david leonhardt

This week we’re bringing you, our live show from Boston, which we taped at WBUR’s CitySpace. We had a great time meeting so many of you, and now we’re excited to let everyone else hear this conversation.

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’re talking climate change with a special surprise guest, your senator, Ed Markey. He helped write the two highest profile climate proposals of the last decade. Then, do election results from around the world mean that liberalism is dying? And finally, a recommendation. [APPLAUSE] For our first segment, we have a special guest, Ed Markey. He has been in Congress since the bicentennial in 1976, which means he’s been serving in Congress for this nation’s entire third century so far, and he has been a senator since 2013. We have a lot to ask him about President Trump, impeachment, climate change, as I mentioned, and the upcoming 2020 campaign. Please welcome Senator Markey. [APPLAUSE] Thank you for joining us, senator.

ed markey

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

david leonhardt

Obviously one thing that’s on many people’s minds is President Trump and the question of what Congress is going to do about it, and so we want to start there with Michelle.

michelle goldberg

So far, if I’m not mistaken, you’ve kind of taken the Nancy Pelosi line. And I guess what I want to ask is how Democrats can justify at this point, you know, now that Mueller has stood up and basically implored Congress to do its job and kind of made clear that this wasn’t an exculpatory report, that there was evidence of obstruction of justice that he couldn’t indict, but that there is a process in the Constitution to hold a president to account, how do Democrats justify not beginning an impeachment inquiry?

ed markey

So Mueller said if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. What he’s saying is that after compiling that 400-page report, in eye-watering detail, that they were unable to say that the president did not commit a crime. And he said at the same time that according to Department of Justice policy, which I may not agree with, but their policy is that they don’t indict sitting presidents, so that sends it over to the Congress. And I think that it is absolutely imperative for the Congress to have these hearings. And the more that Donald Trump says to Donald McGahn or to Hope Hicks that he doesn’t want them to testify, is the more he’s engaging in the kind of a cover up that would make Richard Nixon blush. And so from my perspective, we must begin immediately the hearings, and if we find that he did commit crimes, then that in fact does beg the question of impeachment.

michelle goldberg

Right. But isn’t what you’re saying then that what we know so far, what’s in the report and what’s in that S.D.N.Y.‘s filings about “Individual-1,” the manifest evidence of emoluments violations, are you saying that that in itself isn’t enough? Because to me when I hear people say that we need to find more evidence, what it suggests is that what we all know Trump has done does not itself rise to the level of impeachment.

ed markey

Well again, I think that the evidence is piling up, and I think that we need to have the public hearings. I think the public hearings themselves will build the case.

michelle goldberg

But is that an impeachment inquiry or no?

ed markey

I think that it is a set of hearings that could lead to an impeachment. But we have to go through that process to ensure that the public understands what the crimes were and why in fact they should lead to an impeachment.

ross douthat

Can I ask if you think Robert Mueller has done his part of this job adequately? And since I suspect your answer will be yes, let me elaborate a little bit. I mean, I think one of the reasons that Democrats are in this odd position of confronting an incredibly detailed report that he clearly sees it as possibly building a case for impeachment, but you’re talking about having another set of hearings as a kind of intermediate step. I mean, isn’t one of the reasons for that that Mueller has ended up with this bizarre double-negative approach to the thing that he was supposed to investigate, right? Where he’s out there saying, well we didn’t find him not guilty.

ed markey

I think what he’s saying is, my hands are tied, I can’t do anything, and I point over to another institution, the United States Congress, and I say, your hands are not tied.

ross douthat

But he didn’t just say that. He didn’t say, we think there are reasons to charge the president with obstruction but we can’t do it, therefore it’s in Congress’ hands. He said, we didn’t reach a conclusion.

ed markey

We did not reach a conclusion that he did not commit a crime.

ross douthat

Right. But even as you say it, even as you say it, it sounds a little odd.

ed markey

But he’s saying that because of Justice Department policy. And so he’s strongly suggesting that the United States Congress can look at this evidence, and that they should look at this evidence in order to make a determination as to whether or not a crime was committed. And so I think that his statement is one more nudge, push towards the Congress conducting the hearings that could lead to the impeachment. Impeachment’s now on the table.

