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, is it O.K. to talk about Joe Biden’s age?

michelle goldberg

I remember seeing Joe Biden giving this kind of barn-burner speech against Trump, and he’s just not that person anymore.

david leonhardt

Then we talk cancel culture, the phenomenon of boycotting famous people who’ve behaved badly.

ross douthat

It gets to a much larger question, which is, what are the moral and ideological norms for artists and for society right now?

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

The strange thing about this book is that it is ultimately uplifting. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Joe Biden would be the oldest American president to take office, older than Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump. And Biden’s age has become a sensitive subject in the Democratic campaign. He’s 76 years old, and there have definitely been times in the campaign when he has not looked sharp.

archived recording (joe biden) —cannot do it. Poor kids who are just as bright and just as talented as white kids — wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids. No, I really mean it. Play the radio. Make sure the televisions— excuse me. Make sure you have record player on at night, the phone. Make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school or a very poor background will hear four-minute words —

david leonhardt

Michelle, Ross, and I have touched briefly on this issue on previous shows, and apparently, it’s also been on the minds of some of our listeners.

archived recording (elaine) I’m responding to your piece on Joe Biden. He definitely should not run. archived recording (patrick) He seems like he would be the best candidate of the options, but would stumble over the words and not fare against Trump very well. archived recording (justin) And I see a more youthful candidate being more in touch with maybe society’s demand for progress and just the issues facing the world today.

david leonhardt

Those messages came from Elaine, Patrick, and Justin, and thank you to all of them. But here is another view from Matthew.

archived recording (matthew) So I myself am in my 20s, but I feel like more and more I hear something about someone being too old and I hear now with people saying that Joe Biden is too old. And for me, I look at that and I kind of wonder, isn’t this a form of essentially discrimination, right?

david leonhardt

Today, we’re going to dive fully into this subject. And let’s start with the most basic question— is this a legitimate subject for debate? It would be akin to debating whether America is willing to vote for a woman or someone who is L.G.B.T. By having the debate, we’re feeding the negative stereotypes. Or is this different? Michelle, what do you think?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I think it’s different for a couple of reasons. First of all, aging is a thing. And unlike being a woman or being a person of color, I think there is widespread agreement that a person’s abilities decline as they age. The question is when and by how much, right? You know, if you look at Bernie Sanders, he seems basically to be the same person he was four years ago. Joe Biden doesn’t, and it is, to me, a form of madness that we’re not talking about his mental acuity, which just seems to be obviously in decline, which has ramifications both for his ability in the campaign, but also for his ability as president.

ross douthat

I think it would be much more useful to have the debate in a sort of open flat out obvious way than to do it with dog whistles, which is basically so far what Joe Biden’s Democratic rivals have been trying to do. And you saw this happen with Castro in the last debate, where he was basically accusing Biden of having stumbled and misunderstood or misremembered something or contradicted himself in one of his own answers, where the obvious implication of this line of attack was, Joe Biden you’re too old to be running for president. But it got all tangled up in an empirical question about whether Biden had actually gotten the policy wrong, which I think he hadn’t. I mean, I can see why candidates don’t want to come out and say, let’s just have a discussion about whether 78 is too old to be sworn into an incredibly high-pressure job in the highest office in the land, et cetera, et cetera. But it doesn’t get us anywhere to have these sort of weird performances on the debate stage where you’re trying to goad Biden into sounding vaguely senile so you can pounce on him without saying that’s what you’re doing.

david leonhardt

Julián Castro obviously did it poorly. He looked mean, and as you said, Ross, it also just looks like he was empirically wrong that Biden had misstated something. But what would the right version of it look like? I mean, we’re not going to see it from Warren or Sanders, who don’t have much to gain. But one of the candidates further down in the polls may. I mean, is it basically someone like Cory Booker or Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris basically saying, look, Mr. Vice President, I have enormous regard for you and your career. But I think it’s time to have an honest conversation about whether someone your age is up for the demands of a campaign and then the presidency.

michelle goldberg

Right, but the problem is that it’s not about someone your age, it’s about him. So I feel like Pete Buttigieg has tried to gesture in I think a kind of totally optimistic, forward thinking way to the need for a new generation of leadership. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the fact that Joe Biden seems to be obviously slipping, right? You watch him or at least I watch him with my heart in my throat. He kind of loses his train of thought. He makes these, like, extremely anachronistic references. I mean, I remember seeing Joe Biden at the 2016 Democratic Convention giving this kind of barn-burner speech against Trump, and he’s just not that person anymore. There’s such an intense pathos to this whole spectacle, and it would seem cruel for any of the other candidates to attack him on these grounds.

