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Of course, the story of Christian Smalls, the worker who unionized the Amazon warehouse in New York City, an incredibly inspiring story — you know, who doesn’t love a David that goes after a Goliath?

Goliath.

Yeah, the Philistines were very anti-David.

That’s true, Goliath does not — yeah, they were not into it.

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

So this has been a summer of strikes, and it’s going to be an autumn of strikes as well, it looks like. It seems like everybody’s striking, from Hollywood writers and actors to nurses, to coal miners, and now, maybe the most politically significant strike is the United Auto Workers. And we’re all journalists, and journalism, of course, has its own labor issues. So before we dive into the general subject, I wanted to ask, have any of you guys ever been on a picket line?

No, I have not.

I have not.

No. I mean, I think that’s probably generational, right? I mean, we’re all kind of roughly in that cohort, where I feel like there was something of a detente, particularly in our profession. We’re all too young to have experienced the big newspaper strike that gave birth to “The New York Review of Books” and other things, but we’re kind of too old and too fancy to be involved in the current one in any big way.

I don’t know about fancy, but I’m definitely too old.

I’ll go further. I’ve never been part of a union. Wherever I’ve worked has either been not unionized, or I’ve been a manager or in some exempt category. So it was never even an option.

Yeah, I’ve been on both sides, both a member of the union here at The New York Times, and then I’ve been a big bad boss at various media companies on the other side of the bargaining table. So —

Yes, that was —

I’ve seen it from all angles.

My other question was, have you ever hired Pinkerton detectives to put an end to labor unrest, Lydia Polgreen?

Ugh, you know, life is long.

There’s still time. Yeah. So just from the personal to the political, I want to talk more about this uptick of union organizing and strikes and what’s behind it. So why do we think there’s so much labor activity and unrest right now? Carlos? You’re an economist. You can go first.

I wish you would stop saying that. I mean, OK, so there are, probably, some basic economic reasons. The labor markets are tight. Unemployment is low. Companies need workers and are still having some trouble filling positions, so that gives a little more power and leverage to labor.

You know, like, if you need motives for unionizing or for striking, you have a moment when profits are very strong for, say, the auto companies or for UPS, which narrowly averted a strike recently. Wages for the top 1 percent of wage earners are growing so much faster than for everybody else. Just, like, maybe 50 years ago, CEOs made 20 times what workers did, and now, it’s closer to 400. So inequality creates clear incentives for organizing. Inflation, right? You’re coming out of a period of high inflation. It makes sense that people would want cost-of-living adjustment clauses in their contracts — and also the pandemic, right? The pandemic made clear how workers in different sectors enjoy very different kinds of benefits and opportunities and wages, and that sense of rediscovered insecurity, I think, is probably nudging people to organize as well. Now, none of that explains why, precisely, now, like what is happening this year that is making labor have its moment.

I mean, it’s probably a matter of timing. I mean, contracts that are coming up and things like that. I think there’s also a lot of emotional valence to this as well. I mean, I, as I was saying earlier, have been on the kind of management side of the table for a number of union negotiations, and particularly first contracts for media workers who unionized both at HuffPost and at Gimlet, which is a podcast studio part of Spotify that I used to run.

And clearly, the kind of lunch-bucket issues of pay and benefits were important. But you know, what I really sensed was, a desire to wrest more control over the conditions of their work, the products of their intellectual creativity, and things like that were just as, if not more, important. So I think that there’s this interesting and sort of complex moment where a lot of people are evaluating the relationship with work in general and how they feel they’re being rewarded in a very broad sense.

For example, issues of diversity were to often come up at the bargaining table, which are just not the kind of lunch-bucket issues that we associate with collective bargaining, but they were extremely important to these bargaining units. So I think these issues are — they’re all kind of snowballing in a variety of ways coming in the post-COVID era.

OK, so we’re having these strikes. But do we really think this is like a new era for unions, or do we just think it’s like a — they’re not asleep anymore, but it’s not going to pan out to be all that?

