CBH Talk | Richard North Patterson and Bret Stephens Discuss “Tripwires”

How did American democracy arrive at its current moment? Which decisions, institutions, and political turning points brought us here, and what would it take to rebuild public trust?

Join bestselling author and former attorney Richard North Patterson for a conversation about his new book, Tripwires: 15 Twenty-First-Century Events That Undermined American Democracy—and How to Reclaim It. Drawing on decades of experience as a novelist, lawyer, and political commentator, Patterson traces fifteen pivotal moments that, in his view, fundamentally reshaped American politics and weakened the country's democratic institutions. From Supreme Court rulings and economic crises to electoral battles and political realignments, he argues that today's challenges emerged through a series of consequential choices, not historical inevitability.

He will be joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bret Stephens, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times whose work explores American politics, foreign policy, and culture. Together, Patterson and Stephens will examine the forces that have transformed American civic life, debate where the nation's democratic experiment stands today, and explore what it will take to strengthen it for the future.

Participants

Richard North Patterson is the author of twenty-three novels, sixteen of which have been New York Times bestsellers, as well as a nonfiction narrative of the 2016 presidential campaign. A former trial attorney, he is a political commentator whose regular columns and articles have been published in The New York Times, The London Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Bulwark, and elsewhere. The author lives between Jacksonville, Florida, and Martha’s Vineyard.

Photo by Robb Chamberlain.

Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times. Since joining The Times in 2017, he has written about everything from the enduring relevance of Edmund Burke to his grandmother’s advice about sex to his misgivings about The Times’s 1619 Project. He is often described as a conservative, though he’s been a vocal critic of the direction of the Republican Party. He is a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post and was, for many years, The Wall Street Journal’s foreign-affairs columnist, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Bret was raised in Mexico City and educated at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. In 2022, the government of Russia barred him for life--a distinction he considers his highest personal honor.