michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

david brooks

I’m David Brooks.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat, and this is “The Argument.” [MUSIC PLAYING] This week, are the impeachment hearings changing anybody’s mind?

david brooks

I never thought there was a possibility 20 Republican senators would vote to convict, and so this will all end in a whimper with Trump claiming victory.

ross douthat

Then we talk tipping. Is it necessary? Is it immoral? And is there a better way?

michelle goldberg

I would also love to get rid of the tipping system and just force a system where everybody can be paid a living wage.

ross douthat

And finally, a recommendation.

david brooks

When you’re sort of on the right, you don’t have the luxury of measuring your musicians by their politics because they all disagree with your politics.

ross douthat

The public impeachment hearings have brought testimony about President Trump’s dealings with the Ukraine into the open. There is a public airing of evidence that Republicans claim to want, and there is a spectacle that Democrats hope will boost support for impeachment. David Leonhardt is out this week, so we’re joined by our colleague, David Brooks. David, welcome to “The Argument.”

david brooks

Pleasure to be here.

ross douthat

So I’m hoping that you can play our persuadable American for the purposes of this segment. You are, I think, nobody’s idea of a pro-Trumper, but back when Nancy Pelosi first announced the formal impeachment inquiry, you wrote a column arguing basically that impeachment was a mistake. You said it was an elitist process that ran against the public’s priorities, that it would distort the Democratic primary, and entrench Trumpism in the G.O.P. So here we are weeks later, the process is ongoing. Has anything about what’s happened so far changed your mind?

david brooks

I’m vindicated in my own mind. No, I still basically think — I understand why they had to do it as a matter of just making a statement about what the rules are of American politics and statement against the sort of quid pro quo corruption that Trump has done, but I don’t see any good outcome. I never thought there was a possibility 20 Republican senators would vote to convict, and so this will all end in a whimper with Trump claiming victory, and I think there’s no evidence that anybody’s minds have been changed. If you look at the polls, when it started, it was about 48 percent approve the impeachment process and 40 or so percent disapproved, now it’s about 45 percent approve and 42 percent disapprove. I was just taking the Real Clear [Politics] average, they have like a bunch of, like, 10 or 15 polls. So if anything, there’s been a slight movement away from approval of the impeachment process, but no real movement at all. And so we’ve shown the public that Donald Trump is extremely guilty of this quid pro quo, but people are not changing their minds.

michelle goldberg

Well so the most recent polls actually show 51 percent for impeachment and removal and 70 percent saying Trump’s actions were wrong, and these things fluctuate depending on polling methods and weighting, but I just — I don’t think it’s correct to say that support for impeachment has diminished. The most recent numbers suggest that it has crept up a little bit even if there hasn’t been a broad change in people’s minds. But I think this was also the case — I wasn’t alive during Watergate, but I’ve read a lot about Watergate, including a very interesting book called “The Battle for Public Opinion” which tracks very carefully kind of how public opinion shifted throughout the course of the Watergate investigations. And my understanding is that public opinion didn’t change that much after hearings in the Senate. It started to change more during the House hearings, which I guess is the reverse of how it’s going to play out here because they didn’t actually ever have a trial in the Senate. So for everyone listening, we’re recording this kind of midway through what is supposed to be a very high profile week. But so far we’ve had about three days of testimony. It seems kind of unrealistic to expect that there would be big shifts. We do know that the feared Republican backlash hasn’t emerged. And so I just don’t see what the downside is given the horrible position in which Trump has put this country to airing the evidence of his crimes and civic disloyalty to a population that reviles this president and mostly wants to see him gone.

david brooks

I would say that one difference — or a couple of differences I would make between now and Watergate. First, when Watergate happened, trust in American institutions was like at 60 percent or 70 percent, and so people were genuinely surprised that this was going on. And there’s nothing about that Donald Trump has done vis-a-vis Ukraine that is a surprise. He’s been this way sort of scandalous all the way along, and people have sort of baked that in. Second, in the Watergate era, if your party lost an election, it didn’t feel like you were in some sort of existential crisis. But a lot of people now, but because the country so polarized, feel if the other side takes over, then it’s an existential crisis for the whole country. The idea of a Republican backlash, that certainly hasn’t happened. I think the one downside for Democrats — and maybe it’s not a catastrophic downside — is that I think the presidential race is actually quite interesting. Having a lot of good debates, and it’s sort of being overshadowed.

