david leonhardt

Hi, it’s David. I want to tell you about a special live recording of “The Argument” that’s coming up. It’s happening March 9 at the Times Center in New York. And we’ll be tackling two big topics. First, social dysfunction. We’re going to challenge Ross, as we like to do, to defend the premise of his new book, “The Decadent Society,” and ask whether it even goes far enough. Then, we’ll talk about the presidential race. Super Tuesday will just have happened, which means it’ll be a great moment to talk about the Democratic nomination and to look ahead to the general election. Ready to jump into the fray? You can buy tickets at nytimes.com/theargumentlive. That’s nytimes.com/theargumentlive. I hope to see you there.

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 break down the New Hampshire primary and look ahead to Nevada.

michelle goldberg

There’s just such a yawning need for someone to lead, and it just boggles my mind that nobody has stepped into that breach.

david leonhardt

Then Valentine’s Day, is it the worst holiday of the year?

ross douthat

My feeling about holidays is that they engender stress, and yet, as human beings we need them.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation. On Tuesday night, Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, and he’s now looking stronger in the polls of Nevada, which is the next contest. Joe Biden’s weakness means if anything, Sanders is now the favorite in Nevada. So we want to start with a pretty simple question. Is Bernie Sanders on a march to the nomination? Michelle, what do you think?

michelle goldberg

It’s hard for me to think of a scenario in which Bernie Sanders is stopped without the Democratic Party being blown up, right? I mean, he’s obviously the front runner. He’s obviously — I don’t know if he’s the delegate leader. I think that’s still Mayor Pete. But he’s likely to become the delegate leader after the next couple of contests. And although it’s a strange situation because it’s, in some ways, similar to the Republican contest in 2016 in that you still have a majority of the Democratic primary electorate that doesn’t want a candidate as left as he is, although there’s some complication with sort of projecting who people’s second choices are. Nevertheless, there is obviously a big moderate bloc in the Democratic primary electorate. But there seems to be very little prospect of them coalescing around anyone. And if somehow Mike Bloomberg was able to swoop in and win this thing with a plurality of delegates because I don’t think there’s any prospect of him getting a majority of delegates, I shudder to think what that convention would look like and what it would do to the party going up against Donald Trump.

ross douthat

Michelle, I see how that could happen, meaning that Bernie just keeps winning, but I guess I’m not yet persuaded that he’s that strong. I mean, you compare what he did in New Hampshire this year to what he did there four years ago, he beat Hillary by something, like, 20 percentage points four years ago. And he beat the mayor of South Bend, Indiana by basically one or two percentage points. And so I agree it’s messy right now. But when you take the fact that the Democrats award delegates proportionally, so basically, Bernie and Buttigieg got essentially the same number of delegates from New Hampshire this week, with the fact that there are a lot of Democrats who don’t want Bernie to be the nominee, I don’t know what it looks like, but I can absolutely still see a scenario in which Buttigieg or Klobuchar or Bloomberg emerges by Super Tuesday or shortly thereafter as the clear alternative to Bernie, and then just beats him in a series of primaries. And you have something that looks more like 2008, in which you have a close contest, as we did between Obama and Clinton in 2008, but Bernie is the close loser in that contest. And that still seems totally within the realm of possibility to me.

michelle goldberg

But I guess for that to happen, I mean, if you go through each of those candidates, right? Like Amy Klobuchar would have to have some sort of huge money bomb and be able to stand up organizations in a lot of these upcoming contests extraordinarily quickly. And maybe that’s possible. But it’s hard for me to envision. Pete Buttigieg would have to dramatically increase his margin with voters of color, which, again, I think could be possible, because I don’t think it’s clear to most people whether the fact that he’s doing so badly with voters of color is about active antipathy, as opposed to just kind of unfamiliarity and preferences for other people. The fact that so many black women in particular have started moving towards Bloomberg suggests that there’s just a huge hunger out there for who can win. And if it looked like that could be Buttigieg, maybe that would change. So even if he had a kind of blowout on Super Tuesday, he’s still starting from this huge numerical disadvantage. So I agree with you, that Bernie showing is pretty weak, compared to in the past and also compared to Trump’s showing four years ago. But I just don’t see a possibility for somebody else to have a stronger showing at this point.

