michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” [MUSIC PLAYING] This week, Michelle, Ross, and I look back on 2019 and on what we got wrong.

archived recording You had this new class of Democrats being sworn in. It was young, multiracial, a lot of women. And you just look at what’s happened.

david leonhardt

Then we’re taking your calls about New Year’s resolutions, the political kind.

archived recording I’m a bit of a Michelle. But I think I need to get know some more Rosses.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

archived recording There’s all of these different pieces. And ultimately, it comes together with this puzzle box clarity. And it’s just incredibly satisfying. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

The new year is fast approaching. And we’re going to take a moment now to reflect on 2019. In recent years, a modest journalistic tradition has sprung up. Some columnists, including you, Ross, write year-end pieces looking back on what they got wrong and what they’ve learned from it. It’s known as pundit accountability. And we’re going to subject ourselves to it today. Are you ready for some self-flagellation, Michelle and Ross?

michelle goldberg

Let’s go.

ross douthat

I mean, always. [LAUGHTER] OK, I’ll go first. In January, I wrote a column called “Run Joe Run,” in which I urged Joe Biden to enter the presidential campaign, which he did. I’m not saying he did it because of me, obviously. But my basic case was that Democrats had made a big mistake in 2016 by trying to clear the field and effectively decide the nomination in advance for Hillary Clinton and that I think the way to find out who’s the best candidate is to hold a primary campaign. I still think that, actually. Get a big diverse field. Let them fight it out. See who emerges, and see who should take on the other party’s nominee. And in Biden’s case, I specifically thought he should run, because he wasn’t like any other candidate, his experience, his apparent connection to working-class voters — both white and black, by the way. I added that I didn’t know whether he would win and that I didn’t even know if I’d be rooting for him. But I thought he made the field a lot stronger, because he wasn’t like any other candidate. And I guess there’s still a chance that it’s all going to work out. Maybe he’ll win the nomination and thump Trump. But I’ve also come to understand there is a big downside that I just didn’t adequately foresee, which is that Biden had such a large name recognition, and good early polling numbers, and support among the establishment that he’s scared away some really good potential candidates like Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans. And among the candidates who did run, Biden sort of boxed them out — Steve Bullock, Amy Klobuchar. And so I guess I’m now worried that he is this weak Goliath who is preventing other strong candidates from emerging but might not be that strong himself. And with that, Michelle, you are invited to pile on.

michelle goldberg

I obviously didn’t want Biden to run. Because I saw him as you know yesterday’s man. I saw him as having a record full of things that he would have to defend, from the vote for the Iraq War, to the Clarence Thomas hearings, and his treatment of Anita Hill. But it’s not like I anticipated his frailty and just the fact that he just seems very, very old. I’m not sure anybody could have foreseen that.

david leonhardt

I appreciate that generous response, Michelle.

ross douthat

I mean, it’s interesting, David, because I got many, many things wrong this year, as usual. But my choice was also about Biden. And I think it overlaps in certain ways with your take. But I wrote a column in April called the “Real Joe Biden Decision,” which basically — this is was when he was deciding to run. And I was saying, the real choice, the most important choice isn’t whether he runs but whether he runs trying to constantly adapt himself to this changed party ideologically or whether he runs against the emerging progressive consensus and makes himself a tribune of resistance to it. And my take then was basically that the first option, if he just tries to be woke Joe Biden, he’ll look ridiculous, and his candidacy will fall apart. If he runs against the consensus of the party, then he will consolidate support, but maybe make the primary campaign really poisonous, and win the nomination, and have everybody hate him in some way. I think what I got wrong and didn’t anticipate was that there was this third path, which is that he hasn’t adapted himself to the ideological contours of his party, really. He’s made some adaptations, but they haven’t been a big part of his thing. But he also hasn’t, I think, really run a kind of ideologically centrist campaign. Instead, he’s run as transactionalist. He’s basically run saying, shouldn’t we just have a politician in charge who likes to make deals and can get along with Republicans? And he’s drained, I feel like, the ideological content out of his — even though he’s getting moderate support, he’s not running a moderate campaign. He’s running a drained out, Trump is bad, remember the good old days, vote for me campaign. And enough voters really like it that it’s, I think, working as well as can be expected to work. And I feel like I committed in part the characteristic pundit’s fallacy of assuming that lots of voters are eager for the ideological battles that newspaper columnists are always interested in. And in fact, Biden’s appeal isn’t — it is that he is a moderate, but it’s not about the policy arguments that he’s making or not making. It’s about an idea of how you do politics that he represents, I think, which is different.

