Aloha, mirembrema, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic, coming at you tonight from a position approximately as far off the grid as the safe house occupied by Gene Hackman’s “Brill” in Enemy of the State—but not so far that I’m beyond the long arm of Puck’s editorial Boban Marjanović, Jon Kelly. So, before setting off for my week of R&R, I rustled up two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for a wide-ranging and fascinating chat, the entirety of which we posted as the latest episode of the Impolitic podcast here, and a text version of which (edited and condensed for space) you’ll find below.

But first…

Kristof won his first Pulitzer, along with his wife, Times reporter Sheryl WuDunn, for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Kristof’s reports on millions of kids in India and the developing world dying because of water contamination and diarrhea spurred the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to devote billions of dollars to the problem. Kristof won the Pulitzer again in 2006 for a series of columns, reported at great personal risk, on the genocide in Darfur. In a wide-ranging conversation, Nick and I discussed the state of the post-Biden Democratic Party, whether Barack Obama is right that most Americans want to get along, and why Nick’s first choice to replace Biden was Gretchen Whitmer. As usual, our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

And it struck me over the course of the convention that there was a common thread that ran from Clinton’s speech through Obama’s and Tim Walz’s, advising Democrats to avoid doing the basket-of-deplorables thing again. I’m curious what you think about that.

Nicholas Kristof: It’s important that we distinguish between Trump and people who have voted for Trump. It’s harder to win people over when you’re accusing them of being racist and bigots. Frankly, after the 2016 election, too many Democrats fell into the trap of seeing every Trump voter as a racist and a bigot in ways that were unfair and counterproductive.

I’m in rural Oregon, and most of the folks around me are Trump voters. Most of them have views about gun policy that I completely disagree with, but they are also good people. I can’t believe the way they think about some issues, and they can’t believe the way I think about some of these issues. But we can talk to each other, and as a country, I think we need to. I’ve really welcomed that shift in the Democratic Party—less finger-wagging at people who voted for Trump. I will say that after I tweeted that and put it on Threads, I got a lot of pushback from people who said, Oh, but they are deplorable. We should demean them. They deserve to be rebuked.

I guess I’m surprised that most of the voters around you, even in rural Oregon, are Trump voters. I think of Oregon as a pretty progressive place.

I live in a town that has about 1,000 people on a good day. Traditionally, the economy was built around agriculture, timber, and light manufacturing, and then those jobs all went away.

I was at a Steve Earle show last summer in Los Angeles, and at the end of the show, he was talking about politics, and he said, basically, that the most pernicious thing in our political culture isn’t just that we’re sealed off in our enclaves, where the left only talks to the left and the right only talks to the right, but that we’re now automatically avoiding having conversations with anyone we know we’d disagree with. And his view was that this is the death of democracy—if we’re at the point where, when you see people coming and you know they’re not on your team, you just say, Fuck it.

It’s even worse within families. So often I hear from people who say they’re not going back to Thanksgiving because dad is a Trump voter and they can’t bear those discussions. When we give up on trying to engage people, we lose something. I don’t know what your take is, I’m curious, but I think it’s actually still possible to have conversations with people we deeply disagree with. It has to be done carefully. It involves what social psychologists call complexifying an issue. You don’t talk about it at 30,000 feet, you talk about it in the weeds. I talk to friends out here who pretty much have Second Amendment stamped on their foreheads. And we don’t talk about the Second Amendment, but I say, Look, we all recognize there has to be some age limit to buy a handgun. In Wyoming, it’s 21, here in Oregon, it’s 18. Wouldn’t it make sense to move toward the age of one the most pro gun states there is, Wyoming, and move Oregon up to 21? Or I’ll say, We recognize that a felon can’t buy a firearm. What about somebody with a violent misdemeanor conviction? Should that person maybe be barred for five years from buying a firearm? People are willing to have that conversation, if you also listen to them.

I meet people who are voting for Donald Trump without much enthusiasm because they have a strong view that Democrats are destroying the country. They don’t love Trump, but they dislike him less than they dislike what they see as the poison of Democratic policies and ideology. I can have a conversation with that person. It’s when you get into the angry lunatics and conspiracy theorists, those are the people I don’t want to talk to.

