The Argument

We’re headed into the third year of pandemic life, and one thing is clear: We’re all exhausted from Covid. Virus caseloads are waning across the country, masks are coming off, people are traveling more, and office workers have new return dates. Does that mean the pandemic is over? Maybe. And maybe not.

On Feb. 25, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its guidelines on mask wearing and social distancing, saying that 70 percent of Americans no longer need to heed those recommendations. But for a lot of people, like parents of kids under 5 and those who are immunocompromised, this presents more challenges. It’s clear the burden of managing Covid risk increasingly rests on the individual, so what are we supposed to do now?

It’s a lot to contemplate. So on today’s show, Jane puts that question to two experts to help the rest of us.

Dr. Monica Gandhi is an infectious-disease physician whose previous work on H.I.V. informs her assessment of public health messaging during this pandemic. Dr. Aaron E. Carroll is the chief health officer at Indiana University and has spent the pandemic thinking about how to keep his community safe. The good news? Both of them think we’ve got the tools to move forward safely.

Mentioned in this episode:

• “Overcaution Carries Its Own Danger to Children” by Monica Gandhi in The Atlantic.
• “Why Hospitalizations Are Now a Better Indicator of Covid’s Impact” by Monica Gandhi and Leslie Bienen in The New York Times.
• “Covid-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Against the Omicron (B.1.1.529) Variant” in The New England Journal of Medicine.
• “To Fight Covid, We Need to Think Less Like Doctors” by Aaron E. Carroll in The New York Times.
• “Immune Cells Mean Omicron Won’t Swamp Hospitals in Vaccinated Areas” by Michael Daignault and Monica Gandhi in The Washington Post.
• “We Need to Talk About Covid” Part 1 and Part 2 from “The Daily.”

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

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It’s been a week since Russia invaded Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled Ukraine and Russia continues to target major Ukrainian cities with powerful weapons. And amidst the chaos of war – President Biden held his first State of the Union address. Yara Bayoumy, the world and national security editor for Times Opinion, and the columnists Thomas Friedman and Ross Douthat joined Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a Times Opinion podcast host, to discuss what could happen next.

Listen to Jane's interview this week with retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman here.

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In the days since Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine, its citizens have taken up arms to defend their borders and their right to self-determination. Where is the rest of the world in all of this?

To help understand the current situation and how we got here, Jane Coaston talks with Alexander Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was the director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council from 2018 to 2020. Vindman was also a key witness at Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, having listened in on the notorious 2019 call in which Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. Vindman says of the Western response to the invasion, “We need to drop these incremental approaches that are intended for a kind of peacetime environment,” because “we’re in a new Cold War.”

What is your take on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? We want to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the comments on The New York Times website once you’ve listened to the debate.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Alexander Vindman’s book, “Here, Right Matters: An American Story”
• “America Could Have Done So Much More to Protect Ukraine,” by Alexander Vindman in The Atlantic
• “Not One Inch: America, Russia, And the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate,” by M.E. Sarotte
• An interview with the historian Serhii Plokhy in The New Yorker: “Vladimir Putin’s Revisionist History of Russia and Ukraine”
• People to follow on Twitter, as suggested by Alexander Vindman: Igor Girkin, Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, Michael McFaul
• The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s Ukraine crisis response fund
• The MOAS humanitarian relief effort for Ukraine

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

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An American flag, football, the national anthem, “Make America Great Again” — all of these can be symbols of American patriotism, but to whom? In 2022, the notion of being a patriot is complex to say the least, and in a divided nation one might ask: Who gets to be called a patriot, and what does patriotism really mean in America?

This week, Jane and her guests dig into how each of them feels about patriotism and how our two dominant political parties use the idea to their own ends.

Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser from 2009 to 2017, posits that a fundamental sense of patriotism still holds in America today. “This has always been about the story we tell about ourselves and that we don’t live up to,” Ben says. “I think patriotism is basically about the effort to live up to the better version of the story that America tells us about itself.”

Jamelle Bouie is a columnist with Times Opinion and resists the idea that it’s possible to forge a unifying sense of patriotism across the country. America is simply too large and too diverse to unite on a baseline of meaning. Patriotism, he argues, rests at the individual level: “I think all you have to do is identify what are the things that are valuable to you? What are the things that are important to you? And you pursue them,” he says.