That’s a great — I mean, unionization rates are still very low.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, 10 percent to 11 percent of the workforce is unionized, which is about 1/2 what it was, like, in the ‘80s. I mean, so there are different ways to gauge, kind of, the power of unions.

Wait, did something happen in the ‘80s, Carlos, involving unions that might have had an impact on that?

I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I can take an airline back to the ‘80s to tell me. Yeah, I mean, Reagan cracked down on the air traffic controllers’ union, and that was part of a downward spiral of unionization in America.

I mean, I do think that, independent of labor per se, something seemed to shift in the American economy somewhere in the mid-2010s, where the big story of the post-1970s economy that you referenced, Carlos, of increasing inequality wage stagnation at the bottom — that story shifted. And starting at the end of the Obama presidency, the start of the Trump presidency, you started to see lower-wage workers capturing a little more of the economic pie, and a little more stagnation sometimes for people in managerial positions.

And there’s sort of interesting debates about why this is, that maybe sort of white-collar professionals became more vulnerable to outsourcing, and not — you can’t outsource your service economy in the same way. But either way, that trend, interestingly, has continued, even through inflation and some of the economic disappointments of the last few years, where the bottom 10 percent, 20 percent of American workers are still seeing better percentage gains than the professional class. So in that sense, the return of strikes, the renewed interest in unions, is sort of pushing with this 5-to-10-year economic trend that’s been better for low-wage workers than the prior trend had been.

Well, I think there’s also — there was a terrific episode of “The Daily” this week about this sort of rethinking about the value of college, that there was this kind of grand bargain that if you get a four-year degree, you get that college wage premium, and you’re kind of set up for a life that is largely non-precarious. And I think that there’s been a real rethinking of that bargain. So I think you’re seeing this kind of trend of unionization, particularly among white-collar workers or white-collar-adjacent workers.

You talk to young people, for example, like the podcast producers who worked for me at Gimlet, and they felt like having a college degree in a highly specialized set of skills was no guarantee that they were going to have a secure economic future. So I think that there are a bunch of different trends that are coming together there. And I think all of us are thinking about, like, have the bargains that we signed up for paid off? And I think a lot of folks are saying, like, no, no, they haven’t paid off.

– I do think there’s a lot to your generational point. I mean, I think millennials and Gen-Zers have very different expectations, especially in the white-collar realm. If you’re going into certain fields, whether or not you should be able to expect job security or a certain level of compensation or whatever, whereas, like, a lot of folks where I grew up, if you were worried about that, you picked a more stable field. I mean, you just did. You didn’t become a musician or a journalist. So I do think that there has been a shift in expectations, even beyond the question of labor.

Yeah. I mean, I think — and I’m curious what you guys think about this — there’s also a sense in which because labor has been so weak for so long, a lot of people have ceased to have some of the negative associations with it that a lot of Americans had, let’s say, in the 1970s.

You mean, with unions, Russ?

With unions.

Yeah, sorry.

That there was, at a certain point in the American economy, this sense that a heavily unionized workforce, let’s say, in the auto industry was associated with stagnation, with Japan outcompeting us. And then, also, there was just the reality of union corruption, the ties between unions and the mafia that — somewhat famous in the Jimmy Hoffa era.

And all of that is now so distant. Just as young people had never experienced inflation until a few years ago — I could barely remember when inflation was a major issue — the idea of unions being sort of strong and potentially corrupt, which was, again, a powerful aspect of American political debate in the Reagan years, is just completely off the table.

Also, one other quick thing that I would often remind my young colleagues was that unions played a really crucial role in segregating professions and keeping people of color out of certain kinds of jobs. So whenever this would come up in the context of collective bargaining, it would always just note the irony that they were important targets of the Civil Rights movement, because they were extremely segregated.

I mean, the notion of corrupt unions is not some sort of historical artifact. Two recent former UAW presidents were convicted of embezzling union funds and went to prison, you know. Like, that was not long ago.

