michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt, and this is “The Argument.” This week, what the heck happened in Iowa?

michelle goldberg

We’re sleepwalking into this scenario where we all have to take this giant risk.

david leonhardt

Then how worried should we be about coronavirus, and what does it say about China?

ross douthat

There is a story here of like this is how China blows up the world.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

You kind of understand just how big it’s going to become and just how politically influential it’s going to become in the way that she, the character, doesn’t.

david leonhardt

This year’s Iowa caucus was a mess. There were technical problems, which meant the state didn’t release any vote counts on Monday night, and everyone was left confused about the state of the Democratic race. We are taping this on Tuesday afternoon when it seems that Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg did best in Iowa, followed by Elizabeth Warren, and today we’re going to talk about both the race and about Iowa’s role in the process. Let’s start with the race itself. Michelle, you spent much of last week in Iowa working at the beginning and then getting sick at the end of the week, I’m sorry to hear. But Ross and I are interested to hear what you found when you were still up and about going to rallies.

michelle goldberg

So yeah, I started out the week in Iowa going mainly to Bernie Sanders rallies. Although I also followed Pete a little bit. And then I got really sick, spent three days in my hotel room with the flu, waiting to be well enough to fly home. Little did I know that that was a portent of how everything in Iowa was going to go. But I mean, I guess what I saw with Bernie is that he has a movement behind him, maybe alone among all these candidates so we have this almost total bifurcation in the party between where the grassroots and where the energy is and where the kind of cultural ferment is. I mean, people even joking about Bernie-palooza because you had all these indie bands coming into Iowa to play Bernie rallies and then all the institutional support and all the kind of establishment of the party on the other side.

david leonhardt

It’s interesting, Ross, you’ve been talking about this notion that Biden would be the figure who’s got 25 percent support and benefits from a fractured field, but it’s also possible that Bernie is going to be that figure.

ross douthat

Yeah. I mean, I think, again, based on what we think we know about Iowa’s results, and what we think we know is that Biden badly underperformed his polls. So far, the evidence from Iowa — and I use the term evidence loosely — is that maybe the pundit instinct was right, and this was Michelle’s instinct, certainly, since she’s the one of us who’s been out the most in the field. My basic sense is that you have to analyze the Iowa results in terms of the results themselves, and in terms of how they interact with the, pardon my language, there’s no other word but shit show to describe what happened. But to have this combination of him near the top, Biden apparently collapsing, and then this haze of confusion over the whole process, I think, yes, that sets him up pretty well to keep running his 20 percent to 25 percent campaign. So I think the combination of the fiasco and the outcome is pretty good for Bernie.

david leonhardt

I guess I want to argue against the Biden collapsing thesis because we know Biden is strongest among African-American voters, and we know he’s also pretty strong among Latino voters, and Iowa is an almost all white state. And so the idea that he underperformed in Iowa — and he certainly seems to have, I’m not saying otherwise — to me, you can’t actually say all that much about what this means until we get more diverse States voting. And it’s why as I reflected on what happened in Iowa, I realized I was actually happy about it. Because I don’t really know what I’m rooting for from this field, but I definitely am rooting for Iowa given all of its idiosyncrasies not to be picking the nominee. And I’m not convinced Biden is collapsing.

michelle goldberg

But David, if you look at the polls, he’s also really starting to tank — I don’t know if tank is the right word, but he’s going down in South Carolina, certainly, compared to Bernie. And so I mean, I find myself just livid, livid at the Biden campaign, at whatever parts of the establishment urged him to get in because it seems like they’ve foisted this zombie candidacy on the party where he had enough name recognition and kind of stature to suck away oxygen from less well-known candidates, but not enough energy and, frankly, capability to bring it home. He’s put the party in this really terrible position where there aren’t that many moderate alternatives, and so it seems very likely that Bernie is going to run away with this and then lose.

ross douthat

I mean Michelle, I’m sort of struck by how despairing you sound at the prospect of Bernie rumbling, stumbling, tumbling his way to the nomination. Do you feel like — have you bought in to the thesis, which is not a crazy thesis, that he’s going to lose to Trump?

michelle goldberg

There are polls out there that show him doing relatively well against Trump. There are also polls about the unpopularity of socialism and large numbers of people saying they wouldn’t vote for a socialist. And I think we don’t know yet whether people know that Bernie identifies as Democratic socialist and discounts it or whether they just don’t know. Again, the polls show that Bernie could do well. I have enormous trepidation particularly about some of the districts like upscale suburban women voters who are not Bernie’s base. And I would also say that early reports show that turnout wasn’t great in the Iowa caucuses, which cuts against the claim that Bernie is going to be able to bring a lot more people into the process. That’s one of the rationales for his campaign, the argument that what they lose in upscale suburbanites they will win in this sort of remade electorate.

