I used to represent a manufacturing client that required every meeting - whether with operational workers, in-house counsel, or C-suite types - to begin with a relevant safety briefing. On the shop floor, it would be about hard hats and eyewash stations. In a conference room, it would be about fire exits and trip hazards. This was, of course, silly in a sense. But it was pretty effective at reminding everyone that safety was a very high priority for the company.
This is why routine, required land acknowledgements are a terrible idea, because they have such a powerful signalling function about priorities. I agree with Ben, and I'm surprised at Josh and Megan's surprise that he found them so offputting.
Suggest substantive policies to improve conditions for Native Americans, absolutely, but the message transmitted by the land acknowledgements is not that.
The funny thing is they're so rote, I don't think they even actually do anything to get people inside the party to think more substantively about those issues, whereas I suspect the safety briefings at least made the office workers a little more cognizant of trip hazards.
this podcast should have a pillar that it will do everything it can to spoil a Newsom nomination. I say this as a Californian. He cannot be the nominee. We will lose be a million. It has to be a Shapiro or Whitmer type.
I don't know that I'm ready to go the full JVL and say it should be knocked down on day 1 of the next administration, but this ballroom is a giant pay to play exercise. Surely none of you are naive enough to think that the "private funding" isn't bribery or extortion?
I doubt that any of you would have defended President Obama, or President GWB, if either of them had up and bulldozed the East Wing, after lying that they would not, and then tried to fund the building of a ballroom by collecing money from people who wanted favors from the Admin or just wanted to stay on the Admin's good side.
I got the sense from the pod that your pro-ballroom stance was a special dispensaton to Trump, as opposed to a believe that future Presidents should also have a free hand to demolish various government structures they don't own (inclduing Trump's ballroom!). It makes me wonder if you in a kind of 5-stages bargaining phase? "Let him have his ballroom to play with if it sidetracks him from his mission to ruin the country?" I could appreciate that if I thought it woulfd work. Unfortunately he has largely delegated the job of ruining the country to people like Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, and Pete Hegseth.
I'm left to wonder if this is just cynical centrism on your part. Siding with Trump on this one just to not get your podcast categoized as being too left wing.
I don't think anyone is going to categorize this podcast as being too left-wing. The headline topics for the last two episodes have been about how the Democratic party sucks and needs to change to win more often (and not by moving to the left on some issues, good heavens no!). I'm being glib, of course, but I don't think there's cynicism in the way you describe it.
(I don't necessarily disagree with those observations about the Democrats btw)
Anyway, I don't really care that much about the ballroom thing. Yes, there's all sorts of problematic things about it, but given the incessant, daily drumbeat of "Look at me! Look at what I said!" outrages and corruptions bursting from the mouth and mind of the great leader, renovating the White House is pretty far down the list of offences to me.
Partly because of the industry I'm in, the thing that got me the most in this administration was the needless and cruel gutting of USAID. I know foreign aid is not high on the "we need to keep this" priority list of most Americans (people seem to think it's way more costly to the budget than it actually is), but in terms of sheer number of lives affected it's one of the dumbest and most heartless things this administration has done. Maybe that's not politically savvy of me to say -- I feel that "this is morally reprehensible" has pretty low valence as an argument these days -- but I think some things should be beyond politics.
I think the Democratic party is on the verge of sucking its way to national irrelevance, so I agree with you there.
But part of Trump's success is that he is nakedly, openly, brazenly corrupt, in a way that would have made Richard Nixon and Spiro "Taking bags of bribe cash in the White House" Agnew blush (not to mention any of their successors), but he gets a free pass on all of it, even from centrist good government types. The ballroom is open corruption.
There's a throwaway line by Megan six minutes in during the ballroom discussion, "You've just gotta zen it out", that is perhaps the most single telling line in the entire three episodes of the podcast so far. The idea being expressed is, essentially, "Yes, we all *obviously* agree Trump is bad," (and you can almost hear the exasperated sigh here), "but the real problem is how all of you people are complaining about it." It's the exact same sentiment from the first episode's discussion of the Portland protests, and the exact same sentiment in the second episode's discussion of immigration. It's a tag-line for the entire centrist position that the podcast seems to espouse: that the real issues with the world today are about how "the Left" isn't protesting against Trump the right way. And what's funny is the hosts never actually call out that the things being protested against are worth protest! They just carefully and consistently aim their fire at the protestors and turn their backs on the actions being protested.