ross douthat

So I mean I lived through — I mean, we all lived through, but since I’m a conservative, I lived through it maybe more intensely than you guys — a version of this four years ago. And where you had a leading candidate who a big part of the party didn’t want to see nominated, and when you added up the vote totals of the non-Trump candidates, as you can do with the non-Bernie candidates, now it looked like there was a big non-Trump bloc that could deny him the nomination, which is why people like me kept writing columns saying Trump can be denied the nomination well after it became clear that, actually, he couldn’t be. And I feel like part of me just takes the lesson from that experience to be— and I end up agreeing with Michelle in the sense that Sanders clearly has a core of support that extends nationally, right? He competes well. He competed well in Iowa and New Hampshire. And he’s going to compete well in the demographically very different confines of Nevada. And he’s probably going to compete pretty well in South Carolina, too. And that against a divided field is a pretty strong powerful thing, especially when the people who support him are doing so, so enthusiastically, right?

michelle goldberg

Can I say some — I think another lesson that Democrats should draw from 2016 — and I say this again as somebody who would be really, really thrilled with a Bernie Sanders presidency and is still pretty worried about a Bernie Sanders candidacy. One of the things you saw with Trump is just that the other candidates never really attacked him, or if they did attack him, it was sort of on places where he had been not sufficiently conservative, as opposed to his business failures or his just sort of personal grotesqueries. And this isn’t an exactly analogous to Bernie Sanders. I would really like the other candidates to make a case against Bernie Sanders on the basis of the things that I think would render him most vulnerable in a general election, right? I think that there should be a more robust debate about Democratic socialism, maybe about all of these sort of wacky leftist positions that he’s taken in his past, his endorsement of the Socialist Workers Party candidate in the ‘80s, his service as an elector to a Trotskyite party at a time when that party was sending fraternal greetings to the ayatollahs in Iran. And it could very well be that they make that case, and it doesn’t stick. But it would be good to know whether people already know all that stuff and how they feel about it before we get to the general election. But nobody’s doing that.

ross douthat

I think that’s smart, but I think there is a limit to that, too, in the sense that you still need the not Bernie candidate, in a way, to do it, right? That I think definitely so far there’s been this weird dynamic where the attacks on Bernie from his fellow Democrats tend to be things like, he’s not left-wing enough. And you can tell because he accepted Joe Rogan’s endorsement, these kind of things.

michelle goldberg

Right. They’re all attacks from the left.

ross douthat

Right, which are probably not the way to beat him in the primary, unless you’re maybe Elizabeth Warren, but also are not, as Michelle says, stress testing him in any meaningful way for the general election. But the other thing that happened was in the Republican primary, at a certain point, people did start making those attacks on Trump. They waited too long. It was too late. They did it basically at like 1.5 debates. And Marco Rubio got in a literal manhood measuring contest with Trump that was a disaster. But there were those attempts at a certain point. And they still failed. You can’t beat someone with an alternative that is defined by the person you’re trying to beat, or at least, it’s very hard.

michelle goldberg

Right, but I would argue — but right, but in a certain way, they didn’t fail. Because they basically showed that the attacks didn’t work. And indeed, the attacks didn’t work, right? They failed if your goal is to stop the candidate. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about, again, seeing if they work.

david leonhardt

It reminds me, in 2008, someone said to me, is Obama tough enough to win a general election? And my attitude was, well, either he isn’t and Hillary’s going to crush him in the primaries, or he is and he can win both the primaries and the general election.

michelle goldberg

Right, and part of the ugliness of the 2008 primary was that Hillary actually did go after him on a lot of that stuff. Right? I think kind of internally damaging her reputation, but in the process, showing just how tough and kind of robust Obama’s support was. And so it’s like, who is going to do that this time around? I mean, there are certain people who are well positioned to do it. Mike Bloomberg certainly has nothing to lose by doing it. But so far, nobody has.