In fact, the only reason Shawn Fain is president of the UAW is because they changed the way the union bosses were elected. They actually made it a direct election from members, from workers, as opposed to backdoor delegates picking in a convention with a lot of influence from leadership. I’ve never been in a union, and so I speak out of ignorance, but I’ve always been a little skeptical of them.

It’s nothing to do with politics. It’s to do — you accuse me of being an economist, so I’ll own it for a microsecond, and I’ll say it’s the economics of it, right? Like, there’s that idea in economics, the principal-agent problem. The idea is that you have to sometimes rely on a third party, on someone else, to act on your behalf, but your interests are not aligned with that of the third party.

So like, you hire a lawyer to resolve a dispute, but the lawyer just wants to bill more hours, so the dispute drags on. What union leadership wants and what workers want, that stuff doesn’t always align, right? It can be blatant, like in the case of the UAW bosses who went to jail for embezzling union dues.

But it can be kind of benign. Like, say I’m a younger worker, but union leadership might be incentivized to look out for the needs of older workers who make up more of the membership. That kind of stuff happens.

And so that said, like, as skeptical as I am of the unions because of that issue, because of the misaligned incentives, I’m more skeptical of management. So like, I’m among those who are now thinking that it’s a good idea that unions are, sort of, gaining more power, in a relative sense, versus the managerial or ownership class.

I think that’s right. But I think that it’s really important to separate the sort of long-established unions that, clearly, are much less powerful than they were but still are big powerful institutions, and think a little bit about what the more, kind of, newer and modern unions look like. I think most young people are not joining a union like the United Auto Workers. They’re joining something more like the unions that are trying to unionize Starbucks or REI or these other supposedly progressive liberal companies, and are facing really, really creative, but also quite brutal union-busting tactics that don’t look like the union-busting of old.

Yeah. I mean, this gets very complicated very quickly. There are public sector unions and private sector unions and white-collar and blue-collar unions. And one of the things that I wonder about is, like, if you have this kind of outpouring of just kind of blanket enthusiasm for union organizing, that overlooks things like Carlos is talking about, where in some cases, what they’re asking for is extremely problematic. Like, the UAW head is known for, basically, pitching the idea that he’s going to bring back the glory days. I mean, we’re talking about defined benefit pension plans again, which strikes me as —

Old-school.

— total madness. But that is kind of what they’re doing. They’re kind of working to promote this cause mentality, and we’re going back to the glory days, and it’s all going to be great again. And these things are very, very problematic on some level.

I think there’s an interesting dynamic here, where I found, Carlos, your explanation of the trends creating this general sort of union moment to be very compelling. In the case of the highest-profile strikes, though, both the UAW strike and the Hollywood strike, the strike of writers and actors in Hollywood — there, the dynamic is a little different. You have, in both cases, this sort of big technological shift happening.

You have electric cars in the auto industry, which are changing the incentives for auto companies, and the UAW and workers are worried that they’re losing out in this transition. And in Hollywood, you have the streaming situation, where Hollywood made this huge bet on streaming, it created this economic model that appears to be both exploitative of writers, and also unsustainable. And in these cases —

Geniuses of management.

Right. And in both cases, I have a fundamental sympathy with the strikers, but I’m also concerned that they are asking for more at a moment when their industries — or part of their industry, in the case of workers, who work on gasoline-powered cars — are just not actually in the best shape to give them what they want.

They know what’s coming, right? And so better do it now than in three to five years.

Yes, no, no, I think it — I think it makes sense. But it’s different from the labor action as a function of abundance.

Yeah.

Abundant job options, versus labor action trying to get out ahead of a potential crisis.

And not to get all political on it, but it does make the situation very complicated, especially for Democrats. Because on the one hand, you have their green energy, EV goals, and on the other hand, you have their pro-labor goals. And there’s a tension there.

Yes.