david leonhardt

Speaking of those moderate districts, Michelle, Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine had this, I thought, devastating list of quotes from people on the left in the Democratic Party heading into the midterms, where they basically said, look at all these moderate candidates who inspire no one. They can’t win. And basically, all those moderate candidates won in the midterms, and many of the Bernie-type left candidates lost.

ross douthat

Call it the establishment, call it moderate Democrats, whatever choice you want, it looks pretty bad. I mean, you’re set up right now going into New Hampshire with Pete Buttigieg, who is a very talented guy, but also a somewhat ridiculous figure as a candidate for president of the United States as the not Biden alternative to Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, who I think we both agreed would have made a more plausible Democratic nominee, especially for those districts and those suburban female voters that Michelle is talking about, is pretty much knocked out by her performance. And so you’ve got Buttigieg who shows no capacity to win minority votes yet. You’ve got Michael Bloomberg lurking. Who’s the moderate candidate who emerges out of this, not just to beat Trump, but in a way that consolidates the party and doesn’t create some kind of total meltdown?

david leonhardt

It’s Bloomberg.

ross douthat

OK.

david leonhardt

This is all setting up quite well for Bloomberg.

ross douthat

It is.

david leonhardt

So let me make the case, and you guys can mock it. Look, Bloomberg got in the race when Biden looked at his weakest, and then when Biden seemed to rebound over the last few months, Bloomberg’s chances looked nil. I mean, if Biden does well, Bloomberg’s finished. But if the two of you are right, that Biden is in something that looks like a freefall rather than my being right that we can’t know so long as pretty much only white people are voting, I agree with you. I don’t think Buttigieg and Klobuchar have a very good path. I mean, you look at their polling in South Carolina and among African Americans more broadly, and it’s still horrific.

michelle goldberg

Most young people are voting either for Bernie or for Warren. Can you imagine a scenario more calculated to make them cynical and to cause them to withdraw from this race?

david leonhardt

Nope, that’s the big downside. You’ve got a rich guy basically buying the nomination to some extent. I mean, obviously, not totally. He’d be winning votes in this scenario as well. But I think in that scenario, you do have a significant number of people who stay home or don’t vote, and that’s the risk in that scenario. And the question is, even if Bloomberg isn’t well suited to actually capture the American center as we talk about all the time, the actual American Center is to Bloomberg’s left on economics and well to his right on social issues. Americans don’t really make decisions based on white papers and adding up all the issues, and Bloomberg seems moderate. And so basically, what Bloomberg would need to do is run a version — and this is Biden’s strategy too, for that matter — run a version of the 2018 campaign where you get enough enthusiasm from younger people and more progressive voters just from an anti-Trump perspective and then you win those suburban moderates handily.

ross douthat

I don’t think it’s impossible for Bloomberg to beat Trump, head to head. I guess what I see though looking forward is, when does the field consolidate to make it Bloomberg against Bernie? Because Buttigieg is going to say that he won or quasi won Iowa. He’s going to do pretty well in New Hampshire, presumably. So he’s going to say, look, I’m the moderate alternative here. Warren, presumably OK in Iowa will presumably do OK in New Hampshire, and if it’s this sort of scramble with delegate accumulation, there’s every reason for her to stay in. And it just seems like the most likely thing then is you’re headed for a scenario where Bloomberg is accumulating delegates for a contested convention. And for Bloomberg or anyone to hope to win it at a contested convention, I mean, it just seems like an epic world historical nightmare. If Bernie goes into the convention having won more states than anyone else and with a plurality of delegates and the plan is for Michael Bloomberg to have come in and won a ton of delegates to deny him the nomination, that’s not going to happen, right?

michelle goldberg

No, it can’t happen. And especially if you assume that another block of delegates in that scenario belongs to Elizabeth Warren. Right?

ross douthat

Right.

michelle goldberg

Her and Bernie, the most likely scenario is that they combine forces. I mean, that’s the thing. I don’t see any good ending to this fiasco that Democrats seem to have sleepwalked into. I mean, we all have to just take this giant risk and hope that the young people whose time may have come knows what they’re doing.

ross douthat

Well, Michelle, I think that’s basically one of the two cases for optimism, which is that politics is really hard to predict, and there are a bunch of reasons to think that Bernie actually might be a pretty good candidate to take on Trump. And so maybe he gets the nomination, and he’s able to win. And I think you and I both would not be super alarmed at the idea of a Bernie presidency.

