Gail Collins and Bret Stephens enjoy each other’s company, before a cardboard dummy.
A couple of days back I tried to improve your moods by giving you some good news — although it was only good, I suppose, to me.
So back to bad news. Here’s some that should matter to everyone, but most people are probably entirely unaware of it:
After Eight Years of Challenging Each Other’s Politics, One More Chat for the Road
That’s a depressing thing I listened to on Tuesday, a thing that told me that after almost a decade (80 percent is “almost,” right? or at least almost almost) of setting an example for us all, Gail Collins and Bret Stephens were going to stop doing their weekly Conversation feature in The New York Times.
You’ve heard me praise it before. Here’s one example of the hagiography I’ve heaped upon it.
But if you’ve somehow missed it, here’s a brief explanation of what it was (you can read a longer one at that last link above): A weekly demonstration of how intelligent, civilized people discuss things about which they disagree.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but such things are rare as hen’s teeth. Encountering such a feature is like finding a flawless diamond buried in a trash heap — the trash heap that is current political discourse in America.
Our world in the Year of Our Lord 2025 is desperately short of intelligent people (or at least, they’re very quiet and hard to find). And almost no one has any idea how to engage in civil discourse. So when you find two people who possess both those qualities demonstrating an exercise in the amicable, mutually respectful exchange of ideas, you’ve found a seam of gold.
And folks, this is not just about being nice to one’s neighbor, although in truth there’s nothing finer than that. This sort of sharing of thoughts is a necessity in this country — or at least it was, when the system our Framers gave us was functioning.
Ours is a deliberative form of government. For it to work, people with different ideas have to listen to each other, and learn from each other, so that they can come up with solutions that may thrill no one, but that address the issue before them effectively, and in a way that makes the country better.
The way this system is made to function, it is the precise opposite of tribalism. It is the opposite of huddling into groups, and never speaking to people in other groups except to tell them how much you despise them.
I started this blog long ago to provide a place where people could come together and converse in the way Bret Stephens and Gail Collins have been doing these last few years. You may think that was overly ambitious, or at least overly hopeful, of me. But not really. When I started in 2005, such things were still possible, and we had a lot of really good exchanges. Oh, there were a few people who came to win battles, to demonstrate how much smarter they were than everyone else, or simply to shout insults.
But most participants weren’t like that. It was normal for a post to have 100 comments, or 200, or even 300 on rare occasions. I was startled when I realized that I was getting more comments in a day than The State got letters in a week.
At first, the trolls were very few, and I simply ignored them. But then, some of the very best commenters — the ones most like Gail and Bret — started falling away. Frequently, they would say that what caused them to quit was the rising tide of negativity. And we were starting to get more. So I tried various approaches to a civility policy. But the tide just grew higher. Something quite corrosive was destroying the collective American mind. And now, we live in a country and a world that is shockingly different from what we had in 2005.
I got discouraged myself, and eventually spent less and less time here. The days when I quite normally posted 10 times and more are long gone, and hard to imagine now. I’ve posted a couple of times this week, but it’s been a few days since I’ve glanced at the pending comments, and I see that there are 18 of them (what a sad harvest after the 300 a day of years gone by!). I know that a number of them will be of the unpleasant sort. Hear me when I say that I will not approve any of those. If they don’t show at least a hint of the attitude I find in one of those NYT Conversations, they’re gone.
As for Collins and Stephens themselves, what’s their excuse for stopping this constructive collaboration? They’re not discouraged. So why? Well, it’s the usual answer we get when favorite columnists go away for awhile — they’re writing books! Well, these are fine folks, and I’m sure these will be fine books.
But I don’t see how they’ll do the country nearly as much good as The Conversation…
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Re that cardboard dummy behind them in that still from a video at the top…
The fact that they started this eight years ago, in 2017, suggests that they did so BECAUSE of the advent of the Trump era, when it seemed that people from across the spectrum had lost the ability to do anything but shout at each other.
I can’t remember whether they addressed that in that NYT Audio conversation I heard on Tuesday, but in their last official “The Conversation,” Stephens wrote, regarding the positive response the feature received:
So the dummy at least contributed to bringing them together.
If you’re one of the ones-and-zeroes people, you’re probably jumping up in triumph to cry, “Aha! That’s why they got along! They were on the same side!”
No, they weren’t, and aren’t. As much as I tend to avoid the much-abused words “liberal” and “conservative,” they’re not misleading when applied to these two. If anyone in America is liberal, Gail Collins is. If anyone anywhere is conservative, Bret Stephens is.
If you believe there’s even a ghost of truth in the statement, “Conservatives like Trump,” you don’t know what a conservative is, and you really don’t know what Trump is. And maybe you should start reading something deeper than social media.
Doubt me? Who among pundits has been Mr. Conservative over the last few decades (or at least since William F. Buckley died)? Why, George Will, of course. Go catch up on his columns over the last few years. Or just read his latest (this is supposed to be a link I can share with nonsubscribers.):
Behold, the artful dealmaker Trump working his magic on Putin
And not one jot of George Will has changed. It’s just the common delusions of the crowd that have morphed…
This is what Slate had to say about the end of the column…
“For eight years, the two ideological opponents sparred weekly over Trump-era politics, in the jaunty manner of affluent people who did not themselves feel endangered by any of the policies or portents under discussion. “Hanging out with you like this for eight years was such a pleasure,” Collins said to Stephens in their final joint column. Unfortunately, the pleasure was all theirs.
For as long as opinion journalism has existed, overworked editors and program directors have sought to fill space and time by bringing together politically mismatched pundits and directing them to duke it out—but respectfully. These sorts of conversations can be entertaining, even illuminating, and can help build empathy and consensus in polarized times. The Conversation wasn’t that sort of conversation. Stephens is a tedious bore, and Collins is excessively nice, and in practice what this meant is that Stephens dominated the conversations while Collins laughed at his wordplay and rarely pushed back on his fatuous both-sidesism. In the context of this country’s most prestigious op-ed section, the Conversation always seemed like a bizarre waste of column inches—and, in the context of Donald Trump’s political resurgence over the past few years, its commitment to cocktail-party politesse struck me as tone-deaf, if not downright embarrassing. In the Conversation, civility reigned—and actual, productive debate was nowhere to be found.”
Yep, a lot of grossly immature people despise civility, and casigate it at every opportunity. Fortunately for them, there are places like Slate.
This is not such a place….
I don’t mind civility. It has its limits.
Too often the “let’s be civil” crowd is being run all over and, in some cases, losing rights or freedoms while they smile and shake hands.
But folks conversing and laughing off serious issues and allowing one person to dominate the conversation seems odd.
As a former supervisor of mine use to say, “sitting quietly and nodding along can also be rude ”
As my dad who spent a career in sales has told me more than a few times, “the guy standing in front of you smiling broadly and wanting to be your buddy could be stabbing you not in the back, but right between the eyes”
I never listened.
I tune into the Michael Smerconish show on Sirius 124 almost every weekday from 9am – noon (as I’m often driving somewhere). He is the most balanced talk show host in the country and it’s not close.
He also has excellent guests from all over the political spectrum. However, his show is not exclusively political. It’s mostly political.
But he spends a lot of time talking about the loss of institutions that use to bring people together: Bowling leagues, civic clubs, etc.. He frequently says people no longer “mingle” like they use to and it’s hurt America. He also agrees that the cable news shows, talk shows, and more and more politicians make money off of keeping people divided
He also talks a lot about the problems of lonely men and believes those realities hurt society overall.