david leonhardt

How would they even begin? I mean, what do you each think it would sound like?

ross douthat

I think it’s a totally legitimate argument to have on the merits. It’s also incredibly hard to figure out how you broach it without sounding like a jerk and just alienating the people watching preemptively and making them sympathize with Biden. Booker, I believe, tried to do it in the post-debate, but he didn’t want to go all the way. First, he said something like, I think we really have to ask if Joe is on the ball enough. And we’re all a little confused by some of his answers. But then the follow up question was, well, are you saying this is about his age? And Booker said, no, no, I mean, I’m just saying he’s always had some of these issues. And that, I think, gets into what is the big question here, right, which is that it is true that Biden has always had issues of being a rambler who says out of date weird things. And we have this long litany of Bidenisms for a reason. And one of the things that defends him against this attack is the reality that if he’s changed, it’s an acceleration or an accentuation of a pre-existing propensity for gaffes and crazy Uncle Joe statements.

david leonhardt

What would be the right way for a journalist to ask this question in an upcoming debate?

michelle goldberg

That’s a good question. I don’t have an answer to how they should ask it in an upcoming debate. But I do think that there’s just a lot of reporting that can be done about the concerns that people are voicing privately, but not publicly. One of the best things that could happen is maybe if one or two were of Joe Biden’s endorsers would say, we love this man. He’s done incredible services to our country. He was a great vice president. But we just don’t think that he is up to this challenge, and we’re shifting our support to whoever. I think that that would maybe crystallize it. And somebody should do that for the good of the party because it is just going to be excruciating to see these two men fumble against each other in a general election. I mean, Biden and Trump, and part of the problem, too, is that Biden doesn’t say more untrue things than Trump does. And he doesn’t seem necessarily more senescent than Trump does. But he doesn’t have the same courage of his convictions.

ross douthat

I’m curious what worries you more for both of you about Biden’s age. Is it the long term consequences of electing someone in decline to the presidency, or are you really worried about how he plays against Trump?

david leonhardt

Oh, that’s easy for me. I’m much more worried about how it might help Trump.

ross douthat

Really?

david leonhardt

Yes. I think Trump as a president is a much bigger national emergency. I mean, we have a white supremacist president, who, by the way, is also aging and doesn’t seem completely with it. And I think that is a much larger emergency than having a president who may have some level of compromise. In our lifetime, the United States has survived having a president with some level of compromise. Ronald Reagan second term, that’s a real issue. Michelle, I assume you agree with that.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, he’ll have good people around him. And it doesn’t frighten me so much how he will perform in office. It terrifies me how he will perform in the election. But I’m curious, David— I mean, we had this argument when Biden first entered the race. I was very much hoping that he wouldn’t. You were kind of enthusiastic about his entry. And I’m wondering if you’re now having second thoughts about that.

david leonhardt

Yeah, that’s a fair question. I mean, I wrote a column called “Run, Joe, Run,” in which I said, look, I’m not sure that I’m going to support him, but I really hope he runs because he’s unlike anyone else in the race. He’s got the experience and that I thought one of the big mistakes in 2016 was Democrats essentially cleared the field and then ended up with a flawed candidate. And my view is have the election, and if Biden is actually a bad candidate, he won’t get the nomination. I guess, Michelle, I’d say I still basically believe that, but I’m now closer to where you were. I have not been impressed with him. Look, Ross, I agree with you. In part, this is just Biden being Biden. It’s not like when he was younger and ran for president in 1992, which is now, what, 27 years ago. He was bad at it then, too. So I don’t think this is all aging. But I haven’t been impressed with him, and I do now think there is a possibility that he ends up getting the nomination as a flawed nominee, which would, I think, have been worse than not.

ross douthat

I don’t think Biden has been particularly impressive. At the same time, I think he has so far held off the existing challenges to his position as sort of the moderate establishment frontrunner. He’s running further ahead of Trump in the polls still right now than Warren and Sanders and the other Democratic candidates. I think there’s still a lot of upside if you’re just trying to say, who’s the most likely to beat Trump by the biggest margin so the electoral college doesn’t become an issue. I think there’s still plenty of upside for Biden, and I would be much more worried not just about the four-year problem, but the fact that if he wins, then he is the Democratic Party probably for four years through another election cycle through another presidency if he wins. Yeah, I would be more worried about him as president.