ross douthat

Yeah, I mean, I think what you said at the start, David, about the idea that this could be a bad idea but maybe the Democrats had no choice is sort of how I felt about it at the start. You do have this situation, right? Where you go through a long investigation and at the end of the day, it doesn’t come up with the goods, and —

michelle goldberg

Wait, let’s back up. It doesn’t come up with all of the goods.

ross douthat

It doesn’t come up with sufficient goods to persuade me, important pundit and swing voter, right? That Trump should be impeached. And immediately after this happens, Trump is engaged in some kind of act of corruption connected to the next presidential election. And it just seems like in that situation, if you’re Nancy Pelosi or the Democratic Party, you’d probably have to respond. You don’t want to escalate to the shooting someone on Fifth Avenue scenario, right? You need to prove that there’s some sort of cost to even business as usual for Trump.

david brooks

They, in theory, could have done the censure, or they could do this and then move on. I think — I’d love to see them get this out of the way in a week or two. Mitch McConnell may try to drag it through January in the Senate, but at least public attention will have pulled off and put on to the things that I think are actually much more important. First, the Democratic Primary, but second, there’s the interesting fact that America is unpersuadable. Why is that? Back in Watergate, presidential approval ratings rose and fall sometimes by swings of 30, 40, 50 points. Often presidents at the beginning of their term would have 70 percent or 80 percent approval ratings, and that doesn’t seem to happen anymore, and that even goes back to the Obama years. And so focusing on that, the underlying subterranean issue that explains why people are unpersuadable is I think the big story here.

michelle goldberg

I actually think that it’s a big mistake for Democrats to wrap this up too quickly. I mean, so far it’s been kind of all upside from my point of view. And I actually think they’re not doing their job if they don’t plumb the broader context in which this specific corruption takes place, because we haven’t even gotten to the fact that the two sort of low-level thugs that were doing Giuliani’s bidding in Ukraine, apparently on direct orders from Donald Trump, are being paid by this guy who is, according to our own Justice Department, a high-echelon associate of Russian organized crime. You kind of need to also publicize and dramatize that side of it, and I don’t see what would be the downside to giving it a full hearing through the spring and kind of wrap it up in time for the general election.

ross douthat

If those kind of threads don’t end up leading to the moment when John Bolton stands up and says, “I was there when Donald Trump took a phone call from Vladimir Putin and said yes sir, I’ll do whatever you want.” If it just ends in this sort of spiral of foreign names and weird connections that don’t get you back to Trump, isn’t that the sort of miasma of the fog of scandal that David’s talking about that doesn’t necessarily help the Democrats?

michelle goldberg

I think that Democrats tend to always approach these things from this kind of defensive crouch. If you look at the way Republicans are acting on this impeachment hearing, they could care less about persuading anyone who isn’t already steeped in Fox News arcana. There’s obviously structural differences between the two parties, but I do think that Republicans have actually benefited quite a bit from showing the courage of their terrible and corrupt convictions. I think that Democrats, by and large, believe that this administration is a font of absolutely unprecedented corruption and foreign compromise. And if these hearings don’t go on, it’s not as if they get to then pivot to talking about Medicaid expansion. If the TV news is not airing these hearings all day every day, they’re not going to be talking about kind of the Democrats’ preferred policy priorities, they’re going to be shifting to whatever kind of madness Trump decides to perpetrate upon the country each news cycle.

ross douthat

Well, but won’t they be shifting to the Democratic primary to David’s point? It’s now November. Even with Trump’s capacity to command the headlines, by the time you get to December and January, normally we would all be talking about Warren, Buttigieg, Biden, Bernie, and so on, right? So there would be a— in a sense, this would be the moment when the Democrats in Congress would be ceding the floor to the theoretically more appealing and transformative future leaders of their party.

michelle goldberg

I mean, look, the Democratic Primary is way too long. All of our primaries are way too long, and they end up just doing damage to party cohesion. I don’t know that Democrats are so harmed by having the span of time in which people are paying really close attention to this, kind of somewhat attenuated to sort of what would be a normal level in a normally-functioning democracy.

