michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” [MUSIC PLAYING] This week, have we been underestimating Bernie Sanders?

ross douthat

He has the support he’s always had. He has the donors he’s always had. He has the organization he’s always had. And he has the strength that not all of his rivals have had.

david leonhardt

Then has the future failed? We talk about the possible end of technological wonder.

michelle goldberg

Technology itself has just become this looming menace.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

This book is like if Graham Greene and Spike Lee had a baby.

david leonhardt

He finished a strong second in the 2016 Democratic primaries. He has the largest group of donors — 1.2 million of them. And polls have consistently shown him at or near the top of this year’s field. Even so, Bernie Sanders is sometimes seemed like an afterthought in this year’s campaign, at least to the media and to Democrats supporting other candidates. But now something seems to be shifting. His campaign raised $34 million in the final quarter of last year, more than any of his rivals did, and more than any candidate has in any quarter so far. The betting markets now give Sanders roughly a one in three chance of winning the nomination — almost identical to Joe Biden’s chances. So today we’re going to talk about Bernie, his strengths and weaknesses, and whether we’ve underestimated his appeal to voters. Ross, why do you think Sanders has now emerged as a favorite?

ross douthat

To just take up the framing question, I don’t think we — and by we, I mean you and I and Michelle here on “The Argument,” the best political podcast in America [GOLDBERG LAUGHS] — has ever underestimated Bernie Sanders. I think we’ve actually done a pretty good job throughout of taking him very seriously as a candidate. I think we treated him as a plausible front runner in the period when it seemed like Joe Biden might not get in the race. And obviously when his polling numbers dipped and Warren seemed to be on the rise, there was some reason to think that he might fade. But I think overall this new interest in Sanders is just the rest of political media finally catching up to where we’ve been all along.

david leonhardt

Or maybe it’s me catching up to the two of you because I think I did underestimate him a little bit. I mean particularly after the heart attack, it felt like a lot of his old supporters were drifting to Warren if not someone else, and that it felt like this was going to be Biden versus Warren versus maybe some surprise.

ross douthat

Yeah. I know. I think that’s fair. But in fairness to you, he had a heart attack. Right? I talked to fervent Sanders supporters right and when news of the heart attack was coming out who sort of — even they assumed that this could be the end. I think his strengths are sort of the same strengths he’s always had. And when we talk about a Sanders surge, he’s not tearing ahead in the polls. He sort of bobbed up a little bit as Warren has dropped. But it’s more that people have sort of come around to the realization that nobody else is coming to be a 30 percent of the early vote candidate, and in a race that has Joe Biden as the polling leader. Bernie is a very strong candidate because he has the support he’s always had. He has the donors he’s always had. He has the organization he’s always had. And he has the strength in across multiple early states and multiple constituencies that not all of his rivals have had.

david leonhardt

Michelle, what part of Bernie’s campaign most excites you?

michelle goldberg

Well, look, if Bernie Sanders was elected president, it would be one of the happiest days of my life. And I say that as somebody who’s been critical of Bernie Sanders in 2016, occasionally in 2020. I agree with him policy-wise on basically everything. I don’t agree with his theory of change — this idea that he’s going to be able to pass all of this extremely ambitious legislation. I don’t think that his campaign takes ideological disagreement seriously enough. Right? I think they tend to believe that all disagreement with them is somehow a result of avarice. But the fact that there could be a democratic socialist president is something that has been inconceivable for most of my life. And the fact that he has such strong support among young people would bring an infusion of energy into our politics. The thing that people who support other candidates in 2016 and 2020 have found very frustrating about Bernie Sanders supporters — there’s relentlessness. The fact that— the way they bombard you, this kind of tendentious style of argumentation would be a tremendous asset if Bernie Sanders were the nominee, and all of that kind of troll energy was being directed outward at the Republican Party. It could in some ways match the energy that Donald Trump was able to draw on in 2016. He seems to me to be like an extremely high risk, high reward candidate.

david leonhardt

You know, I’m also skeptical about this vision that he spins out where he says, look, we’re going to get everyone to rise up and overcome the special interests. And he tells a plausible story of how he did a version of that in Burlington, Vermont. But getting 50 people to show up at a meeting that previously had three people at it and changing the dynamic of the meeting in local politics is different from doing that on a national level. So Michelle, I tend to agree with you. But I guess I wonder what’s the alternative for progressive change other than trying to animate more people at the grassroots to overcome some of this entrenched opposition.