michelle goldberg

No, I’d be thrilled. No, don’t get me wrong, the idea of a Bernie presidency would be wonderful.

david leonhardt

Yeah. And then I think the second case for optimism is that whether it’s Biden being stronger than he looks in an all-white State or Bloomberg or emerging, unlikely as that may seem, that it still could be a more moderate nominee. And then I guess the third thing is just some kind of surprise, which is Warren stages a comeback, Buttigieg somehow gains support among African Americans, but the first two to me seem to be the most likely more optimistic cases for the Democrats. And the interesting thing is it feels like actually New Hampshire isn’t going to move this race that much because all the signs are that Bernie is going to win, and so then it’s still going to be roughly where we are about a week from now. Does that feel right to both of you?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I think, again, depending on what comes out of the results, it could be a boost either for Pete or for Warren if one of them starts to look more viable based on what comes out of Iowa.

ross douthat

Yeah. I think New Hampshire could do a lot to tell us whether Buttigieg has staying power and whether, as Michelle said, Warren can mount a comeback and present herself, again, as an alternative to the Bernie-Biden, or Bernie and Bloomberg showdown. But I guess I agree with you, David in the sense I think South Carolina now is huge because it’s the first place that tells us — I mean, Nevada too. The Nevada-South Carolina combination tells us basically one, is Biden still viable, and two, if he’s not, where do minority voters go?

david leonhardt

So let’s leave it there, and take a quick break, and we’ll be right back. Coronavirus has spread from the Chinese city of Wuhan to more than 20 countries around the world. Thousands of people have been infected, and several hundred have already died. In China and elsewhere, people have added a new item to their winter wardrobe — a face mask. The virus has raised serious public health questions, but I want to start with a more personal question for each of you, Ross and Michelle, how scared are you personally about this virus? Ross?

ross douthat

Most of the time, not incredibly scared, but every few days, there will be — this is the wonders of social media, right — there will be some extremely long Twitter thread by some extremely competent-sounding person making the case that this is all vastly worse than public health authorities want you to believe. And not that we’re all going to die, but there will be some sort of major panic in the United States in Western Europe over this within the next few weeks that will shut down schools and cities and basically, bring the Chinese situation to the Western world. And I think that’s my biggest fear right now, not for my own life or the lives of my children, but that the spread will create conditions in our societies like conditions in China even if the actual death toll doesn’t get that high.

david leonhardt

What about you, Michelle?

michelle goldberg

I mean, look, I have the flu. I am just getting over it. The flu is like a more serious disease by many accounts. It kills a lot more people than coronavirus. And so like, Ross, I don’t really have any fear about it for myself or my family. I certainly don’t trust this administration to manage a public health emergency.

david leonhardt

It’s interesting. I mean, in some ways, it’s the common theme between our two subjects this week, which is different kinds of institutional breakdown. And I’ve been really interested to see how these public health crises are different for China than almost anything else. It’s just much harder for them to bulldoze public opinion and just tell people that red is green and green is red because people are experiencing it themselves and the stakes are so high.

ross douthat

Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a general fog that surrounds the Chinese situation that I think is just fundamentally different and unique to a totalitarian regime. There aren’t the basic structures of social control in America that in turn create incentives to what you might call the Chernobyl incentives, the incentives to avoid reckoning with a problem in the hopes that it goes away and to clamp down on information streams and then just leave this basic open question. There’s no reason right now, I think, for anyone outside China to trust the information flow that we have from China right now.

michelle goldberg

Although it’s actually very different than Chernobyl. I mean, they’re certainly not underplaying the severity of this. The kind of scale of the response and the intensity of the response must be itself kind of a cause for panic. You kind of think is there something even bigger here given that they’ve basically shut down the world’s biggest economy, put whole megacities under lockdown.

ross douthat

Michelle, you were just in Iowa, and David, a little bit before that, you took an extended trip to China, right?

david leonhardt

I did.

ross douthat

And this was well before the coronavirus outbreak started, and you came back and wrote a column that I thought was pretty optimistic about the basic stability of Chinese societies, sort of abstracting from moral questions about the obvious wickedness of the regime, you emphasized in the 10 years since you’d last been there the growth of a pretty stable and optimistic middle class. And I mean, how does that feeling that you got to interact with something like this?

