The Opinions - Why a Good Political Argument Is Like Good Sex

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

The Conversation has been a staple of The Times’s Opinion pages since 2017. But after eight years, the weekly dialogue between the liberal columnist Gail Collins and her conservative colleague Bret Stephens has come to an end. The editor Aaron Retica joins Gail and Bret to answer reader questions and discuss how they’ve managed years of civil conversations — for the first and last time in audio.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. The rest of the show's production team includes Vishakha Darbha and Jillian Weinberger. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Aaron Redica. I'm an editor at large in the opinion section of the New York Times. In that job, I work a lot with a number of our columnists and one of the great joys, really one of the premier delights of my life here, is that I get to work on something we call in the conversation, which is a weekly dialogue between two of our columnist, Gail Collins, who's standing in for Liberal American. and Brett Stevens, who's standing in for conservative America. It appears every Monday morning and is a crucial part of the agenda setting and sort of thought world of the opinion section. I'm sorry to say that after eight years, this particular iteration of the conversation is

coming to an end, but we didn't want to just let it kind of drop there. So I brought them together in the studio. They're sitting right next to me to reflect a little on the years they've been doing this, what the future might hold, really just to give us one last, conversation in audio form. And in the last written conversation, we asked their readers to send in their thoughts and questions for Gail and Brett, and they did so by the hundreds. You did so by the hundreds. So I'm going to try to incorporate as much of that material into the show as I possibly can. Gail, Brett, welcome. Thank you so much for coming in to do this. Hi there. Great to be here. Thanks for

having us. the people who are listening to this who have no idea what the conversation is, let's just lay out what it is that you guys do. Well, we go back and forth. One of us begins and thinks of a general topic to start with, and we actually email each other. And what you're reading in the paper is the emails that we sent back and forth to each other, just saying, okay, what about this about Trump did? Or if I ever get desperate, I always say, well, okay, why can't we have taxes for the wealthy, and then that will distract him from whatever good points he is making at that point in time. But it's a really fun way to have the kind of conversations that I think people miss having anymore.

Yeah, I mean, for those who've never encountered us, it is a conversation in a conversational tone between a liberal and a conservative columnist who, despite their political differences like each other and are prepared to sit down at a metaphorical table. The metaphorical glass of wine. And sometimes not metaphorical. Sometimes not metaphorical happen. And shoot the, I guess, the breeze for the better part of an hour. And we've done it week in, week out for eight years.

And we're just bringing it to a close now because we have books to write. I mean, it's been kind of amazing that the easiest thing we do has been, the most popular thing that we do. And I can't tell you how many times in how many settings someone has approached me and said, is Gil Collins as funny in real life as she is on paper? You know, a story I tell in our last conversation. I was standing on a street corner in L.A. Just minding my own business. I think I was waiting for an Uber. And some total stranger comes up to me and he looks at me and says, you're Brett Stevens in this kind of nice way. And I thought, I'm being recognized.

Yes, I am. And then he laughed and he said, Gail Collins is my favorite colonist. I had to laugh. I called Gail right away. And that was what the conversation really was about. I think it was not just between us, but it involved so many people from all over the country

who in their way participated. And Brett is the kind of person who would tell you a story like this. I mean, that's why people really love him so much, reading him so much. But I have said to him, too, that walking around in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is the most liberal democratic neighborhood in the entire universe, probably, people are always stopping me and saying, hi, how's Brett, Wes, how's that going? How's he doing? You know, they really love, feel like they're talking to him, too. Yeah, but their following question is, is he dead yet?

Not exactly, no. We have a lot of reader questions that I'm going to turn to, but we want to first almost demonstrate a little bit about what the conversation is the big story, obviously, over the eight years that we've been doing this together, has been the transformation of the Republican Party. It is no longer the party, Brett, that you were an enthusiast of, right? It's completely, almost totally different. We're all different ages, but we all grew up to some degree with Russia being the enemy and Reagan talking about the evil empire and now Russia is our best friend, right?

