Politix

Erin Ryan joins Brian Beutler in a special mailbag episode to answer your questions about democracy, Republican obstruction, Kyrsten Sinema, and the best movies of the year.

If you could go back in time and had the power to stop the social media revolution in its tracks, what would you do? Would you let things proceed exactly as they did? Or would you try to warn people? We’re at a similar fork in the road right now with artificial intelligence, and the recent advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s fun to play around with, but when you do, it becomes clear that the horizons have changed. And if AI like ChatGPT becomes as ubiquitous as smartphones and earbuds and the Internet of Things, it’s going to change the world. A lot. How can we impose order or mitigate the risks around artificial intelligence? Can these early stage innovations generally do more harm than good in the near-term—that is, before the machines get smart enough to build weapons and enslave us? New York Times technology reporter and host of the Hard Fork podcast Kevin Roose joins Brian Beutler to talk about what upheavals AI might bring, including the amazing ones, the scary ones, and the robot apocalypse ones.

Elon Musk’s Twitter seems unsustainable. At the same time, with all of his apparent grievances and conflicts of interest, Musk now owns digital megatons of user data, which he can abuse to settle political scores or to appease the governments that his other companies depend on for revenue. He recently leaked internal communications, including the personal emails of a Congressman, putting us in dangerous territory. It’s almost like we’re in a race to see how much damage Musk can do before everything falls apart. But what happens when Musk outlasts his critics? How valuable is it to the global consortium of reactionary, wealthy people to keep Twitter alive, in right-wing hands, churning out propaganda, disinformation, and hatred? Kara Swisher, host of Pivot and On with Kara Swisher, joins to talk about how this all ends, if it ends at all.

Because elusive swing voters wield outsized influence over elections, different candidates try different things to motivate and reach them. Democrats believe sticking to bread-and-butter issues is strategically optimal, while Republicans focus on fabricating spectacles that dominate the media ahead of elections. And the only thing we can say for sure is that some Republican spectacles, like the Ebola blitz, work like a charm. What can Democrats learn from their opponents? And how can they anticipate and neutralize Republican propaganda blitzes? Where should Democrats be trying harder to draw attention to real things? And shouldn’t Democrats have the upperhand, as Republicans criminalize abortion, engage in wild corruption scandals, and have dinner with Nazis? Crooked Media’s own Jon Favreau joins to talk about the challenge of reaching swing voters, how the two parties approach that challenge differently, and what, if anything, Democrats could do better since so much turns on how well they perform in elections.

Republicans, especially Donald Trump, hoped the pendulum would swing in their favor on election night, without penalizing their party for its extremism and the Big Lie. Instead the results kind of blew up their plans, such as they were. Now, with a growing realization that Trump is making their party non-viable, Republicans find themselves at a crossroads. Who are their party leaders? What’s their basic character? What policy agenda do they even have, if any? Unfortunately for us, what’s left of the national GOP is a group of people who’ve been selected for their willingness to set aside right and wrong in order to make Donald Trump happy. Mark Leibovich wrote a book about that called Thank You for Your Servitude, during which he got to know just how deep the servitude runs in each of the people who will soon gain power in Washington. Mark joins host Brian Beutler to discuss how those people might grapple with these dilemmas, and what will happen when their decisions, forged in the Fox News cinematic universe, meet reality.

Going into Tuesday’s midterm elections, polls forecasted a close race, while Republicans and the media promised a red wave or even a red tsunami. But then the votes came in and it was basically a tie, and the phantom red tsunami was replaced by a storyline that Republicans really blew it—by banning abortion, rejecting democracy, and latching to extreme ideas and candidates. And while Democrats are mostly relieved, they also chose to cautiously hedge their bets instead of maximizing their advantages on those issues. Both parties are making choices, but are they the smartest choices? And what do these choices say about how they plan to govern? New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie joins to talk about the election results and the choices facing both parties that will affect us all.

American work culture has changed dramatically in recent years. As the fog of the early pandemic lifted, workers had more power, the job market is tighter than it’s been in a generation, and many workers are realizing remote work has big perks. Yet, working from home and hybrid work weren’t the product of a lot of considered thought, it was thrust upon us in a crisis. Less time in office, fewer expectations around clock punching and putting in face time seem to make workers happier. But is that because being at home is inherently preferable? Or is it just that we never had a public emergency that forced us to make workplaces themselves more enjoyable environments? How do we lock in reforms that will make work in the new era better for everyone than it was in the pre-pandemic era? Anne Helen Peterson, who writes the Culture Study newsletter on Substack and hosts Crooked Media’s newest podcast Work Appropriate joins host Brian Beutler to talk about the future of work.

Survey data has become the North Star of the Democratic Party and politically active liberals. Statisticians proved to be better forecasters of election outcomes than pundits and strategists, so over the past decade and a half we’ve outsourced the whole vocation of politics to them. It was a fateful development, but it hasn’t been a smashing success. Have we landed in the best possible place? Or can we do better? Why don’t Republicans follow this same strategy? Conversely, with Republicans given back over to highly compromised candidates in this election, why are Democrats shrugging off their scandals and sticking to the pocketbook issues playbook? Especially when that playbook has such mixed results. Data journalist and Washington Post opinion columnist Perry Bacon Jr. joins Brian to talk about the limits of quantitative methods in politics, and how a smarter approach to data can help Democrats, when democracy itself is on the line.

Frank Foer stuck around long enough to talk about his recent profile of Attorney General Merrick Garland in the Atlantic, which is really an investigation of the question, Will Garland indict Donald Trump? And to what extent does the light-touch way the Justice Department has gone about investigating Trump until recently stem from Garland's own internal contradictions? Brian and Frank discuss the fairly apparent tensions between Garland's sense of himself, his actual personality, and the momentousness of the dilemma staring him in the face—if he is going to pull the trigger.

Tech billionaires like Elon Musk are surrounded by sycophants and think they’re masters of the universe. But what happens when the shine comes off and the public starts to question their ingenuity, their power, their social value? Or when men like Elon Musk decide they’re right and everyone else is wrong, and then start deploying their immense resources toward making sure nothing stands in their way? Musk’s on again, off again, on again, hostile takeover of Twitter is a live fire exercise, showing what happens when rich men try to exert more power over society on a whim. Longtime Big Tech skeptic Frank Foer joins to talk about the worst possible outcomes of Elon Musk buying Twitter, and of a global movement of Kleptocrats fusing with our mighty tech barons to wage an information war against democracy.