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Is there a lot of footage of him without a shirt on? Because I’ll tune in for that.
There is a fair amount —
Michelle. HR.
— of footage —
Ooh.
— of him —
HR is on the case.
He does not work for The New York Times, Carlos.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
From New York Times Opinion, I’m Carlos Lozada.
I’m Michelle Cottle.
I’m Ross Douthat.
And I’m Lydia Polgreen.
And this is “Matter of Opinion,” where thoughts are aloud.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I’m never going to stop.
Stop.
Don’t stop.
Just stop it.
Can’t stop, won’t stop.
All right, so this week, we’re going to try something a little bit different. It’s inspired, in part, by an exercise I used to do when I taught an undergrad class on political journalism. Every semester, for more than 10 years, I kicked off the first evening of class by having each student share the answer to the same question — what is your earliest political memory? And why do you think it’s stuck with you?
Sometimes the answers were very personal, like, I went to a rally with my mom or how I voted in my school’s mock election in the third grade. But often, they would kind of cluster together. So early in my time teaching, a lot of the answers were about there was something going on with the president and some girl named Monica, and my parents would stop talking about it when I came in the room. And it was Bush v. Gore. We didn’t know who the president was going to be for a long time. It was very confusing.
Then it was 9/11, and that was really the dominant answer for years. Like, it seemed to really kind of lay a marker down on a lot of people. And finally, during my final years teaching — and this made me feel super old — some kids were saying it was the election of Barack Obama.
Hmm.
Ooh.
That was exactly —
That hurts.
Yeah, I know. I know. That was my first, kind of most vivid memory. So I’d like us to do a version of the same thing with each of us sharing our own political awakening, those key moments in our lives, probably our early lives in which our worldviews and ideological leanings began to take shape. The reason is that, well, we cover so much politics in “Matter of Opinion,” and God knows with the election year coming, we’re going to do a lot more of it.
And I thought it would be useful not just for our faithful listeners, but for us, for each of us, to have a better sense of where we stand, but also how we came to stand there and how certain experiences from long ago can shape our political attitudes for the long haul. And after we wallow in memory lane, we can pivot forward and talk about the events and debates today that are forming the attitudes of the next generation of voters. Does that sound like a plan?
Let’s do it. I love it.
All right, so Michelle, why don’t you kick us off? What is your political awakening, so to speak?
Well, Professor Lozada, thank you so much for asking.
Michelle loves to be called on first.
I do. I didn’t even have to raise my hand.
Oh, teacher’s pet. Bring me an apple.
Mine’s a little bit odd, so just bear with me. So I did not grow up in a family that talked politics. Look, my parents were conservative. My dad was a down the line Republican, and I grew up in a conservative area. And my mother did not like to talk politics. So this just wasn’t a thing, which I think makes me probably not that different from a lot of Americans, who don’t spend their days obsessing over big P, Politics. So I remember in the summer of 1987 watching the Iran-contra hearings —
Whoa.
— on my grandparents’— you know, one of those big old TVs that was like the size of a Buick, and it had three channels. And it made that ch-ch-ch-ch sound when you turned the knobs. So I remember that, and I remember family members. It’s probably my dad, possibly my grandfather, talking about how Ollie North was a great American hero who was being railroaded by unpatriotic Democrats or whatnot. And it just didn’t occur to me that that wasn’t how the entire nation saw things.
And so it went on. I went to college, and I’m kind of living proof that the Republicans are right that college takes a good, God fearing, conservative child and skews them toward the left more.
Even Vanderbilt does that? Is nothing sacred?
Even Vanderbilt back in the day.
Oh, oh, especially Vanderbilt.
And my political aperture got broadened. And it wasn’t until much later that I just kind of realized the different ways that different parts of the country and the political world look at things.
Iran-contra was like the least sexy of all those big moments like Watergate. It was complicated. It was weird. People never quite understood what was going on. That was the one. That was the —
Yeah, that’s what I remember first.
Iran-contra.
Huh. We don’t get to choose our moment, I guess.
Yes, exactly, or the TV we watch it on.
Ross, how about you? What’s your —
Please tell me yours is sexier, Ross.
What’s your great awokening — I mean awakening, sorry.
Well, I mean, awakening. So I think I said on an earlier episode maybe that my literal earliest memory is going with my mother to a polling place in 1984 to cast a vote for Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. I remember my mother was very insistent that she was mostly voting for Geraldine Ferraro, which was not how America voted in that year.
