Marshall here, welcome back to The Realignment. Thanks for your patience waiting for new episodes.

I've been on the road the past two weeks. I recorded a bunch of great conversations and I'm

pumped to play catch-up. Today, I am joined by Brink-Lenzzi, a senior vice president at the

Niskanen Center, and author of a new book, The Permanent Problem, The Uncertain Transition,

From Mass Plenty to Mass F flourishing.

We recorded a wide-ranging conversation about what's got off the rails in liberal democratic

capitalism in the 21st century and what it will take to fix it.

Brigh describes himself as a, quote, libertarian mugged by the 21st century, and we unpack

just what that means, why the legitimacy crisis in our politics is real and here to stay,

why the status quo is dead, and how he came to believe a robust social insurance state can

complement a dynamic entrepreneurial economy rather than smother it.

We also revisit his 2017 book, The Captured Economy, co-authored with friend of the show, Professor Steve Talley's.

And of course, we get into the abundance debates next frontier in the new year, the internal tension over what abundance even means, whether it's a

Democratic Party slash center left reform project, or something bigger, plus the off-dodge

question, an abundance for what? I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Brink, Lindsay, welcome to The Realignment.

Great to be with you, Marshall.

So I love doing these episodes with my Niscanning colleagues because I think what consistently

happens, especially with my episodes of Steve, is we could talk about a lot of the broad

themes of the realignment, but via a sort of specific

sort of approach to these questions that I think is very uniquely in Ascanon. But I think what's

also important here, because sort of Steve has been the main Niskanin person on the show, and we have,

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