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, we talk about the new state of the Democratic presidential race.

ross douthat

It is very striking how quickly the Democratic field has consolidated.

david leonhardt

Then it’s “The Argument’s” first anniversary. Michelle, Ross, and I take a moment to reflect on how our own opinions have changed over the years.

michelle goldberg

Although I didn’t necessarily take very much of what my parents had told me about politics for granted, for some reason, I sort of accepted this view that I kind of inherited.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

It feels like something very new and very of the moment. And if you have a chance to go see it, you really should.

david leonhardt

Twelve Democratic candidates took the debate stage on Tuesday, but much of the focus was on just one: Elizabeth Warren. She received the bulk of the criticism from other candidates. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar each made the implicit case that Warren wasn’t a good candidate to win Midwestern swing states, and they specifically criticized her unwillingness to explain the details of her “Medicare for all” plan and whether it would require middle class tax increases.

pete buttigieg Your signature, senator, to have a plan for everything, except this. amy klobuchar The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.

david leonhardt

Michelle, I think Ross and I both think this question of the tax increases is a legitimate question for her to answer, and I think you find it more frustrating. So let’s start there.

michelle goldberg

I’m extraordinarily irritated in both directions because I do think this hectoring on her to say I will raise taxes in order to pass this plan that will lower costs, to get her to say those words, I will raise taxes, is basically a demand that she give Republicans a talking point that they can use in advertising. I mean, they basically have made this a focus of every single Democratic debate so far and yet, the fact that she hasn’t figured out how to finesse it also terrifies me because it’s nevertheless going to keep on coming. And it’s obviously going to keep on coming in a general election. And she has to figure out a way to answer it without being evasive. And here, I think she might have sort of backed herself into a corner by embracing Bernie’s plan without coming out with a plan of her own, which I really hope she does soon because she ends up having to answer for a lot of details of a plan that she was never responsible for creating.

ross douthat

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that the sort of moderator approach that we’ve seen for years and years and years of “Democrat, admit you’re going to raise taxes,” is this sort of performative toughness that I don’t think is actually that tough or that interesting. I think the problem here is that her plan has this massive real-world weakness, which is —

michelle goldberg

Well, she doesn’t have a plan yet, right?

david leonhardt

She doesn’t have a plan, but what she’s committed to has a massive real-world weakness, which is she has embraced this idea of taking private health insurance away from people and putting everyone in Medicare. And while focusing on just the tax part of that is too narrow, it is true that she hasn’t in any way answered the questions of how are you actually going to pass this unpopular plan that’s going to force people to give up their private health insurance and yes, force them to pay higher taxes, even if that’s not the most important part of it. Ross, this scares me, but do you disagree with anything I just said there?

ross douthat

No, I thought that Warren generally was fine on the debate stage last night. But I think her approach to what is on paper the biggest of all her big ideas, even if, as Michelle says, she doesn’t actually have the formal plan yet, it’s not really an effective approach. And it’s a particularly weird approach, given that she is standing right next to Bernie Sanders. And it’s made stranger by the fact that Warren is now arguably the frontrunner, and she’s the frontrunner on the basis of the claim, which is a powerful claim for a lot of Democrats, that you can do bigger things as a liberal and you should champion bigger programs as a liberal. But everyone in politics knows that if Elizabeth Warren is elected president, she’s not actually going to be passing a Medicare for all bill in her first term.

michelle goldberg

Sorry, can I just interrupt? Because I actually don’t think it’s true that she sees Medicare for all, or her campaign sees Medicare for all, as their biggest project or their biggest plan.

ross douthat

But that only makes it weirder.

michelle goldberg

I think that the thing that they are going to be focused on is probably going to be this wealth tax and all of these social programs, you know, universal pre-K and college debt forgiveness and the like that could be paid for by the wealth tax, right? That’s the plan. I don’t think that Democrats expect Medicare for all to be the first thing that a Warren administration tries to enact.

ross douthat

Right, but again, I guess to me that just makes it even weirder still, right? I mean, imagine, what would be a sort of Republican version of this, right? It would be a world where there were a couple of candidates on the right who were advocating social security privatization on the scale that Grover Norquist or someone like that has always wanted to see. And one of these campaigns was sort of all in for this and had this blueprint for how you would do it. And then another candidate would endorse that without having their own version of the plan but then say, oh, don’t worry guys, I’m technically running on this massively unpopular social security privatization, but really if I’m elected, I’m going to focus on normal Republican priorities like middle class tax cuts and tax cuts for businesses. I don’t know, it’s just a strange situation for the Warren campaign to have found itself in where if you’re embracing the Sanders’ plan, that’s a really big deal and a really big gamble. And you can’t just wave it away by saying, actually, we’re going to use a wealth tax to pay for universal pre-K, right?