I would say really that 1992, the ‘92 election, was the first election that I experienced in a serious way, where I was actually reading like news weeklies. Remember when those were sort of the center of political conversation? You’d wait to see who was on the cover of Time and Newsweek this week.
Ross, I hate to break it to you. We’re a news weekly right here on “Matter of Opinion.”
We are. No, that’s true. And people —
Podcasts have, in fact, replaced news weeklies.
People tune in every week, and they’re like, who’s on the cover? And it’s one of those covers where it’s political awakenings, experts weigh in.
Oh, I always hated that.
And you’re like, oh. Oh, boo. Boo. But yeah, ‘92 was a big year. I remember —
How old were you, Ross?
I was 12. I remember Clinton coming to — we lived in New Haven. He came, I think, to Wooster Square, to the Italian pizza area, and we went down to see him. My parents went to a couple Clinton rallies. We were big, big Clinton fans. This was the period when the term “family values” was in currency as sort of a statement of social conservatism. And my parents went to a rally with a sign that said our family values Clinton. You know, genius.
Ooh.
Genius, genius, genius stuff. And there was —
Oh, man.
I mean, they would make up limericks about Dan Quayle, right?
Oh, I’m sorry. Do you have any of these that you recall? Because I’m going to need that.
Danforth Quayle was white and male. He chose the guards instead of jail. Behold, he lived to tell the tale of courage on the campaign trail.
[CLAPPING]
Oh —
I think there were some others.
Wow.
— my god.
That’s the only one, but yeah, so I remember the election night. We had a puzzle, a state by state puzzle that you put together of the United States. And we were putting together the states, as Clinton and Gore won them. And my strong memory of that time is, to Michelle’s point, I was unable to imagine how anyone could cast a vote for George H.W Bush. He was just so awful, such a loser.
So square.
So square. Well, his voice —
Oh, I know.
I’m not going to do the Dana Carvey, but you know what I mean. So that and I guess to the extent that there was, obviously, some kind of transformation thereafter since I did not remain a Clinton Democrat, it happened before college because I do remember in 1996, when it was Clinton against Dole, and of course, if George H.W Bush was not the most likable Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole perhaps was not either.
And there was a moment where we were religious liberals, basically, but like many religious people over the course of modern American history, we were feeling a tug to the right. And I, looking to rebel against my parents and my environment, took that tug a lot further. But I remember ‘96 was the year when I was like, wait a minute, I kind of think I’d vote for Dole. And if you’ll vote for Dole, I mean, it’s over. You’re on the right. So —
Did your parents disinherit you?
I mean, they were sort of bemused, I would say, when I started reading “National Review,” and horribly disappointed might be another way of putting it, but we’ll stick with bemused.
Alex P. Keaton vibes. Did you have a briefcase and a —
Wearing the tie to high school.
Yeah, I mean, we were like — I did weirder things. I wore like those Scottish snap brim caps.
Oh, dear Lord.
And the fashion was to wear them backwards, right?
No, no, it wasn’t. No.
Oh, wow. You were so cool.
It was not.
Well, there was a moment. No, there was a moment when like —
I hate to tell you that.
— there was heartthrobs wearing them backwards. And I, of course, wore mine.
As a budding heartthrob.
— forwards, and for some reason, I didn’t acquire a girlfriend for a long, long time.
The mind reels.
I’m still turning that over in my mind, why that didn’t work.
Yeah, ‘96 was actually the first presidential that I voted in, that I was old enough to vote in. Yeah, yeah.
And you voted for Perot, right?
Yes, exactly. I voted for Perot.
Yes, all the way.
The straight Perot ticket.
Lydia, aside from your Perot campaign rally attendance, how about yours?
So mine was when I was very, very young, and my family was living in Kenya. This was 1982. I was six years old. And there was a coup attempt.
Wow.
Kenya, at the time, was governed by — I mean, one would say ruled by — an autocratic president who was a president for life named Daniel arap Moi, and a young kind of upstart — I believe that maybe he was in the Air Force and the military — mounted a coup. And it was both incredibly exhilarating to witness, but also completely terrifying.