michelle goldberg

One of the things that he said during his interview with our editorial board, which, for listeners, we’re not part of — but he talked about how I don’t call people on their birthday. I’m not interested in all that bullshit. That kind of grumpiness is kind of charming. But I also think that you do need some of that unctuous backslapping, personal relationships, arm twisting, L.B.J. stuff. Right? It was often a knock on Obama that he didn’t do that. And then I think the other thing that you need is this technocratic understanding of where the pressure points in the system are. And here’s where I’ll give my disclaimer that my husband has been consulting for Elizabeth Warren. But if you look at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, you really have to have a very acute understanding of how this system works and how government can be brought to bear to put pressure on private actors.

david leonhardt

Yeah. And I do think Warren has the most sophisticated understanding of how to use government to change people’s lives and also to alter politics. I think that really is a point in her favor. Michelle, you mentioned Bernie’s interview with our editorial board a minute ago. And my favorite moment of that was where Bernie didn’t know what “cancel culture” was. And it was so authentically Bernie. You could just hear it with his accent, sort of saying, “What’s cancel culture?”

michelle goldberg

Right. And in a way, that sort of goes to this argument that Ross has made in the past that Bernie Sanders is very, very left, obviously. But he doesn’t necessarily read to everyone as culturally left. Right? And he doesn’t speak the sort of language of the online left.

david leonhardt

Yeah. Ross, I’m interested in how you think about that because even though I think of Bernie as being to the left of Elizabeth Warren, I do think, Michelle, I agree with you that he doesn’t necessarily present to people who don’t follow politics as obsessively as we all do as being to her left. Right? He doesn’t have that sort of same progressive speech that she does, which is why she struggled with working class voters in Massachusetts in her senate elections. And so I could see how authentic Bernie, just talking about the billionaires, would actually do quite well with those voters. On the other hand, he really was steeped in all this left wing politics for basically his entire career. And it’s pretty easy to imagine the opposition advertisements that the Republicans run on that stuff.

ross douthat

Yeah. The things that Bernie said about communism, the Soviet Union, and American history in the 1980s were extremely radical then. And we haven’t had a big, vigorous debate about communism outside of certain parts of the internet since. But presumably they’d still be controversial now. But I think it is also the case that there are ways in which the nature of what we think of as “the left” has changed. Right? So in that interview with our editorial board, there was a moment where people were asking Bernie about immigration. And it was clear from the discussion that even though Bernie has officially evolved towards the Democrats’ almost open-borders position on immigration — I’m caricaturing here just a little bit — but he has evolved. In his heart of hearts, he still holds what was once the position of organized labor, the New York Times editorial board, a lot of people we think of as the left — Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and so on — that low-wage immigration was bad for American workers. And he sort of returned to versions of that argument even in the conversations with our editorial board. And that’s the kind of thing I think that’s interesting, like sort of dropping those kind of instincts into an American politics that’s polarized. And in a very different and more cultural way, I think could matter more than old statements that he made in the 1980s about the Soviet Union that nobody cares about anymore. I just don’t know. I think obviously there’s sort of a high level of risk there that at least some Bernie Sanders supporters probably aren’t taking into account. The other thing, though, is that there is also what you might call the neoliberal shill argument for Bernie, which is basically the argument that the next Democratic president isn’t going to be able to get all kinds of sweeping things done. And so what matters most is having a president who can keep the left of the party on board with an agenda of incrementalism. And precisely because, as Michelle was saying earlier, Bernie has this intense, cult-like devotion on the left in a way that even Warren doesn’t, he’s actually the person best positioned to sell incrementalism to the base and prevent a certain part of the party from fracturing, creating a left-wing Tea Party, whatever scenario you want to spin out.