After 9/11, there was real interest in what extremist jihadis think. I used to go off and talk to extremist Muslims, and there was intellectual interest in that. But somehow, I think in this country, among liberals, there isn’t as much intellectual curiosity about, say, conservative evangelicals with conspiracy theories. And, you know, I think conspiracies are kind of interesting.

Let’s talk about Tim Walz, who got a lot of attention for labeling Republicans “weird.” In some of his early appearances, he would say this thing about how we need to rescue Thanksgiving dinner from what it’s become—a time for toxic arguments and bizarre conversations. On some level, the promise of the Harris-Walz ticket is, Let’s make Thanksgiving normal again. What do you think of Walz?

The football coach thing is big—the hunting, the sense of somebody who isn’t extremely educated. Democrats have this amazing ability sometimes to come across as condescending and patronizing. Walz is very good at avoiding that. He’s totally somebody who resonates.

I think we are in a much better place than we were six weeks ago. I’m so glad people spoke up, including members of Congress, for whom it was pretty awkward. It’s easy for us in the cheap seats to squawk and demand a new nominee. I was in favor of someone like Gretchen Whitmer leading the ticket. I thought she’d be more likely to win in November. But I must say that Kamala Harris has done an amazing job uniting the party and building excitement. So maybe I misjudged her in that respect.

You asked about how this came to be, and, frankly, I do feel a bit betrayed and misled, in that when I was hearing Republicans talk in the spring about Biden being doddering and a victim of his age, I tended to dismiss it, because so many of the things they were saying were preposterous. In retrospect, there was clearly some truth to that. There were times when he was completely lucid and there were times when he was something of a mess. And the mess version showed up in that first debate, but what if that version didn’t show up until the second debate? And then Trump would have been very much destined to be elected. I think it’s fair to ask the people who were around Biden how they could have let this happen.

As far back as the fall of 2021, polls showed that voters thought Biden was too old to run for a second term. How does a political party not look at that and say: Our candidate is fatally flawed, we have to make a change, we have to force a primary? They never tried to communicate to him, You’ve done an incredible job here, but you said you were going to be a transitional president, and it’s time to pass the torch.

We on the left have often noted that the Republican Party was way too deferential to Trump, and in retrospect, I think the Democratic Party, as a whole, and members of Congress, et cetera, have been too deferential to the White House. It probably relates to policy as well. I think Biden messed up on Gaza. Likewise, if you look at the Federal Application for Free Student Aid, that’s a debacle, and there are fewer kids getting a chance to go to college this fall because the White House bungled FAFSA. And that has gotten very little attention or oversight or accountability.

When you’re looking at a November election, and you’re looking at the stakes, it’s a little hard to say, Well, the White House screwed up FAFSA, and we have to figure out how to create accountability without empowering Trump.

Did you take an incredible amount of shit from Democrats online or elsewhere for repeatedly saying Biden should bow out?

People were mad at me in a way that I kind of expected. But there were also a lot of people quietly texting me, you know, Thank God you’re saying this, because they can’t. I think members of Congress felt that. My Gaza columns have generated even more animosity and resentment than the ones about Biden. We’re in the business of dishing it out. We’ve got to be willing to take it.

Changing tacks, I don’t think Barack Obama is perfect by any means, but listening to him at the convention, when he spoke about how we live in a culture that prioritizes money and fame and status, how we chase the approval of strangers on our phones, how algorithms teach us to fear each other, and how most of us don’t want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided, I thought, Man, I miss him—I miss a president who can talk like that. And I think what he said is true.

He’s dead right about the fraying ties, and I think we do suffer an epidemic of loneliness in America and, frankly, in all industrialized countries. That is a real problem that kills a lot of people and is a source of social distrust and unhappiness. When he was saying we still have ties that bind us together, I see much less evidence for that. Of course, we do still have Little League and a lot of shared visions. But if you look around the country, ever since Bowling Alone, people have made the point that we engage less and we have fewer friends.

When you ask people how many friends they have, men in particular, middle-aged men and young men have very, very few. Unemployed men, I forget the exact figure, but they spend maybe 18 minutes a day helping out around the house, and the rest of the time sitting on the couch feeling alienated and upset and buying into conspiracy theories. I think President Obama was absolutely right in his diagnosis, but I think his counterpoint about where we are, was more aspirational. And I do think we can have better policies to try to address that social isolation and loneliness.