michelle goldberg

We’ve seen over and over and over again enthusiasm and excitement matter. And I agree there are people who like Joe Biden, but there was a sort of politico in South Carolina who said to me, people aren’t going to take a day off of work to go vote for Joe Biden. People aren’t going to stand in line for three hours to vote for Joe Biden. And that’s something you see. I’ve seen it in polling places, African-American polling places all over the country, right? They’re set up so that sometimes you have to wait in line for four or five hours. And so the degree of passion that you feel, I think about back to 2008 when my husband went to work for Barack Obama and took — I don’t know what it was — like, a 75 percent pay cut. And we moved into this little building behind someone’s house in Chicago, and he slept under his desk. I mean, I would have given a kidney. On the weekends, I would go and canvas, and that willingness to leave just everything you have on the table. I think that people will do it to beat Trump, but there’s just a million little tiny micro decisions, right? Do you go out canvassing for an extra hour? How much time do you spend imploring your neighbors? I mean, I think if we had had any of that with Hillary Clinton, there’s no question she would have won. To me, it seems like we’re replaying what just happened in 2016.

david leonhardt

Obviously, Michelle is expressing a view there that a lot of Democrats feel. Do you think liberals are essentially too anxious about what a Biden candidacy— not a Biden presidency, I understand you’re worried about that— but a Biden candidacy would look like. And do you think he would be an overwhelming favorite to beat Trump?

ross douthat

I think that it’s important to be humble in these assessments because obviously, I assumed that Trump would never win the Republican nomination. That being said, I live in a different world of anecdotes than Michelle. I live in a world where there were lots and lots of people, not people in professional politics but people who I knew who were sort of lukewarm Republicans who I assumed wouldn’t turn out for Trump because they didn’t like him. They were afraid of him. And in the end, I was always surprised by how many people I thought would vote for Hillary ended up staying home and how many people I thought would stay home ended up voting for Trump. And those people are the reason why Biden has these big leads over Trump. You can tell a story where nominating Biden ends up being a disaster. But I think people inside the progressive world are underestimating the advantages of nominating the guy who, right now, seems like the most moderate guy in the race. And I also think there is an entanglement here of the age issue and this basic political divide within the Democratic Party. A lot of the places where Biden gets hammered for sounding rambling or sounding senile are also places where people listening think he’s out of touch with the new progressivism. So just to take the example from the debate, he went on this weird tangent about record players, right? And playing record players in kids’ homes and this idea that minority kids or poor kids aren’t hearing enough words as kids, and that’s why they aren’t performing as well in schools. And this was pounced on and attacked as an example of Biden’s sort of crypto-racism, his chauvinistic assumptions, and so on. But all Biden was doing there was recycling what was liberal wonk technocrat conventional wisdom, like, four years ago before a bunch of studies came out saying, oh, no, it wasn’t true, right? And it’s sort of an indicator of an ideological split as well as just this age issue. And in that sense, some of the places where Biden sounds both old and out of touch to progressives are areas where maybe he sounds old, but to a lot of voters, doesn’t sound out of touch.

michelle goldberg

Right, but can I just answer that really quickly? Some of his other flubs where there was one point where he said, I’m for Medicare for All, Medicare for choice. Biden coming out for Medicare for All sounds great to me, but that is not good for him to be flubbing that like that. At another point, he said that people shouldn’t be in prison for non-violent crimes, which, in some ways, would make him the most radical of all of the criminal justice reformers. But he obviously doesn’t mean it.

david leonhardt

Well, it seems like this is going to be central to the campaign in the coming months before the voting in Iowa and New Hampshire. There was a fascinating poll that just came out in which Democrats were asked if they had to choose between Warren and Biden, who would they choose? Warren had a very slight advantage, 52-48. But it feels like the two of them in some ways are virtually tied right now, and so the whole question of, is Biden electable and whether Biden’s too old is going to hang over the race in coming months. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you, again, to everyone who called in on this subject and got us thinking more about it. Now we’re going to take a quick break. Last week, “Saturday Night Live” announced to the cast for its new season, and the show soon had a problem. Hours after the announcement, videos of one of the new cast members, Shane Gillis, surfaced online. In the videos, Gillis used a racist slur to make fun of Chinese people. This week, the show dropped Gillis from the cast, saying that it had not been aware of the videos when it hired him. By losing his job, Gillis has joined the list of celebrities under scrutiny for their bad behavior, and that plays into a larger debate that many liberals and conservatives have been having. Should we erase the work of people who’ve done truly odious things, or should we instead try to separate the art from the artist? Michelle, Shane Gillis has been canceled as they say, at least from “Saturday Night Live,” and that makes me want to ask you to explain to us what is cancel culture.