And that's just one example of so many. On so many subjects, you know, I think. think of the Republican Party as like upside downistan. I mean, you know, I grew up as a youthful believer in the virtues of free trade. I remember Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain talking about the importance of comprehensive immigration reform, international relations, a strong NATO, partnerships around the world, a tilt against. the old school isolationism that defined the Republican Party in the 1930s and early 1940s. All of that has been upended. And so, you know, I remember in my parents' generation, they would sometimes say,

we never left the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left us. That was a cliche of the time for a lot of Reagan Democrats. And I am on the other side of that, which is that my views are pretty much the same as they were, say, 10 years ago. It's a Republican Party that's just marched into a dark place. And so it's really a challenge trying to have arguments sometimes because he really does hate Donald Trump more than I do even, I think, possibly. Can we talk a little bit about the degradation of public discourse that's come with us? I mean, you're talking about and so was I, about the ideological changes, right? But there's also just been a sea change in the way people perform politics, and I don't mean perform in some kind of negative sense. I just mean do it, right? You have

people really in fear of mobs being unleashed on them online and also sometimes in real life. How much of that is because of Trump? Like, is he a symptom or is he a cause? And how much, what do we have to do to make that change? Because it seems like we're not going to change any of the rest of this if that doesn't change. Get used to the idea that the best of the best of biggest change in American politics in our history, I always thought, was when people who were living in towns around the, who only knew they belonged to a party but didn't know anything else, didn't really have any sense. And it was just their little town things that were going on. Suddenly they started getting newspapers and mail and realizing, oh, my God, there's a national thing

out there and we should look and who the heck is Grover, Cleveland, or whatever. But that was so transformed, you know, right there in people's lifetimes from a thing that was very local and regional to this national argument. And now it's happening for a second time. And it's equally as thunderous. You're talking about the social media revolution and the media revolution. No, it's true. There is no longer a felt need among the political class to talk to people on the other side. The felt need is to talk to the extremists on your own side. Growing up, I had the sense that politicians at the fringe realize is they had to bend to the center in order to gain respectability and broader appeal. Now, the politicians at the center are always bending towards the fringe.

And I think that's especially pronounced in the Republican Party, where so many of the senators, governors, whatever, know perfectly well. And they'll tell you privately that some position is a lunatic position. But their public posturing is always for the sake of preventing a primary. And Gail is right, social media, which brings together these sort of accretions of like-minded, angry people has been a huge driver of that. So Trump really was a symptom of this new technology that created this angry, vitriolic, and increasingly polarized mood. So is there a recourse? Like, how do we get out of that? How do you push back against it?

Well, it's not easy, and we won't know in a way because more media stuff will happen all the time and things will change. But it is interesting to me how wildly enthusiastic people are about the idea that Brett and I can have a conversation and not screaming each other. It's just, clearly there's a hunger for that out there. Yeah, I was always fascinated by the fact that if you looked for the conversation online, like on social media, we basically had no presence. And yet our numbers in terms of New York Times readership, which is not, it's not a small number, were incredible. And you know, you and I would marvel like, gosh, this piece is just, you know, rocketed northward. And how is that even possible? And I think it's because social media's algorithms are built for outrage.

And our algorithm, if that's what you want to call it, was built for something entirely different. And people, I think there is a silent majority of people who want a really different tone in political conversation. They just don't know where to find it. Or how to do it themselves, right? So let me turn to the first reader question because it's kind of on point. To the readers, if I'm asking your name, I'm sorry, I'm just reading them. But Linda Musuris, who's from Cambridge Mass. Like, how did you guys do this?

Could you kind of just explain that process? talk a little bit about how you decided topics. How were you going to go back and forth? We should just lie about this. Or just, you know. We'll never tell. We'll never tell. Go ahead. No, it's actually, it turned out to be very easy. Many people think we actually talked to one another and then got written down.

But there'd be a day, Brett is such a genius traveler that he can do all this on airplanes or in kayaks or whatever on a laptop. Especially kayaks. Yes. Yes. Kayak was my specialty. I can't do that. at home and my, but I'm doing stuff like this, but we just, you know, the day goes on and I write him a thing and then he writes a thing back. And because we've been doing it for a long time now,

we kind of know which things will lead into other things and, you know, make sure that we're not being too cranky or too glib or whatever. Yeah, I mean, it was important that we worked hard to keep it light. One of the analogies I've had in my mind as we've done this is that we're like playing tennis, not with the purpose of scoring points, but just keeping the ball in the air and not being too fussy about trying to win an argument. You know, so at no point where we're spending time like going to the side and looking up some killer data point to, you know, completely refute whatever crazy thing Gail just said.

It was just the idea was keep the ball in the air. We arrived at this court as friends and we're going to leave as friends. and we're going to do it every week. That was, I think, the frame of mind that was central to the enterprise. Okay, so that brings us right to the question that Wyatt, Franz, he's in Phoenix. When it comes to having a proper discussion

with someone who's coming from a different political perspective, how do you feel the best way to start that conversation is and to maintain it to allow for proper discourse without it flying off the rails? Gail, why don't you start? We started from different points in the world, and my point in most of my career has been trying to take whatever is going on and talk to people about it in a way that's sort of amusing and funny.