And Republicans are happy to exploit it. I was just talking to Senator JD Vance, and he had just written a piece blaming a lot of this labor uncertainty on the shift toward EV, which, of course, he puts at the feet of the Biden administration, which is overly simplistic. But it is a tension that the President is having to deal with.

In defense of Senator JD Vance, I mean, it is the Biden policy to try and rapidly transition —

Oh, sure, but it’s transitioning that way anyway.

Well, and I think trying to transition in a way that prioritizes American labor, right? I mean, there are a variety of ways in which, through policy and law, the Biden administration is trying to make sure that this transition is happening in a context of high-quality American jobs, rather than just buying things from China. But I mean, just to channel Ross, I mean, I think that there is this kind of cyclical nature to these things, where there’s overreach, and then there’s retrenchment.

And if you have Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, interviewed on television, saying, well, look, all of my compensation is stock, I’m just being paid for making the company successful, but you also know that we have an economy where making a stock successful is not so much about delivering real value but doing gimmicky things like stock buybacks, people have become very cynical about that. And so I think that the sort of fundamental desire for some sort of recalibration of the scales to make them a little bit more even — I think that both parties are sensing that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with. This has traditionally, obviously, been the kind of Democratic party issue, but I think everyone knows that the current situation is just unsustainable, and that the old answers about the free market, rah, rah, rah, being paid for performance, just don’t wash anymore.

Yeah. I think that as long as you’re in an economy like the one we’re in right now, people are going to be looking for some kind of countervailing power, whether it’s unions or something else — government something — to, basically, try and direct more money to workers. Whether that continues, we’ll see, but yeah, I don’t think this debate is going away.

But I think neither is the question that hangs over not just autoworkers and Hollywood screenwriters, but all of us, which is, what do we think the future of work will be? What should it be? That’s what we’re going to talk about when we come back after this break.

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And we’re back. And now, I want us to get a little more, shall we say, existential. Because in the background of all these labor disputes is the larger question about what role should work play in our society and in our lives. And there’s always been this promise that technological change is going to radically shorten everybody’s workweek.

John Maynard Keynes predicted 100 years ago that we’d have 15-hour workweek someday. And it hasn’t really worked out that way. American life is characterized by what The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has called “workism,” which is this use of work as a substitute for religion or family or community. But the pandemic has changed things. Maybe AI is about to change things.

The United Auto Workers aren’t asking for a 15-hour workweek, but they are asking for a four-day, 32-hour workweek. So I mean, what do we think is the future of our working lives? How little work should The New York Times pay us to do?

Look, I’m trying to train ChatGPT to churn out one of my pieces as accurately as possible as quickly as possible.

I have had very limited success with that, thank goodness, and I think our jobs are probably safe for now. Are you guys familiar with this meme on yield internet? “What’s your dream job?” “I don’t dream of labor.” It’s a thing that kind of popped up in the pandemic, and it’s a thing that my wife often says to me, although she, strangely, decided to go back to full-time work during the pandemic.

But I think it really does speak to the final nail in the coffin for what felt like this crazy hustle culture that marked our lives from, I would say, the 2010s to the pandemic. And it’s funny. Like, that’s the same period when I moved from the developing world, having spent a lot of time in Asia and Africa, back to the United States. And one of the things that I noticed was the way that technology had, basically, like, turned what employment was, kind of, upside-down.

And it looked a lot like the informal economies that India and sub-Saharan African countries were desperate to get out of. You know, you had people with tenuous employment agreements that were, essentially, independent contractors to these apps. They didn’t have benefits.

And just after years of covering economies where the IMF and the World Bank and others would be like, you need to formalize your economy, formalize the economy, to move back to the United States and find that there was this rapid deformalization happening, that people were actively participating in, and that this work of shifting the risk away from the corporation and the employer onto the employee and the customer was something that was just happening so fast.

And so I do think that there’s just this, like, huge roiling set of things that have happened that have been enabled by technology that, rather than making us have more leisure time, actually has commodified and made it possible for us to, quote unquote, “work” in lots of different ways and squeeze work into lots of nooks and crannies of our lives that were not work-associated before.