david leonhardt

I agree with you. We overstate how much policy matters. I’m trying to get better at that. But it’s possible that it’s not even, well, he represents some version of politics that people like. It’s possible it’s just he’s sort of a familiar guy, and no one else has caught fire. Biden is such an unusual candidate. I mean, the combination of his strengths and weaknesses — it feels like nothing that we’ve seen before. We’ve seen people on paper look like good candidates, and then run campaigns that are weak, and they get no support. But the combination of Biden’s strengths and weaknesses just feels to me really different. So I guess I’m not totally surprised that two of us chose that as our mea culpas. Michelle, what did you get wrong in 2019?

michelle goldberg

I started this year feeling pretty good politically. You had this new class of Democrats being sworn in. Some of them, a lot of them were really inspiring. It was young, multiracial, a lot of women. And you just look at what’s happened, some specifically. You look at what’s happened to Katie Hill, driven out of Congress by revenge porn. You look at what’s happened with Ilhan Omar sort of making herself toxic in ways that I think she bears some responsibility for but not total responsibility. And I thought that they would be able to do a lot more to check Donald Trump. I just feel like the Democrats — they were elected by this huge wave of anti-Trump energy. They’ve decided that they need to show, especially in swing districts, that they’re willing to work with Trump where they can. And what I think that that’s done is it’s helped to normalize him. They’ve given him victories on things that I really don’t understand. And when I talk to Democratic strategists, they’ll say, well, we’ve been able to extract all these gains on policy. But it just looks to me, at least, like Trump is just rolling them. There are so many things that I think, in general, they should be willing to grind things to a halt to save the last remnants of this democracy. Instead, I feel like the Democrats are, in some ways, completely leaderless. Again, I just thought I was a pretty pessimistic person. And I just didn’t foresee it getting this bad.

ross douthat

But can I — not that I’m going to talk you out of despair. But the democracy grief — I feel like the problem you’re describing, the dilemma that the Democrats have that you’re describing, that’s a Democratic dilemma. The Democrats succeeded in winning the House by running campaigns that drew on strong anti-Trump energy. But also, in a lot of states and districts, people ran as moderate dealmakers. And the place where the Democrats have ended up under Pelosi is the place of, when Trump does something public and egregious, we will quickly impeach him. And at the same time, if he wants to do a trade deal that unions like, we’ll do that, too. And that’s, I think, a very — it’s very responsive to small-d democratic politics. It’s sort of the combination of there’s a lot of voters who voted for Democrats, because they wanted Trump restrained. And the Democratic House as it exists is a restraint on him. It really is.

michelle goldberg

No, but what I mean by democracy grief is that they are helping to enable his re-election. If he is re-elected, I think that democracy does not survive.

david leonhardt

I fervently hope — maybe this is just me grasping for optimism — but I fervently hope, Michelle, that you will one day look back on that prediction and say that it was what you got wrong one year. And I’m sure you agree. You also hope that you look back and feel that way.

michelle goldberg

Of course. Yeah, inshallah. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Now we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] The year 2020 is going to bring a lot of change, new decade, new presidential election, and of course, new New Year’s resolutions. We asked you to share your political resolutions for the new year. Here are a few of our favorites.

voicemail My name is Christian and I’m from Minnesota. I’ve just started working my first job out of college or a state senate campaign. And my goal is to get as many of my friends, neighbors, and family paying attention to their local, state, and down ballot races as we approach 2020. And then if we can give more attention to those, we can actually get a lot done. So that’s my resolution. Hi, my name is Lisa Culver. I live in Arlington, Virginia. I’m trying to go zero waste, using the popular term, and looking at basically everything I do, and seeing how I can make it not wasteful, reduce what I buy and why I buy it so that I’m not just recycling. Hi, this Chuck Tank. My New Year’s resolution is to work as a field enumerator for the 2020 census. Two things have become apparent lately. First, that we must count all Americans in all our glorious diversity. Second, that the nuts and bolts work of democratic government is partly done by conscientious workers whose service is largely unsung and ultimately nonpartisan. Hi, my name is Lauren. I’m from Huntington Beach, California. And my New Year’s resolution is to have more conversations or I guess even arguments. I am a politics major. And I feel decently informed. But I’m too scared to have those conversations, especially with how divisive things are. So I’m a bit of a Michelle. But I think I need to get to know some more Rosses.

david leonhardt

Well, first of all, I love Lauren’s idea that more of our listeners need their own Rosses.

ross douthat

I love that idea, as well. I mean, I think mostly that all of our callers put me, at least, to shame. Because my own New Year’s resolution was going to read more about some particular area. Whereas, they’re out there organizing, practicing politics, counting Americans and imposing an admirable spiritual discipline on their shopping habits. So I think they’re all in better shape than I’m likely to be in six months.