david leonhardt

I think all three of us are a little disappointed in this aspect of Mueller’s work. Are you satisfied with Mueller?

ed markey

I can’t question his deference to Justice Department policy because he is a career Justice Department employee. And there’s probably a part of that that constrains him from acting in a way that is probably more consistent with his beliefs about what Trump did. It’s troubling, but still understandable, but what he’s saying is there’s still another recourse, and that’s the United States Congress. And he’s right about that. And we should have the hearings. And they should be the kind of hearings that tip over every rock, bring in every witness, not allow Trump to engage in the kind of road blocks that he has been trying to throw up. And as long as it takes, we have to go there so that the American public knows what happened in 2016 and beyond in their name.

ross douthat

Can you imagine a scenario where an actual impeachment process and vote would make sense if you were certain throughout that process that it would just die and fail in the Senate?

ed markey

I don’t know the answer to that anymore than I know the answer to the question of what would have happened if Alexander Butterfield did not testify that there were actual tapes. I don’t know what the reaction is going to be to any information which is put out in the public domain by any Republican. You want me to get inside the internal workings of the cerebral mechanisms of Republican right-wing congressman, that’s hard for me to do. I’m a liberal from Massachusetts. So I cannot prognosticate that far ahead.

michelle goldberg

Whenever I speak to Democratic members of Congress who are against starting an impeachment inquiry, they make it clear that this is the kind of a purely political calculation, right? Either they’ll say you know the public isn’t with us yet or they fear kind of the impeachment backlash that Republicans faced after they impeached Bill Clinton, or else they’ll say that we ran on lowering prescription drug prices, we didn’t run on impeachment. But I feel like although it’s probably true or it is true that the polls show kind of slightly more people against impeachment than for it, doesn’t this sort of like naked political calculation make Democrats look sort of weak and spineless? I mean, isn’t there a value in leading and showing strength that has electoral repercussions down the line?

ed markey

Again, I think we need to have the hearings. And out of that set of hearings, all that information being made public, perhaps even taking it 25 pages at a time in the Mueller report so that there’s a full understanding by the American public of what is actually in there, then I think we’re in a position to make a determination in another month or two or three from now after we’ve done it in an exhaustive and thorough way, but in a way that has fairness attached to it as well in terms of how these hearings were conducted. I think that’s a big part of what happened with Watergate, and I think that’s a big part of what didn’t happen with the Clinton impeachment. And so it has to be done correctly, ultimately, if it’s going to have the credibility to then make a recommendation to in fact impeach a sitting president of the United States of America. Two-thirds of the American people did not want Bill Clinton to be impeached right from the get-go. And it never changed. They never thought that that, quote/unquote, “high crime or misdemeanor” that he was charged with actually was a high crime or misdemeanor, right? And so the public was saying that the whole way and they lost seats. Here, this is a potential high crime that was committed, and there’s no one who’s doubting that even on the Republican side. This interference by the Russians is something that’s quite serious, and anyone who engages in obstruction of that investigation, they would be engaging in a crime. So to the extent to which the American public actually does believe that, and they do right now, it’s imperative for us to lay it all out, have that case to be made in a very definitive way, then reach that conclusion as to whether or not it was impeachable and whether or not we should take that step.

david leonhardt

So let’s turn to climate. At The New York Times there are all these warnings against using the word “unique.” People often use the word “unique” when they mean unusual, but I think I’m on safe ground here. The copy editing gods will not smite me down for saying, you are in a unique position here. Your journey on this has been fascinating. You have had your name on each of the two big climate policies of the last decade. So you are obviously the Markey in Waxman-Markey, the cap and trade bill in the Obama administration that was very ambitious, but was also seen as somewhat moderate and technocratic. And now you are the partner of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Green New Deal, which many people see as radical. Can you talk to us about your own journey and how you see these two pieces as consistent, but also what ways in which you’ve changed your mind or how you think a different approach is better today than in 2009?