david brooks

One thing that should mitigate things for the Democrats is that on the campaign trail, nobody’s paying attention to this. I traveled to about two or three states every week and have for the last four months or so, and whether I’m in Kansas, Nebraska, anywhere outside of a few highly-educated areas on the coasts, impeachment is not talked about. And I thought it would freeze the Democratic race because nobody be paying attention, but I was sort of wrong about that. If you look at the polls in Iowa, the polls in South Carolina, there’s been a fair bit of movement. This Buttigieg surge has happened at the same time as impeachment.

michelle goldberg

I think that’s right. I mean, I think you’re right, that’s been my experience when I’m on the campaign trail, but they do talk about it in town halls. I think people aren’t going to ask about impeachment because it doesn’t really differentiate any of these different candidates. Joni Ernst was asked about impeachment and about whether it’s O.K. to ask a foreign government to interfere in our elections at one of her town halls. People in the House have said that it’s come up in their town halls, but I agree that it’s not something that the candidates are talking about. There’s not so much that they can do about it and they’re all basically unified on it.

david brooks

One practical way it could interfere is if McConnell decides to hold a trial and drag out a trial across January, then all the senators sort of would have to stay in D.C., I assume?

michelle goldberg

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that’s true.

david brooks

And I wouldn’t want to be Senator Warren, Senator Booker, Senator Klobuchar, etc. in those circumstances.

ross douthat

So then just looking ahead a bit from where we are, David, Michelle, do you guys have predictions for what happens with the politics of impeachment in the next couple months?

michelle goldberg

My guess is that support will inch up a little bit. And then meanwhile, I think it will continue to torment Trump and throw him off his game. I’ve long since given up hope that there is going to be a sudden outbreak of decency or patriotism among Republican senators, right? I think we’re stuck with that. And we’re also stuck with a lot of Trump-appointed judges who are not going to follow any sort of precedent about enforcing subpoenas, releasing grand jury testimony as they did in Watergate. Our system is going to stay in this kind of status, but anything that Democrats can do to chip away at that little by little, it seems to me, is all to the good.

ross douthat

David, is there anything that would prove Michelle wrong about Republicans? Is there anything that could come out in these hearings that would actually turn 15 Republican senators against the president fully?

david brooks

I don’t see it. I mean, Trump has still got that 89 or whatever it is, 90 percent approval rating among Republicans, it’s just not possible to come out against him. I mean, I think Republicans have been embarrassingly flailing in the hearings. So from a Democratic point of view, keeping them doing that sort of looks interesting. But overall, I guess the two things and why I still think they should wrap it up, first, the Congressional Democrats are not the most attractive face of the party— I think Schiff is doing a very good job, but the most attractive face of the party of the presidential candidates, and getting them out front seems to be just the right thing to do for the Democratic Party. Second, I think it’s just always important to know what year it is. And so speaking to the top priority and giving America a sense of hope that this is going to be ended through the Democratic process and that you can get a significant governing majority to oust Trump, that seems to me the most important political project in front of the country right now, and I would say impeachment is probably not the most important leverage point to advance that project.

ross douthat

O.K., we’ll leave the discussion there and we’ll be back right after the break. [MUSIC PLAYS] The American service industry relies on tips. Your server at dinner, your Uber driver, your hairstylist. Tips are a big part of their income. But tips in the U.S. aren’t mandatory. We’re one of the handful of countries where a gratuity usually isn’t added in automatically or folded into the cost of a service. It’s something that, for better or worse, complicates the relationship between the worker and the customer. So David, you recently wrote about how you used to be a big supporter of the tipping economy, but now you have doubts. What changed your thoughts on tipping?

david brooks

Sure, I’m a tipping flip-flopper. So I was very pro-tipping, and I thought A, it’s a way for one to reward good service and we like to do that; B, I thought it was a small but at least the direct way to alleviate income inequality; and C, I just thought it made relationships in these encounters at a restaurant, say, just friendlier. The servers know that they need to be friendly to get a tip, they know that if they touch you on a forearm, they’re likely to get a big tip — there’s a whole science behind how you maximize your tips. Having looked at the data, though, I’d have to say I had to change my mind. The big shock to me was that people who study this say there was no relationship between the quality of the service and the size of the tip. There’s a relationship between the size of the check and the tip. Second, it increases the inequality between people who work at the front of the restaurant and people who work at the back of the restaurant. Third, it’s not racially fair. African Americans get a third less tips — lower tips them white Americans do, so it maximizes that inequality. And then finally, for some significant number of male patrons, it’s a leverage point to do some sexual harassment. So for all these reasons, I thought, wow, this is not a great idea.

