The Argument

This week on The Argument, Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias debate the tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Jerusalem argues that Americans should have access to cheaper, climate-friendly cars, while Matt says industrial policy requires a more cautious approach.

They dive into the failure of Trump’s tariffs, what serious industrial policy looks like, and how the climate activists are once again missing the mark.

(0:00) The BYD car that can jump over potholes
(4:07) Climate activists miss the mark
(11:46) Setting the stage for war with China
(20:13) Protecting nonunion electric vehicles
(27:50) Let Jerusalem buy a...

Spirit Airlines is dead and the right, true to form, is blaming Joe Biden. 

The immediate cause of Spirit's demise is pretty clear: the war with Iran spiked jet fuel costs, and the already-battered airline couldn't absorb the hit to its bottom line. Last we checked, Joe Biden didn't start any wars with Iran. 

In this episode, Matthew Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas break down what really happened with Spirit Airlines, the weird history of aviation policy in the U.S., and the conspiracy by some progressives to reduce competition in the space. 

(0:00) Spirit Air...

Betty Friedan thought Korean POWs were dying in captivity because their mothers were housewives. She thought boy moms were making their sons gay. She wrote a whole chapter comparing suburban kitchens to concentration camps — in 1963, while America was still processing what concentration camps actually were. 

"The Feminine Mystique" is one of those important books that everyone "knows" but no one has actually read. 

For today's episode of The Argument podcast, Matthew Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas read and review the book that kicked off second-wave feminism. 

0:00-Introduction to The Feminine Mystique
9:02-Psychotherapy, Mad Men...

Matthew Yglesias wants to end asylum. 

On a new episode of The Argument, Matt argues that the post-WWII asylum framework is not just politically untenable but practically unworkable. 

Jerusalem Demsas, true to form, disagrees.

New episodes post every Thursday.

For an ad-free version, show notes, and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com. 

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New episodes every Thursday—subscribe so you never miss a debate...

For the past century, America's foreign interventions often carried the pretense of liberal idealism – to help bring peace and prosperity to people around the world. 

But it doesn't take a history scholar to know that positive outcomes weren't always the result. 

In the latest episode of the Argument, Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias debate the merits of liberal hypocrisy, its benefits and drawbacks, and whether it's worth bringing it back. 

New episodes post every Thursday.

For an ad-free version and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotif...

People tend to defend online anonymity by pointing to the long tradition of anonymous speech in American democracy.

But modern anonymity is an entirely new beast. 

Should we ban anonymity on the internet? That's what The Argument's Jerusalem Demsas and Slow Boring's Matthew Yglesias debate in The Argument's latest episode.

New episodes post every Thursday.

You can find The Argument on Substack, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Visit TheArgumentMag.com for show notes.

(Illustration by Th...

When the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities in 2023, finding that Harvard and the University of North Carolina practiced race-based discrimination against Asian American students, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it." 

The case, decided along ideological lines, caused a stir among progressives.

But was this discrimination the inevitable consequence of affirmative action policies? Or did it simply give cover to people with genuinely racist beliefs?

“The core problem with affirmative action — how it was being practiced, particularly at Harvard — is that they were just be...

Watch the official trailer for The Argument — a new podcast cohosted by Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias.

Has affirmative action gone too far? Should we abolish internet anonymity? Is liberal hypocrisy worth defending?

Welcome to The Argument, a weekly podcast from Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias, where two friends argue about politics, policy, and whatever else is on their minds.

This is a debate show for people who want the nitty-gritty without the typical screaming matches or softball interviews. Each week, one host argues a distinctive point of view — armed with facts and rese...

Are men naturally promiscuous and drawn to younger women? Are women obsessed with tall, older, rich men? Dating discourse is littered with pop evolutionary psychology that makes broad claims about how men and women are under a thin veneer of scientific credibility. But how much of it is backed by real science?

In this episode of The Argument, host Jerusalem Demsas interviews UC Davis psychology professor Paul Eastwick about his new book, Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection. Eastwick breaks down some of the memes and myths about what evolutionary psychology really says...

Economists love to say there are no free lunches. Jennifer Doleac thinks criminal justice is one of the rare places where that’s wrong.

In this episode, host and Editor of The Argument, Jerusalem Demsas talks with Doleac—economist and author of The Science of Second Chances—about what happens when you treat crime policy like an empirical problem instead of a morality play. 

Rejecting the false choice of being "tough on crime" or "soft on crime," Doleac surfaces a surprising number of reforms that can reduce crime and make the system more fair.

The A...

Trump didn’t just reshape the GOP—he may have ended what we used to call “the conservative movement.” 

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat joins host Jerusalem Demsas to map the new right: the collapse of fusionism, the rise of nationalism, and a media ecosystem where influencers matter more than institutions.