david leonhardt

And that’s your question, Ross, which is, who’s going to do it?

ross douthat

Well, and but also, I mean, I think I disagree a little with Michelle in the sense that I think that it’s not that Rubio and Cruz and Jeb proved that those attacks on Trump didn’t work. They prove that for attacks to work on a candidate, who a certain number of voters like, there has to be a clear alternative to that candidate. If you’re tearing someone down, there has to be a safe harbor for voters to then go to. But if you’re not for Bernie, who are you rooting for right now?

michelle goldberg

Well, look, I still am glad that — I think that we should still take seriously the fact, although I know this might sound crazy to some people, the person who’s coming in third in the delegate race is still Elizabeth Warren. And I understand that she’s had a kind of dramatic collapse. But I think it makes sense for her to hang on as the Bernie alternative, at least for a while. And in some cases, it’s maybe incumbent on her to make the case about why her version of kind of progressive anti-monopolistic capitalism is superior to socialism, both politically and substantively. That said, there’s something weird about what’s happening with Pete, I think. Because he’s doing kind of amazingly well, right? He’s had this sort of astonishing rise. He has this great backstory that you would think would be media catnip. He’s the person besides Bernie who’s genuinely exciting people and getting huge crowds. So you would think that he would be the sort of natural person for moderates to consolidate around. But he just evokes such visceral loathing in I think a lot of people in the media class in particular and then certainly on the left, that stops that from happening.

david leonhardt

Which brings us to Klobuchar. And I mean, I was, as you both know, I thought she had real potential in this race for a long time. And this is the first time she’s actually really showed it. She got roughly 20 percent in New Hampshire, which just wasn’t that far behind either Sanders or Buttigieg. And yet as I was watching her speech on Tuesday, which was a big moment for her — and she got that it was a big moment, right? She began by introducing herself to America. I was just reminded of her real weaknesses as a presidential candidate, which is she hasn’t yet gotten any of that kind of uplift, right? Her speech was sort of a recitation of thanks to her campaign workers. It was making this argument again about how electable she is, which feels like it really should be the subtext, but she keeps making it the text of her speech. And —

ross douthat

Lamar Alexander.

david leonhardt

Yeah, exactly. And so I mean, Ross, you’re right. I’m not answering your question because, as Michelle says, Buttigieg has issues. I still don’t think Klobuchar has figured out how to sound like a presidential candidate for all her strengths. And so I think it’s not really clear. I guess the one thing I would say is I do think we’re going to learn significantly more over the next couple of weeks. So to what extent can Buttigieg actually grow his support among nonwhite voters in both Nevada and South Carolina? For that matter, to what extent could Klobuchar? And then if neither can, we’re very quickly going to get to the point where we’re at Super Tuesday and Michael Bloomberg, who is on his way to second place in the national polls, if they don’t come out of these first ones, if neither Buttigieg nor Klobuchar comes out of them looking strong, then the Bloomberg scenario starts to get very real.

michelle goldberg

Can I say that I think there is a huge missed opportunity here for one of these candidates? And maybe even for Bernie, but for one of them to step up as the leader of the resistance at a time when we are sliding closer and closer into full authoritarianism, where you have this total breakdown of the rule of law at the Justice Department, Bill Barr and Trump nakedly putting their finger on the scales, too, so that kind of people who have broken laws for Trump can evade justice, never mind these politically motivated investigations into Comey and to Andrew McCabe, right? I mean, we’re kind of getting closer and closer to full Banana Republic. And with impeachment over, somebody has to take up the mantle of saving American democracy. But one way to show that you can be a leader is to lead at this moment when people are terrified and looking for somebody to do that. And there are a lot of ways that you can do that, but they can use their platform. The people in the Senate can grind things to a halt until there’s some kind of action. There’s a lot of things that you can do. And again, there’s just such a yawning need for someone to lead and a whole bunch of people trying to show that they can lead. And it just boggles my mind that nobody has stepped into that breach.