This is the centrist problem on the whole: they're so focused on being "not the Left" that they twist themselves into knots trying to find critiques. I don't think this comes from a sense of *agreement* with the Trump administration, but rather from taking as granted that everyone can tell how obviously lawless it is that the hosts don't think it's worth their time to call it out. (Or alternately, they want to be able to proceed from the assumption that the Trump administration is awful without having to state it out loud.) But in that tacit refusal to call a right-wing spade a spade, while at the same time quibbling over the specific dimensions of the shovels the Left are wielding, they are providing rhetorical cover for the worst of the right and reserving all their criticism for the least of the Left. When you treat Trump with an air of, "Well, that's just Trump", but pretend naked cyclists in Portland are representative of the entire Left, you aren't being centrist; you're being disingenuous.
Three episodes in, this isn't a podcast for people who are genuinely interested in a middle ground between political excesses on the Left and on the Right. Instead it's a podcast for people who want to take pot-shots at the Left for the grammar on their signs while the Right tears a building down behind them.
In case you worry that this is just about the building, the entire discussion around (and indeed the point of) Deciding To Win is that Democrats aren't fighting for things the right way. "Yes, of course, the literally lethal vitriol the Right has towards the trans community is super duper sad, but the real problem is the Democratic Party talking about it." Deciding To Win is quite literally a playbook for the Center to fight against the Left for space! "We have a short-term need to have individual candidate brands that are bigger than the (D) next to their name?" is a super telling comment by Liam Kerr. They're not trying to get anyone on the right to "overcome the (R)" next to their names; just Democrats. Why is it always the Centrists vs. the Left, trying to cannibalize that space and ceding the rest to the Right? The *hostility* of Kerr and the hosts towards every Democratic candidate from the previous cycle, the disgust that is communicated solely from Center towards Left, it's just so tiring.
Also not for nothing, but suggesting a gubernatorial candidate say "I'm with the 70% to 80% of population that believes that we should be willing to discriminate against a minority" (Megan, at 28:50) is how you get Don't Ask, Don't Tell and decades of repression for sexual minorities. "I don't think that gender identity is important enough to be recognized by the state or federal government" (Josh, at 32:55) is the *exact* argument that was being made a couple decades ago about sexual orientation (schools should be able to prevent gay students from enrolling), and a couple decades before that about racial minorities (schools should be able to prevent certain races from attending). How you can want to hold that position is mind-boggling. If a Centrist position isn't, first and foremost, founded on basic civil liberties, then what the heck IS it based on?
Well, if you don't win a majority, you don't get to govern. Personal moral convictions are important to guide individual advocacy, (and hopefully effective persuasion of others) but a democratic system quite literally requires pragmatic compromise to win majorities.
Yes, some level of compromise is important to actually be able to govern. But I do think that some politicians get far too bogged down in strategy, that they compromise on their values so much, "oh I can't say this because people might not like it", that you start wondering whether they actually believe anything at all, or why they bothered even running for office in the first place if they're just going to abandon everything they actually care about. Harris was a bit like this, imo.
It applies to pundits too, including Yglesias and (I think) sometimes Josh. There's this kind of reluctance to talk about anything in strictly moral terms, because strategy is clean and morality is messy, or because you think you're above it all. It reminds me a bit of some foreign policy realists, who treat great power politics as like a giant game of Risk, divorced from trifling concerns like, say, human rights.
For me personally, I support trans rights because I think it is morally correct to do so. And I would have immense respect for any politician who stuck to their guns on the unpopular side of such an issue. Someone who could stand up and say (for example) "actually you know what, I think immigration is good, I think we should have more of it, and here is why".
Maybe I'm in the minority, maybe that's not smart politics, but not everything is about politics. And sometimes the majority is actually wrong!
True, effective and healthy politics is part compromise, and part persuasion. Additionally, the persuasion part often has to take place outside the roles of elected office, though, through advocacy in the cultural institutions and the public sphere. When law and public policy gets too far outside culture and public opinion, the results generally aren't good. The short-term high of imposing morality is tempting and may feel satisfying, but it's a fragile imposition, and can often generate an even stronger backlash. Jonathan Rauch has a good perspective on that.
I used to represent a manufacturing client that required every meeting - whether with operational workers, in-house counsel, or C-suite types - to begin with a relevant safety briefing. On the shop floor, it would be about hard hats and eyewash stations. In a conference room, it would be about fire exits and trip hazards. This was, of course, silly in a sense. But it was pretty effective at reminding everyone that safety was a very high priority for the company.