david leonhardt

I realize neither of you probably want to criticize any of our wonderful listeners’ wonderful resolutions. But I was interested in your thoughts about, what do you each think about this difference between personal behavior, the idea of changing your own behavior in terms of the climate, versus political organizing, trying to get involved in ways to affect policy? Michelle, how do you think about the difference between those two?

michelle goldberg

Yeah, obviously, I am on the side of political organizing. That said, that caller is probably doing more for the planet than I am.

david leonhardt

And I also think that having people change their own behavior can inspire them to get involved politically in a way that might actually be more intense. If people feel like they’re both doing something and getting involved, I feel like that can be much more lasting than political dabbling.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, because it makes it part of your identity.

ross douthat

Well, and also, you can’t stop climate change. But you can make yourself a better person. There’s a reason that most of the great religious traditions of the world have counseled asceticism, detachment from possessions, and a life lived more in harmony with creation. And so I think I have a deep and profound disagreement with the Greta Thunberg approach to climate change, which I think is a much more austere and utopian than either of yours and I think, as a policy matter, is wrongheaded. I think you’re never going to get public policy to impose lower standards of living on an unwilling democratic populace. But if you find Greta inspiring at a personal level, changing your life to reflect that inspiration I think is a good thing to do. And it’s the only way to prove me wrong. You need to show, you need to model that this change is possible at some scale before anyone could imagine having governments in democratic societies impose it.

david leonhardt

Well, since we asked our listeners to call in with their resolutions, I think it’s only fair that we offer ours. And I’m going to go first, because, Ross, you just mentioned asceticism and changes that are inspired by religion. And mine falls into both of those categories. I’ve written about this a little bit, as people who subscribe to my newsletter may know. But this idea of a tech Shabbat has caught on, which is you pick 24 hours over the course of a weekend, and you decide you’re not going to use — however you define it, you’re not going to use technology. So for virtually everyone, that means putting away their phones, putting away their laptops and tablets. Some people include television. I don’t. I still watch sports with my family. But I’ve now done it, I think, four times. Basically, my wife and I have decided that, unless there’s a Saturday that we absolutely cannot do it, we’re going to have a tech Shabbat, which means, on Friday night, we turn off our phones. And we don’t turn them back on again until Sunday morning. And I have to say, I’ve loved it. It introduces some hassles. But I’ve come to look forward to it. It means that I read more books and spend less time just doing useless stuff on the internet. And I’ve heard from a lot of readers. And I was just really struck by not just how many people seem to be doing this, because I’m sure the overall numbers are not huge, but the people who do do it, how much they like doing it. So there you go, Ross. All this time being on this podcast with you has made me, in part, into more of an ascetic.

ross douthat

That’s wonderful, David. I’m glad I’ve had that kind of influence on you. I have no illusions about my own likely capacity to add ascetic disciplines to our life in the coming year. Because as you two guys know, but our listeners probably do not, we’re expecting our fourth child in a few months.

michelle goldberg

That’s ascetic discipline.

ross douthat

Right, exactly. It is imposing an ascetic discipline, a ruthless and brutal one. But it’s a time when adding other ascetic discipline seems very unlikely. So as I said, I have a more boring resolution, which, as a columnist, I want to read more and follow more politics in the global South and maybe particularly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. I write a lot about the likely influence of Africa on the European continent. And I think I have an insufficient grounding in what’s actually happening on the ground in Africa. And I’ve been struck in political stories recently from Bolsonaro in Brazil, the recent turbulence in Bolivia how many similarities there are between U.S. politics and Latin American politics and how much people in our elite, myself included, spend so much time drawing analogies and comparisons to Europe and much less time drawing analogies and comparisons to Latin America. So my ambition at the very least is to write a few columns drawing some analogies southward rather than eastward across the Atlantic in the next year.

michelle goldberg

It’s funny. I’ve been thinking that I need to figure out a pretext for a trip. I don’t know exactly where. But just because being in a lot of countries there with all of their problems, which are many, often cheers me up, just because it’s a place where things are — in many of these countries, countries I’ve spent a lot of time in, Ethiopia, in particular — for all their challenges, it’s a place where things are getting better instead of worse. And that is heartening.

david leonhardt

Michelle, what’s your resolution?

michelle goldberg

Well, I guess I have two. One is similar to yours. I don’t think I could actually pull off a tech Shabbat.

david leonhardt

You could!