michelle goldberg

Right, no. I mean, I think they’ve sort of allowed themselves to get trapped. And there’s other candidates on that stage that also backed Bernie’s plan. And you know, in a way, like one of the things that people who love Warren love about Warren is that she doesn’t say stuff that she doesn’t believe and she’s really earnest and forthright. But it’s too risky for something that they’re not actually even going to do.

david leonhardt

O.K., well we shouldn’t make the same mistake that the debates have been making and spend way too much time on Medicare, so we’ll spend only a little bit too much time on it. I’d be interested in what you both thought about Joe Biden. I mean, it’s true. Look, his polling just doesn’t fall. Ross, I know you keep emphasizing this, but it is really hard to look at him and not be anxious. I mean, that whole little riff he went on where at first he said he was going to get rid of the capital gains tax, and it’s fine, we all misspeak. Then he said, no, no, I’m going to double it. And then he said something about people clipping coupons in the stock market? I mean, are we too much in the Twitter bubble, and is there a world in which most Americans look at that and think it’s just fine and Biden actually wins the nomination and is going to be O.K.? Because I don’t really completely see it at this point.

ross douthat

I would be interested in a poll or a study showing what share of each candidate’s supporters are watching these debates because one of my guesses is that Biden support skews towards Democratic voters in constituencies who are least likely to sit down and block out three hours on a weekday night. There is a possibility that the things that all of us are seeing from Biden, people who are planning to vote for him just aren’t seeing it because they have better things to do with their life at the moment. Does that seem plausible to you guys?

michelle goldberg

Well, you know, it does, but I also don’t think that it’s correct to say that it’s just people in a Twitter bubble who are concerned about this. I mean, you see in Iowa where ordinary people are super attuned to what’s going on in politics and go and see candidates multiple times. You’ve seen his support in Iowa really go down, and now his campaign is basically conceding it and saying, they don’t expect to win Iowa, they don’t expect to win New Hampshire. So I do think the more people see Biden the more anxious they get about his ability to stand up to Trump.

ross douthat

I mean, to me, what’s striking, and I’m hardly the first person to write about this, but it is very striking how quickly the Democratic field has consolidated and the extent to which Biden’s place in the race has made it really hard for a whole range of candidates who seem like they could be electable candidates who are somewhat closer to the center than Warren and Sanders to get oxygen and attention and win votes. And you know, you could see both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar trying to sort of pivot off Warren last night and presumably try to pick up some of those voters in Iowa who may be abandoning Biden. You know, there’s a window there where you could imagine Biden fades in Iowa as people pay close attention, and the non-Warren, non-Sanders vote coalesces around a Buttigieg or a Klobuchar, but it hasn’t happened yet. And if Warren wins Iowa, then it’s basically just Warren and Biden.

michelle goldberg

Well, I don’t know because I think my guess is that Warren will win Iowa, but then what if Mayor Pete ends up being in the top three, which I think is a completely plausible scenario?

ross douthat

Then he’s got the Lamar Alexander path to victory. [GOLDBERG LAUGHS] I mean, I think he needs to be in the top two. I joked about Lamar, but you really don’t want to be in the Marco Rubio lane of like, well, we’re going to come in third in Iowa and second in New Hampshire. [DOUTHAT and GOLDBERG LAUGH] Because Buttigieg is not going to win South Carolina, right? So I don’t know. David, what do you think?

david leonhardt

Well, I do think there’s one way in which third place is O.K. So the person we’ve talked the least about is Bernie Sanders, and I know a lot of Bernie’s supporters are extremely frustrated that he doesn’t get more attention. I just don’t see a path for him. I know he’s got about a fifth of the Democratic electorate who love him. I know he got more than that last time around because of the discomfort that people had with Hillary. But I do see a path in which Warren or Sanders wins Iowa, the other one finishes second, and Biden really fades. And I think if Buttigieg or Klobuchar can beat Biden, then I think they’re still in it. Because I think then you have a path to winning New Hampshire. And even if that candidate doesn’t win South Carolina, I do think there is a path in which a more moderate candidate comes out of Iowa as the top more moderate candidate.