This is why routine, required land acknowledgements are a terrible idea, because they have such a powerful signalling function about priorities. I agree with Ben, and I'm surprised at Josh and Megan's surprise that he found them so offputting.
Suggest substantive policies to improve conditions for Native Americans, absolutely, but the message transmitted by the land acknowledgements is not that.
The funny thing is they're so rote, I don't think they even actually do anything to get people inside the party to think more substantively about those issues, whereas I suspect the safety briefings at least made the office workers a little more cognizant of trip hazards.
this podcast should have a pillar that it will do everything it can to spoil a Newsom nomination. I say this as a Californian. He cannot be the nominee. We will lose be a million. It has to be a Shapiro or Whitmer type.
I think you are all wrong on the ballroom!
I don't know that I'm ready to go the full JVL and say it should be knocked down on day 1 of the next administration, but this ballroom is a giant pay to play exercise. Surely none of you are naive enough to think that the "private funding" isn't bribery or extortion?
I doubt that any of you would have defended President Obama, or President GWB, if either of them had up and bulldozed the East Wing, after lying that they would not, and then tried to fund the building of a ballroom by collecing money from people who wanted favors from the Admin or just wanted to stay on the Admin's good side.
I got the sense from the pod that your pro-ballroom stance was a special dispensaton to Trump, as opposed to a believe that future Presidents should also have a free hand to demolish various government structures they don't own (inclduing Trump's ballroom!). It makes me wonder if you in a kind of 5-stages bargaining phase? "Let him have his ballroom to play with if it sidetracks him from his mission to ruin the country?" I could appreciate that if I thought it woulfd work. Unfortunately he has largely delegated the job of ruining the country to people like Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, and Pete Hegseth.
I'm left to wonder if this is just cynical centrism on your part. Siding with Trump on this one just to not get your podcast categoized as being too left wing.
I don't think anyone is going to categorize this podcast as being too left-wing. The headline topics for the last two episodes have been about how the Democratic party sucks and needs to change to win more often (and not by moving to the left on some issues, good heavens no!). I'm being glib, of course, but I don't think there's cynicism in the way you describe it.
(I don't necessarily disagree with those observations about the Democrats btw)
Anyway, I don't really care that much about the ballroom thing. Yes, there's all sorts of problematic things about it, but given the incessant, daily drumbeat of "Look at me! Look at what I said!" outrages and corruptions bursting from the mouth and mind of the great leader, renovating the White House is pretty far down the list of offences to me.
Partly because of the industry I'm in, the thing that got me the most in this administration was the needless and cruel gutting of USAID. I know foreign aid is not high on the "we need to keep this" priority list of most Americans (people seem to think it's way more costly to the budget than it actually is), but in terms of sheer number of lives affected it's one of the dumbest and most heartless things this administration has done. Maybe that's not politically savvy of me to say -- I feel that "this is morally reprehensible" has pretty low valence as an argument these days -- but I think some things should be beyond politics.
I think the Democratic party is on the verge of sucking its way to national irrelevance, so I agree with you there.
But part of Trump's success is that he is nakedly, openly, brazenly corrupt, in a way that would have made Richard Nixon and Spiro "Taking bags of bribe cash in the White House" Agnew blush (not to mention any of their successors), but he gets a free pass on all of it, even from centrist good government types. The ballroom is open corruption.
There's a throwaway line by Megan six minutes in during the ballroom discussion, "You've just gotta zen it out", that is perhaps the most single telling line in the entire three episodes of the podcast so far. The idea being expressed is, essentially, "Yes, we all *obviously* agree Trump is bad," (and you can almost hear the exasperated sigh here), "but the real problem is how all of you people are complaining about it." It's the exact same sentiment from the first episode's discussion of the Portland protests, and the exact same sentiment in the second episode's discussion of immigration. It's a tag-line for the entire centrist position that the podcast seems to espouse: that the real issues with the world today are about how "the Left" isn't protesting against Trump the right way. And what's funny is the hosts never actually call out that the things being protested against are worth protest! They just carefully and consistently aim their fire at the protestors and turn their backs on the actions being protested.