ed markey

I had authored from the House side the fuel economy standard law in 2007 which President Obama used to increase fuel economy standards to 54.5 miles per gallon along with the California waiver. I was the author of the appliance efficiency laws that increased dramatically the efficiency of air conditioning and refrigeration in America. So I had worked in these areas beforehand. But when Obama won, he said that climate was one of his top three or four issues. Henry Waxman and I had sat next to each other for years, we were the two most powerful Democrats on environment in the Congress. So we decided to move and to move quickly in January of 2009, and we produced the Waxman-Markey bill on June 26, 2009, which was an 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by the year 2050. It was considered radical by the Republicans, but we were endorsed by the Edison Electric Institute, by labor unions, by every environmental group in America, and we passed it, 219-212, Obama said he would sign it, and it fell short in the Senate. So it’s 10 years later. We’re heading up to June 26, 2019. Tenth year anniversary of Waxman-Markey. And I’ve come to the conclusion that we didn’t have a huge public movement behind us 10 years ago, but we had the inside political power. Now Trump is president. The denier-in-chief actually sits in the Oval Office. He’s named a coal lobbyist to run the E.P.A. He’s named an oil lobbyist to run the Department of Interior. He’s pulled out of the Paris Agreement. He’s pulled back from the fuel economy standards. He’s pulled back from the Clean Power Plan for utilities. And what he’s done is, he’s created an emergency which the United Nations says is an existential threat to our country. And all of his scientists, all 13 agencies said could lead to a nine-degree Fahrenheit warming over the planet by the year 2100. And so the Green New Deal is not just a resolution. It’s a revolution. And young people, millennials, this is the issue that’s their top issue. And so Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I introduced the Green New Deal in the first week of February. Now what’s happened in 14 weeks? It’s now catapulted itself up to the very top of the issues that Democrats across the country want to have dealt with along with health care and the economy. We never had that before. Climate was never a top-tier issue. It’s something people cared about, but it was much lower. And they are insisting that there be a plan that is put together to deal with it. Every candidate now has a plan, there are calls now to have a separate climate debate amongst all Democrats that we can lay out the plans. And while Republicans might think that they’re going to do a reverse takedown on this issue, all I can tell you is, be careful because the millennials who are Republicans actually believe in climate science. So there’s a split that’s breaking open even within their own party, and I think it’s something that is going to have very sharp political edges in 2020, and I believe we need the movement to get back to a point where we can legislate as we did in 2009.

david leonhardt

I see a question on your face, Ross.

ross douthat

It’s less a question than a slight re-description. Maybe. But it seems like— and I think David was getting at this a little bit, that the theory of Waxman-Markey — as you said, there was lots of Republican opposition, and there obviously was, that was what doomed it — but it came at a moment when prior to the financial crisis, prior to 2008, there had been a certain amount of elite Republican support for a cap and trade carbon tax kind of approach. You had John McCain supporting it at least notionally, you had Newt Gingrich famously sharing a couch with Nancy Pelosi in a advertisement series about climate change. And I think there was a sense at that moment that it was possible to have a kind of center-left meets center-right response to climate change. And that failed. And now it seems like the political theory is grassroots mobilization from the left that eventually pulls the center along. So it’s a different approach. And I guess to bring that re-description to a question, part of that different approach has been an attempt to essentially wrap the entire progressive agenda into climate policy, right? I mean, the Green New Deal insists that basically everything on the Democratic wishlist from minimum wage laws to Medicare For All and so on is all part of the response to climate change. How do you see that playing as a political matter?

ed markey

Well, there was a Koch brother study of the Green New Deal that came out and said, oh, it’s Medicare For All. Oh, it’s free college education. Oh, oh, oh, it’s going to cost $93 trillion. Of course, Medicare For All is not in the Green New Deal, and neither is free college education in the Green New Deal— it’s not in there. Not mentioned. But the Republicans have done a very good job in trying to characterize it that way, but it’s not actually in the Green New Deal. So we call for a mobilization heading towards 100 percent clean renewable energy. We call for massive job creation. We call for ensuring that marginalized communities, communities of color are included in this new deal in a way that they weren’t in the first New Deal. And what we did was we took Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address where he laid out a second bill of rights, and this is the language that he used and this is the language we used: that everyone is entitled to health care. Everyone’s entitled to a good education. Everyone’s entitled to a good job. Everyone’s entitled to a living wage that they can take care of their families and even take them on vacation.

ross douthat

Right, right. That’s bigger than Medicare For All.