ross douthat

Yeah, I guess that’s right. If Biden dropped to, like, fifth in Iowa, then you’re into sort of free-for-all territory in New Hampshire and anyone who finishes ahead of him could presumably have a chance. Then presumably, his support in South Carolina takes some kind of hit.

david leonhardt

Yeah. It’s really not clear. I just think there is a long slog, potentially, for a more moderate candidate and a more progressive candidate. And we all assume that’s Biden, and I think it’s overwhelmingly likely to be Biden, particularly when you think about the history. People weren’t that excited about Mondale, but he got the nomination. People weren’t that excited about Gore, but he beat Bill Bradley. People weren’t that excited about John Kerry, but he beat Howard Dean. I mean, there really is a very large pool of Democratic voters.

michelle goldberg

Right, but I feel like people are very attuned to that history. People see that. They were scarred by Hillary Clinton. They were scarred by John Kerry. So they might slouch towards the same kind of outcome. But I think that there’s a significant number of Democrats who see that exact dynamic and are determined to head it off.

ross douthat

And there’s also a media effect where, and you guys can tell me if you disagree, the center-left press, sort of accepting the pro-Bernie socialist wing, has decided that it’s Warren. They don’t want to sort of open it up for Klobuchar, Booker or whoever.

michelle goldberg

But who do you mean by the center-left press?

ross douthat

No, I’m talking about a mix of reporters and pundits at publications like ours and the CNN-New York Times-Washington Post world.

michelle goldberg

But you know, but that wasn’t necessarily true a few months ago. It’s not that her support is following the favorable feelings. It’s that people see that she’s drawing these enormous, enthusiastic crowds, that she’s able to survive all of these slings that Trump throws at her. And so the kind of favorable coverage follows the favorable performance.

ross douthat

Yeah, yeah. I’m not I’m not claiming that the media has rigged it for Warren. I think she’s run a strong campaign, and people are reacting to that. But I think, you know, there’s a feedback effect where that then becomes a built-in advantage for her. I also think the media is a little unfair to Sanders in the way that it treats him, vis-à-vis Warren.

david leonhardt

I mean, I guess Ross, I would say, I think, look, obviously, most journalists are left of center. But there’s also, I think, a bias in journalism toward compromise and toward bipartisanship. And I think we saw George W. Bush and Barack Obama in very different ways get positive coverage because of that bias toward compromise and bipartisanship. And so I actually think, to the extent that such a thing as a media establishment exists, it is uncomfortable with Warren’s more ideological approach and her more populist approach. But she is arguably the only candidate running a really good campaign. And if you’re going to add a second, it would be Bernie Sanders. And so we’re in this strange moment in which there are candidates who acknowledge the existence of swing voters and are trying to figure out ways to win them over and there are candidates running effective campaigns. And right now, the overlap between those two groups in the Democratic Party is zero, and that’s what worries me.

michelle goldberg

Wait, no, I don’t think that’s true because I think that there are certain sorts of Obama to Trump swing voters who are probably pretty receptive to a left-wing economic populist message that is kind of wholeheartedly against the billionaire class, against free trade deals. Those aren’t the people that she is laser targeting, but I do think that our conception in the media of who swing voters are, we tend to think more often of like Romney to Hillary voters. But there are a lot of people who didn’t vote for Romney because of that 47 percent crack who really hate corporate consolidation, who really hate a lot of the things that Elizabeth Warren is running foursquare against who I think, at least theoretically, could be open to her message.

david leonhardt

I totally agree that, Michelle. I just think that when you add on banning private health insurance, banning fracking, and decriminalizing the border that you’re starting to lose a bunch of those voters. I think Warren and Sanders are really good at appealing to those voters in the way that they’re deeply progressive on economic issues. I don’t think they’ve shown any instinct for tacking back to the center on anything. And on some issues, those voters are not way on the left. That’s all I’m saying.

ross douthat

I mean, I would only say, you know, I basically agree with David. But the polls that we have right now I think show both Bernie and Warren sort of performing equally to Biden. The Warren-Sanders case that they can win swing voters as well as Biden has not been disconfirmed by current general election polling.

david leonhardt

O.K., we will leave it there. A couple of weeks ago, we discussed the perils of airplane travel. I talked about my literal pet peeve, pets masquerading as service animals. Ross suggested that airlines make a family section so parents can sit together and help each other out. And Michelle took on manspreading.

michelle goldberg So they always take both armrests. They always spread their legs. I’ve taken photos of, like, my backpack is under the seat in front of me, and the man next to me has his foot on it.