michelle goldberg

So this is one of the places where I basically agree completely with David’s conclusions and just really disagree with how he got there. I mean, especially this part about it kind of encouraging friendliness. I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve been in the service industry, but I worked as a cocktail waitress in college and I smiled a lot and probably occasionally touch people on the forearm. I worked at a jazz club, most of the people I served were men. I looked into their eyes and it was not because I felt any sort of human connection with them. That said, I would also love to get rid of the tipping system and kind of just force the system where everybody can be paid a living wage. It seems like the kind of thing that you can’t do piecemeal, right? As long as some restaurants try to do it, they’re going to be undercut by other restaurants.

ross douthat

Michelle, when you were working at the jazz club, if the owner had come around to the staff and said, we’re going to raise prices and get rid of tipping, do you think people would have been in favor of it or against it?

michelle goldberg

I can’t remember. I think people probably would have been against it because it was a way if you were— and I certainly wasn’t the cutest there, but it was a way if you were a relatively cute young woman to monetize that. And so probably people would have been happy to keep it, it just — it was — I remember it as a pretty emotionally-gruesome experience. And I think I think there are people — I mean, there are people who are like excellent servers and pride themselves on it and are happy to be able to monetize that. I do think that it is — when you go to Europe, it’s true that waitstaff are just much less servile, and customers, particularly people who have a lot of experience in the United States experience that as maybe less pleasant, but it also strikes me that it means that there is less need to grovel in their profession and that it’s probably a sign of a — kind of a healthier social contract.

david brooks

I was just in France, and I thought the service was pretty much on par with American service. So if there’s a big difference, I certainly wasn’t noticing it. Second, I’d be curious to know how many people experience it the way Michelle does. My perception — and this was true, I used to be a bartender — was that there are a lot of people who take the idea of being in the service industry — of being a server out of the hospitality industry if we want to put it — use another word — as sort of a point of pride — this is something we do well, this is something— I am a good host, it’s my special magic skill. And so I wonder if there are some people who find it dehumanizing and some people find it really a source of pride how good they are at this job. I also found that people I worked with, we all thought we were above average, and therefore we all thought — we want tipping because I’m so good at this, I will be rewarded.

ross douthat

Well, I mean, the different people thing, too, is interesting, because, of course, far from getting rid of tipping, it’s actually becoming a much bigger part of the American economy at least in the industries that now run on digital credit card interfaces, right? Because there are all kinds of contexts in which the coffee shop counter, the cab ride where in the old days, the cabbie asks for a fare, he doesn’t ask for a tip. You can give him a tip, but it’s not sort of there in your face, whereas when you put your credit card through the cab machine, now the first question is, do you want to leave 15 percent, 20 percent or 30 percent? And the same thing at a lot of non-sit-down restaurants and basically anywhere that uses the various Square apps for credit cards and so on. So that sort of expanded the range of situations in which people are reminded to tip and therefore are likely to tip, while also creating a zone of greater uncertainty about what you’re tipping for. Like if you tip at the coffee shop, right? Do you guys tip at the coffee shop?

michelle goldberg

Always. Do you?

ross douthat

I do, yes. Who am I tipping?

michelle goldberg

I just feel like you’re just sort of like bolstering the wages of underpaid baristas.

david brooks

Presumably they — in those places, they’re collective.

ross douthat

So you tip the 30 percent, David, on a, like— if you spend $5 at a coffee shop and you tip?

david brooks

Yeah. That’s so inexpensive, so it doesn’t really hurt. So I can feel like I’ve done a good thing for a very low price.

ross douthat

Are you tipping more, Michelle?

michelle goldberg

Well, I mean, I think in general, like there’s a lot of things that women have to do as ordinary upkeep that men don’t think about that you end up also tipping for, right? Like I’m sure you guys don’t worry about how much to tip the person who threads your eyebrows. The thing that I worry about with the expansion of the digital tip jars at coffee shops is whether that ends up impacting how much people are paid, right? If you can hire somebody for less because you sort of know that it’s going to be made up in tips, the whole ethos around it ends up hurting the very workers that you’re hoping to help tipping them in the first place.