michelle goldberg

I am resolved — well, maybe I could. But it’s like one of those things that just has to click into place before you feel like you’re really ready to do it, like quitting smoking or something. But I am resolving to start carrying around novels with me. Because I’ve just feel like, in all of the interstitial time in my life, I end up either on Twitter or reading the news and marinating in politics all of the time. And so I just have to start reading more novels, which I find incredibly therapeutic. And also, I’m really hoping, following on what we said before, to spend more time out of the country, just because Trump sucks up so much of our psychic energy that we end up ignoring so much of what is going on in the world. When I think about how much I used to follow international politics compared to now, it’s really pretty shameful. And I would like to turn that around. And I think it would be a relief, again, to think about something else besides the decline of my own country.

david leonhardt

I feel like we’ve developed a unified “Argument” 2020 resolution combining the listeners with us, which is —

ross douthat

Go to a monastery without internet service in Ethiopia.

david leonhardt

[LAUGHING] Well, no, that’s only half of it. So that’s our part. All of ours are versions of, how do we be a little bit less obsessed with the politics of the moment? But then you add in the listeners. And it’s, figure out a way to get civically engaged with your country. And also, figure out a way to maybe spend some more time doing things that aren’t in any way related to the big political story of the day. And both are really worthwhile. So that’s the unified “Argument” advice for the year 2020. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation. And in keeping with the theme of today’s show, we make a suggestion that is meant to take your mind off of the news of the day. Michelle, it’s your turn this week. What do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

So this isn’t going to be too surprising. But I’m going to recommend HBO’s “Watchman.” Without giving away too much of the plot, it’s based on the famous and incredibly dark graphic novel that was the first one to subvert the superhero genre. So the creator of “Watchmen” is Damon Lindelof. So know if you’ve ever seen “Lost,” there’s all of these unsatisfying things that aren’t resolved and all sorts of mysteries that are introduced but don’t go anywhere. And it’s full of red herrings. And the nine episodes of Watchman are like the anti-Lost, in that, at first, you can’t figure out how all of these things fit together. It begins with the Tulsa race riots, then circles forward to an alternative version of America in which Nixon stayed in power for a very long time, and we won the war in Vietnam, and it became the 51st state. It’s an interesting dystopia, because it’s actually a dystopia ruled, in some sense, by liberals. Robert Redford is president. And there’s a lot of oppression needed to keep down this white supremacist insurgency. But again, there’s all of these different pieces. And ultimately, without giving anything away, it comes together with this kind of puzzle box clarity, in which, suddenly, you see how it all fits. And it’s just incredibly satisfying.

ross douthat

You’ve given me the hard sell here, Michelle. Because I had vowed never, never to enter another Damon Lindelof production again.

david leonhardt

Why?

ross douthat

Because David, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I kind of over-committed to “Lost.” I got a little bit too into it in seasons 1 and 2. It’s not something I’m proud of. I was looking at the screen grabs of the hieroglyphs on the walls of the island and trying to figure out what it meant. And I kept the faith with “Lost” longer than a lot of people did. When other people were saying, oh, these guys don’t have a plan they’re just making it up as they go along, I was like, no, I think it’s going to fit together. And it didn’t. It was a travesty. And Lindelof went on to make “The Leftovers” for HBO, which I’m told is very good. But every time I read reviews that said something like, this show, it shows that the most important thing is the mystery and not the resolution, I was like, go to hell, O.K.? I want a resolution. So I guess if there’s a resolution here, maybe I will have to reconsider my powerful hatred. My question, Michelle, is, do you want a second season? Because I’ve read some people saying that quality you’ve described, the sense that this season was perfect in the end, makes people want the show to just leave it there.

michelle goldberg

I’m a little torn. Because I think that that is true. And I also think that the precise satisfaction of the conclusion makes you want to see where that character goes next. So it might be artistically wise for them to leave it alone. But if there’s another season, I will definitely be watching it.

david leonhardt

Michelle, what’s the recommendation?

ross douthat

“Watchman” on HBO.

david leonhardt

Thank you. Before we sign off, we wanted to say thank you and goodbye to our excellent longtime producer, Kristin Schwab. She is moving on to a job as a reporter for “Marketplace.” Congratulations, Kristin, and thank you for making us all sound smarter and more succinct than we really are.

michelle goldberg

Thank you, Kristin.

ross douthat

Thank you, Kristin.

david leonhardt

And we’ll be listening. [MUSIC PLAYING] That’s our show for this week. Thank you so much for listening. Leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324 if you have thoughts or ideas. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristin Schwab and Maddy Foley for Transmitter Media and edited by Sarah Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, and Ian Prasad Philbrick. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’re taking a break next week. Until then, happy new year from everyone at “The Argument.” And we will be back on January 9.

ross douthat