david leonhardt

Yeah. And I think your description of that column is fair. I think I was pretty optimistic on behalf of China’s power, if not on behalf of what it meant for the world. I mean, look, I think there are two clear risks to China’s ascent as a world power, but the first is a subject, Ross, you’ve written about, which is this massive coming demographic decline, the fact that the one child policy is going to leave them with an aging society that’s going to be really problematic for the future. And then I think the second risk is one that coronavirus really highlights, which is having authoritarian countries where you put no or little value on truth and the number one priority is keeping people in line, the number one domestic priority, can really create serious vulnerabilities, and a public health crisis may be the most serious of those. And so I still look at China and I say, here’s a country that on most measures of what it cares about, its ability to project military power in the Pacific, the diversification of its economy, its ability to produce, actually, innovative companies like TikTok, by all those measures, China really has had quite a good decade, and the United States, the country it’s chasing, has had a pretty bad decade. But it’s definitely the case that this isn’t just a public health crisis, but it also really highlights what is a huge problem with authoritarianism, not just the moral part of it, which is the biggest problem with it, but the kind of brass tacks does it work problem?

ross douthat

Yeah, I mean, it seems to me like it is simultaneously a case study in how you could imagine the Chinese regime falling, that you have some internal disaster that basically produces a crisis of confidence that becomes impossible for the regime to manage. And I think that’s a pretty remote possibility overall, and I think one of the lessons of the last 20 years is just that there is much more stability to a certain kind of authoritarian quasi capitalism than 1989 and 1991 made people assume. But still, I think you can see in this how, if that happened, how it would happen. And then related to that, I mean, there’s also the more apocalyptic thing, and I’ll wax apocalyptic a little bit. Like there is a story here of like this is how China blows up the world, right? That you have this incredibly large, incredibly bound into the global economy hub that becomes the obvious vector for the kind of black swan scenarios that we worry about when we worry about the actual fate of human civilization. And that’s not going to be this virus, but the combination of authoritarian control, deep complexity. You started asking how worried we are. I think this is an event that reasonably triggers some deeper worries than just what’s the balance of power between the U.S. and China.

david leonhardt

I do think the darkest scenario involves the problems with the current version of China, which is China is so much more powerful today than when Mao ran it and so much more connected to the rest of the world. And so you really could see whether it’s a war or a pandemic. You really could see how China’s refusal to admit this was a problem when it first broke out, the fact that they punished doctors who were saying we’ve got a problem here rather than actually taking quick action, you really can see how China’s problems can impact the world much more than they did a half century ago.

ross douthat

Well, I guess now that I’ve talked you into being as unreasonably grim as I am, David, we should just leave it there.

david leonhardt

Fair enough. Fair enough. And now it’s time for our weekly recommendation, when we make a suggestion that is meant to take your mind off of the grim news of the day. Michelle, this week is your turn. I’m not sure if you have cold remedies or something else for us, but what is your recommendation?

michelle goldberg

Well, it’s not necessarily going to take your mind off the grim news of the day, but a couple of weeks ago I was working on this piece that I was calling “The End of the Future.” I think it ended up being called “The Darkness Where the Future Should Be.” And there was a book I read for that piece, which is the new memoir, “Uncanny Valley” by Anna Wiener. It’s a memoir of a young woman who goes to work in the tech industry and at first half buys in to the utopian culture around Silicon Valley and gradually becomes more jaded as the pernicious effects of Silicon Valley become more and more manifest in the world. And so it’s just like a really, really compelling kind of coming of age book that feels very zeitgeisty, but also penetrating look at the hubris and self-mythologizing around all of these big technology companies that are now in addition to breaking the entire world have also now broken the Iowa caucuses.

ross douthat

Independent of the utter destruction of human flourishing being visited on the world by Silicon Valley, I’m very curious/fascinated by the gender dynamics. I mean, does the book—

michelle goldberg

Yeah. I mean, the book is actually pretty startling in how bad it is to be a young woman at these companies. I mean, I think that there’s this idea out there that all of these companies are bending over backwards to be politically correct. And I think one of the things that you see, at least through her eyes, is that the definition of politically correct just means kind of not rampant sexual harassment and pay disparities and gender-race put downs. And then you kind of see the extreme resentment bubbling up of men who have to abide by even these minimal standards of even gesture to gender equality or gesture to a non-hostile workplace. And one of the themes of the book is that you see the alt right start to bubble up in these various message boards that she’s on. And you understand in this horror movie kind of way just how big it’s going to become and just how politically influential it’s going to become in a way that she, the character, doesn’t.

david leonhardt

Michelle, what’s the recommendation?

michelle goldberg

The book is “Uncanny Valley” by Anna Wiener.

david leonhardt

Thank you. That’s our show for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts or questions, please leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show is produced by Maddy Foley and James T. Green for Transmitter Media and edited by Sara Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help, as we always do, from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here next week.

ross douthat