Besieged by an unprecedented convergence of crises, the atonal, discordant bickering that marks our every interaction as a country could easily be mistaken as our national anthem. That’s eroding our trust in institutions, unraveling our democratic norms, and generating a collective anxiety as oppressive as putrid smoke. Despite the diminished stature of many political leaders, a few voices rise above the maddening cacophony, summoning our 'better angels.'
In a series of one-on-one conversations, featuring influential thinkers who have studied how the country has weathered its toughest times, Common Ground with Jane Whitney offers the calming reassurance of historical perspective and a moral clarity that can inspire a broad cross-section of Americans.
david french
David French, an evangelical Christian at the center of the country’s sharpest cultural clashes, is the conservative conscience that liberals love. A lawyer with an abiding commitment to pluralism, he has helmed high profile religious liberty cases, and now, as a star columnist for The New York Times, is among the country’s most provocative writers on the complex intersections of law, faith, and politics.
Born in Alabama and raised in a small Kentucky town, David French's Southern roots instilled in him a deep understanding of rural values, positioning him as a natural bridge across America’s cultural and religious divides. A graduate of Lipscomb University, a Christian institution in Nashville, French carried his convictions to Harvard Law School, where he was one of only three students to found an anti-abortion club.
As a young attorney, he bestrode the rural versus urban divide, litigating cases that spanned the concrete jungles of the Southern District of New York to the most remote courthouses in the Appalachian Mountains. While teaching law at Cornell, he remained on the frontlines of the culture wars, representing small evangelical congregations and the faithful in their battles with secular institutions. The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, he tried constitutional cases in federal courts from coast to coast.
In his 30s, French took a significant detour from his legal career to serve as a major in the United States Army Reserve. In 2007, he was deployed to Iraq, where he served in Diyala Province as Squadron Judge Advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, earning the Bronze Star for his service.
Upon returning home, French became a prominent and fiercely partisan voice in the conservative media. His columns, which became known for their measured and thoughtful approach, focused on religious liberty, foreign policy, and the moral challenges facing the conservative movement. French's unwavering principles positioned him as one of the GOP’s most outspoken anti-Trump critics, prompting Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol to float his name in 2016 as a white-knight, independent presidential candidate. Yet, perhaps the most personal blow came earlier this year when, due to his stance on the former president, French was “canceled” by The Presbyterian Church in America, a small, theologically conservative denomination that had been his family’s spiritual home for over 15 years.
He is the author or co-author of several books including Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can’t Ignore and, most recently, the No. 1 New York Times bestselling Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. In his latest writing, French delivers a powerful warning about the escalating dangers of political polarization, suggesting that the United States is on a dangerous path toward civil war. As French puts it, “There is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart.”
darren walker
Darren Walker has lived on both sides of American inequality. Born in 1959 in a charity hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana to a single mother who worked as a nurse’s aide, he is now one of the most influential figures in the country’s cultural and philanthropic ecosystem. Before he steps down from his position as president of the Ford Foundation, he gives away over $650 million a year of other people’s money, and is paid well to do so.
At the core of his work lies an inherent contradiction: no matter how hard it fights against inequality, the Ford Foundation is a product of capitalism. The non-profit endowment still includes stocks that work against the foundation’s mission. Reflecting on his role, Walker noted in a 2019 New York Times interview, “Henry Ford never imagined that a black gay man would be president of this foundation, but that’s what’s great about American philanthropy, that it continues to evolve.”
Yet Walker’s life exemplifies the sort of social transformation that Ford’s programs are intended to produce. Raised in a rural town in Texas, he was among the first children to benefit from Head Start, the federal program aimed at reducing poverty. He went to public schools and went on to earn a scholarship to the University of Texas, where he completed both his undergraduate and law degrees. After moving to New York City, he practiced law and worked in investment banking, selling mortgage-backed securities.
While working as a bond salesman, Walker began volunteering at the Children's Storefront school in Harlem. His growing commitment to the school led him to a crossroads: his boss insisted he choose between his banking career and his volunteer work. At thirty-five, Walker chose the latter, walking away from Wall Street and dedicating himself to the school full-time. This decision marked the beginning of a new career in the nonprofit sector, first as the chief operating officer of an economic development organization in Harlem, then as an executive at the Rockefeller Foundation, and finally joining the Ford Foundation in 2010, where he became president in 2013.
During his tenure as the foundation’s tenth president, Walker made radical changes, transforming a nonprofit that pushed for charity into one that pushed for justice. He reoriented the foundation's mission to tackle systemic inequalities, fighting the political, cultural, and societal injustices that perpetuate disparities and limit opportunity. Under Mr. Walker’s leadership, Ford increased grants to organizations serving communities of color to $206 million from $111 million in 2014, and grants to help women and girls were increased to $124 million from $88 million during the same period.
anne applebaum
Among the first to raise the alarm about the resurgence of authoritarian movements and governments around the world, Anne Applebaum has become a leading soloist in the chorus warning of the growing threats to democracy.
In her latest book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Applebaum chillingly recounts the global rise of autocratic factions — why individuals in Western societies are increasingly abandoning liberal democratic ideals in favor of strongmen, conspiratorial movements, and authoritarian regimes.
A staff writer for The Atlantic and prolific author, she won the 2004 non-fiction Pulitzer Prize for Gulag: A History, an account of the Soviet concentration camp system that focused on daily life in the prison camps. As a leading critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, she was vocal about the inadequacies of the Western response to Russia’s 2014 military intervention in eastern Ukraine, arguing that the U.S. and its allies had facilitated the rise of a corrupt Russian regime destabilizing Europe.
An expert in the history of communist and post-communist Europe, Applebaum challenged prevailing foreign policy orthodoxy in a 2014 article in The New York Review of Books asking whether "the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism.” As a frequent contrarian, she has described the "myth of Russian humiliation,” praised NATO and EU expansion as a "phenomenal success,” and was among the first American journalists to write about the significance of Russia's ties to Donald Trump, arguing that Putin's support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign to destabilize the West.
Her name became synonymous with foreign affairs as she chronicled the collapse of communism, a reputation cemented during her 17 years writing an internationally syndicated column for The Washington Post, where she served as a member of its editorial board. She also held positions as Foreign and Deputy editor of the Spectator magazine and Warsaw correspondent for The Economist.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and Foreign Affairs, Applebaum has a broad range of interests and is the co-author of a cookbook, "From a Polish Country House Kitchen” and a recently re-published travelog, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which describes a 1991 journey across Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine just before the break-up of the Soviet Union.