And Brett's been explaining things in a way that makes sense and it's important, and he's the one who most of the time will bring up a serious point, and then I'll have to go and respond to it in some sane way. But it's a great challenge. You see, Gail was so nice. What she meant to say was, Brett's usually the one who comes up with an insane, point, and I have to go and find a same way to do it. But to your question from the person from Arizona, I think it's very important that you're not go into a conversation with the idea that

you're going to win. It's not a competition, right? It's an effort to sort of learn how the other side thinks. And people have asked me, as persuasion possible, I have a hard time thinking it is. I think what you can do is make a person, a reasonable person on the other side of an argument say, huh, I can see it. I can see what you're saying. Does it mean I need you to agree with me? I need to kind of assert my intellectual dominance. It just means like, all right, I get it.

And that doesn't sound completely stupid. And I'm going to go back and think a little bit about why that's not entirely right or totally wrong. But the moment it becomes a competition, the moment pride gets involved, you're doomed to bitterness. And so that's, by the way, a reason why humor is so important because it's, you know, as Alan Simpson, the great senator from Wyoming one said, you know, humor is the universal solvent. It really eases conversations, especially when they come to tense moments. You mentioned persuasion. We were asked a lot about that.

By the way, thanks very much to the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of readers who wrote in. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we really owe it to them. Damn straight. Right. Lauren Brooks from Madison, Wisconsin, we really are doing the tour of the New York Times-friendly

cities. Go badgers. Yeah. I'm curious if doing this ever led you to actually change your position, not 180-degree change, but was there something where between the two of you where you came out thinking differently as a result of your conversation? I would say on gun control. Gun control was never something I thought about, you know, a great deal because when I was at the Wall Street Journal, my remit was foreign policy.

And it was just an issue that I just sort of thought, okay, well, you know, there are so many guns in the country and it's nothing you can really do about it. But talking to Gail, there were a whole series of moments during our conversations when we had to take stock of some fresh attraction. Just an amazing slew of its things. Whether it was in Las Vegas or Buffalo or that horrific school killing Uvalde, Texas, I mean, so many. But Gail definitely swayed me on this. And I think at some point I wrote a column called Repeal the Second Amendment, which owes to Gail's influence. Oh. Oh.

Oh. And promptly led to the repeal of the Second Amendment, yes, showing our influence. It's nationwide. Showing how. One more question about this whole question of political discourse. This one comes from Ruth Wood. But she talks about how when she was younger, she had political discourse at the dining table every night,

conversation with the friends, first kind of mimicking the parents' opinions, but then finding their own opinions over time. But then she said, you know, now I fear that political discourse, through no organization's in social media, just doesn't exist at all anymore. And the question she asked, I think, is a tough one, which is how do you inform a world that doesn't want to be informed?

Depends on what it is. Obviously, there are some things that are so important and so critical, you simply have to say, look, this is the way it is and we've got to argue. But there's a lot of stuff in the middle, and it does really help if you can make it seem more friendly, if you can make it seem more, you know, something that you're not going to feel like you're an idiot because you didn't agree with all along. if you can feel like you're having a fun. I think that, like, the fact that we have fun when we argue with one another is a really big, big, important part of whatever we do. When do you think about that?

I think it is sort of one of the great perils of our democracy that people are losing the habits of a free mind, that they are so rarely exposed to a contrary point of view from a very early age, that they don't enjoy the idea of mixing it up. I mean, I had the benefit of coming from a politically boisterous family. We love to talk about this stuff. And then in high school, we'd love to argue about this stuff. I had a great influence in high school,

a teacher, history teacher named Elliot Trummel, who may be listening to this, Portland, Oregon, hi, Elliot. And he politically was way to my left. But boy, did he enjoy just sparring with this aspiring William F. Buckley in his classroom. And the joy he took in it was a great model for me about the pleasure you can have in argument. I mean, I gave a graduation speech a couple years ago, and I said, look, at its best, a good argument is like good sex. It's like it's frictional, it's mutual, and, you know, at best, sometimes it's generative. So, like, have fun with it.

Like, it shouldn't be something you want to avoid. I don't know how the graduating class took that analogy. I don't know how I feel about it either. I thought it was pretty good, right? I'm going to have to think that over. It does the audience. Obviously, a huge part of the conversation for all of us is to try to be funny or to be funny. And David Epstein from our very own New York, New York, and I'm glad to end on a

somebody from here, raised a really interesting point. He said, humor is helpful and difficult conversations, but sometimes it detracts from a serious point or where it comes an escape route from the conversation itself. So how do you use humor and still stay on point? And obviously, Gail, I'm going to start with you there because this is your bread and butter. Well, yes.

