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, is the Democratic Party doing too much to narrow its presidential field?

ross douthat

I think the way this field has narrowed has the potential to strip some interesting ideological and intellectual diversity out of the Democratic debates.

david leonhardt

Then, can the American right escape racism?

michelle goldberg

When racism was on the menu, they made it very, very clear what they really wanted.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

It’s is more realistic than the highly scripted and staged American reality shows. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

The Democrats narrowed the field for this week’s debate in Houston. Only 10 candidates made the stage. And this narrower debate field has real consequences. Several candidates, including Kirsten Gillibrand, John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee, have recently dropped out of the race. I’m going to go first on this topic. And my argument is going to be a big no, no, no. The Democratic Party is not doing too much to narrow the field. If anything, it’s doing too little. I’m a journalist. I like politics. And even for me, the early debates — two nights, multiple hours, more than 20 candidates — were just too much. It’s hard to really make decisions. And I think it’s perfectly appropriate for political parties to play a role in this process and basically make decisions about who’s a legitimate presidential candidate and who’s a good presidential candidate. And I guess I take it one step further and argue, if anything, I think it’s erring on the side of not being tough enough, the Democratic Party. I think it’s great that party leaders put pressure on John Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor, to step aside and run for Senate. But I think they should be putting more pressure on Tom Steyer not to spend his money to run for president. And I’m fine, I guess, with one stage of 10 candidates at this point. But my view is that it should start to narrow as we get into the fall, and we have a couple months before primaries. And I guess I’m curious, Michelle and Ross, whether either of you think I’m being anti-democratic with a small d by having that view.

ross douthat

Speaking as a pundit, I appreciate debates with smaller fields. I think that the way the Democrats have ended up narrowing it is going to end up removing candidates who I personally enjoy having in the mix, including Marianne Williamson, Tulsi Gabbard, and maybe eventually Andrew Yang, before it eliminates candidates like Beto O’Rourke, who have, as far as I can tell, contributed very little to the debate. So in that sense, as a pundit, it’s not so much that I object to a narrowing field as that I think the way this field has narrowed has the potential to strip some interesting ideological and intellectual diversity out of the Democratic debates. But with that being said, we just lived through an entire presidential cycle where the Republican Party demonstrated a conspicuous inability to function the way a party is supposed to function, as a somewhat self-interested entity. I don’t think anyone who observed the Trump phenomenon in 2016 can blame the Democratic Party for trying to exert a little more control this time around. And finally, the reality is, as I’ve said before, that there isn’t a lot of evidence that voters are interested in finding that 1 percent candidate who has a good debate and elevating them. Democrats seem very happy with their top five candidates. And so the odds of a Yang boomlet or a Gabbard surge, based on the debate performance, seem pretty low.

michelle goldberg

So I actually don’t think that the Democratic Party has been exerting all that much control. And it’s not so much that they’re responding to the Republican Party last time. They’re responding to all of these resentments that bubbled up about the performance of the Democratic Party last time. Some significant number of Bernie Sanders voters didn’t support Hillary Clinton. We don’t know exactly how many, but I’ve seen numbers that say 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 — certainly enough to make a difference. And you can’t necessarily attribute that to the performance of the D.N.C. But there was obviously tremendous resentment towards the D.N.C. that was then exploited by the Russian hack of D.N.C. emails. So there’s been an effort to be as fair and egalitarian as possible. And that’s why we actually have less control from the party in the way the first debates were structured. The Republicans did that overcard and undercard debate, which meant that the serious contenders at least got to debate each other. And because Democrats didn’t want to do that, we’ve had this bizarre series of debates, where until this week, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden had not appeared on the debate stage together, which makes no sense given the dynamics of this race.

ross douthat

I completely agree with Michelle about the — to my surprise— superiority of the undercard-overcard model that the Republicans used last time because while it was going on, I thought it was kind of stupid. But it had the clear advantage of getting the more important candidates together on stage. And the failure of the Democratic model until this week’s debate has been just that, that you have this situation where the electorate is clearly signaling that they think there are only five candidates worth taking seriously. And the structure is set up to protect against populist discontents, but those don’t seem to be materializing. If you look at their polling numbers, as much as I enjoy the Marianne Williamson experience, she’s not running up to 15 percent in the polls. Tulsi Gabbard, I think, is doing as well as some of the people who are somewhat arbitrarily included when she isn’t, but that means she’s got about 2 percent of the polls. So I think the undercard-overcard model maybe worked a little better than I appreciated while the Donald Trump experience was overshadowing everything last time around.