michelle goldberg

It’s a very labile term that can mean anything from being criticized a lot on the internet, to losing your job, to having your artistic output declared invalid. And so I understand both sides of this because on the one hand, when people, I think, in our position criticize what can seem like the mob response online, I understand why so many people get so angry for comedians and writers. And some kind of freedom that they used to enjoy has been lost. And it seems particularly acute when it comes to comedy because part of the job of comedy is to test taboos and break boundaries. And that seems to be why there’s so many of these blow-ups around comedy. The other part of the problem is just that because everything is recorded now, right? I mean, it used to be probably that a comedian could, over many, many years, work out this stuff and try stuff. Part of Shane Gillis’ whole shtick is that he always talks about coming from a, quote unquote, “white trash town,” sort of very Trumpy place, and now he’s been transplanted to the big city and is trying to sort of understand the new norms. It’s not like this was in his distant past, right? He was saying these terribly racist things last year, and I can understand people being super uncomfortable working with him. So it’s a real thicket for me.

ross douthat

Man. Well, there’s a lot— there’s, like, 17 layers of this. So let’s start with your question, right? So is it reasonable and legitimate in specific cases or as a general rule to basically end someone’s career over misdeeds? And I think everyone agrees, or 95 percent of people at least agree, that that is O.K. If a major director is a rapist, it’s O.K. not to hire him again. We all believe in cancel culture to the extent that we all believe that there are things you can do that forfeit your right to be a big star or a big celebrity. Now, when that happens to somebody, the secondary question or the related question is, what do you do with their art? And my general view as a conservative who has spent my whole life separating artists from their political views is that you have to be able to separate artists from their art, not least because lots and lots of artists in human history have been truly terrible people, who did really terrible things. Does it make sense to ban Michael Jackson’s output from the radio because Michael Jackson was probably a child molester? No, I don’t think it does. Does it make sense to drop every Kevin Spacey movie from Netflix because Kevin Spacey was probably a rapist? I don’t think that we do. But it gets to a much larger question, which is, what are the moral and ideological norms for artists and for society right now?

david leonhardt

I bet you have cooler music taste than I do, Michelle, but I still listen to Michael Jackson. But I don’t feel great about it when the behavior is truly odious. Can you separate the art from the artist?

michelle goldberg

When I hear “Pretty Young Thing” at the gym, I, like, really cringe. But for me, the hardest case is Morrissey and the Smiths, right? Morrissey has become this horrible Islamophobe. It’s so heartbreaking because I honestly think I would have offed myself in high school if it wasn’t for the Smiths. I mean, I cannot overstate to you what that music meant to me growing up. [MUSIC - THE SMITHS, “THE BOY WITH THE THORN IN HIS SIDE”]

the smiths

(SINGING) The boy with the thorn in his side, behind the hatred there lies a murderous desire—

michelle goldberg

It sustained me. And the other day, my husband and I were driving with our kids. And I put on the Smiths on the iPhone, and my husband was like, oh, I don’t want to give money to Morrissey. And I sort of felt guilty. Like, oh, yeah, maybe we shouldn’t. At the same time, I can’t really imagine my life without this music.

ross douthat

I guess the money issue is sort of separate, right? Like, if you have an artist who has an ongoing career who is engaged in either reprehensible behavior or some kind of political activism that you hate, yeah, I mean, I can see why you might say I don’t want to support their career with my dollars. But if you took the standards of the Me Too era and applied them not to one band but to literally every rock and roll singer from 1962 to 1981, you could never listen to classic rock again. The whole genre would just be gone. So I think what a lot of people not just on the right, but in sort of a kind of centrist, liberal whatever space you want to describe it get anxious about with this is not so much the idea that bad people who say bad things shouldn’t get to work for “Saturday Night Live” or shouldn’t get to have big movie careers. It’s this sense that what we’re calling cancel culture right now, which is basically, Twitter mobs applying pressure to corporate actors, is a foretaste of essentially a new censorious world view that, over the course of the next 20 years, could be just sort of instantiated. And that, I think, is the fear.

michelle goldberg

Right, but we’re all talking about kind of, quote unquote, “cancel culture” like it’s new. We were all alive when the Dixie Chicks were sort of shunned by huge parts of the culture because of their criticism of George W. Bush, right? We all witnessed Bill Maher losing his job for saying that you could call the 9/11 hijackers a lot of things, but it didn’t really make sense to call them cowards.

ross douthat

I mean, more recently, the N.F.L. canceled Colin Kaepernick.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, absolutely. I think that there is something that people on the left are often very frustrated because it’s not that this is necessarily a new phenomenon. What’s new is that transgressions against women or people of color are treated with similar gravity to transgressions against right-wing sacred cows.

