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The Powerline Show

Steven Hayward brings you the Power Line Blog's perspective on the week's big headlines, along with interviews with leading thinkers.

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Episode length: 39m

The Power Line Show: Rock And Roll Journalism with Chris Welch

This episode of the intermittent Powerline podcast departs from the usual topics and style featuring mostly book authors on political and intellectual topics, and instead will offer a conversation about . . . rock and roll journalism, with a British rock journalist that I suspect almost no Americans know at all, except for the music-obsessed. He is Chris Welch. Last month, while I was over on an idyll in Germany, and through a long train of circumstances I won't recount, I got to meet Welch. He has been arguably Britain's most influential rock journalist since he started out at Fleet Street at the impossibly young age of 16 back in the 1960s That fact alone was enough to perk up my interest, because that early a start is unheard of in media today. (And is there another rock music critic anywhere in the known universe who can brag of having been awarded a writing prize as a schoolboy by the legendary World War II General Bernard Montgomery? Talk about heavy metal. . .) During his long years at Melody Maker magazine, he had a well-earned reputation of someone who could make—or break—a new band. And so, he often heard of now-legendary artists like Eric Clapton, or Pink Floyd, before anyone had heard of them, when he'd go to some small club in London to track down word-of-mouth about a new talent. A rave review from Welch offered a major boost to emerging artists, not to mention their album sales. And you name any rock icon from the last 50 years, and Welch knows them. Special thanks to all the good people at Trading Boundaries, a really interesting arts and music enterprise in England that facilitated my meeting Chris and setting up our conversation.

July 2026

Episode length: 53m

The Power Line Show: A Conversation with Michael Anton

Michael Anton is best known for his famous "Flight 93" election essay that appeared seemingly out of the blue in September 2016, though many of us have long known of his qualities as a writer and thinker. He told me later that he never expected the "Flight 93" article to be a huge sensation, but after Rush Limbaugh read the entire essay on all three hours of his broadcast when it appeared—which in turn crashed the servers of the Claremont Review of Books where the essay was posted online—it took its place among the most memorable election broadsides in American history. New York magazine said the essay "defined the Trump era," and it remains a subject of intense controversy and criticism a decade later. But beyond politics, people started to recognize that Michael is one of the finest essayists on the scene today, across a broad range of topics. He has two brand new books out that display both the reach of his topical interests and his supreme intellect.

Episode length: 47m

The Power Line Show: ‘Divided Over the Declaration,’ with Bobb & Williams

My final conversation with authors of new books about the Declaration of Independence before this Saturday's formal observance features the co-authors of Divided Over the Declaration: How an Enduring Debate Sustains the Vision of America. The authors of Divided Over the Declaration are David J. Bobb and Tony Williams, who are colleagues at the indispensable Bill of Rights Institute. Bobb and Williams have hit upon a unique way to draw our attention to key aspects of the Declaration as it has affected our political history from the beginning. Rather than doing a chronological narrative or analytical account of the sources and ideas in the Declaration, Bobb and Williams highlight several important episodes—you can call them "Declaration moments"—where the Declaration became a central factor in a new debate. For example, the first chapter takes as its starting point Frederick Douglass's famous speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" in 1852.

June 2026

Episode length: 50m

The Power Line Show: Ed Larson’s ‘Why 1776 Matters’

Most of the books I have been featuring in this series highlight the philosophical and political background of the Declaration, going all the way back to antiquity in some cases, as well as dilating the ongoing controversies about several key aspects of the Declaration, such as the nature of "self-evident truth" or "all men are created equal." This week's featured book takes a different tack. It is Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters, by Edward J. Larson. Larson is a best-selling author and historian who also happens to teach law right across the hill from me at Pepperdine University. He is the author of more books that I can count at this point, including a previous book that we'll briefly discuss here that won him a Pultizer Prize back in the1990s, Summer for the Gods, which tells the real story of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1924. The significance of his new book in this semiquincentennial season is that blends both ideas and events together in a unified narrative of the pivotal year in which the Declaration was promulgated.

Episode length: 48m

The Power Line Show: Brad Birzer’s ‘A Radical Experiment in Liberty’

This week's spotlight on new books about the Declaration of Independence features Hilldale College historian Bradley Birzer, whose book is The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, just out last month from Stone House Press. Prof. Birzer's book has a somewhat shorter time frame than some of the other books we have discussed in this series, which often take the run-up to the Declaration back to the 1760s if not all the way back to classical antiquity, and while Birzer recounts many of the distant antecedents of the Declaration (most especially Cicero), the heart of the book looks most closely at the years from 1774 through 1776, and ends with useful chapters on the structure of the Declaration, and a review of the reaction to the Declaration right after it burst on the scene in that fateful summer. The book is relatively compact at about 250 pages. It is an eclectic work that attempts to synthesize a number of competing though by no means mutually exclusive interpretations of the Declaration.

Episode length: 50m

The Power Line Show: Timothy Sandefur’s ‘Proclaiming Liberty’

We're now only a month away from the July 4 semiquincentennial of the founding of our country, but there's still time to acquire and read through some of the new books appearing to mark the auspicious occasion. And one of the very best of the very large field of contenders is from Timothy Sandefur, whose day job is Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute's Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation. His brand new book for the occasion is Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence. Tim is one of my favorite writers on legal and constitutional matters, because he combines clear-headedness with clear and lively writing—even in his law review articles, which is no mean feat. His books are even more compelling reading. Proclaiming Liberty builds upon and supplements one of his previous superb books from 2014, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty.