ed markey

Yes, everyone does have a right to health care, and a job, and a good education. But we don’t call for prescriptively what the policies are going to be to accomplish those goals other than that that has to be the goal for our country, and it should be the goal for our country.

michelle goldberg

And can I say something in response to you really quick?

ross douthat

Absolutely.

michelle goldberg

[LAUGHS] Right. So we’re going to talk in a minute about the rumored death of liberalism around the world, right? And one of the examples of that that you, Ross, and our colleague Bret Stephens sometimes give for this is how embattled Emmanuel Macron is in France. You have these yellow vest protests in part because people are very angry about these new carbon taxes. But part of the reason that people are so angry about these new carbon taxes is because they haven’t been offset by other new social spending, right? So if you were going to kind of demand that people make the sorts of sacrifices that I think most people who study this issue believe are necessary to kind of decarbonize the economy, then it is politically impossible, as you yourself acknowledge when you talk about how Macron is failing, if you don’t backstop it with new social programs.

ross douthat

So two points, right? I mean, the first is that that larger question is another example of how the political climate has changed since Waxman-Markey, right? That in 2008, it was possible to say that the U.S. was this outlier in global politics in terms of having actual political opposition to climate change legislation, and as we see in Europe and Australia, that’s no longer the case, so that’s another big shift. One of the things that I’ve said favorably about the Green New Deal, right? Is that there is a side of it that is more plausible, more politically plausible than just doing a carbon tax and figuring out some complicated rebate scheme so it doesn’t necessarily fall too heavily on the working class. I think the side of the Green New Deal that is sort of plausible is the extent to which it suggests a kind of populist center for climate change action where you basically say, we’re not going to tax you, we’re just going to spend a hell of a lot of money on research, mitigation, clean energy transformation, and so on, and we’re going to figure out a way to spend it in red states and make it sort of a jobs program for the heartland and all of that kind of stuff. I feel like that at least points to a different center. But I don’t think you can get there — and again, I’m curious what the senator thinks — if it’s just seen as a full Ocasio-Cortezian socialism on the march, right?

ed markey

Socialism on the march.

ross douthat

Social democracy on the march.

ed markey

And by the way, it’s been a long march.

ross douthat

It’s just a caricature. It’s just a caricature here.

ed markey

Socialism’s had a long hundred-year march from the first day that the oil companies a hundred years ago got their tax breaks from the Congress, O.K.? And for a hundred years they’ve been on the long march. Oil companies, gas companies, coal companies, nuclear companies, huge subsidies from the federal government. Then we show up and we say, how about permanent tax breaks for wind, for solar, for battery storage technologies, for all electric vehicles, for all electric buildings? And they say, ah! Socialism! And so what we say is, hey, give us some of your socialism— [APPLAUSE] —and we’ll show you how to make capitalism work. We see an existential threat to the planet from climate change, the words of the UN, they see an existential threat to the business model of the oil, gas, and coal industry. That’s all it is. Give us the same breaks, O.K.? Keep the fuel economy standards on the books and increase them. Increase the building efficiency standards for our country the way I did with appliances, O.K.? Watch what happens. A.I. will move in within five to 10 years and cut the costs of actually having to construct a new building that has 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent less energy that is being consumed. Let’s create a capitalistic marketplace through the policies which just say to the private sector, we’re getting out of the way now. And I am the author of most of the telecom laws, the 1996 Telecommunications Act. I unleashed that, I’m the Democratic author of that. A trillion and a half dollars of private sector cash went into that — that created the dot-com bubble, but it created a broadband revolution. The same thing is true over here. If we create the correct tax and regulatory policies, it’s going to be ultimately a bonanza for private sector companies to say, look at that. Wind, solar, automotive, building, agricultural sector that we can now move into and completely overhaul that’s been stopped for a generation.

ross douthat

But don’t you think that honestly if we get that kind of strong AI and you tell it to solve climate change, it’ll just exterminate us all “Terminator” style? Aren’t you concerned about that?

ed markey

Can I say this? There is a sinister side to A.I. There’s a— you know, there’s a Dickensian quality to all of these technologies that can enable and ennoble or degrade and debase. And if we’re not careful, we’re not going to actually put in place the protections against the sinister side of A.I. [APPLAUSE]

ross douthat

Thank you for joining us, senator.