ross douthat

What is absolutely the case is that cancel culture is doing some of the same kinds of things that conservatives, I mean, still do, but certainly did more after 9/11 and that social conservatives used to try and do with boycotts and agitation against Hollywood and so on. But what is happening, I think there is sort of a question where the culture has shifted, the culture industry has shifted even more. And there is sort of a contest now about what are the new orthodoxies, how are they getting enforced, and how much like the old Hays Code in Hollywood, right— which regulated whether men and women could be seen in beds together in movies and so on— how much of a progressive version of that do we want, versus how much do we want to see ourselves on the left as still the champions of freedom from 1968.

david leonhardt

Michelle, I’m interested in whether you agree with something that Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate, said about this whole Saturday Night Live incident. He said, look, I find these stereotypes offensive. I’ve been hurt by them during my life. He said, I also spent time watching and listening to Shane Gillis’ work after this happened, and he didn’t strike me as malignant. And then this is what Andrew Yang said. I think we have, as a society, become excessively punitive and vindictive concerning people’s statements and expressions we disagree with or find offensive. So I think you and I would definitely agree that the right is often excessively punitive, but do you agree with Andrew Yang that the left recently has been as well in some cases? Or do you think that’s just sort of a false charge?

michelle goldberg

I absolutely feel like that, and I think a lot of people feel like that. But I also think it’s so much on a case by case basis. The thing that makes it hard to push back on is that the individual people who are doing the dragging has so much less power than me that I can understand why it just seems like ridiculous special pleading to complain about it.

ross douthat

Right, but the people who run Saturday Night Live do have real power, right? And in that sense, I think what critics of cancel culture are looking at is it’s not so much the Twitter mob. It’s what happens when there’s this kind of perfect synergy between the views of the Twitter mob and the incentives of people who run networks, media companies, and so on.

david leonhardt

I mean, it’s interesting to me that we all feel somewhat torn about aspects of this issue. And it seems to me it reflects that some of these are easy calls, but some of them are hard calls. So a lot of these changes are really positive. And you go back and you look at these old shows from the ‘80s, and the number of jokes that are about something horrific like date rape is really alarming. And to say that it’s good that comedy has changed isn’t to say that all of the forces that are involved in so-called cancel culture right now are so good. And I guess I would just end with a plea, which is we’re not all going to agree with where to make distinctions. But it seems to me it’s really important to make distinctions with different levels of sin and different levels of sin that call for different punishments. Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we make a suggestion designed to take your mind off of the news of the day. Michelle, this week is your turn. What do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

I’m going to recommend Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments,” which is the sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The strange thing about this book is that it is ultimately uplifting. It’s a thriller. It’s intensely emotionally satisfying. It’s so much fun, which probably sounds like a weird word to use when talking about the theocratic fascist regime of Gilead that Margaret Atwood conjured in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But it’s inspiring in these dark times.

ross douthat

I haven’t read it yet. I’m a fan of the Atwood original. And I became less and less of a fan of the TV adaptation as it went, and one of the commonly shared critiques of the TV adaptation, not just from conservative curmudgeons like me, was that it turned into this sort of you go, girl, wish fulfillment thing. What do you think of where the show went, and how does the book’s optimism compare to the shows were playing rock music while the handmaids walk in slow motion and kick ass thing?

michelle goldberg

O.K., so to be really honest, I had to stop watching the show towards the end of the second season because I just couldn’t take the brutality of it anymore. Let me just say there will be spoiler alerts. So if you haven’t read the book, and you don’t want to hear them, you can turn this show off right now. The big reveal or one of the big reveals is that Aunt Lydia is part of the resistance in the Gilead administration and ultimately contrives a way to take the regime down. She and these two teenage girls become enmeshed in this sort of spy thriller plan to get a cache of information out of Gilead. For those of us who felt a great deal of suffering over the course of the Trump administration at the devaluation of truth and the fact that no revelation of Trump’s utter corruption, depravity, and unfitness ever seems to have any effect on his power, there is also something satisfying and almost nostalgic about the idea that the revelation of all of these terrible things that the commanders have done in Gilead ends up contributing to its demise, right? Women don’t matter in Gilead, but truth still does. And that’s something that makes that dystopia different than ours.

ross douthat

It sounds kind of improbable.

david leonhardt

Well, many of the greatest novels are far fetched. Michelle, what’s the recommendation again?

michelle goldberg

It is “The Testaments” by Margaret Atwood.

david leonhardt

That’s our show for this week. Thank you so much for listening. As always, if you have thoughts or questions, leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also send us an email at argument@nytimes.com. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show is produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media and edited by Sarah Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. And we will see you back here next week.

michelle goldberg

Left wing people often want The New York Times to fire Bret Stephens.

ross douthat