The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Democratic Candidates Respond to the Conflict with Iran

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Next week’s debate, in Des Moines, was likely going to focus on health care and other domestic issues, but the agenda will probably be dominated by the Trump Administration’s killing of Iran’s General Qassem Suleimani and America’s history of war in the Middle East. The New Yorker’s Eric Lach, who is in Iowa, describes how the candidates are honing their positions. Plus, the contributor Anna Wiener reflects on the changing face of Silicon Valley; and the Moscow correspondent Joshua Yaffa describes how to succeed in Putin’s Russia. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you've gotten sick of seeing presidential candidates on television, in debates or in commercials, you might want to visit Iowa. There you can find candidates in the grocery store, in diners, maybe even delivering the sermon at church on Sunday. Or shaking hands and kissing babies like mad. We've been talking about the Iowa caucuses forever, it seems. And now it's just weeks away. The next debate among the Democrats is on Tuesday in Des Moines,

and the New Yorker's Eric Latch has been covering the campaign, and he's stationed in Iowa. Eric, I've been a journalist for a long time, but I've never had the pleasure of covering a presidential campaign, and I'm kind of jealous, to be honest with you. One thing is to watch it on television and read about it and so on. What's it like day-to-day covering the weeks running up to the Iowa caucuses? What do you do? Where do you go? What's it like?

Yeah. So, you know, it's a combination of, you know, the candidates putting together little kind of tours and you're trying to follow them and see what they're talking about and see what the rooms that they're in are like and talk to the people who go out to see them. But you're long past the living room and diner stage of campaigns, right? I mean, now you're in high school gyms and auditoriums and things like that. Yeah, although, you know, the scale with Iowa does not, you know, a big rally is still 800 people. It doesn't ever quite reach the kind of like arena size. The Iowa voters you meet tend to talk more about like, well, I've shaken this person's hand and I've shaken this person's hand and I'm going to make my decision after I've shaken this other person's hand rather than...

That counts for everything. Yeah, that counts for a lot, I think. Now, I got to tell you, Eric, if you'd ask me a week ago, I'd have said that the coming Democratic debate would be like all the other Democratic debates, which concentrated on domestic issues, Medicare for All, climate, all those things. Yep. But that's clearly changed with the killing of Qasem Soleimani in Iraq and the retaliation that took place Tuesday night. How has Soleimani's death shaken up the Democratic primary so far? In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Soleimani, you had kind of two ways that the candidates responded. On the one hand, you had Biden and Pete Buttigieg, most prominently, sort of issuing statements saying, Soleimani was a bad guy, you know, responsible for all kinds of bad things in the world, and nobody should be sad that he's dead.

But they were questioning the tactics and the timing and the administration's plan for moving forward. So it was a kind of tactical critique. Whereas what Bernie Sanders most notably did and Elizabeth Warren did and even, Andrew Yang is kind of come out and say, Soleimani aside, what we're against is a war. You know, the polling suggests that voters think that Biden is the strongest candidate on foreign policy. And Sanders, I think, wants people looking for an anti-war candidate to turn to him. The memory, I think, in Iowa of the 2008 cycle looms really large here, right? That was a race that turned on the question of war versus no war. And here you've got, you know,

a present-day question, not even a sort of retrospective question, but a live question of whether we should get into another conflict in the Middle East. I would have thought that this issue would be bad for Joe Biden, not good for Joe Biden, in the sense that Hillary Clinton struggled to justify her vote for the war when she was a candidate, when she was running against Barack Obama, when she was running against Trump. She was saddled with her vote in 2003 on the Iraq war. Joe Biden, the same thing. Bernie Sanders voted the other way and can say that,

every single day on the stump. And yet you're telling me that Joe Biden gets the highest marks for foreign policy. And I think it plays into a pitch that Biden's been making all along, which is like I'm the one who's been there. You can just count on me to just take care of it. Sort of it's less an ideological pitch than it is almost an emotional one in some way. It's just if you're looking at the current president and the current situation and you're anxious and nervous about it and you don't want to feel that way, let me just worry about it. Budajajad served about a half a year in Afghanistan, and he makes this part of his stump speech all the time. And I've got to imagine that it's a big part of his rhetoric when he discusses the

conflict with Iran and Trump's handling a foreign policy. Does it have any penetration with the voters in Iowa? I'll be curious to see how he talks about this at the debate, because that would seem to be his way of getting into a debate that otherwise as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he otherwise might not be able to sort of get into, you know, the way that he's framed it, and I think the way that might be the most powerful way to talk about it in the context of the conflict with Iran isn't as, this is my experience. I served in the military, but rather I'm part of the generation that made up the ranks of the military in the post-9-11 wars. and, you know, that perspective, facing the prospect of another Middle East war might be a powerful way to sort of talk about the situation.