ed markey

Thank you. Thanks to all. [APPLAUSE]

david leonhardt

In India, the populist nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has just won re-election in a rout. In Australia, the conservative prime minister defied the polls and won re-election. In Europe, far-right parties made gains, winning the most votes in both Britain and Italy. And here in the United States, Donald Trump is enjoying a decent few months. The Mueller report wasn’t as bad for him as expected and the economy is chugging along. Our Times colleague Brett Stephens, one of Ross’s fellow conservatives, recently summed up all of these developments in a column headlined, “How Trump Wins Next Year.” So Ross, what is going on here?

ross douthat

I’m not going to channel Bret, exactly, because Bret wrote a column arguing that these are global developments portended a Trump re-election. And I’m a little more skeptical of that, but I think that there is suggestive of something that goes to something we’ve debated a lot on the show, which is the question of, how unfair is it that liberalism is basically out of power in America right now? Obviously the Electoral College helped Republicans in the last election and we’ve debated at length the possibly anti-democratic character of the Supreme Court, and there’s this larger narrative in especially elite liberalism, but not only elite liberalism right now, that the Republican majority is not really a majority, that there is this sort of this tacit democratic majority—

michelle goldberg

But it’s not a majority.

ross douthat

Right. Well, it’s a majority of the Senate and the House.

michelle goldberg

Right. But it’s not a majority of people, that’s the part—

ross douthat

Right, that’s the point, right. Yes, that’s the that’s the argument. And what I was suggesting was that it’s obviously true that the Republican Party in the U.S. has benefited from these sort of counter-majoritarian setups in the last couple of years, but the fact that populists and nationalists are doing well comprehensively in Europe and Australia, and also in the very different but related landscapes of India and Brazil and elsewhere, suggests the possibility that in effect, Donald Trump is kind of propping American liberalism up in this weird way. That yes, he’s benefited from the Electoral College and all these things, but liberalism has benefited from the fact that populism in the U.S. is embodied by a figure like Trump, who’s a cartoonish character who can’t seem to do outreach, can’t seem to build beyond his base, and we have examples all over the world now of populist nationalist political figures who seem more successful than Trump, who seem capable of winning without the Electoral College, without Fox News and all these things. And that suggests that there’s this very potent what I think of as a kind of right-wing blocking coalition against liberalism that doesn’t have a clear governing agenda of its own, but it’s very clear that it’s against liberalism. And that liberals in the U.S. are lucky that that coalition in this country is led by Trump instead of an American Netanyahu. So that was my attempt at a provocation that you guys can now be provoked by.

michelle goldberg

Right. So it’s too bad that Brett isn’t here, because his column was the one that made me like truly apoplectic. [AUDIENCE LAUGHS] Because the— right? Because is the argument is basically that kind of right-wing populism is on the march and liberals haven’t been able to stop it because they are too radical, because they haven’t embraced centrists like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. And I think the evidence from around the world shows that that is not the case, right? If you look at India as a country where I’ve spent a lot of time— not recently, but in the past, I mean, it’s just— it’s crazy to think that the reaction against the Gandhi family, which is the descendants of Jawaharlal Nehru, the kind of founding political family of that country, right? The epitome of that establishment, to imagine that their sin was land of left-wing overreach as opposed to establishment sclerosis. And so I do think that there is this crisis of liberalism all over the world. It’s personally terrifying to me. I look around sometimes. I don’t know if any of you watch “The Man in the High Castle,” but it sometimes feels like that, right? We’re like the Axis Powers—

ross douthat

I role play it like every night. [LAUGHTER]

michelle goldberg

But nevertheless, I also think that the places where there has been successful pushback to this, one of the reasons why I’ve become a lot more grateful for people to my left is because there’s a reason why people keep using the phrase “socialism or barbarism,” right? That the people who’ve been successful in pushing back against this wave are insurgent socialists with a mission, right? So Spain has so far held off this wave. It’s patchy, but the evidence so far suggests not that the way to stem the tide of this roiling disaffection with modernity, which is clearly very real, and this like roiling rage about inequality, the way to do that is not to sort of like triangulate around the party of Davos, but is to meet it with some sort of— and I don’t think we quite know what this looks like, and as I say this, I’m going to say that Britain is a counter-example of kind of left-wing populism that’s failed, but some sort of modern left-wing populism.