ross douthat

Right. I mean, the traditional tip, if you’re tipping in cash, there’s a directness to the transaction which isn’t just that you’re sort of this person has served you and you have sort of a personal connection to them, it’s also that you can do that sort of direct economic transaction that bypasses the structure around you, the restaurant or the hair salon or anything.

michelle goldberg

And I’ve said that makes me super uncomfortable. I mean, I kind of don’t like slipping money into someone’s hands, I’m usually happier when there’s a way to sort of do it in a hands-off way, because it does feel sort of patronizing to me to just like slip someone a few bills. I don’t know. I mean, do you feel like that? Don’t you — do you feel like it’s sort of —

ross douthat

Oh yeah, yeah. It’s much easier to tip — yeah, it’s much easier to tip with a credit card on a screen. Do you guys ever tip below 20 percent?

michelle goldberg

No.

david brooks

No. My wife says the waiter would have to punch me in the face to get below 20 percent. [DOUTHAT LAUGHS]

michelle goldberg

No, I think— I tend to think of 20 as the minimum.

ross douthat

It’s also much easier to calculate than 18.

david brooks

We’re stuck in a bad system I’d be happy if it changed, but in the meantime we can adopt some rules and norms to try to make it least bad, and the first of those is if your meal is under $25, tip 30 percent, and if it’s over $25, tip 20 percent. The second rule is, if you’re in a hotel room, always leave a tip. And this is something that a lot of people don’t do and I’ve in the past not done, but the people who clean those rooms deserve a tip probably more than anybody else in American society.

michelle goldberg

I’ve read that that’s something that people skimp on. My guess is because you don’t have to be there to kind of face the person that you’re stiffing.

ross douthat

That all seems like good advice. And I think the point about hotel workers, that is the place where it is an infinitely more difficult and, in its own way, intimate form of work than making you a latte or even serving you a meal. And now to finish up, we’re going to do our weekly recommendation where we offer you something that we recommend to take your mind off politics and the news. And since we have David as our special guest, we’ve asked him to recommend something for us. David, what do you have?

david brooks

So this gives me the chance to assuage a piece of guilt that I’ve been harboring for last year or two. I wrote a column praising Chance the Rapper for a piece of very genuine music that he wrote, and the same column I criticized Taylor Swift for a piece of very ungenuine angry music that she wrote. And this was a hurtful column to myself because I emerged as an early big Taylor Swift fan, but then when she hit about 23, 24, she got angry. She got angry in the way you’re supposed to get angry if you want to be countercultural and assertive in the way that record labels like you to get angry. But now with her new album Lover, she’s returned to form. She’s returned to her genuine self, she’s bucked the corporate trend, and so Taylor Swift is back.

ross douthat

Michelle, what do you think of Taylor Swift?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I know this is supposed to be the segment that takes our mind off politics, but my opinion of Taylor Swift is totally ideological in that I sort of thought very little of her until I realized that she was quietly part of the resistance, and I feel like one of the strangest things about our era is that Taylor Swift has turned out to have better politics than Kanye West. And so seeing sort of them switch places in terms of righteousness has been kind of another thing that makes me think that we live in a computer simulation that’s gone wrong. But I don’t really listen to Taylor Swift, and so I don’t really have an opinion of her new album. I don’t think I know any of the songs from it. Do you? Do you, Ross?

ross douthat

Not that many, because I have a similar take to David where I was a big fan of these sort of early red state, high school, country music Taylor Swift, and probably influenced by having girls who are very much pre-teen and like a lot of Taylor Swift music. And her music seemed to become very adult and very corporate in a way that sort of took it out of our family drive world. But David, what is your favorite Taylor Swift song?

david brooks

It would still be “Tim McGraw” or “Love Story,” which is an epic anthem. And the one thing, as Michelle was speaking, it occurred to me that when you’re sort of on the right, you don’t have the luxury of measuring your musicians by their politics because they all disagree with your politics.

ross douthat

All right. David, what is the recommendation for us again?

david brooks

To listen to Taylor Swift’s latest album Lover and not watch Kanye West’s appearance on Joel Osteen’s church on YouTube.

ross douthat

That’s our show for this week. Thanks so much for listening. Leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristin Schwab 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 Alison Leyton-Brown. We’re taking a break next week for Thanksgiving, but we’ll see you back here in December. So you’re really — you’re all in. If you see a tip jar, you’re going to put a tip in.

david brooks

I will do anything for a cheap, self-righteous, moral high.

ross douthat