I have to say in my memory of the Iowa caucuses and the races in Iowa in years past, it's usually a little more sorted by now. You've got recent polls saying that Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg are in kind of a dead heat. And then at the same time, I think you were telling me this on the phone the other day, there's a lot of undecisputed. voters a month out. A lot. And, and, you know, everybody here, a lot of people are like, nobody knows what's going on. A lot of people are bracing for, you know, there's going to be so many candidates represented on caucus night. You know, caucuses are not just going into a voting booth and voting by yourself, right? It's this kind of, you know, it's this public kind of like almost like voting melee or something, you know, where it's like everybody gets into a room and has to

go into the corner and then support their candidate and then rearrange. And it's, and there's going to be so many different competing interests. Like, like electoral. musical chairs. Exactly. You know, so, so, so that part of it, people are embracing for something very messy. People are also, the polls show it. When I go to events and talk to people, you know, you go to a Biden event, you say you're a Biden supporter. No, well, I'm just kind of still kind of weighing things. I'm still kind of considering things. And these are not, you know, quote unquote, low information voters. These are veteran, activist, veteran political, you know, people in the state who are saying, you know, I'm going to go into caucus night, not knowing where I'm going to go.

And I think the reason for that, I mean, there's a few reasons for that. But I think there was polling suggesting that voters were more interested in electability than values. So traditionally, you know, people look for candidates who share their values. And the polling early on this cycle was suggesting that people were looking for somebody who could just beat Trump. So that's the crucial point, isn't it? that what voters are looking for more than anything. And I'm not saying all of them, but a lot of them, and they tell pollsters, is who can beat Donald Trump? And what are voters saying about what's necessary to beat Donald Trump?

Because it varies wildly. Some people say I'm for Biden because he will have appeal in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Florida and the rest. Some people say that Bernie Sanders has the best chance because he has the passion behind him. He has the best ground game, which we used to hear about Elizabeth Warren. But there's more juice behind him, clarity of vision. How do you see it? Yeah, I think it's just a really hard thing for voters to wrestle with because it's not just asking them to vote on how they feel or how they think of themselves ideologically. In other words, look inward.

It's like they have to look outward. They have to make a kind of tactical choice. And like how is somebody supposed to sort that out for themselves? It's hard. When you were driving around east of Des Moines, west of Des Moines, north and south, and all around the state, who's got the most signs on the front lawn? Who's got the best ground game that's evident to you? Warren and Buttigieg are, you know, kind of the most ubiquitous, I think. You know, the yard signs, you know, it's a tough measure, you know, who's got the most billboards in the state?

Tulsi Gabbard. Why would that be? It's just a particular choice that her supporters made. She's also got these, rather than these little lawn signs, you know, the kind of like two foot by one foot little things that you just stick in with two little stakes. There's these big banners that are like maybe 20 feet long that you see around that people are putting up in their front lawns on two big, like almost like tetherball poles or something with these giant Tulsi signs. I mean, Gabbard has her diehard supporters here. They might not be numerous by the polls, but there's definitely people who have, you know, given over their front lawns to Tulsi Gabbard for the better part of a year here.

Why has Elizabeth Warren faded? Yeah, it's a good question. And it's a question I'm asking a lot of people here. The media's focus on Medicare for All and her navigating of her Medicare for All plan. You know, that's one theory. That said, you know, the polls are still kind of moving around. And this morning a poll came out and she was kind of back up nationally. And, you know, it's hard to say.