Yeah. I mean, I think that whatever you think of it, that pattern extends beyond the gig economy, right? Like, a huge part of white-collar professional life is the professionalization, in bits and pieces, of leisure time, where you’re never formally off the clock. You’re always supposed to be accessible and available.

But then, it is a trade, right? Where you don’t have to be in the office, or you can be with your children while checking texts from, let’s say, hypothetically, your podcast producer or something, right? Like, that’s sort of the bargain with the internet age that I think a lot of Americans have made.

Because we haven’t made it, may want it, right? You’re seeing that push for flexibility move toward more, quote unquote, “frontline workers,” where it’s been captured by sort of managerial-class workers.

Yeah. I mean, it’s been interesting to follow. There was a nursing strike here in New York City, and I have a lot of nurses in my family, so it’s a topic that I’ve followed very closely. And one of the things that’s really striking is that the economic incentives for nurses are basically very well aligned to taking these short-term gig jobs.

You can make way, way, way more money going and working in a place that needs you for two weeks, rather than being a pediatric nurse at a local primary care clinic, for example. And Lord knows, we need pediatric nurses, but the economics of our health care system are aligned in such a way that these big hospital — whether they’re corporations or nonprofits — their incentive is to try and keep staffing levels low, keep wages low.

And those very same forces are pushing teaching nurses into different modes of working that work better with their lives. And so I think that misalignment speaks to both the economic issues, but also, I think, to the control that people want over their lives, you know? And this notion that the company that you work for owns you and is entitled to x, y, z from you at any particular time — I think a lot of this unionization comes down to wanting to reassert some control.

I mean, it’s interesting that we’re talking about it like that. Because the idea of a company man died years and years ago. So it’s not one company that you’re basically selling your soul to, in a lot of cases. It’s like half a dozen gigs, or people work multiple jobs.

And my first career — kind of, vaguely career-track job — was working for a management consultant 100 years ago. And I remember it was based in Silicon Valley, and I remember there was a lot of discussion back then about all the tech companies offering workers all these great lifestyle things. You could get childcare and a yoga class and a restaurant and a gym, and they were all at your office, and everybody was like, oh, that’s great.

But the whole point was people originally figured out that they were doing that, so they could keep you with the office all the time. They just, they expected you never to go home. And so what we’re seeing now is a shift from that to everybody is going to work from home.

But when you work from home, again, you’re never off the clock. So there’s always going to be something that needs to be managed, with each new iteration of work. And so yes, there’s this new thing, but you’re going to have the downsides that you have to deal with, just like the last new thing.

That’s a trade that I would take, though. That’s a trade that I would take.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, I have.

Well, should our bosses be suspicious of that trade then? I mean, because there’s a lot of argument in not just Silicon Valley but everywhere, right? About, what does work from home do for productivity? Do you need to get people back into the office?

I think it’s very job-specific, though. I do think a lot of it depends on what you do.

Yeah.

Do people need to work?

Yes.

Because I feel like — OK, good, we settled that. I mean, I feel like we went through a period, maybe more pre-pandemic, in debates where the Left, especially, sort of revived the idea that in an age of abundance, people just shouldn’t have to work that much. And this was sort of the whole idea of a universal basic —

Universal basic income? Yeah.

And in a way, we did a sort of pseudo version of that in the pandemic. We paid a lot of people not to work, effectively. We created a very temporary UBI under certain conditions. And my impression is that — curious if you guys disagree, but even what we talked about with union organizing and demands for higher wages and so on suggests that people prefer the work model to the non-work model.

I mean, I guess — I mean, I think — yeah, I think that feels to me like a bit of a false choice. I mean, we do not have a robust welfare state in this country, right? And the minute that these child credits were withdrawn, thanks to Joe Manchin, we saw child poverty double, for example.