At the time, we lived in Nairobi, and we lived in kind of a gated compound. And my brothers and my father were away. And so my mother and I, the two females, were by ourselves, but we were in this kind of guarded, gated compound. And what happens when there’s a coup attempt is like everything gets really chaotic. And so there’s just like a ton of looting. So my primary experience of it was that all of the domestic servants, who lived in our compound, went out to the shopping district, which was very near where we lived, called Westlands, and they helped themselves to all kinds of items. And I remember just sort of like opening the curtain and peeking out the window from our apartment and seeing one of the domestic workers who I knew carrying a giant refrigerator on his head. And there was a huge kind of flap of flesh that had been ripped from his —
Ew.
— face. And there was blood sort of pouring down. And I had this like immediate reaction of like horror and revulsion, but also like excitement that I think many journalists would recognize. And this is perhaps a little overdetermined that sort of witnessing this kind of thing like made me into a journalist, but it was this very sort of like searing, early memory. And I remember turning to my mother and saying, Mommy, Mommy, Westlands is open and all the shops are free. Can we go?
And my mother, who is Ethiopian and whose family had lost everything when a Marxist dictatorship overthrew the emperor, Haile Selassie, was like, absolutely not. We cannot go. And this is actually a terrible thing, and of course, my mother was terrified. But I was sort of enthralled. I think that that memory for me really sort of crystallized what political violence is all about and how deeply and sharply it can affect people’s lives. And seeing my mother’s response to it, thinking about my own kind of attraction and revulsion to it, was really, really formative.
And then much later, when I was in high school, we lived in Ghana, and I had kind of the reverse experience, which was the then military dictator decided to take off his uniform and run for office. And there was a true, free, and fair election. And I was 16 years old at the time. And it was really exciting and thrilling to watch that and to see how —
It wasn’t boring by comparison.
Yeah, this, to me, felt actually like even more exciting because I was like, oh, this is how things should be, and the contestation of ideas and blah, blah, blah. So those are the bookend moments that both sort of formed my political consciousness, but then also got me thinking about how we should be governed.
Oh, my God, Carlos, I would not want to have to follow that one.
No.
I’m desperate to hear Carlos’s story.
Carlos spent his childhood leading a guerrilla movement.
I knew it.
He set up this whole special episode just to have this escalation from Michelle and I’s sort of lame, “we watched something on TV”—
Right, sit in front of TV.
— to Lydia like looting in the streets. And now? And now, Generalissimo?
No, so mine is kind of a hybrid of all of the above. And I love these stories, the move left, the move right, seeing different kinds of politics in action. For me, the first one was right after my eighth birthday. We were living in California, and the hostages were taken in Iran. And I became fixated on this story. I thought it was the only story in the world, the only thing that mattered. Every night, on the local evening news, they had a little ticker at the bottom of the screen. And it counted how many days the hostages had been —
I remember that.
— held. And that’s why I always remember it was 444 days because I obsessively looked at that ticker. And it made politics seem really frightening, but also, it made it seem something that happened far away. It was sort of a distant thing. The next moment was a few years later, we had returned to Peru, where I was born, where my family’s from.
And suddenly, an uncle of mine on my mother’s side of the family became a very prominent cabinet member. We knew how hard he was working, what a difficult job it was. But he was getting all this criticism in the press and from political opponents. And I could see how it made my mom feel to see her older brother criticized and attacked in the media. And so it made me sad and angry. Also, I think I was like 11. And it became clear then, I think, that politics wasn’t just something that happened at a distant remove, but it was very personal. It felt something really up close.
And then the third thing, which, to me, was the most exciting one, was when I was in high school, and Peru was going through a lot of turmoil politically and economically. And suddenly, my favorite writer and great intellectual hero, Mario Vargas Llosa, decides to run for president. I was all in for Vargas Llosa as president. He was an intellectual. He was a man of ideas. He was opposing this like crazy lefty demagogue who was trying to nationalize the banking system and who had led us into hyperinflation.
To me, this seemed like the platonic ideal of what politics was supposed to be like, a man of the mind stepping in and leading the way. And of course, he lost to Fujimori, and I was just crushed. I was devastated, and the lesson that I sort of took from there — I don’t know that I knew it when I was 16, but I kind of came to conclude is that the life of the mind and the life of politics are not really compatible.
Hmm.
[LAUGHS]:
And I don’t know that those three experiences placed me somewhere on the political spectrum of left to right, but they did foster a kind of attitude toward politics, I think, a kind of skeptical, distrustful attitude —
You viewed it as dirty, didn’t you?