david leonhardt

I buy that. And I would add some. I would add a second kind of neoliberal argument for Bernie, which is I think moderate Democrats sometimes think that their best hope of achieving what they want is just constantly pushing what they want. Right? Which is clear, progressive change that doesn’t go too far. But actually sometimes the way to get moderate change is to go for bigger change. And I think that’s a mistake the Democratic Party has made a number of times. And I actually think it’s within the realm of plausibility that the best way to get some of the policies that people who think of themselves as more traditional Democrats or moderate Democrats would be to have a president like Sanders or Warren who would be trying to do so much that the fallback would be some of this more moderate change. I do really fear with a president like Biden that he wouldn’t reach far enough. And then he would get even less. And it would just all be kind of a big, mushy disappointment. And that’s part of why I feel so torn because I do think the odds are that Biden is more likely to beat Trump than Bernie or Warren. I don’t think it’s a huge difference. But I’m actually more worried about Biden as president than I am about Bernie, I think. And I almost can’t believe I’m saying that. Let’s spend a minute on the fight between Sanders and Warren. In the end I don’t think it’s going to matter that much. And we’re recording this before the Tuesday night debate. But I do think there’s one interesting part of it, which is Bernie, according to Warren, said that he didn’t think a woman could be elected president. And I guess my view is he shouldn’t say that even if he thinks it. And if he did actually say that, I think he’s wrong. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by millions of votes. But I am sort of haunted by this question of how much sexism there continues to be in politics, and the idea that we may emerge this year with Bernie and Biden fighting it out to take on Trump. It feels like that’s a legitimate question to wonder about. Where are you each on that?

michelle goldberg

I think as I wrote in my column, I sometimes fear the same thing. Right? Just as the 2016 campaign was this like masterclass in the power of misogyny, so too is this race. The fact that this story has made people so much more angry at Warren than at Bernie is in a way an argument that a woman is indeed at a profound disadvantage. And so, part of me, because I think that defeating Trump is such an existential necessity, I have really gone back and forth over who the best candidate should be. And that’s a big part of it because I do think that we are a very, very sexist country. Her gender gives her less of a net when people worry about her strategy, right? Because I think that what you’ve seen at certain key moments in her campaign, particularly with Medicare for all, it wasn’t that voters didn’t like her plan. It’s that they suffered this real crisis of confidence about her electability and the fact that people keep suffering that crisis of confidence. I’m not saying that it’s not rational. But part of the crisis of confidence is, is this woman really electable. So I just think that there is less scope for mistakes. It’s much more of a high wire act when you’re a woman running. Right? I don’t think that Elizabeth Warren could have gotten away with what Bernie has done and basically said, no, I’m just not going to release a plan for how I’m going to do Medicare for all. I’m going to do it.

ross douthat

First of all, I agree with you. I think female candidates operate with less of a net and less of a margin for error. But I think in that debate, what Bernie had going for him was that he seemed to be taking ownership of a reality of the plan by saying — it wasn’t about the details. It was about him saying, look I’m Bernie Sanders, the last honest man in America. And I’ll tell you it’s going to raise taxes. And Warren’s brand at that moment was the wonk — the person who had a plan for everything. And she got, it seemed like, deliberately evasive for a little while. And that sort of cut against the brand she was trying to build. And again if she were a male candidate or a Joe Biden figure with this long history in the party and so on, it might have mattered less. I think she was trying to craft a persona. And she made a choice there that ended up undermining the persona she was trying to craft, which was crucial to her larger strategy.

david leonhardt

OK. Let’s leave it there. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] Sometimes for our second subject we talk about a column that one of us has just written. Today we’re going to talk about a column that Michelle is working on right now, which is about the future, and particularly whether the future has failed. The future has not delivered flying cars or unlimited energy or a cure for cancer. But it is delivering these terrible wildfires in Australia and worries about social media disinformation. And so I think a lot of people are starting to sour on this whole notion of the future and particularly technology, which was supposed to solve so many of our problems and instead sometimes seems to just be creating new problems. So Michelle, talk to us about how you’re thinking about this question of is the future failing.

michelle goldberg

Well, I first had this idea when I started reading interviews with William Gibson, the sci-fi writer. After Donald Trump’s election, he suffered some sort of block where reality had so far outstripped dystopian imagination, that he couldn’t write for a while. And then he eventually did write this book that’s coming out shortly. You heard people talk after the election about us being in the dark timeline. And that’s the conceit of this book, that we are. And I thought that maybe what he hit on was this idea that lit up my brain that it’s the future itself that has come to seem like a source of horror to a lot of us. At the same time, I was reading Ross’s forthcoming book, “The Decadent Society.” And Ross makes this point that I think is right but that doesn’t go far enough about the death of technological awe. That for a long time there were these new, great, technological leaps forward, whether it be like the telephone or space travel. People felt this sense of like sublime astonishment. And Ross says we don’t have that anymore. And I think it’s true. We don’t have that anymore. But I actually think it goes farther than that in that most new technologies, I think fill a lot of people, certainly fill me but not just fill me, with this deep sense of horror, whether it be social media or artificial intelligence or gene editing or mass surveillance. Technology itself has completely given up its liberatory potential, it seems to me, and just become this looming menace. And I guess I’ll finally say — and I’m still working out how I’m going to write this. Maybe you guys can help me — is that I think part of our problem as a society is that when the future itself is a source of threat. You lose any sense of optimism and dynamism.