What does patriotism mean to you? Would you call yourself a patriot? We want to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the comments on The New York Times website once you’ve listened to the debate.

Mentioned in this episode:

• “After the Fall” Being American in the World We’ve Made” by Ben Rhodes.
• “This Is No Time for Passive Patriotism” by Ben Rhodes in The Atlantic.
• “After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division” by Samuel Goldman.
• “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” by William James in the International Journal of Ethics.

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

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The U.S. State Department recently ordered all nonemergency diplomats and embassy employees to leave Ukraine, signaling that its personnel believe a Russian invasion of Ukraine may be imminent. Such a move by Russia would be the most consequential invasion in Europe since World War II.

If Russia acts, what is America’s responsibility to Ukraine?

Two of Jane’s Opinion colleagues, Bret Stephens and Farah Stockman, join her to tackle that question today. Both Bret and Farah have reported on foreign policy. Bret, a columnist for Times Opinion, told Jane: “I think Ukraine ought to be what Ukrainians want it to be. Vladimir Putin is unwilling to let Ukrainians decide their own future.”

Farah, a member of the Times editorial board, sees wars as dirty pursuits that are often antithetical to democracy and freedom. Farah argues that America needs to focus on its own battles before engaging in international conflicts. “We need to do a better job picking our battles, we really do, because we have to protect ourselves and our own democracy first,” she says. “We cannot help anyone else if we’re in disarray. And guess what? We’re in disarray right now, we really are.”

Mentioned in this episode:

• “Bring Back the Free World” by Bret Stephens.
• “Putin’s Pickle” by Julia Ioffe in Puck.
• “Stop asking what Putin wants and start asking what Ukrainians want” by Mychailo Wynnyckyj

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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases, one involving Harvard and the other the University of North Carolina, that could reshape college admissions. Both schools are being accused of race-based discrimination in their admission practices. In the coming year, the court will examine whether it’s lawful for college admissions offices to consider a student’s race.

These cases and others have brought into focus the role affirmative action plays in higher education, and whether it helps or impedes the overall goal of achieving racial equity on college campuses.

So the question Jane debates this week is: Should we end affirmative action?

On today’s episode, the Opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang sets the stage by sharing with Jane his view that affirmative action policies merely make for “cosmetically diverse” campuses, rather than contributing to broader social justice initiatives.

Jay and Jane’s conversation is followed by a debate between two guests with starkly different views. Ian Rowe, the former chief executive of Public Prep, a nonprofit charter school network, believes that race-based affirmative action needs to be retired in favor of class-based solutions. Natasha Warikoo, a professor of sociology at Tufts University, believes affirmative action is worth saving, and we should find ways to reframe it.

What is your take on affirmative action: end it, or keep it? We want to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the comments on this page once you’ve listened to the debate.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Jay Caspian Kang’s newsletter on politics, culture and the economy.
• Natasha Warikoo’s book “The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions and Meritocracy at Elite Universities.”
• “The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal — And How to Set Them Right,” by Adam Harris.
• “Can Affirmative Action Survive?” by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker.
• “Affirmative Action Shouldn’t Be About Diversity,” by Kimberly Reyes in The Atlantic.

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With the midterm elections just nine months away, the Democrats face some hefty existential questions that need answers: Who are they in this post- and possibly pre-Trump era of American politics? Are they simply the anti-Trump party? Or are they the party of progress? Who are the voters they need to turn out in November? Should they excite the base by building a coalition united against white supremacy, or should they moderate their message to win over Republican-defectors?

This week on “The Argument,” Jane Coaston brings together two voices that represent the factions in the Democratic Party’s existential struggle. Lanae Erickson is the senior vice president of social policy, education and politics at the center-left think tank Third Way. She argues that Democrats need to make their platform as broadly popular as possible in order to bring more voters under the party’s big tent. That’s the way to win, and then enact progressive policies.

Steve Phillips disagrees. He’s the founder of the political media organization Democracy in Color and author of the book “Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority.” He counterargues that the Democrats must run and win as the party united around a vision of a multiracial, just society, unapologetically calling out racism on the other side of the ticket.

The two political strategists strongly disagree on what the party needs to do to win in November, but they agree on one thing: Democrats are afraid and need to answer the question of who they are, fast.