— about political life. Not dirty, just like — just kind of mean and scary and ultimately small.
Hmm.
And it’s an attitude I’m trying my best to pass along to my children.
Aw. Good parenting.
But anyway, that’s mine. And I guess, the one thing I’m wondering is, kind of where did these experiences, how did they lead you to think about being journalists who cover politics?
I was going to say, I’m really curious about Michelle, right? I mean, you were like —
This is what I do all day, every day.
Because this is what you do. This is like your vocation. And you’ve done it for years.
So I think what has been most useful for me, and I tend to be of the mind that it would be useful for a lot of people, is, I grew up in red state America, and I chose to run my career and most of my adult life in blue state America. But I neither vilify nor romanticize either.
Yeah, I mean, I guess in a way, I’ve had that experience in reverse, except when I became a conservative, I didn’t move to red America to ply my trade. I, in fact, live, once again, in Southern Connecticut. So I sort of occupy a weird — yeah, a sort of weird position as someone who is sort of culturally very at home in the environment in which I grew up and was educated and have lived much of my life, while having very strong political and religious disagreements with that world. We did this as political awakenings, but by the end, Carlos was doing sort of political formation, which I think is a little bit different.
And if I had to say, a more formative period for me was probably George W. Bush’s presidency and sort of coming into journalism right after 9/11 at this moment when the American right, and especially sort of neoconservatism, like the Weekly Standard, these publications that I definitely identified with strongly at the time, were sort of very certain about their place in the world, the coalition they were leading, what they were trying to do, and then having it all come to grief across the Bush presidency, again, at a time when I was from age 22 to 27 or 28. For some people, that probably would have swung them back to the left. For me, I remained a conservative, but I probably gained some of the skepticism, pessimism, disillusionment, whatever that we associate with Carlos.
Yeah.
I mean, George W. Bush in 2000, when he ran as a supporter of a humble foreign policy, a compassionate conservatism in domestic policy and some kind of Christian infused politics, I often think that before — I don’t think I actually cast a vote in that election.
Bush v. Gore?
But that was probably the last —
So you’re why we had that problem.
I’m why we had that problem. Because I would have voted for Nader. But in an odd way, there has actually never been a Republican candidate since then, including Bush in 2004, whose stated worldview was as close to my own. And here we are, 24 years later, I’m still waiting to recapture the magic.
Waiting for JD Vance to run.
Speaking of that, actually, that’s actually not a terrible place to pause, now that we’ve shared our own political origin stories. We’ll take a quick break, but when we’re back, we’ll look at the disillusion that may be affecting the current generation of voters, and what are the big debates and battles of this moment that are shaping their views and their politics.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Let me return for a second to my classroom because it is not —
Professor.
Oh, captain, my captain. I’m going to stand on a chair for you, Carlos.
Be gone, J. Evans Pritchard.
Oh.
This class that I taught on political journalism was a weekly seminar in the evening. And as luck would have it, I was scheduled to teach class on the evening of Wednesday, November 9, 2016, less than 24 hours after Donald Trump had become President-elect Trump. That, by the way, was the first election I ever voted in the United States because I’d just become a citizen. So you can blame me or thank me.
And I felt more like a therapist than a professor that night. We set aside whatever readings we were going to discuss, and we just talked for three hours. And when I think of those students, who were 19, 20, 21 years old, and their response to that moment, I think of that as part of the trifecta of issues that we normally think about as affecting this new generation of voters, right? 9/11, the Great Recession, and Trump’s election shaping kind of millennial attitudes. Those are three biggies, but I’m wondering, are there other things that you see having a big impact on the new generation of voters?
So the thing that immediately pops to mind for me is actually something that happened in 1999. And that’s the massacre at Columbine. My parents, I think all of our parents, except maybe yours, Carlos, grew up in the age of duck and cover, the fear of nuclear annihilation and hiding under your desk, and drill, drill, drill. And then we grew up in the glorious aftermath of the end of the Cold War and the end of history.
The interregnum.
End of history.
And I think that sort of, for many of our generation, gives you a sense that change can happen and that big political change happens, and that change can be positive and progressive in these ways. And I just like — I don’t know. I think about a generation of kids who have been trained to hide under their desks from a school shooter and live in a political system that will do absolutely nothing to address that.
