Interesting Times

Last week, Kansans voted in overwhelming numbers to protect abortion rights in their State Constitution — the first instance since the overruling of Roe v. Wade in which voters have been able to weigh in on the issue directly. But local battles aren’t just limited to abortion. There’s guns. There’s school curriculums. Most crucially, there’s voting rights. As national politics becomes increasingly polarized and stalemates in Congress continue, how we live is going to be decided by local legislation. It’s time we step into the state houses and see what’s happening there.

So on today’s episode, guests Zack Beauchamp and Nicole Hemmer help Jane Coaston understand what these state-level legislative battles mean for national politics. Beauchamp covers the Republican Party for Vox, and Hemmer is a historian of conservative media and an associate professor at Vanderbilt University. Both share the belief that state governments have become powerful machines in influencing the U.S. constitutional system, but to what extent that influence is helpful or harmful to American democracy depends. “This idea of the states as the laboratories of democracy, being able to try out different policies and different programs and see how they work in the state — that’s great,” Hemmer says. “But they’ve become these laboratories of illiberalism in recent years. And that’s something that we have to reckon with.”

Christian nationalism has been empowered in American politics since the rise of Donald Trump. From “Stop the Steal” to the storming of the U.S. Capitol and now, the overturn of Roe v. Wade — Christian nationalist rhetoric has undergirded it all. But given that a majority of Americans identify as Christian, faith also isn’t going anywhere in our politics. So what would a better relationship between church and state look like?

To discuss, Jane Coaston brings together two people who are at the heart of the Christian nationalism debate. Katherine Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism” and has reported on the Christian right for over a decade. Esau McCaulley is a contributing writer for Times Opinion and theologian-in-residence at Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago.

Stewart feels that the movement is paving the way to something with graver consequence. “This is a movement that wants to promote theocratic policies,” she says. “But theocracy is really not the end point. It’s sort of a means to an end, which is authoritarianism.” McCaulley agrees the danger is real. But to him, there’s a place for faith-informed arguments in the public square. “When you try to enforce your religion as the base of your argument and the sole way of being a good American, that’s Christian nationalism,” he says. “And when you’re saying, well, hold on, here is a value that I want to advocate for, perhaps this is my best presentation of the issue, let’s vote and let society decide — I think that’s the best that you can hope for.”

American politics has an age problem. At least, that’s what voters think. According to a new New York Times/Siena College poll, 33 percent of Democrats who want a different candidate for president in 2024 pointed to Joe Biden’s age as a motivating factor. But a nearly equal percentage say they aren’t keen to have Biden for a second term because of his job performance — or lack thereof. Could the answer to appease voters be that Democrats just need some young blood? Or is there a deeper rift between voters — especially young ones — and political leadership?

Jane Coaston brings together Michelle Cottle, a Times editorial board member, and David Brooks, an Opinion columnist, to parse out what we are really talking about when we talk about age in politics. “What is age actually a proxy for?” Cottle asks. “Is it your concerns about fading ability, or is it concerns about a lack of fighting spirit?” But for Brooks, the question is centered more on stagnancy: “Why has the gerontocracy been able to stay in power? What is it about these people that they’ve been able to persevere and just stick around?”

For years, Republicans have been known as the party of moral outrage. Take for instance the recent book banning wars, or Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But Democrats aren’t immune to moral outrage. At least that’s what Noah Rothman, a conservative writer and commentator, believes. He is the author of the new book “The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun.” In it, he argues that progressives, in their pursuit of liberal ideals, are fueling a movement of moral panics more reminiscent of 17th-century preachifying than 1960s liberalism — and that we’re all worse off for it.

Host Jane Coaston has doubts. So on today’s episode, she invites Rothman and the editor at large for Times Opinion, Alex Kingsbury, to debate if moral outrage has really moved from the right to the left. “Are Republicans cultural revanchists? Of course they are. That’s not new,” says Rothman. “What’s new [is], progressives are joining them in the fight.”

Today we're bringing you an episode of another Times Opinion show, First Person. Hours after this episode was released, the Supreme Court overturned New York State’s gun-permitting system — a decision with major implications for the regulation of guns outside the home. The case was, unsurprisingly, backed by the National Rifle Association. But it also found supporters in typically liberal public defenders, like Sharone Mitchell Jr.

Mitchell is the public defender for Cook County, which includes Chicago, a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Growing up on the South Side, Mitchell was raised to believe that guns are dangerous and harmful, a view that was reinforced by his experiences as a public defender and gun control advocate. But those experiences have also led him to believe that gun-permitting laws are harmful, as he explains to Lulu Garcia-Navarro in this episode.