ross douthat

“Roiling discontent with modernity,” by the way, was that name of my—

michelle goldberg

That’s like Ross’s—

ross douthat

That was my ska band in high school.

david leonhardt

I realize that I’ve spent a lot of time talking about what I think are the tactical mistakes that progressivism has made and is making, but I don’t know what you think the tactical mistakes are. You just got close to it, but I’m curious, what do you think in this country — coming back to this country — what do you think the Democratic Party should do differently over the next few years than it’s done over the last few years to do better politically?

michelle goldberg

I don’t know about tactics, but I would say like in terms of broad orientation, I think that the kind of generation of Democrats before this one were traumatized by a series of elections in which they felt like they ran candidates like McGovern and then were eviscerated, and the lesson they took from that was that you have to pivot to the center. And the way that they interpreted pivoting to the center — and this also had something to do with the decline of union power and just sort of needing new sources of campaign cash, but they defined pivoting to the center as kind of pivoting to the center on economics, right? As becoming more economically conservative, as becoming more hostile to the welfare state, more indulgent of finance capitalism, more indulgence of austerity. And to me, that was the mistake, because I think that there is a type of person who exists in New York, in Washington, maybe in Boston, almost nowhere else who’s like socially liberal and economically conservative, and they have an outsize impact on political discussion. But if you look at polling, they’re almost nonexistent in the populace at large. And so I think that if the Democratic Party had been listening to your other Senator, Elizabeth Warren, back when she was talking about the horrors of the bankruptcy bill, back when she was warning about the imminent financial crisis, the party would be in much better shape.

ross douthat

So I think that’s actually an issue where the three of us tend to be on the same page, right? That whatever our views of where either party should go, we have a shared sense that the sort of Blairite neoliberal model, whatever its possible virtues in the past, doesn’t work at the current moment. There’s a sense in which clearly there has to be some different coalition forces in liberalism in order to respond to this kind of backlash against liberal governance, right? And that could mean moving left on certain issues, right? It could mean moving well to the left. But it if it means moving to the left on everything, it’s not likely to work. And I think my frustration— and of course, I’m a conservative, so I don’t really wish liberalism well, so maybe it’s not a frustration, but my pseudo-frustration with liberalism at this moment is that it was sort of encapsulated by the questions that I asked David to ask Pete Buttigieg when we had him as a guest on The Argument, which was basically: Buttigieg has pitched his campaign as, “Hi, I’m a guy from the Heartland who went to the coasts and became a coastal person, but then went back to the Midwest and became a Midwesterner again, and I’m going to build these bridges between Trump voters and the BOS-WASH elite.” And David says, well, are there any cultural issues ranging from bakers baking cakes for same-sex weddings to guns to immigration— is there anything where you can see room for a compromise with cultural conservatives? And his answer was basically no, because either the principle at stake is too big or the country agrees with us already. And that can’t be liberalism’s answer on everything, right? Like if climate change is the existential threat of our time, why are you spending your time trying to close down Catholic adoption agencies because they don’t want to place kids with same-sex couples? Alternatively, if crushing social conservatism and destroying Gilead and whatever case you want to make there, if that’s the central purpose of liberalism, then you maybe can’t also do the Green New Deal.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, but no liberal conceives their purpose as crushing social conservatism, right? I mean, that’s the sort of—

ross douthat

No liberal?

michelle goldberg

I mean, except me, but— [LAUGHTER] It’s a completely false choice, right? Just as I could never say to you if you actually think that abortion is murder, why are you spending your time on any other kind of economic or foreign policy issue. Why aren’t you spending all of your time outside of abortion clinics? Obviously people are going to address a host of different problems—

ross douthat

But I will say, I would happily sell out my fellow conservatives on 16 other issues if doing so would persuade you, Michelle Goldberg, to support even third-trimester abortion restrictions.

michelle goldberg

But do you actually think that saying that like, O.K., we’re going to let you government-funded adoption agencies refuse to place children with gay couples — and Jews and Muslims for that matter, because that’s also part of the package — do you actually think that kind of allowing that, even if it were a good tactical idea, is going to make conservatives more likely to join a coalition on global warming? Because from where I sit, it seems like when you give the right an inch, they just take a mile.