this upcoming debate here in Des Moines is a chance for her to remind her folks that she's still very much in it. You know, when people come away from covering the Iowa caucuses, they either come back thinking, this is the craziest way to run a railroad, meaning a democracy, imaginable, or they come back with their hearts singing about how wonderful and close to the ground this is. And it's the embodiment of American democracy. How do you feel about it? Both. Yes, is my answer. You know, these cycles have happened long enough in Iowa that it's not only that people are coming out to see the candidates this time, but that people have very long memories of past campaigns. And that's interesting and exciting and kind of admirable to talk to people who remember 2004, remember 2008, remember the 80s, the 90s, and are participating in a process that means a lot to them. over the long term. That said, why did the Democratic Party just spend a year campaigning in Iowa for the polls to more or less be at the same place they were at the beginning of the year? Why is the first state to vote a place that is overwhelmingly white? The caucuses are a very romantic

and interesting process, but it's a tough process to participate in and even in a really great year turnout, you know, never tops 20 percent. So, so, so, so it's still a kind of, it's, but hang on that. Turnout never tops 20 percent of registered Democratic voters. No. I mean, it's a, you know, it's a caucusing means you have to go to a caucus site at a particular time on a particular night and be there for three plus hours, uh, and navigate all of these complicated rules. and that's daunting and tough for people. It's a big investment, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I've talked to many people who are caucusing for the first time or for the first time in a while this year. And when you say why, they say, well, our kids are in college now. Our kids were growing up. You know, we couldn't go caucus. We'd be little kids. Who could really lose big in Iowa and come out of it really damaged among the front runners? And who stands to gain the most?

You can imagine a scenario where if Joe Biden, with his electability pitch essentially, comes in third or fourth, like, that's going to be tough to kind of explain moving forward. And you could imagine Pete Buttigieg is a kind of unproven and new face. You know, if he comes in fourth, that's also going to be kind of tough to move on from at the same time. potentially it's plausible that four different candidates will run the four early primary states and then Super Tuesday will come and nobody will remember what happened in Iowa anyway. So it's just kind of like nobody knows. That's the thing. What a mess.

Eric, we'll be reading you in New Yorker.com and hearing from you soon. Thank you so much. Thanks, David. Eric Latch is covering the primary campaign and you can find his reporting from Iowa and other states at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Around 1980, the prison population in America began to skyrocket.

But very few of us were talking about mass incarceration as a problem. Very few of us even knew the term. Until Michelle Alexander came along and wrote the New Jim Crow, one of the most influential books of the past decade. The New Jim Crow helped to frame mass incarceration, particularly of young men of color as a central issue of social justice. We have birthed a system of mass incarceration unlike anything the world is ever seen, and millions of people have been relegated to a permanent second-class status

in which they are stripped of basic civil and human rights, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, housing, access to education and basic public benefits. It wasn't a message people were eager to hear, but I think it is today much easier to see 10 years later. Michelle Alexander and others will join me next week to talk about what we've achieved and failed to achieve

in a decade since the new Jim Crow. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Josh Rothman. I write about technology, among other things, for The New Yorker, and I edit a lot of our tech stories. Anna Weiner is a contributing writer who worked for a few years in tech. She has a new book called Uncanny Valley.

It's a memoir of her years before she became a journalist working for startups in Silicon Valley. San Francisco was an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of aspiring alphas. It had long been a haven for hippies and queers, artists and activists, burners and leather datties,

the disenfranchised and the weird. A lot of writing about technology takes place in just a few locations, a boardroom where a deal is being struck, or a garage where coders are working on some new project. Anna's writing is different. It's cultural. It's about what it's like to live and work in Silicon Valley, and about how the culture of the valley shapes the technology that all of us use. Anna was there when the reputation of Silicon Valley took a nosedive

after revelations about Facebook and other issues, and she has an unusual perspective because she didn't think of herself as a techie. She's both an outsider and an insider. The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of Tech's dark triad. Capital, power, and bland, over-corrected heterosexual masculinity.

It was a strange place for young and moneyed futurists, The pleasure center of the industry might have just been exercise. People courted the sublime on trail runs and day hikes, glamped in Marin and rented chelets in Tahoe. They dressed for work as if embarking on an alpine expedition, high-performance down jackets and foul weather shells, backpacks with decorative carabiners. They looked ready to gather kindling and build a lean to, not make sales calls and open pull requests from climate-controlled open-pland-controlled open-plan. offices. They looked in costume to larp their weekend selves. When did you first get to San Francisco? What was it like?