So I don’t know. I think that. I think climate. I think these sort of big, unsolved — what feel like big, unsolvable problems, in ways that are more diffuse, but I think, quite powerful, are, to me, I think a big contributor to why young people today might feel the various ways that they do about politics.
Although I do think that it is overstated how, I guess, not disillusioned, but disaffected they are, or how out of touch they are. In my experience, it looks like they’re doing exactly what young people are supposed to do. They’re getting involved in the issues they care about, whether that’s reproductive rights or LGBTQ rights or climate change or mass shootings. They’re going out there. They’re getting involved in these —
Restoring Catholic monarchy, too, right?
Yes, I can’t tell you how many 20-somethings I hear, how often I hear them talk about that, Ross. I have a 20-year-old and an 18-year-old. And even if they’re disappointed with a lot of the politicians and the establishment, they care about issues, and they find other ways to get involved. But this is what young ‘uns are supposed to do. They’re supposed to be disgusted with their elders and the way things are and the establishment. If you’re not, then you’re not really living it, I guess.
I think that’s sort of — I mean, we’re all Gen Xers here, but isn’t that kind of like a baby boomer ideological perspective on, oh, the young are always supposed to be disgusted, and so it’s OK — I mean, it seems a little silly. Why can’t the young be happy with the society they’re entering into?
Because, then, they’re not separating from the older generations, and they’re not getting independent and on their own. It’s why you get disgusted with your parents.
But the way you join an older generation is by emulating their — I mean, I think the core challenge of the entire Western world right now is, you could call it a failure of emulation or a structural inability to emulate the successful life transitions that older generations went through, meaning that people are waiting much longer or not at all doing things like getting married and having kids and buying homes and all of these things.
And it’s not clear to me that sort of feeling disillusioned with the system and politically radical is actually what you need in order to enter into adulthood. It seems like there’s sort of a depressing cycle here, where young people embrace ideologies of pessimism and despair that then justify sort of drift and aimlessness because the world is so —
I’m not talking about pessimism and despair.
Hey, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Pessimism and despair? I mean, do you think —
That’s just you, Ross. That’s not kids today.
I’m not pessimistic and despairing. I intend for my progeny —
About American society?
My progeny will inherit the Earth while other people’s progeny waste their lives playing video games. And I have no despair whatsoever. I think it is an empirical fact that young people, especially, in America are more pessimistic, depressed, despairing, and suicidal.
Everyone is.
No, not everybody. We’re making generalizations. We’re doing punditry.
Yeah, we are making generalizations.
I’m making a generalization. They’re depressed and unhappy. They think climate change is going to destroy the world. They think there’s no point in reproducing, et cetera, et cetera. These are generalizations.
It all comes back to reproducing.
I mean, sort of. Yeah.
I’m sorry, but having spent time with young activists who are incredibly devoted to — whether it’s the Sunrise Movement, which is a group of young climate activists that have pushed the proposed Green New Deal, or the Parkland teenagers, I think that their orientation is towards trying to build a future that they want to live in and that they want to raise children in. And just because it doesn’t comport necessarily with your vision of what that might be, I think, I mean, to act is to be optimistic. To sit in your basement and play video games is to be resigned.
And I see a lot of action. I mean right now, we’re seeing marches in the streets. There are people who are marching against anti-Semitism. There are people who are marching in support of Palestine. And to me, that speaks to a desire to make change happen in the world. We also saw a very vigorous March on the Capitol on January 6 that included a lot of young people.
Older. Mostly older. Some older people —
There were some young people, too, so.
— were involved in that, yes.
So I think people are enthusiastic. Yeah, sorry, Carlos, you were trying to jump in.
No, no, no, no, no. I mean, I think there’s a difference to reconcile these two irreconcilable worldviews. There’s a difference between disillusionment and apathy. You can be disillusioned with the political system and be entirely active outside of it. I read a book back in 2015 called “Running From Office” by a couple of political scientists, Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox. And they were looking at young people’s engagement. Just even saying young people makes me feel like I’m 1,000 years old. The young!
Le jeune.
Yeah, looking at political engagement on the part of young people, and their basic argument is that young voters growing up in the environment that we’ve just described are increasingly turned off from formal politics. They don’t talk politics with their families. They don’t follow it as closely. They believe politicians are fundamentally dishonest and hypocritical.