david leonhardt

I’m interested, if both of you were made emperor of the Democratic Party— it’s sort of fun to imagine Ross Douthat, Democratic Emperor — what sort of measures would you use so that as we go into the fall, we would go even further down from here? Because it’s interesting — arguably, with the exception of Yang, we’re now down to fairly serious candidates. But some of them, like Julian Castro and Amy Klobuchar, seem to really be struggling to take off. So what’s the fairest way to really get the discussion focused among Biden and Sanders and Harris and Warren.

michelle goldberg

Oh, god. I have no idea. I think that the donation threshold makes sense to a certain extent. You need to be polling at a certain percentage, and you also need to have gotten a certain number of individual donations. But I think the donation threshold has pretty easily been gamed by Tom Steyer, who’s a billionaire and has a lot of money to spend on that. And so I would like to see that somehow transformed in a way that would make it a more genuine measure of grassroots enthusiasm.

ross douthat

I think you could do, in effect, a hybrid of what the Democrats have been doing and what Republicans did last time. You could say, we’re going to have a first round of debates, where we have a very expansive criteria. And we’ll even let in people who just barely missed the cut for the big field debates, like a Seth Moulton or something. Basically, you’ll have a debate where anyone can get in. And you’ll have as many nights as it takes to get everyone in. But then when you move into the fall, you set a hard cut-off and do an overcard-undercard and basically say, look, you had a debate or two and several months to build support. And if you aren’t at not 1 percent or 2 percent but 4 percent or 5 percent in the polls, then you’re going in our undercard. You could have the overcard literally be Biden, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders, and Warren, with Booker maybe on the bubble. And then everyone else is in the undercard debate. And you do that twice, and then you drop the undercard debate as the primaries actually arrive.

david leonhardt

Well, it’s funny because when I was watching the Republican debate, I really did feel like the adults’ table and the kids’ table aspect of the debate was sort of humiliating to these successful politicians. And it didn’t feel right. And then you watch the Democrats, and you think, wait a second. Maybe that’s actually better. Or maybe, as you say, a hybrid is better. You start with the model the Democrats used this year, and then you move into the Republican model, and you say, hey, you didn’t make the cut. We’ll still leave you around in this other way. But you had your chance, and you didn’t do it.

ross douthat

My main objection to the current situation is I totally see what separates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren from Amy Klobuchar and Tulsi Gabbard. But I don’t see what separates Klobuchar and Gabbard. It seems like you’re drawing these incredibly arbitrary lines with the 2 percent candidates, when in fact the clear division is between the top 5 or 6 and everybody else.

michelle goldberg

Right. I guess the thing is that there is no neutral process that would eliminate the people that I, and maybe David, and certainly a lot of Democrats, just consider embarrassing kooks. There’s not a metric that you can use to do that that’s also not going to sweep out people that we think are serious and legitimate.

david leonhardt

Well, and it’s a reminder that there’s a real cost to the deep level of skepticism that our society now has for experts because I agree with you, Michele, completely. There is no perfect number that you can do. And I love numbers more than most people. The numbers don’t quite work. But you know who could do it? People running the Democratic Party. They could say, hey, we’re looking at this whole situation. And we’re saying that these folks aren’t going to become president. And they’re not helping our party by having them in the race. But as we talked about before, there’s just still so much leftover anger about the Bernie-Hillary stuff that it’s clear that the party can’t do that. And that actually reminds me of something else that I’d be interested in your thoughts on. The elite hostility— the hostility to elites— I also really notice when I hear Democratic voters talk about the media’s role in these debates, I think a lot of Democrats are angry that the media is bringing up questions that the Democrats think aren’t actually of interest to that many voters and aren’t really good for the party. You usually hear these complaints, of course, from Republicans, that the media is biased, and they’re asking liberal questions. I guess I’m curious, one, do you share some of these critiques of the moderators? And two, do you think we might be one presidential cycle away from a party basically saying, hey, we’re going to hold the debate without traditional media moderators, and we’re going to put it up on the web?

michelle goldberg

To some extent I share the critiques, but it’s more that I actually think that there are misaligned incentives. So the journalists who are moderating this debate are mostly, I think, doing a good job given what their role and responsibility is. And it’s just that their role and responsibility has to do with generating conflict, creating good television. It has this game show setup. And so it’s not aligned with the incentives of a party that wants to have a serious debate about the issues of greatest concern to their core voters. So it’s not helpful to the Democratic Party, either candidates or voters, to have these questions that are sort of designed to embarrass the candidates and kind of trip them up before voters who are maybe not as sympathetic to the party — so getting people to raise their hands on these various wedge issues.