david leonhardt

And by the way, Michelle, you actually e-mailed us a photo of that backpack after our taping as proof, which we appreciated.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, I have a chronic fear of kind of not being believed when I describe what it is like to be a woman in this world.

david leonhardt

Well, we got a lot of voicemails on this topic, so we’re going to go ahead and play a few now.

audience voicemail Hi, my name is Norbert. Hi, my name is Scott. I’m calling from Cincinnati. Hey, guys. This is Peter from Oak Park, Illinois. I enjoyed very much your comments, Michelle, regarding difficulties with male passengers on air flights. Men are not immune from the problems you have encountered. I know men are pretty awful generally, but Michelle was a bit off in only blaming us brutes. So now I wanted to volunteer to fly next to Michelle wherever she goes, and I promise I wouldn’t violate any of her airspace or otherwise. [GOLDBERG LAUGHS]

david leonhardt

So I guess that raises the question, have you ever, either of you, experienced this kind of aggressive physical space claiming from a woman on a flight, as one of our callers suggested?

michelle goldberg

So I definitely haven’t. And I think the thing I would emphasize is that it’s not because men are always larger, although men on average are larger. Because when I sit next to a very large woman, what she almost inevitably does is push her legs together, fold her elbows in, tries to make herself as small as possible.

ross douthat

But Michelle, oh my god, I have to tell you. I was on a flight, a long flight, last week. And the guy in the middle, who was already on the plane before me, I would say he was extended two inches into my seat already. Either I had to yield a large portion of my seat to this guy or essentially spend the entire flight with my elbow up against his. And I just felt like—

michelle goldberg

Welcome to my world.

ross douthat

Yeah, exactly.

michelle goldberg

I’m actually shocked, though. I mean, I totally did not think that that was something that men did to other men.

ross douthat

The male-on-male conflict over the armrest zone is sort of a chronic feature of long flights. Like, you know, I’m the alpha male. I put both my elbows and my middle seat armrest.

david leonhardt

O.K, well thanks to all of our listeners who called in on this topic. We love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324 on airline etiquette or anything else. You can also email us at Argument@NYTimes.com. And we’ll be back after the break. This month marks “The Argument’s” first birthday. We started this show a year ago when the country felt as polarized as it had been in a very long time, and that certainly hasn’t changed since then. Impeachment is now in the news, and another presidential election is looming. But we created this show as a place where people from different parts of the political spectrum could hear each other out. Michelle, Ross, and I have certainly done a lot of hearing each other out in the last year, and now we’d like to take a minute to talk about how our own views have changed over the years as opinion columnists and just as people. I’m going to go first. I would say that over the course of roughly the 1990s, my views on economic policy, which is where I’ve spent the most of my time as a journalist working, moved to what might be called the political right, that I really came to see more of the importance of markets and how markets work, often in ways that other places don’t. I’m more positive about airline deregulation than a lot of people are. I’m more positive about school reform than a lot of people are. And then I would say that over the last decade or so, the 21st century, other parts of my economic views have moved to the left. Because when I look around and I see this crisis of net worth for the typical American family still being lower than it was at the start of the century, life expectancy falling, which I find shocking, the general views that people in the country think things are going wrong, I don’t think tweaks like a little minimum wage increase or an earned-income tax credit are enough to deal with what I think is a crisis in living standards. And so I am much more sympathetic to bigger tax increases on the wealthy who’ve done extremely well. So that is my example. And I’d be interested, Ross in particular, I think you’re sympathetic to some of those economic views, but my guess is that I’m further to the left than you are on them.

ross douthat

My strongest and most enduring form of conservatism is a kind of religious and cultural conservatism. And I sort of came into conservatism as it exists as a movement via that door where I was sort of a pro-life Catholic before I became any kind of political conservative. I may have made this joke before, but you know, you either become a conservative as a teenage male by reading too much Ayn Rand or by reading too much J.R.R. Tolkien. I was in the Tolkien camp. But that meant that I sort of came into a conservatism that in the late 1990s that had a lot of confidence sort of built up across the Reagan era and the end of the Cold War about its foreign policy and economic expertise. And in certain ways, part of my own education as a writer and someone who tries to think about American politics has been shaped by deciding that the mainstream conservative consensus was wrong on foreign policy during the Iraq War era and then turned out to be somewhat wrong, and here I agree with you, David, about economic policy after the Great Recession. And it was interesting because I started as a Times columnist in 2009. So the Obama presidency started. This huge debate starts, and sort of the default conservative position is, this is the late 1970s all over again. If we spend too much money or cut interest rates too much, we’re going to have galloping inflation. And I sort of deferred to that consensus for a while. And then through a combination of argument and evidence, decided that it was just getting the moment wrong. And so the columns that I look back in my time at The Times and I’m most likely to sort of disagree with or want to qualify today are columns about the deficit, the risks of the deficit, everything associated with that in the early Obama years.