For nearly 50 years, the issue of abortion has driven voters of all persuasions to the polls. But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and the question of reproductive rights has been returned to the states, America’s political parties are going to have to figure out how to metabolize that energy in the years ahead. To discuss what comes next for Democrats and Republicans alike, host Jane Coaston is joined by Times Opinion columnists Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg. As colleagues, they’ve been debating abortion with each other, on this podcast and in the pages of the paper, for years.

So in today’s episode, they convene again to share their thoughts on this watershed moment in America’s political history. “The reason I, and many people I know, feel such intense despair is not just because a right that they cared about deeply is no longer protected, but because it seems like the democratic process is short circuited at every turn,” Goldberg says. But Douthat feels that may just be a good thing for the future of American democracy, especially for states. “Whatever happens with state laws or national laws, it makes a big difference to a lot of people’s relationship to this country to have the abortion debate return to the democratic process,” he says.

For the past month, the House select committee on Jan. 6 has held a series of public hearings on President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Yesterday it surprised all of us with some of its most stunning evidence yet.

In revelatory testimony, Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a top aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, divulged details about just how much Trump and some of his supporters knew about the potential for violence at the Capitol before Jan. 6. According to Hutchinson, Trump knew that the crowd was heavily armed, but that didn’t stop him from calling on his supporters to march to the Capitol anyway. “They’re not here to hurt me,” she overheard him say.

Host Jane Coaston is joined by The Times’s columnist Bret Stephens and editorial board member Michelle Cottle to unpack the new testimony and what it might mean for Trump — and the future of the G.O.P.

Recommended reading from this episode:

Michelle Cottle’s Opinion essay “Cassidy Hutchinson Did Her Job”

Bret Stephens’ column “Will the Jan. 6 Committee Finally Bring Down the Cult of Trump?”

The Wall Street Journal opinion essay “Trump Needs an Apprentice”

(A full transcript of the episode will be available by the end of the day on the Times website.)

From New York to San Francisco, there’s a sense that crime is on the rise in American cities. And in some ways, that’s true: Violent crime has risen. Murders are up nearly 40 percent since 2019. But property crime has fallen for years. And how we define crime, and what’s causing its increase, is a complicated issue — as is what we should do about it.

So on today’s episode of “The Argument,” Jane Coaston is joined by Rafael Mangual and Alex Kingsbury to debate what’s really going on with crime rates and why people feel so unsafe.

Mangual is a senior fellow and the head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute. “I do think this is more than just a bad-vibes moment in a lot of places. It really is as bad as it’s ever been or close to it,” Mangual says. Alex, an editor at large at New York Times Opinion, thinks we need to first change the narrative of how we understand crime. “Crime as a general term is just really broad,” Alex says, adding, “Where you sit determines what you see.”

When does creative license become cultural appropriation? Take “American Dirt” and “The Help,” two books by white authors that drew criticism for their portrayals of characters of color. Artists’ job is to imagine and create, but what do we do when they get it wrong?

To discuss, Jane Coaston is joined by the Opinion writers Roxane Gay and Jay Caspian Kang. Roxane is an author of multiple books, including “Hunger” and “Bad Feminist.” Jay is a contributor for The New York Times Magazine and writes a twice-weekly newsletter. In their work, both have thought deeply about the thorny issues of writing across identities — including what makes work authentic, the pressure of representation for writers of color and the roles social media and the publishing industry play in literary criticism. “I don’t think it’s that complicated,” Roxane says. “It’s not that we divorce identity from the conversation. It’s that we treat it as inherent because we can’t separate out parts of ourselves.”

On Thursday, a bipartisan House select committee will begin public hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The weeks ahead will be awash with news as the committee reveals what happened in the days and weeks before the attack — and to what extent the rioters were emboldened, or enabled, by the White House and Republican lawmakers.

To wade through the news and help us understand what to pay attention to as the hearings unfold, host Jane Coaston calls upon two experts on the Republican Party.

Nicole Hemmer is an author and historian of conservative media. Ross Douthat is a Times Opinion columnist. They give their takes on what narratives might play out in the hearings and comment on the danger of far-right extremism in the G.O.P. “I don’t see an incentive structure that pulls the Republican Party in general away from procedural extremism, or even really at the moment, anything that pulls them back to a majoritarian democratic process,” Hemmer says.