I moved to San Francisco in the spring of 2013, so April. And so I was staying in an Airbnb in a bedroom, in a loft in Soma. And I realized not quickly enough that it was actually owned by one of the founders of Airbnb. So this was sort of like my first introduction to like startup Disneyland, which is what San Francisco really started to feel like the CEO of our company was 24 and he had started the company at 20. I think that I felt that this was anomalous to a certain extent to have a CEO who had no real work experience prior to this position, who was figuring it out as he went along, as we were all growing up, as the company was growing up. I thought that that was really unique to this company.

as I got a little older and I got to know more people who worked elsewhere in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, the extent to which we had almost identical experiences with someone who was just learning how to manage with a lot of capital and a fast-growing company and young employees who also didn't really know what they were doing. I don't know, there was a lot of being pulled into conference rooms, a lot of mind games, a lot of sort of behavior that I now understand as like a need to maintain power in a workplace because there was this like, you know, a lot of his employees were older than him. Right. But at the time I just thought I had just like found a completely unusual environment.

And it felt so improbable. It felt so improbable that this company was making something that was wildly successful and had fundraised $12 million. and that this should be working. So part of the mythology of Silicon Valley companies is that it's completely different. It's like a whole new way of doing business and it's a whole new way of running a company and you're throwing out all of these fusty rules and inherited hierarchies that are basically dopey. How much did you find that to be true?

In a lot of ways it's cosmetic, sort of superficial. The way that I wrote emails and publishing in a tech context looked like I was crazy. All my emails and publishing were like, I'd be like, Dear Josh, hope you're doing well. Here's a little call back to the last time I saw you. How's your mother? I was thinking of you the other day because I came across this book, and on page 43, there was a description of whatever.

And by the way, I have this favor to ask of you. I'm so sorry. really overworked, but if you possibly have time to do this, also I need to cancel our lunch. With warm regards, can't wait to hear from you, like fondly, Anna. In tech, the email

has no punctuation, it's all lowercase, and it just says, do you have that report? And so, as someone who was coming from this really florid communication style to this really fast, truncated communication style, that was really jarring, and it was also

was so exciting. Yeah. Could you say a little more about exactly what skills were that you had learned? They were like technical skills? So the company I worked for, I don't think we've even mentioned this, was a data analytics company. So I could sort of look at a block of code and see how our products had been implemented and understand how that had been done or done badly.

So if you had something like seamless and you wanted to implement this data analytics tool, it would allow you to track all of the ways someone behaved with that app. So if someone is searching for Thai food, which restaurants they click on, which dishes they add to their cart and then remove, what time it is, where they are when they're doing this, if they close the app. And so the idea was to track engagement rather than what had sort of been the industry standard, which was like the equivalent of page views. Right. This was to see what are people really doing inside of, on websites or inside of apps.

And not just that, but in what order? And how can you then kind of optimize people's behavior to achieve whatever goal you have inside of your apps? So interestingly, you sort of found yourself, it's like the part of the valley that now we are extra freaked out about, I guess, which is like this idea that when we open up an app or when we open up an app or when we're, we use a website were being, like, tracked and sort of maybe, like, manipulated in some way. Is that accurate? And it did feel weird that you could see all this data

about people's interactions? It feels weird now. At the time, I found it thrilling. I thought it was fascinating. No, I honestly think that it taps into this feeling of, that if you have a lot of data on what other people are doing, that really feels like knowledge.

And it feels there's something a little bit secretive about it. There's something, it's sort of like you're behind the curtain. It didn't feel like surveillance at the time. It felt like understanding how people were engaging with digital products. And that, to me, felt like sociology, or it felt sort of like anthropology in a way. Every month or so, we'd have like a happy hour for customers, and they would come to our office, and there would be all of these snacks, and a lot of booze and beer and wine. customers would come from other startups.

And the team I was on that kind of encompassed client-facing roles was called the Solutions Team. So the Solutions Team would sort of sit around our laptops and help people solve their problems over a beer. Everyone in the company was supposed to wear the company shirts. So we were all wearing T-shirts that said, I am data-driven. And I have to say it was hugely gratifying to meet people who were using the product, who had problems and I could solve them.