Then they argue about what liberalism can and can’t solve. Can abundance and faster growth stabilize democracy, or are the deeper crises cultural, spiritual, and demographic in ways GDP can’t fix? 

The Argument is a podcast dedicated to honest, unf...

Over less than 25 years, the opioid epidemic killed over 800,000 Americans. These deaths and the resulting economic and political ramifications were unequally distributed across the country. Some places were ravaged, others barely noticed what was happening. 

In this episode, host Jerusalem Demsas is joined by economist Carolina Arteaga to unpack new research linking the opioid crisis to increasing vote share for the Republican party. They dig into how a public-health catastrophe came to be a law and order issue, how conservative-leaning media covered the crisis differently, and how much of the shift can really be chalked up to p...

Children are a problem for liberalism -- and it’s one you can see in everything from school-board wars to fights over “indoctrination.” If all individuals are free and equal, endowed with rights by their Creator, then does that include children? Kids are fully human, yes, but they’re also dependent, impulsive, and not yet capable of adult autonomy. So when do rights actually kick in?

Rita Koganzon, a political theory professor at UNC Chapel Hill, has a blunt answer: adult-style rights have to start at a fixed age, and before that, children don’t really have any rights...

NIMBYism is usually explained as selfishness: homeowners protecting property values, or neighbors who just hate change. But a growing body of research suggests something simpler and harder to argue with: aesthetics.

What if people oppose new housing not only because of who might move in or what it might do to traffic, but because the building just looks “wrong”?

In this episode, Jerusalem Demsas talks with UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf about new experiments that test what actually moves support for apartment buildings—design, context, symbolic cues like “luxury,” and even whether an architect is describ...

 If we want to address racism, should we talk more about race – or less?

Matthew Yglesias argues liberals undermined their own principles when politics shifted from judging people as individuals to sorting them into moral categories based on group identity. We debate “the fox in liberalism’s henhouse,” collective blame, and why “accurate” generalizations can still poison a pluralistic society.

The Argument is a podcast dedicated to honest, unflinching debate about the biggest questions facing democracy, culture, and our future. As the host, Editor-in-Chief Jerusalem Demsas brings together voices across the political spectrum to argue, challenge, an...

A lot of Americans are uneasy about AI,  and so are many of the people building it. Yet we keep scaling and deploying these systems faster than we’re building rules to govern them. Why? 

The Argument's Kelsey Piper has a few explanations, from foreign competition to a sense of inevitability to a conservative party terrified of regulation. Even if the incentives are clear, our collective complacency is not, especially given AI models have already attempted blackmail and in one case attempted to smuggle itself to North Korea. 

Kelsey and host Jerusalem Demsas discuss why guard...

At the end of the year, I wanted to revisit our very first podcast conversation with some of my favorite liberal journalists. 

In our very first live show in Washington, D.C., Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias joined me for a disagreement-ridden conversation to tape the first episode of our new video podcast, The Argument.

We talk about why Matt spends so much of his time arguing with the left, whether Ezra thinks it matters “who shot first” as the right ramps up its attacks, why Derek picked a fight with the New Antitr...

Why is far-right populism on the rise? Political scientist Gabriele Gratton has a controversial theory: For decades, technocrats moved policy decisions — on austerity, climate, and more – away from the realm of mass politics and toward independent authorities, courts, and experts. The result? A populist backlash fueled by the desire to reassert control over policy.

In Gratton's telling, the populist backlash isn't irrational; it's a democratic response to elite failure. But his prescription isn't to abandon liberalism. This conversation explores how we got here and whether liberal democracy can course-correct before it's too late.

The Argument is a...

America's literacy problem is a policy choice. As schools shifted away from phonics toward guessing-based instruction, a generation of kids paid the price. But a quiet reversal is underway in an unexpected place. Mississippi rebuilt reading instruction from the ground up and saw real gains. If it worked there, why are other states so resistant to copying it?

The Argument is a podcast dedicated to honest, unflinching debate about the biggest questions facing democracy, culture, and our future. As the host, Jerusalem Demsas brings together voices across the political spectrum to argue, challenge, and persuade. Each episode...

Why do so many people believe immigrants are screwing them even when the evidence says otherwise? Economist Sahil Chinoy joins host Jerusalem Demsas to break down his massive 20,000-person study on zero-sum thinking — the worldview that assumes someone else’s gain must be your loss. 

They dig into how family histories of enslavement and immigration shape attitudes today, why young Americans are so much more zero-sum than older generations, and how economic stagnation fuels a sense of scarcity. They also explore why some policy fights (housing, redistribution, trade) trigger zero-sum instincts more than others, and what can actua...