david leonhardt

Michelle, have you had the experience, because obviously, in some ways, my recent move on this is typical of a lot of progressives. Have you had the experience of sort of looking at the center left moving somewhat more left on economics and saying, why did take them so long?

michelle goldberg

No, because I think that I was also part of that. For a long time, the people I trusted also suggested that excessive deficits are dangerous, and who was I don’t know any differently? I mean, looking back, I’m sure that I would have wanted Obama to push through a much bigger stimulus. But I think I got some of my bearings from center-left economists who have, in the ensuing years, move more towards the left.

david leonhardt

Well, what’s something else you’ve changed your mind about?

michelle goldberg

Well, looking back, I think for me, one of the biggest things is really Israel. You know, I grew up in sort of a standard liberal Zionist household. I remember my mom telling me when I was really young that Vanessa Redgrave was an anti-Semite because of something she’d said on behalf of the Palestinians. And although I didn’t necessarily take very much of what my parents told me about politics for granted, for some reason I sort of accepted this view that I’d kind of inherited on Israel for quite a while. And I also think I had a sort of reflexive disdain for a certain kind of anti-imperialist leftist, you know, the people who show up at the demonstrations with the keffiyehs and the signs talking about the great hero Saddam Hussein. And for a long time, I think I stupidly and reflexively lumped certain kinds of pro-Palestinian advocacy in with them. All of that was a sort of vague stew, I guess, in my mind until I went to Israel for the first time. And I remember really clearly, I think it was probably in 2004. And it was when they were building the wall. And you know, one of the problems with the wall is that it doesn’t follow ‘67 borders. It sort of cuts into Palestinian territory. And they’d built the wall through the village so as to cut one family off from everybody else. They basically put this family’s house in a sort of prison for no real security reason. It was just a reason of convenience for this thing they were constructing. And you know, the family was allowed in and out, but there had to be Israeli soldiers there to open the gate. And it was the most absurdist, twisted thing I had ever seen if somebody tried to describe to me exactly what I’m seeing, I would have dismissed them. And it also I think made me rethink a lot of what I’m now sort of embarrassed about is this reflexive disdain for certain kinds of marginalized left-wing foreign policy positions.

ross douthat

I mean, I think that idea about the moment when you realized the cranks are right, it’s sort of an important moment and you know, a dangerous one because sometimes the cranks are wrong. You know, I mean, we’ve been talking, I think my own examples and you guys are all sort of movements that are in some sense to the left, and so I should offer an example of ways in which my views have moved right. I did not fully expect the acceleration of liberal animus towards my own religious tradition that I think has been a feature of liberal politics in the years since Obergefell and same-sex marriage. We’re not sort of all the way to what I consider disastrous situations yet, but we’re recording this podcast just a few days after Beto O’Rourke got up at the Democrats’ L.G.B.T.Q. town hall and explained that actually tax exemptions for churches that don’t bless same sex marriages have to go, which is not the position of liberalism. But its expression by a mainstream Democratic candidate I would have dismissed as sort of a crankish, alarmist right-wing fear 10 or 12 years ago.

michelle goldberg

Do you still feel the same way about same-sex marriage, per se?

ross douthat

I think that the things that I expected to be cultural costs of same-sex marriage have been more significant than I anticipated. So I haven’t moved to the left on that issue, no.

david leonhardt

And by cultural costs, you mean what you feel is intolerance for religion or something else?

ross douthat

I think there is a combination of how conventional liberal attitudes towards sex and gender have changed since Obergefell. And a weird sort of sterility and sexlessness and the continued decline of marriage that are not caused by same-sex marriage but are connected to the broader change that made it possible. And I think those trends are worse over the last seven to 10 years than I would have anticipated in 2005.

david leonhardt

I mean, I don’t want to grope for some sort of false consensus here, but I would hope at least that you’ve taken some relief from the fact that while you’re right, Beto outlined this position that is pretty extreme, the predominant reaction on the left has been criticism and disdain for his position. And you’re right, at some point, that could change. He could be a leading indicator. But for now, I don’t see that happening.