david leonhardt

I take that as a yes, Michelle, that you’re not blaming the journalists, but you do think we might be headed to a future in which the party says, hey, we want to have at least some debates that are not conducted by journalists.

michelle goldberg

Yeah. I think they should do that. Maybe not all of them, but I think it would be a good idea to have, say, a climate debate moderated not by journalists but by climate scientists. I think that there’s no reason why you couldn’t do that. And it would probably end up being more substantive. It would both be shorter and just more elucidating to see these candidates engage with each other over these issues that are of paramount importance to the people who are voting.

ross douthat

Here’s a strange fact. William F. Buckley, Jr. once moderated a Democratic debate.

david leonhardt

Really?

ross douthat

Really, he did. And it’s a reminder of how much more haphazard the whole system used to be, how you would have some years with fewer debates, and years where candidates wouldn’t agree to debate, and years where Ronald Reagan would say, I’m paying for this microphone. So I think there’s been a lot of flux in the history of how debates are organized. But I think what you’re seeing with the Democrats and the media is just reflection of the reality that the Democrats have become a more ideological party. And more ideological parties are more likely to feel like the media isn’t asking the right questions when they hold debates.

david leonhardt

I would love to see it next time around, that you still had some of these same debates, with journalists doing it in the traditional way. But to me, that isn’t the only way to have a good debate. And you can imagine other good ones. [MUSIC PLAYING] O.K. Well, let’s leave the discussion there. And we’re going to come back in an episode very soon to talk about the state of the Democratic race and how the various candidates are doing. But for now we are going to take a quick break. [MUSIC PLAYING] The three of us have talked before on this show about racism in the Trump era of American politics. And we all agree that racism is a central part of Trumpism. But Ross, in one of your recent columns, you also argued that liberals sometimes take their accusations of racism too far, and that they’re much too eager to apply it to everyone on the right. And I was hoping that you could just now briefly spin out both halves of your argument as it applies to both the racism on the right and the exaggeration of racism from the left.

ross douthat

So the column was basically occasioned by the fact that a number of conservatives who I know personally, including Steven Menashi, who is a nominee for the Second Circuit as a judge, and J.D. Vance, who’s the well-known author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” got accused in various ways of being white supremacists. I wrote a column basically defending them and some other conservative ideas from what I think are exaggerated liberal charges of white nationalism, white supremacy, and so on. But that column also conceded that, obviously, one of the reasons that liberals are inclined towards what I see as exaggeration is that not only is there a real racism problem on the right, but it’s certainly worse in the Trump era than it has been in the past. Which then led to my second column, which just ran this week, which was basically answering people who read my first column and said, look, defending individual non-racist conservatives is well and good. But the fundamental reality of conservatism is that it is sort of structurally racist. And that can’t really change without the Republican Party being totally crushed. And I think that, in fact, we’ve seen it change in various ways and then change back just in the past 20 years. The Republican Party between 1990 and the early 2000s became less focused on race and racial issues. And generally, the public in the early 2000s felt that racial polarization was less of a problem. And now we’re back in a bad spot, but that we can actually learn some lessons from the late ‘90s and early 2000s about how you could get a less racially chauvinist conservatism without imagining what I think Michelle and others imagine, which is basically the complete destruction of the Republican Party as a precondition to a less racist right.

michelle goldberg

Right. And the thing that I found most unconvincing in your column was that it suggested that the way that you get this decreasing racial polarization is essentially to placate racists with policy so that if you give people with a lot of racial resentment what they want, whether that means welfare reform or tough on crime policing, then racial polarization will go down. And that is obviously not a solution that’s going to be amenable to the vast majority of the Democratic Party. And so the question is, is there a way that you could reduce the salience of race in modern conservatism absent capitulating to the demands of racists? I don’t see it. I think if you want to look at what a non-racist Republican Party might be, it might look like something akin to George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. But I think what we’ve learned is that the base of the party, the people who voted for it, they voted for George W. Bush in spite of his anti-racism. But when given the choice, when racism was on the menu, they made it very, very clear what they really wanted. You can certainly have, I think, elite conservatism — and there are a lot of elite conservative ideas that are not infected with racial hostility. And so I think that what happened is that there were certain people like Paul Ryan — there was a whole generation of wonky technocrats who really did think that it was all about small government and really were attracted to this idea of laissez-faire economics and cutting all these programs. But what I think that we have learned is that’s not what the vast majority of the party was in it for.