ross douthat

I think this was actually key to one of Klobuchar’s effective moments at the debate, where she was — it was sort of a prepackaged line, obviously, but she was attacking Buttigieg for doing his plague on both your houses, Washington is broken, thing by citing impeachment and citing other senators and impeachment. And then she went on the riff about him preferring to watch children’s cartoons. And I think that’s the way, if there is a Klobuchar argument that sort of starts with the electability argument that she has and goes somewhere a little more presidential with it, it might be a version of that, of basically saying, look, I’m the most electable candidate in this race. And we have to win it to defeat Trump’s corruption.

michelle goldberg

No, but I don’t even mean that. I don’t mean— I mean I’m going to lead the fight against Bill Barr right now.

ross douthat

But how does a senator lead the fight? I mean, I guess there are things a senator can do in terms of filibustering. I suppose you could have a Klobuchar filibuster on an unrelated legislation.

michelle goldberg

Well, look, I think you should do that at a minimum. I mean, I think they should all be doing that at the minimum. But why aren’t they all out there with speeches, kind of laying out the stakes, laying out what’s happening, and demanding that Bill Barr resign? And if you had somebody who was just speaking to their fears, speaking to the urgency of the moment, maybe calling on people to come to Washington and protest, right? I mean, just, I don’t know exactly what it would look like. But again, we need a leader. They’re running to be a leader, so lead.

david leonhardt

Ross, let’s end on the substance of this DOJ stuff. You are often the voice of calm. And you say, look, Trump is not ripping up democracy. He may talk about it or tweet about it, but he ends up being stopped in the end. How alarmed are you by what’s happened this week, in which the president and the attorney general have both just really blatantly gotten involved in a case to try to keep an ally of the president from going to jail?

ross douthat

So my read on what’s happening, which is totally provisional and could be wrong or overtaken by events by the time this episode airs, is that what was done at the upper levels of D.O.J. in reducing the requested sentence time for Roger Stone was probably an attempt to head off Donald Trump pardoning Stone outright, which I don’t think will reassure either you or Michelle remotely about the state of this administration or American democracy. But it’s a little different from Trump ordering Barr to keep Stone out of jail. I think that Barr buys a more modified version of the Trumpian witch hunt narrative, which is to say he thinks that the Russia investigation went too far and people abused their powers. And so he doesn’t mind, or is happy, to sort of rein in some of the prosecutors involved. That coexists with a desire to effectively manage the president and prevent him from abusing his powers nakedly through the use of the pardon power. So I think both of those things are going on right now.

michelle goldberg

Right. I just think that, Ross, you’re being far too optimistic. I think that Barr is a full-on Roy Cohn conciliatory to the total corruption of American justice. Because, David, I mean, David, I don’t know how scared you are. I mean, I’m waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I mean, it just seems like it’s really all breaking down. All of the guardrails are gone. And nobody is there to save the rule of law.

david leonhardt

This does feel different to me. I mean, we know that Trump gets emboldened when he has reason to feel emboldened. After the Mueller report was a dud, that’s when the Ukraine call happened. And now that he’s been acquitted, he’s firing the people who testified against him in impeachment. And he’s just really baldly intervening in Justice Department cases. And so I see all the kind of little cases for how it might not be maximum bad. But when you add it all up, it really does feel like the administration just doesn’t buy the notion of the rule of law in ways that Obama and Bush and Clinton and on and on and on did. And they’re now putting that into practice. And listeners, we want to hear from you. What’s your answer to Michelle’s question about how worried are you right now about the breakdown in the rule of law? Give us a call and let us know at 347-915-4324. And we may tell you on the show. On a more uplifting note, or maybe not, Friday is Valentine’s Day. Corner shops, drugstores, and school bulletin boards will be filled with cartoon hearts. And no doubt some kids will get their first taste of heartache when they don’t get a card from their crush. Valentine’s Day is a multi-billion dollar industry. It is also the subject of widespread ridicule on social media. So the question is, are we all too grumpy about Valentine’s Day, or is it actually the worst holiday of the year? Michelle, where do you come out?

