The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk and Charles Fain Lehman explore how strategic policing drove the decline in violent crime—and why Baltimore was left behind.

Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, where he covers crime, policing, and urban policy.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Charles Fain Lehman discuss why Baltimore failed to follow the crime declines that transformed other American cities, what the evidence tells us about why strategic policing works, and how focused deterrence breaks cycles of retaliatory violence.

Watch the conversation below—the full video is behind the paywall on this page!

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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

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Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk debate whether progressives have abandoned the working-class voters they once claimed to represent.

Will you be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday July 15? I will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about how liberalism should respond to the postliberal threat. Find out more and get your free ticket here! —Yascha

In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk examine why center-left parties are losing ground across democracies, whether structural forces or strategic failures are to blame, and what lessons from Canada, Australia, and the UK might offer a path forward for the left.

Matthew Yglesias is the founder and author of Slow Boring, a Substack newsletter focused on policy and politics. He is the author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger and a longtime commentator on economics, housing, and Democratic Party strategy.

Claire Ainsley is Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute. A British political strategist and policy expert, she previously served as Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and as a senior adviser in the Labour government of Keir Starmer. 

Note: This episode was recorded on June 3, 2026.

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Yascha Mounk and Mark Leonard discuss how the West can defend itself without America.

Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think–tank. His latest book is Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Mark Leonard discuss why Europe is behind, the global impact of China’s rise, and whether Europe can learn to defend itself without the United States.

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Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

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Curtis Yarvin, Minna Salami, and Yascha Mounk discuss whether we can ever be free in a liberal society in a discussion moderated by Roger Hearing.

In this special episode of The Good Fight, recorded at the How The Light Gets In Festival, Roger Hearing moderates a debate between Curtis Yarvin, Minna Salami, and Yascha Mounk on whether liberalism can ever be neutral, what a truly free society would look like, and whether liberalism’s heyday is over. Find out more about the Institute of Arts and Ideas—and book tickets to this year’s  How The Light Gets In Festival in September—here. Watch the video of the debate here.

Roger Hearing is a broadcaster and journalist with over 30 years experience presenting and reporting for BBC News and Bloomberg.

Minna Salami is an award-winning Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish author, cultural critic, and independent scholar based in London. She is the author of Can Feminism Be African?: A Most Paradoxical Question.

Curtis Yarvin is a political blogger and software developer.

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Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.

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Yascha Mounk and Sam Moyn also discuss whether some people deserve to have more votes than others.

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, The Last Utopia, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and many other publications.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sam Moyn discuss whether a truly fair democracy might weigh different citizens’ votes differently, whether the emphasis on human rights have got us into the mess we’re in today, and to what extent our democracy is in danger from populism.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.

Email: leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

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