And there was no other part of my life where I was like, I can fix that. I'm highly competent. I have specific knowledge and can be like a little bossy about that. So while you were working at the analytics company, Edward Snowden leaked from the NSA all this information about how much data was being collected in the fact that the government was looking at it. And that must have had an impact of some kind. I think in general that Snowden was sort of a moral test that Silicon Valley kind of failed

just because I'm not quite sure what came of it. And so it wasn't until a coworker of mine actually sort of put together the dots and started to suggest that perhaps the product we were working on was tied to the surveillance economy and perhaps this concept of a neutral platform wasn't didn't quite hold water I think I really only personally like I had drunk the Kool-Aids

so significantly that it took someone from the inside to tell me what we're doing ties into these bigger political and economic forces that are not morally neutral. Yeah. And for me now

one of the biggest things that I think we need some regulation around is who can see data and where it's going when it's getting collected. So like if you're using, again, to use a seamless app example, if you're using seamless, you probably are aware in 2020 that they're collecting some information on your use of the app, but you don't know as a consumer because of the way this technology is designed that there are third-party tools that are also collecting data that are potentially then being shared with even more companies or that at these companies

that run these third-party tools, that there are someone like me who can see it. Right. So it just got me thinking a lot about employee permissions and access and just that there's no transparency around who has data, who owns it, what it's being used for, to what ends, how long it stays on a server, where does it go? I don't know, it's sort of, it's like dust. Yeah.

So the perception from the outside, the way we talk about Silicon Valley's changed a lot in the last couple of years. I mean, I guess since Trump, since 2016. Not long ago, basically the concept was, this is amazing and tech is amazing, and Silicon Valley is incredible, and we're really proud of it. Now we talk about it, like,

it's super dystopian. There's these manipulative overlords, and we see Silicon Valley is like this deeply money-motivated place that's, like, screwing up our democracy. What was your experience of that? shift? Yeah, I mean, largely it's a narrative shift, right? I don't think that anything changed in terms of the concentration of wealth or power or what

enabled that concentration of wealth and power. Everything has been in place structurally for decades to facilitate that. So I think it is more just the story that the industry was telling sort of was accepted whole cloth and for a long time by the media. And then around 2016, with the president of... presidential election, there was all of a sudden this sense of shirked responsibility and a lack of accountability and people felt lied to. And I think that also there had sort of been in large part of failure on the part of the media to take the industry seriously to treat it as like the

sort of powerhouse it would become. Like it was still kids in the garage. Yeah. When I think about what your book is about, and the book is called Uncanny Valley, and it evokes in that title the idea of a thing that presents itself as one thing, but doesn't quite, it isn't quite what it aims to be. And I wondered, I mean, is that right? Is that how you experienced that time? Do you think tech sees itself differently now than it did a few years ago,

or is that something we're doing from the outside? I'm not sure that the increasing amount of criticism or critique of the industry has led to a ton of introspection. I think of anything it has led to a lot of defensiveness to, I think people are really reluctant to relinquish this narrative of being underdogs, of being innovators, of just trying to experiment and make the world better. I think that the most honest and, like, the healthiest thing that people can do is just acknowledge that these are businesses, not cults or, like, mission-driven. in nonprofit organizations or something. So, you know, you moved out there in a state of relative, you were innocent. Do you think now, if you knew what you, if you read your book, do you think you would say,

I want to move out to Silicon Valley? I'm worrying that people listening to this conversation are going to think that they should move out to Silicon Valley. It's incredibly expensive. I don't recommend it. I don't know how people will read this. I think we're in a moment where a lot of industries, are struggling. There's sort of like an institutional erosion in many areas. I think that these are

some of the best jobs people can have in terms of compensation and job opportunity and not needing to have any particular degree or expertise. You can sort of just jump into a company and wiggle your way up the ranks. I think the popularity of the industry in terms of for people who are looking for job, it has to do with, it's a response to other structural factors that make Silicon Valley really appealing. Yeah. And so my focus would actually be on like how do we make it such that this isn't the most viable option for someone with a need for security or for a job that doesn't require an advanced degree. Yeah. Thanks, Anna. Thank you so much, Josh. Anna Wiener is a contributing writer who covers Silicon

Valley. And her book, Uncanny Valley, is out this week. The book has already gotten really spectacular reviews. You can find an excerpt from it at New Yorker.com. She spoke with Josh Rothman. I'm David Remnick, and thanks so much for listening. Please make sure to join us next time, because I'll be talking with Michelle Alexander about mass incarceration. That's next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Karen Frulman,

Kalalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Danny Bonner, Morgan Flannery, Allison McAdam, Monk Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Thank you.