michelle goldberg

I don’t know if I would call it the worst holiday of the year. I would say that here are the things that irritate me about it. So going back to elementary school, I remember that whole process as being intensely traumatic. Like, not so much about your crush, but you give out valentines to all your friends, and you worry about that you’ve gotten less than other people. Maybe they don’t do that anymore. I mean, at least in my kid’s school, you give them to the whole class. But I remember that as being just, like, an absolutely brutal social ritual. I’m a romantic person, but I can’t imagine going out to dinner on Valentine’s Day. It’s the worst day of the whole year to go out for dinner. So it’s not that I have such a problem with it. I like chocolate. I like flowers. It seems to me to be for a holiday about love, it’s a holiday that I think engenders a unique amount of anxiety and unhappiness.

david leonhardt

My wife is also a romantic and also grouchy about Valentine’s Day. And we’ve never really liked it, but we have this nice little solution, which is we happen to have gotten married in mid-February only a few days after Valentine’s Day, which means we can ignore Valentine’s Day without feeling guilty about it, and then focus our flower and gift buying that same week on a different holiday, one that actually means something to us.

michelle goldberg

So here’s where I admit that I am a romantic, but I am to a probably unhealthy degree sort of indifferent to ritual. My husband and I, neither of us know what our anniversary is because we lost our marriage certificate pretty quickly after we got married. And I think we could probably tell you within a few days what it is. And because we eloped, it’s not like there’s invitations that will tell you when it is. So we don’t really celebrate our anniversary either.

david leonhardt

Well, Ross, this is the moment for you to stand the fourth this podcast and tell us to stop our cynicism.

ross douthat

And to defend love.

david leonhardt

Yes.

ross douthat

I mean, look, I agree with Michelle about school valentines. I remember that kindergarten, first grade, everybody giving each other valentines experience. And it wasn’t traumatic, but it wasn’t fun. And Valentine’s Day I don’t think needs to be for kids. It’s supposed to be an adult holiday. Our kids’ school has the kids make valentines for their parents, which I think is sweet, and you don’t give valentines to your classmates at all. I think that’s a totally sensible policy, and I support it. And then I have a lot of sympathy for the broader case that yeah, these holidays, they produce stress and unhappiness. But to me, that applies to every holiday in a way. And my feeling about holidays is that they engender stress, and yet, as human beings we need them, right? And that this is true of all ritual. When I take my kids to Sunday mass, it engenders a lot of stress, but it’s still worth doing. The Christmas season is overall, I would say, one of the most stressful times of year for anyone who has kids and is also in relations with multiple relatives and so on. And yet, to remove it would be to remove this really powerful season of community and solidarity. And I mean, with Valentine’s Day, it can be an inspiration for things that you should do anyway, like in this case, over the last couple holidays, I’m trying to actually put the endless family photographs that we have online or on our phones into actual photograph albums, so that when civilization collapses, we will still have hard copies of all our family photos. And should I do that anyway without the spur of being able to do it as sort of like a Christmas and Valentine’s gift to my wife? Sure, ideally. But having these holidays there as spurs to gestures that you should do anyway is, I think, worth overall the stress that they engender.

michelle goldberg

Now here’s where I say something I think that is genuinely romantic, which is that I suspect the reason that I don’t have any real feelings about Valentine’s Day is that my husband makes a lot of those kinds of gestures unbidden throughout the year and always has kind of unconnected to any holiday.

ross douthat

Oh, man.

michelle goldberg

And so I do think that, like —

ross douthat

See, now you’re making me look bad, Michelle.

michelle goldberg

If those kind of things never happened, I might think like, yes, finally, my one time of the year.

ross douthat

So well, then, we’ve really hit on the classic conservative liberal divide, right? Which is that conservatives think that institutions exist because not everyone is as awesome as your husband, basically, and some poor women are stuck married to me instead. And we need these social pressures, these cues, these structures, these guardrails to force us to do nice things. And if everyone were your husband, there would be no need for such restrictions and rules. But tragically, some people are more like me.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, nor would there be a mess in the Democratic primary.

ross douthat

That is also true.

david leonhardt

That is true as well.