david leonhardt

It seems to me there are two things going on here. It’s both fear of what the future may hold and what some of our technological changes may hold— things like social media fakes. But it’s also disappointment about what technology hasn’t done. We still just sit in traffic. We still suffer from so many of the same diseases. And it feels like Derek Thompson had this piece in the Atlantic that said that big tech has failed to remake the physical world. And that feels right to me.

ross douthat

So first I want to say I’m putting a blurb on my book: “Ross Douthat is right, but he doesn’t go far enough.” -Michelle Goldberg. [LAUGHTER] So is already— and I don’t want to say too much about the book’s thesis. But I think one of the arguments I was trying to make was trying to find a balance between the spirit of techno pessimism or just general pessimism that Michelle describes, and then this counterbalance, right? Which is the arguments made by most famously figures like Steven Pinker and others that in fact everything’s getting better all the time. And the only thing that can stop things from getting better is too much doom and gloom from conservatives or progressives. And it strikes me that in fact we’ve sort of lived through a period not of collapse into dystopia, but more of stagnation and disappointment where we’re constantly promised and told that this is the greatest era of technological innovation ever. And the world is changing faster than ever. And the only thing that’s wrong is that people can’t adjust to it and adapt to it and keep up. But in fact, the last 30 odd years have been an era where innovation has been incredibly concentrated in this zone of simulation and communication — communication and simulation. And it’s hasn’t stopped. But it’s stagnated somewhat in other arenas. And out of that stagnation, I think the gap between our cultural expectations for technology and what it’s actually delivered, you get a lot of anxiety, derangement, despair, paranoia and so on. I’m not quite as pessimistic as Michelle, but I do think we’re stuck. And a lot of our problems reflect a sense of a society cycling through the same arguments, the same ideas, and so on, and without figuring out where it’s going next.

david leonhardt

It’s not that there’s no progress or that the past was better than today. It’s just, it really does feel to me like what is a major problem in our society that technology has solved in our lifetimes? There’s probably an answer to that question. But the fact that I can’t immediately come up with it, I think is part of the point here. I guess it’s that.

michelle goldberg

Right. And it’s not just that. You have a whole insurgent political campaign — Andrew Yang’s — about the coming danger of automation. Basically the coming danger of robots and what it’s going to do to the social fabric. So again, to me it’s not even so much a question of the problems are not being solved. It’s that insolvable problems are being created.

ross douthat

Yes. But Yang, at least for now, is sort of wrong, I think, about the jobs that robots are destroying. This is the part of what I’m trying to describe with the term decadence where we live in an era where people are terrified of the prospect of an innovation that’s going to cost everyone their jobs. But in fact we can’t even generate that innovation. Productivity rates have been stagnant or falling in the U.S. and Western Europe for the last 20 years. And so we have the fear of the future without actually getting the benefits of the future, right? Because automation would have benefits, too. It would be massively disruptive, but also theoretically improve efficiency and productivity and make everybody richer. But we aren’t actually getting that except on a smaller scale. But some of this, too, is just this question that I think has been, I think sharpened maybe for progressives by the election of Trump, and Russia and Facebook and so on. But it is a question of whether the kind of innovation that we definitively do have in innovation in communication and simulation is making people happier.

michelle goldberg

I’m curious about when things sort of turned. Obviously Trump’s election was a big part of it. But I don’t know if it was the only thing if at what — when there was a moment when techno pessimism fundamentally set in? Or sort of any of the optimism around technology — when exactly that disappeared and what it was that drove it away besides Trump’s election?

david leonhardt

I would certainly put Trump’s election on the list, and this notion that democracy is at more risk in our country than I think any of us imagined it would be in our lifetimes, even if, Ross, you think that’s a little bit overstated. I would also say that the financial crisis plays a real role here. Right? And by many measures, we really haven’t recovered from the financial crisis. The typical American net worth is still lower than it was before the financial crisis. And I guess the third I would add— and I’m least confident in this one. It’s a little squishier. But I do feel like the internet went from this wondrous thing that allowed a kid anywhere to look up any literature or any fact, or follow any sports team or any TV show, to this thing that we carry around these machines. And they’re constantly buzzing us. And this sort of move to mobile and everyone walking around with their heads buried in these little computers does feel to me like part of this story.