Rising income inequality hurts democracy, health, happiness, and basically anything you can think of … right? 

Sociologist Lane Kenworthy doesn't think so. In his new book Is Inequality The Problem? Kenworthy argued that inequality is overrated as “the” cause of our problems — and discussed why the data pushes him toward a different set of priorities. Host Jerusalem Demsas is skeptical. Together, they dig into happiness, health, and populism, and they discuss why expanding the social welfare state might matter more than obsessing over the 1%.

The Argument is a podcast dedicated to honest, unflinching debate about the biggest q...

Climate activists spent a decade arguing that if Democrats passed a huge climate bill, created green jobs, and centered “climate justice,” voters—especially the young—would reward them.

They got their bill: the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in U.S. history. Then youth support for Democrats, Republicans tore key pieces out all while red states took the money and blue states made it almost impossible to build wind, solar, or transmission.

In this episode, Jerusalem Demsas talks with Rob Meyer, founding editor of Heatmap News, about what the last few years have revealed...

Silicon Valley’s sharp right turn didn’t come out of nowhere. Former tech worker and current tech writer Jasmine Sun walks us through how a once-solidly liberal sector became MAGA-curious. 

We talk about:

Sun maps the ideological split between the engineers who see themselves as the last “live players” in American so...

What if climate policy can’t survive voters, courts, and NIMBYs?

Bill McKibben is a pioneering climate writer and activist whose books and campaigns helped mainstream the case for rapidly replacing fossil fuels with clean energy. On today's episode, McKibben and host, Jerusalem Demsas, argue about the politics and economics of climate and discuss his new book Here Comes The Sun.

McKibben's case: sun, wind, and batteries are now the cheapest new power on earth and China is sprinting ahead while America stalls. But Demsas is skeptical about McKibben's political strategy, particularly when it comes to...

Why is free speech losing ground? From crackdowns on immigrants, protesters, and law firms to campus speech codes, social-media “jawboning,” and government pressure – we're witnessing the erosion of the free speech culture that once defined American democracy.

Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech organization. In this episode, he and Jerusalem discuss why defending free speech always means defending the unpopular, how bureaucratic cowardice and partisan outrage feed each other, and what a real revival of liberal tolerance would look like. 

The Argument is a podcast...

Economics writer Joey Politano joins host Jerusalem Demsas to explain the great tariff comeback story. From bananas and coffee to washing machines and Christmas ornaments, Trump’s new trade war is making life more expensive – but why? 

They unpack how tariffs actually work, why Trump’s obsession with them never went away, and what it says about America’s growing economic nationalism. Plus: why are politicians obsessed with reviving a 1950s manufacturing economy and can tariffs even make that happen?

The Argument is a podcast dedicated to honest, unflinching debate about the biggest questions facing democracy...

Was everything we did during COVID-19 a mistake — or are critics rewriting history? In this episode, Jerusalem Demsas talked with The Atlantic's Roge Karma about his reporting on “COVID revisionism,” which is gaining popularity across the political spectrum. The belief posits that not only were lockdowns, masking, and other public-health measures ineffective, but officials knew they wouldn’t work. 

Together, they traced how early uncertainty, mixed messaging, and political polarization created today’s crisis of trust in public health. They debated what the data actually showed about nonpharmaceutical interventions, how institutions weighed (or ignored) trade-offs, and what lessons we...

Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the Trump administration's Health Secretary, outdid himself. During a Thursday Cabinet meeting, he alleged that "children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism." This is part of Kennedy's ongoing quest to link Tylenol use in pregnancy to autism, a theory he previewed in September alongside the president. 

My guest today is worried about RFK Jr. Not just because some pregnant women may refrain from taking Tylenol unnecessarily, but because liberals seem to be missing what a dangerous political animal he really is. 

"As with Trump, liberals ha...

The day-to-day chaos of the Trump administration can make it easy to ignore slow-moving threats on the horizon — like the $37 trillion national debt. How can you pay attention to a crisis building months or years away when every morning brings reports of basic freedoms being stripped away?

In this episode of The Argument, host Jerusalem Demsas interviews economics journalist Jordan Weissmann about the U.S. debt crisis, whether Jordan's advancing age has anything to do with his sudden concern about the national debt, and how expanding social welfare programs may rest on taking the national de...

In our very first live show in Washington, D.C., Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias joined host Jerusalem Demsas for a disagreement-ridden conversation to tape the first episode of our new video podcast The Argument.

We talk about why Matt spends so much of his time arguing with the left, whether Ezra thinks it matters “who shot first” as the right ramps up its attacks, why Derek picked a fight with the New Antitrust Movement, and much, much more.

The Argument is a podcast dedicated to honest, unflinching debate about the biggest questions faci...