ross douthat

I want to go back to the beginning of what you said, Michelle, because I think you’re setting up a kind of false choice, where you say, there are these issues that are entangled with race. And if we have a choice, where we either capitulate to the bigots and do what they want, or we don’t do anything, and then the bigots nominate Donald Trump. But in fact, if you look at the racially polarizing debates of the 1980s and 1990s — take crime. One of the huge drivers of racial polarization and white anxiety and resentment in Republican politics from the ‘60s through the 1990s was the huge crime wave, where African-Americans were committing more crimes than whites, inner cities had more crime than suburbs. There was this inevitable entanglement of racism, racial anxiety, and fear of crime. So looking at that tangle, what do you say as a policymaker? Well, you might say, if we can reduce the crime rate successfully, then racial polarization, racial anxiety, and overtly expressed racism might diminish too. And I would argue that is, in fact, what happened. But just push it to the present. The issue that’s most equivalent seems to be immigration. It’s not a capitulation to racists to say that you want to avoid, let’s say, migrant crises at the southern border, that you want to avoid things like the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe. Now, maybe that’s impossible. But it seems to me that the record of the 1990s with crime and welfare and even the kind of quasi-compromise on affirmative action suggests that you can address policy tangles that have racism tangled in them and actually deactivate or at least suppress racial anxiety and racism as drivers of big policy debates.

michelle goldberg

I think first of all, one counter example would be Barack Obama’s pretty tough immigration policies. As conservatives never tire of reminding liberals when we complain about Trump’s savagery at the border, Barack Obama deported more people than any previous president. He set up these family detention camps that a lot of people, including myself, think were barbaric. I see no evidence that that in any way lessened either right-wing anxiety about the changing composition of America or right-wing racial animus towards Obama himself. The crime thing is more complicated because I don’t think it’s clear that it was the policy response to crime as opposed to other factors. And those factors are still being debated. There’s still a lot of questions about what actually drove down the crime rate. And I think there’s a belief that a lot of the political reaction to the crime wave was actually a moral and human disaster in terms of mass incarceration.

ross douthat

I think that Obama’s approach to immigration in his first term was probably necessary to his reelection and to Democrats holding the Senate in 2012. And I think what went wrong for both political parties, but Democrats, especially, in his second term, was a combination of failed negotiations on an immigration bill, followed by a first child migrant crisis that I think owed something to some of Obama’s own policies, followed by his attempt to unilaterally remake immigration policy.

david leonhardt

Ross, there are parts of your case that I’m open to, sympathetic to, even. I also think that we have ended up in a situation where there are liberals who are too quick to claim racism. But the thing that I feel like you’re not really grappling with is, while it’s true that racism may not be structurally a part of American conservatism, it has been functionally core to American conservatism for decades and decades now— the opposition to the civil rights movement, busing, and the rise of Trump. And I agree with both you that George W. Bush was a counterexample, an admirable counterexample, and maybe there are some lessons there about how to move a little bit back. George W. Bush did not vanquish racism from the Republican Party. And it seems to me the responsibility for doing that isn’t on liberals, and it isn’t on Democrats. It’s on conservatives. And I honestly don’t see how it’s going to happen. And I’m curious. How do you actually imagine a post-Trump Republican Party that isn’t at its core relying on white nationalism?

ross douthat

I’m probably biased because this was the period in which I came of age, but the period from 1995 or so into the early Obama years is a useful example because that was a period when Republican voters had a chance to vote for Pat Buchanan. And it got maybe a few butterfly ballot votes that were crucial in Florida, but it didn’t exactly light the world on fire. Even by 2008, when the Democrats are nominating the first black candidate for president who’s named Barack Hussein Obama, John McCain wins the Republican nomination without running some sort of Trumpian race baiting campaign. So I think out of that zone, you can draw some lessons. And one lesson is the one Michelle and I were arguing over, which is that you need to figure out ways to create a sense of progress and stability on certain issues to deactivate racial tension. I do think you need to have a threat of Democratic success. I think it would be good for the cause of weakening white identity politics in the Republican Party for the Democrats to become more competitive in Texas, more competitive in Georgia, more competitive across the South. And then you need something that was conspicuously lacking when Trump was running for president, which is this political entrepreneurship and imagination from Republican politicians, which I’m currently hoping will emerge in the post-Trump party, of people who say, look, our white middle class and working class base actually has a lot in common with African-American and Hispanic voters on certain issues. I want to concede that all of this sounds unlikely. I think my question for both of you guys is, is it more unlikely than what seemed like the other two scenarios, which are one, a scenario where the Republicans somehow hold onto power by winning ever more of just the white vote? Or two, the scenario where the Republican Party is completely crushed nationally the way it’s been crushed in California, which I think is — it’s certainly Michelle’s desire. But it doesn’t seem that plausible to me either, given polarization and everything else.