ross douthat

Yeah. I also think that in the post-financial crisis era, there was a temporary sense that Wall Street was bad, but Silicon Valley was still really good. And that was also associated with these immediate political aftermath of the Great Recession was not populism in the west. It was the Arab Spring. And there was this period when people were talking about how, oh, the magic of social media is going to bring down dictatorial regimes around the world. And it’s definitely the case that the magic of social media has translated into a new culture of sort of protest and unrest in all kinds of places. But it is also pretty clearly — it hasn’t been always that hard for what especially I think good liberal Westerners think of as bad actors around the world to master and manage internet technologies. But then there’s also the dynamic. And I would go further than you, David. I think it’s, yeah, I think in 2011 we were only just starting to figure out what social media and the phone in the pocket meant for people’s everyday experiences. And now we have a decade of experience, as I think there’s a sense of low grade anxiety and misery that people associate with the internet experience right now that just wasn’t the case in the first 10 to 15 years of the internet era.

michelle goldberg

And then I think the thing that you have to add on top of that, particularly, if you’re progressive — maybe not just if you’re progressive — is climate change, which makes people literally feel like there might not be a future or their future might be physically unrecognizable. There’s both the existential reality of it, but then there’s the political ramifications is that what does it mean if you have a left that can’t imagine a better future. Then what do you have?

david leonhardt

The obvious place to end is, well, so how do we get out of this? Or to be more specific about it, what needs to change so that technology plays less of a negative role and more of a positive role? And my answer, which is honest but I don’t think it’s complete, is that government needs to play a stronger role in essentially making sure the incentives are right for technology to make our lives better and not worse. But I recognize that of course that’s my answer because I’m a progressive. Michelle, I guess, do you share that?

michelle goldberg

Yeah. No. I think that that is definitely right, and that in a way the giving up on any illusions about technology is the beginning of that. And so once these companies start to lose their cultural cachet, I think it becomes easier and easier to create a political coalition for reigning them in.

ross douthat

But I think you also have to think of it in bottom-up terms, right? I’ve got kids right now who are still in the zone of school where they don’t need to have phones there. They’re going to be 9 and 7 and 4 soon. And I think we need to become comfortable with the idea that you have to figure out ways to socially regulate the use of this particular kind of technology in a way that we weren’t thinking about 10 or 15 years ago. And I think it probably has to start as such things do, around children and childhood, and how people are exposed to technology when their minds and bodies are really forming and taking shape. So that’s my restrictionist anti-tech view. But then at the same time, I want to pick up on what Michelle said about the left and the future. Right? I think the left has gotten into a place on climate change that is too despairing. The lefts’s solution to climate change is increasingly this unrealistic vision of developed world austerity. And in the end, if we’re going to sort of transcend climate change, it has to be through innovation. It has to be through a recovered vision of a sort of abundant future, of a growing future, of a growing human population of people having more kids on this earth and beyond. And we have to colonize Mars, obviously.

david leonhardt

OK. We will leave it there. And now move on to our weekly recommendation when we make a suggestion that is meant to take your mind off of the news of the day. Michelle, this week is your turn. I’m guessing you have a recommendation that does not involve hamsters this week.

michelle goldberg

[LAUGHS] I want to recommend a book called “American Spy” by Lauren Wilkinson. And part of the reason I want to recommend it is because I just chanced upon it. I don’t remember it getting that much attention. I think it was well reviewed. But it’s the kind of thing that I picked up browsing in a bookstore and might never have heard of otherwise, and then after I read it was really surprised I had never heard about it. If you, like me, like thrillers, want to read something that’s escapist but not stupid, this book is like if Graham Greene and Spike Lee had a baby. It’s about this African-American woman who joins the FBI for all kinds of complicated reasons, finds herself stymied there, and then gets drawn into an intelligence operation against the real life leader of Burkina Faso in the ‘80s and sort of finds her loyalties split. I think I read it in a day or a day and a half.

david leonhardt

I’m definitely going to read it. I love spy novels. I almost feel guilty about how much I like them. So the idea of a book that comes with just a little bit of literature credibility is deeply appealing to me. OK. So Michelle, what’s the recommendation again?

michelle goldberg

The recommendation is Lauren Wilkinson’s novel “American Spy.” [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

That’s our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas, leave us a voicemail 347-915-4324. you can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. It really does matter. This week’s show was produced by Maddy Foley for Transmitter Media and edited by Sara Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help 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