So there are lots of things that were sort of UBI-like that produced, I think, really, really great outcomes, made it easier for people to be home with their children and care for them, and care for their families and so on. So I definitely think that a UBI floor that protects people from the most naked ravages of our winner-take-all capitalism would be a wonderful thing and would engender all kinds of positive things for our society that we can all agree on.

But I think people need meaning in their life, right? I mean, I think that people need to spend their time doing things that are meaningful. Sometimes those things are paid work, sometimes it’s caring for the people that you love, but I think that we’re also seeing that people do want to work. What they don’t want is for such a huge swath of the fruits of their labor to be accruing to the very top 10 percent. And that seems to me to be like a reasonable thing to be really, really mad about.

Yeah, it’s time to smack down the top 10 percent.

Well, I mean —

— the top 1 percent.

— the trends of the last 10 years have not been so great for the — I mean, nobody’s going to cry for the top 1 percent, but professionals and managers have had a tougher time in the last 10 years.

Yeah, but it’s like a tiny, tiny, tiny shift, right? I mean, we’re not talking about a massive redistribution.

Well, there’s still professionals and managers. Right. They still hold the higher-paying jobs. But in terms of wage growth and what people expect, their gains have been weaker than lower-wage workers. I mean, I have — I’m pretty anti-UBI. I guess I have a sort of — I have a certain patriotic affection, in an odd way, for the American model, even though we do seem to work too hard in many ways.

There seems like, in the developed world, you have countries like South Korea that seem so afflicted by crazy workism that people are like, well, I work much too hard to ever get married and have children. Like, South Korea — literally, the birth rate is not just below replacement. It’s below one child for per two South Koreans. And a lot of that does seem to have to do with an insane culture of work and competition.

But then, you look at Europe, which famously has a much more relaxed siesta-based attitude towards work, and they’re dealing with economic stagnation, slipping way behind the US and so on. So there are ways in which I feel like American work culture gets a lot of grief, but maybe we’re actually in a kind of happy medium between East Asian and European models.

I don’t know. I do think that there’s a lot of tweaking that needs to be done. For instance, they need to make it easier for paid family and medical leave. I think there’s a lot of room to make family obligations more manageable, if you are also expecting people to work.

Yes. No, I agree with that.

Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, when I was in my 20s and, kind of, trying to make my bones as a journalist, I thought nothing about leaving my wife behind at our home base in Dakar and going to Sudan for six weeks. And that was a thing that I wanted to spend my life doing.

But life changes, and you get older, and you want to do different things. And I think — I guess my wish is that everyone had the kind of flexibility and opportunity that I’ve had to be able to model my work to my appetite for it, for the stage of life that I’m in, the needs of my family and so on. I think that’s the dream, is to have meaningful work and to also be able to have a meaningful life outside of that work.

Yeah, I totally agree that the flexibility is key. My children are now out of the nest, but over the years, when they were home, I would pick jobs that had more flexibility than compensation. And I was super lucky to be able to make these choices, because that’s what mattered most to me. Of course, now that they’re gone, I’m just — it’s just party all the time at our house. I think I’m —

Well, yeah, this is what Carlos and I want to know. What happens after they’re gone? Because I mean, to me —

Well, I cover — I cover national politics. I’ll be in Iowa.

Oh, well, OK. I take it — take it back. I don’t want to know.

Ross, how about you? What’s your ideal work life?

Well, I think you have the self that you imagine, and then the self that you actually have. And the reality is that I like to work, and I like to be busy, generally, more than I necessarily anticipated in life. I don’t really — again —

You get real twitchy, don’t you?

Yeah, this is the American disease, right? That we don’t know how to do nothing. But —

I don’t do well underemployed.

I was someone who was really good at doing nothing as a kid, and I aspire to recapture that someday, but not yet. All right. And on that note, like good laborers, happy, happy “New York Times” employees, let’s leave it there. And when we come back, we’ll get hot or cold.