ross douthat

I would say the reactions from the left were not sort of a outraged rejection but a sort of weary, well, you know, this is too extreme, and Beto is just trying to get attention. But I think the official consensus of reasonable liberalism has already shifted dramatically on the kind of pressure that should be applied to religious schools or Catholic hospitals. And when I have arguments with my own religious conservative friends, the things that I said 10 or 12 years ago to basically say, you know, you don’t need to panic about same sex marriage, the things that I said then don’t hold up now. So it’s hard for me to take that much comfort.

michelle goldberg

Religious conservatives constantly feel so beleaguered by the left. I mean, I understand that the left kind of has more cultural power. But at a time when the landing page of the State Department is Mike Pompeo’s speech about being a Christian leader and the attorney general of the United States is giving this Torquemada-like speech about the evils of secularism and the kind of destructive things that they’ve wrought, there’s these people who have this unbelievable amount of power, and they’ve got their foot on our necks while they’re screaming at us about how we keep oppressing them.

ross douthat

I don’t see the Trump era as sort of this effective restoration of religious conservatism. I see it as sort of a ineffective, compromised, corrupt, occasionally ridiculous holding action that is likely to be overwhelmed at some point in the near future. So it doesn’t give me some deep political comfort about the future of my own faith that religious conservatives have signed up for Donald Trump’s barricades, I guess, if that makes sense.

michelle goldberg

If there is a sort of growing liberal kind of contempt for a lot of conservative religious organizations, I think it’s intertwined with that because it’s sort of like, why are we supposed to give up our rights to take seriously your religious claims when you obviously don’t take them seriously yourself?

ross douthat

Yeah, I think there is an accelerative pattern where religious conservatives turned to Trump and anxiety and fear and then turning to Trump marginalizes them further and encourages their enemies to be more aggressive. So yeah, I agree, which is why, one reason among many, that I was not and I guess remain not a Trump supporter.

david leonhardt

Well, this is obviously a serious way to mark a birthday, particularly a first birthday. [LEONHARDT and DOUTHAT LAUGH]

ross douthat

Appropriate to the show, though.

david leonhardt

But it is consistent with the show. And I’ve actually really appreciated learning something about each of you. And we’ve along, the way, come up with the idea for about three or four additional segments down the road. So we want to encourage all of you to just go through the same exercise we just did. I read the phone number before. It’s 347-915-4324. Give us a call and tell us something that you have changed your mind about politically over the years. Now it is time for our weekly recommendation, when we make a suggestion meant to take your mind off of the news of the day. Michelle, It is your turn this week. What have you got for us?

michelle goldberg

O.K., so I actually feel a little bit awkward about making this recommendation in this conversation among three white people, but I am going to recommend that anybody who has the chance goes to see “Slave Play” while it’s on Broadway. It is this extraordinarily arresting, extraordinarily shocking and really brilliant play that starts with this absurdist premise of three interracial couples. And in each of them, the black partner has sort of lost the ability to feel and relate to their white partner. And so these therapists have created this bizarre and absurdist multi-day retreat in which they go to a plantation and sort of act out these S&M scenarios in what they call “antebellum sexual performance therapy.” It feels like something very new and very of the moment. And if you have a chance to go see it, you really should.

ross douthat

I think that’s a very powerful recommendation, Michelle. I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen very many Broadway plays recently. But I think it’s interesting because I’ve been reading the coverage of this alongside the coverage of a play that people in my circles are really interested in called “Heroes of the Fourth Turning.”

michelle goldberg

Oh, I’ve heard about that, too.

ross douthat

Yeah, it’s basically just about this very conservative Catholic subculture and people within it reacting to and arguing about our moment. And it’s gotten sort of predictably positive coverage from religious writers, Catholic writers. But it’s also gotten very strong reviews, including in our own newspaper. And it’s interesting because we have these conversations, we did our cancel culture segment. We have a lot of conversations where we’re sort of talking about, is it possible to do interesting artistic work in a moment that is one, polarized, and two, features these sort of attempts to erect new taboos around political and cultural discussions. And the combination of the succès de scandale of “Slave Play” and the fact that you can have a successful play about weirdo conservative Catholics that gets a positive reaction from secular audiences. They both seem like potential counterarguments to the idea that everything is being shut down by polarization or political correctness.

david leonhardt

O.K., Michelle, what’s the recommendation?

michelle goldberg

It’s “Slave Play” on Broadway.

david leonhardt