ross douthat

Speaking only for cultural conservatives, I don’t think the sense among cultural conservatives is that we’ve been taking any miles lately. Although obviously that sort of changed with the sense of the Supreme Court having shifted and you’ve gotten these efforts on abortion in the South. But in general, the dominant mood among cultural conservatives in the last 10 years has been sort of a panicked sense that cultural liberalism now gets to do whatever it wants, and I don’t think like the activists are going to suddenly start voting Democratic. I think the way that political coalitions move inspires mobilization in response. And right now, liberalism inspires mobilization among a lot of different groups that add up at present across the developed world and the developing world to a pretty strong anti-liberal coalition, and you at least have to figure out how to demobilize some portion of this conservative coalition for liberalism to be able to govern.

michelle goldberg

But just looking internationally I think just shows the extent to which it’s not about sort of parochial American culture war issues, right? You know I’ve come more and more around the way of thinking of Corey Robin, who’s a professor who basically talks about that conservatism is simply anti-liberalism, right? It’s not its own coherent philosophy, it’s just a movement against the gains of the left. And I think that when you look around the world, that has a lot of credence, right? Because they’re not fighting about abortion in India — all of these different issues — they’re fighting about kind of Hindu identity and this myth that there’s some kind of what they call the love jihad, that Muslims are trying to marry Hindu women and take them away from their culture. I don’t see any sense if you look around the world that if whoever you take to be liberals in each of these different societies said, I’m willing to compromise with you that it would be demobilizing to these nationalist coalitions that are on the march. And in part I think it’s because this sense of aggrieved victimhood, which is common to all of them, is not rooted in anything real. I mean, except for the fact—

ross douthat

Unless you work for a Catholic adoption agency.

michelle goldberg

Right. Or if you’re a Jewish family who wants to adopt a baby and the only one in your town doesn’t want to give it to you because you have the wrong religion. But this sense of kind of singular aggrievement, right? That you just said that liberals have everything and they’re just going to kind of run roughshod over us because all we’ve got is the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court is— [LAUGHTER] —it’s a license for them I think to kind of do anything, because when you’re cornered, any measures are justified. But A, I don’t think it’s legitimate, and I don’t think— and it just seems silly to kind of ask liberals to treat it as if it’s legitimate and therefore to kind of indulge it in the hopes that they will then become a little less panicked and defensive and a little more willing to work on some sort of common purpose.

david leonhardt

I think what Ross said earlier is right. I do think even though we — we’re in very different places in the world we want to see. I think all of us share this sense that the notion of where the American center has been wrong in a lot of elite discussion. And I would encourage all of you if you disagree with that, to kind of take a look at polls, because it really is true that this notion that Michelle was talking about of the economic — of the social, liberal, and economic conservative is a phenomenon of Brookline. [LAUGHTER] Or Scarsdale or Bethesda or San Mateo, and it really — the social conservatives and economic progressives are much more common in the United States than the flip. [MUSIC PLAYS] So each week we give you a recommendation to end the show, something to take your mind off of politics and something to get the three of us to stop fighting with each other. And this week is my turn. My recommendation is to retain your regional loyalty from childhood no matter how thin a string of loyalty it is. I lived in Boston from when I was two to when I was eight. Otherwise I’m a New Yorker, I was born there. I’m a third generation New Yorker. But those are the formative years for sports, and so I adopted the Boston sports teams, all of them. [APPLAUSE] And I then went back to New York and spent the 1980s completely miserable. With the one exception of the Boston Celtics. I had to go to high school in New York City the day after game six of the 1986 World Series, I endured all kinds of misery, and it was all worth it in the end. Because no city in modern times has enjoyed a run like Boston is now enjoying. The Bruins are now in the Stanley Cup Finals. And so even if you’re not a sports fan, even if it’s just keeping a little bit of the foods of a place where you lived for a few years or it’s remembering a hiking trail in a place where you were, I strongly recommend this, because being a kid is really fun, and having any reason to be reminded that you once were six and you were not always 46 is a wonderful thing. So that is my recommendation. [APPLAUSE]

ross douthat