John Dickerson
John Dickerson is an American journalist, author, and interviewer, best known for his political reporting and long tenure at CBS News. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a longtime co-host of Slate’s Political Gabfest.
American Checks Still Exist, but the Branches Have Stopped Using Them
In an Aspen Ideas Festival panel, Maya Kornberg, Jack Goldsmith and Stephen Vladeck argue that American democracy’s formal checks remain on paper but are failing in practice because Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court are no longer performing their constitutional roles. Kornberg points to a weakened, under-capacitated Congress; Goldsmith to the long expansion of executive power, intensified under Donald Trump; and Vladeck to a Supreme Court that he says has become insufficiently accountable and too willing to enable presidential power. Their shared problem is that repairing the system depends on the same institutions that have helped unbalance it.
Federal Cuts Put Local Public Media Stations in Immediate Jeopardy
PBS chief executive Paula Kerger and filmmaker Ken Burns argue that the 2025 rescission of federal public broadcasting funds was not another routine funding fight but a sudden institutional crisis for local stations that had already budgeted for the money. In an Aspen Ideas Festival discussion, they make the case that public media’s future depends on treating it as locally rooted civic infrastructure: a system that supports education, emergency communications, long-form documentary work and communities the commercial market often does not serve.
Trust-Building Starts With Shared Local Work, Not Political Reform
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, David Brooks of the Aspen Institute and Allstate chief executive Tom Wilson argued that America’s trust problem cannot be repaired first from Washington or by institutional reform alone. They described trust as a practice built through repeated local action: shared work, cross-generational contact, respect across disagreement, and everyday habits that make people feel seen. Their case was that politics is more likely to follow such a civic revival than lead it.