I mean, if you're going to be passionate about something that you truly, truly, truly believe in and that you think is in danger in some way, you've got to kind of have one attitude toward the world. There's just a ton of issues out there that are being argued. They'll go back and forth. And that you can get people interested in by making them more, you know, attractive. And sometimes if you can be funny, if you can show the silly side of some of the stuff, it's a big help.

Lord knows, we live in an age where my view hasn't carried the day. But I ultimately don't think that nastiness is a winning political strategy. And, you know, someone is listening to this and saying, what are you talking about? the nastiest guy ever just won the presidency. But I'd like to think that in the long term, the great politicians are also funny ones. Reagan used humor to great effect. Churchill was funny. Lincoln was famously funny in his day. And that humor wins over not only your friends, but wins over people, you know, on the other side. One of my early political memories was, I will not use my opponent's youth and inexperience against him.

Reagan's great quip against Walter Monda. And you know he won because even Mondale in that debate bursts into a smile. He knows that Reagan's just delivered this zinger. And the race was over at that moment. People understand that. So I wish we'd have more humor in politics. I think it's something like I couldn't have a better partner and a model than Gail, not only in being funny but also good humor in being like,

having a light-hearted spirit. And I think it's one of the reasons why our column was so popular and enduring across the political aisle. So let's stay there for a second. People like to make fun of civility even as a goal, right? And on the one hand, you can say that that's ridiculous. But there's another way of looking at it and sort of lurking in Mr. Epstein's question, which is, okay, look, these are serious, serious matters, right? So if you're joking about it, you're not actually taking it seriously. And obviously, what's happening around us now illustrates that in a pretty profound

way, because right this minute, Trump administration is not doing particularly well, right, there, but they're still doing a zillion things. They're causing a lot of damage and a million different fronts. So I just kind of almost re-ask that question, like, what is the the purpose of humor in the darkness? Is it about retaining a certain amount of hope? Is it about picturing future life and not just humor, but civility itself, like the maintenance of discourse? That's an easy question. Take it away. Listen, you know, life is one damn thing after another, and we're going to have to wake up tomorrow to the next outrage from the White House or the next crisis. And I don't think that a posture of like perpetual fear and rage serves anyone,

and most of all those of us who want a radically different course. Yeah, absolutely. When I started out, you know, I covered state legislature in Connecticut. And you may be surprised to hear that people did not find stories about the state legislature in Connecticut that exciting. But then I started making fun of them, just finding little things that were. silly and then bringing them out. And it got people kind of going in it and really got me into the idea that you could get people interested in stuff sometimes by amusing them, but not in an evil, rancorous way. And that's been the most fun thing I've ever done.

So we often end the conversation, the print version or the digital version, with a quote from poetry or an obit that was in the paper, usually coming from Brett. And so a lot of the readers sent in quotes that I thought were really great. And so we're on it basically ends on one of them. This is Janet Kiefer from Pittsburgh, North Carolina. And she says that one of the quotes she lives by is from Lord Byron. And you'll see why I wanted to mention it in regard to what you just said. And if I laugh at any mortal thing, tis that I may not weep.

You know the great Byron poem? Well, he was in love with a woman named Carolyn Lamb. So the poem goes like this. Carolyn Lamb. God damn. That's good. That's good in the short. I was actually going to cite a Shakespearean sonnet, but that's a better way to – that's a better way to answer.

Sam's right. I love those. I love the really short ones. Okay. Thank you both so much for taking the time to talk to me, but more importantly, for taking the time to talk to each other over the last eight years. But wait, wait, wait, wait a second. Hang on a second. I think this is important for our audience to know this because ours were the names on the conversation, but none of this would have been possible without a brilliant editor, Aaron Redica, bringing it together.

And there was a team also of fact checkers over the years, too numerous to mention, but I'm always mindful of the work that they did, you know, to make sure that we didn't screw up. Right. As I always say that all efforts at effortlessness require just a tremendous effort. All right. Thank you both so much for coming down to talk to me about the conversation, but really thank you more than that for talking to each other for the last eight years. It's been really an extraordinary journey that our readers, hundreds of thousands of them, have loved to be a part of. Thank you so much. What a joy this has been. This has been so much fun. Thank you. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple,

or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Veshaka, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music

by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amun Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.