ross douthat

David, have I sold you at all on the necessity for these terrible holidays?

david leonhardt

Well, that is the more optimistic case for Valentine’s Day, right? Which is it is to get the other husbands and spouses of America to behave more like Michelle’s. But here’s the pessimistic case, Ross. And you’ll see why I’m going to ask this, which is, isn’t the modern success of Valentine’s Day a form of decadence? And for listeners who don’t know at this point, Ross has a big new book coming out, arguing the decadence is the great weakness of American society. It sort of feels like Valentine’s Day, at least the way we actually celebrate it, is a pretty good example of modern decadence.

ross douthat

So, look, David, of course Valentine’s Day is infused with decadence. But one, even under decadence, life can still be lived well. One of the virtues of decadence is that it is not yet the full dystopia, and it still leaves room for people to do better than their cultural cues. And two, the core is still good. And the spirit of prodding people in romantic relationships toward actual romance is a good thing. And in that sense, yes, there’s decadence everywhere. It rules everything around us. But that doesn’t mean we should reject the buried gold beneath the tinsel. How’s that for a metaphor?

david leonhardt

That’s pretty good. And look, you two have spoken so eloquently about it that even I will wish both of you and your spouses and all of our listeners a Happy Valentine’s Day.

michelle goldberg

Now it’s time for a recommendation where we give you a suggestion of something to take your mind off the ever unfolding nightmare of the news. David, it’s your turn. What do you have for us?

david leonhardt

Well, I’m going to recommend Holiday Magazine, which may seem like a strange recommendation because it doesn’t really exist anymore. But I think it’s very much in keeping with the idea of taking your mind off of the news. So Holiday Magazine was this absolutely gorgeous mid-century American magazine. It had incredible photographs. It had amazing writers for it— EB White, Eric Ambler, and on and on and on. But what I do is I like to, couple times a year, go online and buy an old copy of Holiday Magazine. So as you both know and as our listeners know, I went to China recently. Actually, this was a gift from my wife. She bought me an issue of Holiday Magazine from the ‘50s that had a feature on Beijing. And first of all, they’re just not that expensive to buy these old magazines online. And second of all, they’re this amazing little bit of time travel, in which you get to look back and see what these places were like, but maybe even more so, you get to see what Americans thought they were like back then. The ads are incredibly entertaining — the ads for cigarettes and cars and camps, summer camps for kids. And basically you go online, you spend a little bit of money, depending on the issue, $10, $15, $20, and you just get this wonderful form of entertainment. And then you can throw it on your coffee table, and your guests come by and look at it, too.

michelle goldberg

Oh, wow. So I laughed because we had just had this kind of dyspeptic conversation about holidays, but you mean it was like a travel magazine.

david leonhardt

Yes, it’s like the more European definition of holiday, right? Where they use it the way we use the word vacation. I mean, I mentioned Eric Ambler. He’s probably my favorite spy writer ever. And the issue of Holiday that my wife got me with an article about Beijing, I just stumbled on an article by Eric Ambler about murder in London. And so there are just all these hidden gems in it. And for different reasons, I think you actually both would quite enjoy it.

ross douthat

So where do you get copies?

david leonhardt

You can get them on eBay. I mean, what I tend to do is I sort of google around. Let’s imagine that you’re going to Argentina. Just do a little googling and try to figure out when Holiday Magazine wrote an article about Buenos Aires or Argentina. And then you do a little bit more searching and figure out how to buy it. They make good gifts, too.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, that sounds amazing.

ross douthat

Yeah, this is it. I have no other comment. That’s a terrific recommendation. I think I’ve heard of Holiday, but I know almost nothing about it. And lost mid-century magazines are fantastic and also a reminder of a less decadent era— ahem— in American history. Hint, hint.

david leonhardt

Indeed. So that’s my recommendation. Go online, and buy an old copy of Holiday Magazine. That’s our show this week. Thanks so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas, 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 is produced by the all-star team of Maddy Foley, Alex Laughlin, and James T. Green for Transmitter Media and was edited by Sara 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’ll see you back here next week.

ross douthat