May 2026

Episode length: 52m

The Power Line How: Michael Auslin’s ‘National Treasure’

Today's entry in the many books I am featuring in this series is Michael Auslin's National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America. Misha, as his friends know him, assures me he didn't actually name the book after the Nic Cage potboiler, but rather thinks the Declaration deserves to be regarded as more than just an important political or merely historical document. And Misha's book is quite different from most of the new books out recently. Although he does incorporate observations on many of the key ideas and concepts in the Declaration, 'National Treasure' is mostly a story about the document itself—its physical handling and travels over the last 250 years. You might think regarding the Declaration as something akin to a sacred relic, and a narrative about its mere custodial issues (which included many threats to its survival in original form, might not be gripping reading, but somehow in Misha's telling it is. Auslin is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and has taught history at Yale, as well as being one of the nation's leading experts on Asia. All of his work is worth following, which you do on his Substack, The Patowmack Packet.

Episode length: 55m

The Power Line Show: John West on the Declaration, Christian Faith, and Science

Margaret Thatcher once remarked that “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” What she had in mind here was the strain of thought that considered America and its founding thought as predominantly a product of enlightenment-era rational philosophy, especially as it crystalized in the work of John Locke. Hence the view of America as a "creedal" nation, founded on reason. This general account has long attracted criticism for neglecting the contributions of Christianity, and our historical inheritance from England, albeit modified in substantial ways by our colonial and revolutionary experience. These two camps that seem especially irreconcilable for some reason, though it ought to be possible in my mind to achieve a synthesis. Somehow it is seldom attempted, let alone successfully accomplished, so we go on firing from our intellectual fixed fortifications.

April 2026

Episode length: 39m

The Power Line Show: Lucas Morel on Lincoln and the Declaration

Between now and July 4th I'll be doing a series of podcasts with authors and thinkers who have worthy things to say about the Declaration of Independence on the occasion of its 250th anniversary. I can hardly keep up with the flood of new books on the subject, and so this series my well extend beyond July 4. I'm delighted to begin this series with Lucas Morel of Washington and Lee University, though this episode is somewhat idiosyncratic, as we take a considerable detour from the text of the Declaration itself. And that's all Lucas's fault; you see, Lucas is easily one of the top five Abraham Lincoln scholars in the nation, as well as one of the top five scholars on Frederick Douglass. Not long ago Lucas and I were together on a panel focusing in on one the key phrases of the Declaration, namely, the "pursuit of happiness." Most of the time explaining this famous phrase involves going back to what Jefferson and other founders thought about the idea of happiness, which is much different from contemporary understandings of the term. But Lucas decided to direct our attention to one of the best interpreters of the Declaration—that person being of course Lincoln. And while Lincoln, as we know, emphasized the earlier part of that famous sentence—"All men are created equal"—Lucas draws out Lincoln's profound grasp of the whole document. I was curious about the historical and personal paradox of connecting Lincoln with the pursuit of happiness, for the obvious reason that the climax of Lincoln's life and career involved tragedy and personal melancholy. Can Lincoln be said to have fulfilled his own pursuit of happiness?

March 2025

Episode length: 51m

The Power Line Show: David Beito on ‘FDR: A Political Life’

Yep, it's happening. I'm getting the band back together, and reviving the Power Line Classic Podcast format, featuring me in conversation with individual guests of note, though from time to time we may get the Power Line Gang itself to appear on some special legacy episodes. This has been a while in the making, partly by popular demand from listeners who liked our interviews. Among other things, I want to do a series of episodes between now and July 4, and perhaps after July 4, with some of the authors of the flood of new books appearing right now coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I've written about a few of these for the New York Post, and will have more installments to come. My first guest for the revived show is one of my favorite current historians who appeared once before: David T. Beito, who is emeritus professor of history at the University of Alabama. His latest book, which I mentioned in one of my New York Post features late last year, is FDR: A New Political Life. This book is a sequel to a previous book that reviewed the massive violations of civil liberties that occurred during the New Deal—transgressions that have been largely airbrushed out of the sympathetic liberal histories of FDR and the New Deal. David's new book takes a broader look at the whole FDR story, and concludes with a blunt assessment: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was not a great president nor even a good one. The reasons for making this assessment is long"

February 2025

Episode length: 36m

The Power Line Show: Talking ‘Lawless’ with Ilya Shapiro

Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, joins us today to talk about his timely new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites. While America's judiciary has moved to the right in recent years along with the revival of constitutional originalism, our law schools, always left of center, have been moving steadily further to left. Shapiro is himself a victim of a campus inquisition at the hands of the Diversity Industrial Complex, but the problems extend far beyond just the DEI morass. In addition to reviewing some aspects of his book, we also coax an origin story out of him, as Ilya grew up in the old Soviet Union and in 1980 immigrated with his parents first to Canada, and then ultimately to the United States.

Episode length: 47m

The Power Line Show: A Few Minutes with Edward Blum

When the history of civil rights in our time is finally written—though no history is ever “finally” written of course—honest writers will mark the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action admissions cases as a key turning point in restoring the principle of equal rights as understood by the founders. Further, the better histories will note they key role of one person: Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions that brought the Harvard/UNC cases. Edward is modest and self-effacing about his role, but it was a long slog to get to the finish line successfully, and there were many disappointments, setbacks, and equivocal rulings along the way in a constitutional story that is nearly 60 years old at this point. In surveying the story arc of Edward’s efforts, I am reminded of Lord Randolph Churchill’s succinct description of Disraeli’s political career in Britain. It was, Lord Randolph said, “Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure—complete and ultimate triumph.” Edward would say, and I agree, that the triumph isn’t complete or ultimate yet, but the blow stuck with the ruling in the Harvard/UNC case is proving instrumental in the Trump administration’s current efforts to end the abusive regime of DEI. In the conversation that follows I ask Edward how he got committed to this cause in the first place, some interesting inside aspects of the cases, and where we go from here.