But politics isn’t just a series of positions that you hold, right? It’s like a thing that you do. And a lot of these young people they spoke to were eager to have an impact, a political impact, but just doing it through activism, business, nonprofit work, the arts, technology, other arenas beyond the arena with which they are perhaps rightfully disgusted of formal politics.
And that’s fine to me. Like, the authors were very concerned. They were troubled by the kind of lack of formal political engagement. But I think that there are ways in which that is a fruitful response.
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of the “kids today” because we take exception to how they’re getting involved or acting, or we forget that “kids today” has been a complaint for literally as long as there have been kids. So just because they’re not going through what we think they should does not necessarily mean that it is a tragedy.
OK, one, they say that they’re unhappy. They — again, generalizations. Not every teenager in America is unhappy. There’s a lot more teenage and twentysomething unhappiness than there used to be. Two, I see no evidence that “kids these days” is a major complaint, especially among the kind of people who subscribe to and write for The New York Times. I think it’s quite the opposite. There’s a slavish docility in the face of immaturity of like, oh, the kids, they must know so much, because they’re younger than me.
And in fact, the kids don’t know anything. They aren’t getting any guidance about what to do in their lives. They’re unhappy about it. They’ve decided the world is a terrible place. And grownups, meaning Gen Xers and baby boomers, are walking around, scratching their heads, saying, well, I guess they’re just going to figure it out. No, in fact, they won’t figure it out unless you tell them what is worth doing in life.
But what are you going to tell them, Ross? I mean, honestly, like what are you going to tell them?
Get a job, get married, have kids. That’s what I’m telling them if they’re listening to this show, the kids. That’s what I’m telling them.
That’s the Ross program, but I think that they’re also — like, I mean, I think about —
That’s a human program. It’s not a Ross program.
But like —
It’s not a program for everyone, but it’s a program for a large majority of people. That’s what you should do.
But just let me push back a little bit, right? Because I think that there is — I mean, I think that there are sort of fundamental things that have shifted and changed. I don’t know if you all read there was this big report in “The Times” that was done in partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation about basically how old people are just going to go broke because there’s not enough money to care for them, and we don’t have these systems of care. Michelle, I know I’m singing your song here.
In it, it describes a 35-year-old woman who moves back home to help her mother who has a stroke. And she gets $15,000 into credit card debt. And you’re just sort of reading these harrowing stories. And this is just like another lens onto like how —
No, do we think that these stories are more harrowing than the world of 1947? Like, this is just insane. America is the richest country in the history of the universe.
We’ve been through two generations where there have been expectations that life is going to get better, that things are going to get better, that there’s going to be progress, that you’re going to be richer than your parents were. And we are looking at a generation that is going to be materially much worse off.
No, they’re not. There is absolutely no evidence that that is the case. Gen Z and millennials are not going to be materially worse off than their parents and grandparents. That is a falsehood. Our incomes are not growing at the pace that they did after World War II. There is a problem of stagnation. But the claim that Gen Z is going to be worse off is not true.
I want to push back just a little bit on your kids saying they’re so supremely unhappy. I mean, obviously, post-pandemic, we’ve had a bad mental health crisis, and yes, kids have stressors that are different than they used to be. But the one thing that you also see, at least from my kids and their friends over the years, kids know how to express what’s going on in their lives. And they know how to tell you what they need.
Now, that can go a little far, and everything can sometimes feel like it’s pathologized. So if you’re sad, you’re depressed. But you know what? That’s happening with adults, too. Whereas I know plenty of people who had terrible trauma growing up that are our age and older, and they never could speak of it. They didn’t have the resources. They didn’t have the language. So I do think there is a little bit of that as well. It’s just, there’s a more open way of talking about your unhappiness or whatever. And you can hate that if you want to. I sometimes do. But it’s not just that, oh, everybody used to be great, and everybody’s so miserable now.
I mean, Carlos, do you think that sort of optimism about the future is sort of a necessary ingredient here? I mean, why are we expecting that?
When I talk to my kids who are not yet voting age so they don’t matter, they —
Harsh.
Well, you should get extra votes yourself as their guardian.
I really should.
Don’t start on the universal voting, Ross.
Vote early and often.
No.