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And we are back. And it’s that time of week when one of us rants or raves about something that we’re hot or cold on. So who has something, and what’s it going to be? Tundra or tropical? Equatorial or polar? Let’s go.

Enough. Someone stop him.

Someone had their go-go juice this morning.

I’ve got The Hot Cold today. And I just realized, whenever I do The Hot Cold, you can just call it The Cold. I always hate something.

You’re never hot on anything.

Oh, Carlos. Go on, [INAUDIBLE].

I promise, I will be hot on something soon. But what am cold on is Bidenomics. And I don’t mean it in a wonky way. I’m not talking about the actual economic policies that the administration is pushing.

I mean the formulation itself. I do not like the idea of using the president’s name as shorthand, as a branding technique, for a set of policies or a governing philosophy. I know it’s something that opponents sort of put on him first, like they did with Obama and Obamacare. But then, they embrace it.

And I just want to be like Admiral Akbar and be like, don’t do it! It’s a trap! Stop! Do not — but no one listens to me, right? So now, when presidents put their name or embrace the notion of calling a governing philosophy or a policy package by their name, they automatically forever make that issue a partisan issue.

Remember how “Obamacare,” quote unquote, was far less popular than the Affordable Care Act, even though they were the same thing? Calling it Obamacare linked it even more closely with the president, and it made it not about how you felt about health care and made it about your opposition or your loyalty to the president. I remember Pete Buttigieg, when he was running for president, was always very smart about this. He would never call it Obamacare.

He wouldn’t even call it the Affordable Care Act. He would always say the ACA — very, very kind of bureaucratic but neutral. Presidents already get way too much credit or blame for the state of the economy. But now, Biden, with Bidenomics, better hope that this thing does not go south because his name is on it. Now, it’s him.

But isn’t — but isn’t that just because his last name ends with an N and it’s sort of —

So back to Reaganomics.

Reaganomics —

Reaganomics, Bidenomics. Nobody said —

Nobody said Obamanomics.

— Bushenomics. I’m sure I used Obamanomics in a terrible column a long time ago. And the reason Buttigieg isn’t into it is because, come on, Buttigiegenomics? I mean, it’s never going to fly!

So many bad directions that could go in. I mean, look, the high water mark of this kind of branding shift was from Hoovervilles to the New Deal. Like, the New Deal! Who doesn’t like a New Deal?

Who could be against it?

We do this all the time, right? We do — but historically, you’re right. Wilsonianism, the Truman Doctrine —

I think “doctrine” adds a certain flair.

Oh —

I just want everything to be a doctrine.

No, no, presidents and foreign policy advisors want doctrines.

I’m Catholic. I like — I like doctrines.

Sorry.

No, you’re just doctrinaire.

Dogmas. Dogmas are even better. The Biden Dogma.

The Douthat Dogma.

Well, that’s not — I’m not claiming that.

The Great Society, the New Frontier — those aren’t perfect — America First. Right? But it gets us past this great-man view of history toward actually discussing the ideas and the principles.

I don’t think Great Society or New Frontier elevate debate, but I agree with you, Carlos, that it’s politically smarter to have a neutral, aspirational term for your agenda than to name it after yourself.

Do you know, the one that has worked well historically is the Marshall Plan? Because everyone wants, like, a Marshall Plan for whatever. You know?

But he wasn’t a politician.

Maybe it works if you’re not president.

But that was going to — Truman rejected calling it the Truman Plan, because he thought it would piss off Republicans. So very smart, that Harry Truman.

Smart guy.

And instead, it became the Marshall Plan, and everyone loved it.

All right. Well, we’ll be back next week to talk about the Lozada Plan for American renewal. But until then, we’re going to leave it there, wrap things up. See you guys next week for some more labor in the vineyards of The New York Times.

See you guys.

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Thanks to everyone for joining us today. And if you enjoyed our conversation, be sure to give “Matter of Opinion” a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us an appraising review while you’re there.

“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Derek Arthur and Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It’s edited by Stephanie Joyce. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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