This is the centrist problem on the whole: they're so focused on being "not the Left" that they twist themselves into knots trying to find critiques. I don't think this comes from a sense of *agreement* with the Trump administration, but rather from taking as granted that everyone can tell how obviously lawless it is that the hosts don't think it's worth their time to call it out. (Or alternately, they want to be able to proceed from the assumption that the Trump administration is awful without having to state it out loud.) But in that tacit refusal to call a right-wing spade a spade, while at the same time quibbling over the specific dimensions of the shovels the Left are wielding, they are providing rhetorical cover for the worst of the right and reserving all their criticism for the least of the Left. When you treat Trump with an air of, "Well, that's just Trump", but pretend naked cyclists in Portland are representative of the entire Left, you aren't being centrist; you're being disingenuous.
Three episodes in, this isn't a podcast for people who are genuinely interested in a middle ground between political excesses on the Left and on the Right. Instead it's a podcast for people who want to take pot-shots at the Left for the grammar on their signs while the Right tears a building down behind them.
In case you worry that this is just about the building, the entire discussion around (and indeed the point of) Deciding To Win is that Democrats aren't fighting for things the right way. "Yes, of course, the literally lethal vitriol the Right has towards the trans community is super duper sad, but the real problem is the Democratic Party talking about it." Deciding To Win is quite literally a playbook for the Center to fight against the Left for space! "We have a short-term need to have individual candidate brands that are bigger than the (D) next to their name?" is a super telling comment by Liam Kerr. They're not trying to get anyone on the right to "overcome the (R)" next to their names; just Democrats. Why is it always the Centrists vs. the Left, trying to cannibalize that space and ceding the rest to the Right? The *hostility* of Kerr and the hosts towards every Democratic candidate from the previous cycle, the disgust that is communicated solely from Center towards Left, it's just so tiring.
Also not for nothing, but suggesting a gubernatorial candidate say "I'm with the 70% to 80% of population that believes that we should be willing to discriminate against a minority" (Megan, at 28:50) is how you get Don't Ask, Don't Tell and decades of repression for sexual minorities. "I don't think that gender identity is important enough to be recognized by the state or federal government" (Josh, at 32:55) is the *exact* argument that was being made a couple decades ago about sexual orientation (schools should be able to prevent gay students from enrolling), and a couple decades before that about racial minorities (schools should be able to prevent certain races from attending). How you can want to hold that position is mind-boggling. If a Centrist position isn't, first and foremost, founded on basic civil liberties, then what the heck IS it based on?
Well, if you don't win a majority, you don't get to govern. Personal moral convictions are important to guide individual advocacy, (and hopefully effective persuasion of others) but a democratic system quite literally requires pragmatic compromise to win majorities.
Yes, some level of compromise is important to actually be able to govern. But I do think that some politicians get far too bogged down in strategy, that they compromise on their values so much, "oh I can't say this because people might not like it", that you start wondering whether they actually believe anything at all, or why they bothered even running for office in the first place if they're just going to abandon everything they actually care about. Harris was a bit like this, imo.
It applies to pundits too, including Yglesias and (I think) sometimes Josh. There's this kind of reluctance to talk about anything in strictly moral terms, because strategy is clean and morality is messy, or because you think you're above it all. It reminds me a bit of some foreign policy realists, who treat great power politics as like a giant game of Risk, divorced from trifling concerns like, say, human rights.
For me personally, I support trans rights because I think it is morally correct to do so. And I would have immense respect for any politician who stuck to their guns on the unpopular side of such an issue. Someone who could stand up and say (for example) "actually you know what, I think immigration is good, I think we should have more of it, and here is why".
Maybe I'm in the minority, maybe that's not smart politics, but not everything is about politics. And sometimes the majority is actually wrong!
True, effective and healthy politics is part compromise, and part persuasion. Additionally, the persuasion part often has to take place outside the roles of elected office, though, through advocacy in the cultural institutions and the public sphere. When law and public policy gets too far outside culture and public opinion, the results generally aren't good. The short-term high of imposing morality is tempting and may feel satisfying, but it's a fragile imposition, and can often generate an even stronger backlash. Jonathan Rauch has a good perspective on that.
I do hope the hosts will take a few second next week to share their views on the Lincoln bathroom renovation. :)
Let me ask it this way, "If a Democrst wins in 2028, should he offer to keep Donald Trump on as the official WH renovator/redecorator?"
Or at least Melania? When I saw a photo of the red Christmas trees, I thought they were from a "Handmaid's Tale" theme.
The campaign promise should be to rename the ballroom after Alvin Bragg on Day One.