My oldest is 15, and he has basically grown up under the looming presence of Donald Trump in American political life, even during the Biden presidency. And for him, it’s not that, oh, things are terrible, or, oh, I’m going to go become a climate activist. And it’s not necessarily a turnoff from politics. It’s that he feels that the stakes of politics, at every moment, they seem to be enormous, all the time.
Most important election of his lifetime.
Yeah, and —
I blame us for that.
And so that’s — yeah, well, that’s a yes. But I think it’s really that the sense of existential stakes is ever present in so many different aspects of their lives. Lydia, you mentioned some, whether it’s climate or gun violence. Like there were bomb scares at my son’s high school recently, bomb threats —
Oh, wow.
— that were called in. This is just the way that the kids today, et cetera, have to live. And that sense of existential threat just looms over political life and I think makes it hard to have the kind of optimism that Ross would want us to have so that we can all continue procreating and walking hand in hand into this future.
Let this be the last thing that this persona that I’m putting on says, which is that I think that the mood of pessimism, existential stakes, et cetera, that younger people are sort of marinating in, is not self-created. It is created by older people, mediated through the technology of the internet.
And it’s not clear to me that the stakes faced by young people today are more dire than the stakes faced by a young Carlos Lozada in an unstable Peru or a young Lydia Polgreen in an unstable Kenya, or even a young Michelle Cottle and a young Ross Douthat in the end of the Cold War, Reagan ‘80s, threat of nuclear annihilation still hanging over us, all of that. It’s not clear to me. I think the internet creates a sense that the stakes are always higher than they were in the past. And I am skeptical of that, pending the UFO invasion.
Listen, I so appreciate you all going down this road with Professor Lozada.
You’ll be getting your evaluation later.
I just hope you believe in grade inflation because we all need to be A students.
Let’s leave it there. Before we get Hot, Cold, I want to ask our younger listeners, say, if you’re like under 30, what are the formative political moments that have shaped your worldview? If you think of yourself as a younger millennial or a Gen Z, or even younger than that, share your political awakenings with us in a voicemail. That’s the thing when you use a telephone to actually speak to other people. You can call 212-556-7440. We’d love to share what you have to say in a future episode. We’ll be right back.
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It’s time to get hot or cold. Who’s hot, colding this week?
I am.
Ross.
I am hot on the Netflix documentary, “Beckham.”
Mm!
It is, as the title suggests, a documentary about the English soccer/football star David Beckham, his early career, his relationship with Posh Spice, a.k.a. Victoria Beckham. And I, as an American and American sports fan, was aware of Posh and Becks, like everybody in the late ‘90s. But I was not like intimately familiar, for instance, with the extent to which he became a national scapegoat for England’s loss in the World Cup.
So there’s a whole sort of drama of his early career and his relationship. But it’s also a really interesting documentary to watch in the age of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce because it’s sort of a weird sort of synchronicity, a sort of parallel, of the sports star and the pop star —
But totally inverted, right? I mean, she’s way more famous than he is.
Right, Taylor is more famous than Kelce.
Than the football guy, whose name I don’t even know.
And then the guy from the Chiefs.
And then the guy from the Chiefs.
Whereas Beckham is much more famous than Posh Spice.
Well, but what’s interesting is that the moment when they meet, the Spice Girls are the biggest band in the world, and he’s a star, but he’s a young star just sort of starting out.
Huh.
She repeatedly says, I love watching him play, but I don’t really care about football. I think he says he sees her on TV, and he tells his mates, I’m going to marry her. To watch the documentary, it’s sort of rare in this age when it’s hard to even make a romantic comedy anymore to just see a show where you’re seeing like they were really in love. They were really young and really in love. And he was messing up his career and making his coaches mad. And it’s sort of a fascinating love story to watch.
Ross, what I love is that you’re such a softie.
I believe in love.
You’re a sucker for a love story.
I mean, America needs Travis and Taylor to watch this documentary. Like this is our love affair.
OK, Travis and Taylor 2024, you heard it here first. Thank you, guys. We’ll wrap it up there. And we will be off for the Thanksgiving holiday next week, so see you back here in December. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Oh, you as well.
Oh, same to you.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Take care, guys. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Matter of Opinion is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It’s edited by Alison Bruzek. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Engineering by Efim Shapiro, Sonia Herrero and Carole Sabouraud. Special thanks to Alex Brownstein and the Princeton Broadcast Center. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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