of Democracy story.

Not the conversion of forward auto plants into bomber and tank factories, but the creation

of Liberty ships, massive supply ships that actually took the arsenal of democracy into battle.

The crucial part wasn't just the launch of a new class of vessel, but the public-private

partnership that reduced a year-plus long construction process down to only weeks.

Before we dive in, this history-focused conversation really brings to mind a couple of threads

I've been chewing on for the past few weeks.

One of my favorite interviews on the realignment this year was with the author Dan Wong about his book, Breakneck, China's quest to engineer the future.

Dan is really having a moment right now, and the book is now a New York Times bestseller. The basic idea is that China's engineering-focused state increasingly outmatches America's procedure-obsessed lawyerly society when it comes

to building the future. As I said during my conversation with Dan, though, the New Deal and

the Arsenal of Democracy era America was literally one that was run by lawyers from FDR on down.

Studying the story and the massive engineering-focused accomplishments of that version of America

shows that even lawyers can preside over big things and the democracy isn't inherently incompatible with

accomplishment. As listeners will know, I recently took the realignment to the Niskanen Center,

where I'm now director of special projects. Over a year ago, I recorded an episode with

my colleague Jeff Kappa Service discussing our work on building a new politics of pragmatism

at Niskanin. A lot of people code Niskanin as a centrist or moderate think tank. I've never

been comfortable with the words centrist or moderate, because they suggest a comfort with the status quo,

a slowness in response, and a lack of ambition, all things that are dead ends in an era of populist

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