michelle goldberg

So it would be desirable if the Republican Party were to somehow implode and find itself so cast out into the wilderness that somebody had to come up with a more palatable version of conservatism that is not at war with the future of this country. So it’s not that I think conservatism is going to go away, and it’s not that I think that the Democratic Party is going to reign unopposed for all eternity. But I do think that the Trumpist Republican Party — I would like to see it become an irrelevant faction that people will be embarrassed to have ever been associated with.

david leonhardt

I think the centrality of white nationalism to the Republican Party will wax and wane. And right now it’s waxing. And as you noted, not so long ago it waned. I think it will wax and wane within a relatively modest range as long as the Republican Party is winning. And I don’t buy this idea that the Republican Party in the near future is doomed. But it has some real long-term problems. And I think the only way we are going to see white nationalism and racial resentment removed as a central plank of American conservatism is when there is a real electoral cost to it. And so I think, really, the only way it’s going to be beat is if Texas and Arizona and Georgia are no longer reliably red. And it’s not the Republican Party’s going to disappear but that basically, its odds of winning national elections are really quite small. That’s the only way I see that this actually goes away.

ross douthat

I don’t think I disagree that much with that, which is one reason, as someone who’d like to see a less racialized conservatism, I tend to root for Democrats to figure out ways to be competitive in some of those states. But I also think, and this is in a way a point of consensus between Michelle and I, that the most likely replacement for racial identity, white identity, as an organizing focus for conservatism is a different but related form of the religious conservatism that seemed more powerful in the Bush years. And I don’t think the same-sex marriage debate is coming back. But I think that debates over abortion and pornography and whatever biotechnological wonders are on the horizon, that’s what we would end up debating if the Republican Party changed in a way that made race less salient. And Michelle and I started our life arguing together by arguing about whether it was reasonable to describe Bush era Republicans as theocrats. And I ended my column this week by saying, I’d like to return to those debates as soon as possible.

david leonhardt

Well, that is obviously grist for a future argument and one that I expect we will have at some point. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation, when we give you a suggestion that is meant to take your mind off of politics and the news. Ross, it’s your turn this week. What do you have for us?

ross douthat

I am going to recommend a show called “Grand Designs.” And it’s this British show that in certain ways is like the shows that you see on HDTV and other American channels about people renovating houses and so on, except it is one, focused on people who tend to have much more eccentric plans. They are renovating an old castle, or they’re building some hyper modernist cube on a cliffside in Scotland. And two, it’s more realistic than the highly scripted and staged American reality shows. So a person building their house will go broke midway through the process, and the house will sit half finished at the end of the show. Or a spouse will die of cancer midway through the show, and the remaining spouse will finish the project. You can watch it on Netflix, where there are weirdly only two seasons. It’s season 10 and 15. But it’s a really fantastic show. And the host is a Brit named Kevin McCloud, who’s just this terrific philosopher-architect figure who follows these people through their follies that usually work out O.K. in the end but don’t always. And it’s just fascinating.

michelle goldberg

My god. I feel anxious just listening to this description. First of all, there’s nothing in my experience more stressful than — and I certainly never even really renovated a house. But I’ve moved and tried to do some sort of small changes. And it always nearly breaks me.

ross douthat

So I think I was playing up the contrast with American reality house T.V. But I should stress that in most of these shows, there’s some moment of crisis when the money’s going to run out, or the plans are wrong. But in the end, it works out. And the host goes into the strange, bizarre, modernist medieval home and walks around and oohs and ahhs over everything. So turning on this show is not like a step, usually, into an existential nightmare. It’s just that the show is realistic enough that sometimes things do go completely wrong. And you’re aware that that’s a possibility, which lends a little more drama to the proceedings.

david leonhardt

Ross, again, what’s the recommendation?

ross douthat

“Grand Designs,” hosted by Kevin McCloud, two seasons of which are on Netflix. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

That’s our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts, give us a call and leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or a review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media and edited by Lacy Roberts. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Spencer Silva. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here next week. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ross douthat