Mentioned in this episode:

• “The Argument” episode debating the future of the Republican Party: “Can the G.O.P. Recover From the ‘Big Lie’? We Asked 2 Conservatives”
• “The Ezra Klein Show” episode with Ron Klain: “What Biden’s Chief of Staff Has Learned, One Year In.”
• Joe Biden For President first campaign video: “America Is an Idea.”
• Steve Phillips’s book “Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority” and his forthcoming “How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good.”
• Steve Phillips’s podcast, “Democracy in Color.”

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A year into the Biden administration, most of us can agree on one thing: The United States remains a deeply divided nation, with polarizing opinions on all sides. But what about the voices from the middle, the independents? Swing voters are arguably one of the most consequential groups for the midterm elections, so we wanted to hear from them about how they view President Biden’s first year and the current state of American democracy.

So this month the veteran G.O.P pollster Frank Luntz convened a focus group of 14 self-identified independents and moderates to get their perspectives. And there seems to be a striking theme: They’re exasperated. As Nick from Pennsylvania put it, “We’ve been promised a lot by past politicians, and it just seems that nothing ever changes.”

This week, Luntz debriefs Jane on the group’s findings — namely, that independents are very disappointed and don’t see much hope for either party. His takeaway? “Independents are simple rejecters. They reject both the left and the right. They reject the past president and the current president. And in some ways they’re actually even more negative because they don’t see a way out.”

Mentioned in this episode:

• “‘The Lowest Point in My Lifetime’: How 14 Independent Voters Feel About America”
• “Why Republican Voters Think Americans Have to Get Over Jan. 6”
• “‘We Barely Qualify as a Democracy Anymore’: Democratic Voters Fear for America”
• Sign up for one of Frank Luntz’s focus groups

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2022 is a big year for supporters of Supreme Court reform. Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that gave women nationwide the right to have abortions, might be overturned, and the debate around changing the way we structure the bench — in particular, packing the court — is getting only more heated.

The past decade has brought a shift in the makeup of the court — from Brett Kavanaugh, appointed despite sexual assault allegations, to Merrick Garland, blocked from confirmation, and Amy Coney Barrett, rushed to confirmation.

It’s the culmination of decades of effort by Republicans to make the courts more conservative. And now Democrats want to push back by introducing some radical changes.

Today, Jane Coaston brings together two guests who disagree on whether altering Supreme Court practices is the right call and, if yes, what kind of changes would make sense for the highest judicial body in the nation.

Russ Feingold is the president of the American Constitution Society and was a Democratic senator from Wisconsin from 1993 to 2011. And Russ Miller is an attorney and law professor at Washington and Lee and the head of the Max Planck Law Network in Germany.

Mentioned in this episode:

• “Americans No Longer Have Faith in the U.S. Supreme Court. That Has Justices Worried,” by Russ Feingold in The Guardian, published in October 2021.
• “We Don’t Need to Reform The Supreme Court,” by Russ Miller in Just Security, published in February 2021.
• “The Future of Supreme Court Reform,” by Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman in Harvard Law Review, published in May 2021.

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There’s a divide in the Republican Party between those who believe the ‘Big Lie’ — that the election was stolen from President Donald Trump — and those who don’t. But which side is ultimately the future of the party?

That’s the question Jane Coaston poses to Charlie Sykes, a founder and editor at large of The Bulwark, and Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review.

Sykes and Lowry discuss what the G.O.P. has learned from Donald Trump’s tenure as president and what Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in Virginia might mean for the Republican midterms playbook. They also debate whether it’s Representative Liz Cheney or Marjorie Taylor Greene who’s a harbinger of the party to come.

Also, if you’re a Republican, we want to hear from you. What do you think of the party right now and where it should go next? Would you be excited to vote for Trump in 2024? Or if you’re a former Republican, why did you leave the party? And who would you rather vote for instead? Leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324 and we’ll share some of your responses later this month.

Mentioned in this episode:

• “Against Trump,” editorial in National Review
• “Trump: Maybe,” by Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review
• “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism,” by Matthew Continetti
• “Blunt Report Says G.O.P. Needs to Regroup for ’16,” Times report on the G.O.P. 2012 autopsy

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