Claim OwnershipThe Argument
Subscribed: 42Played: 1,038
Subscribe
© 2026 The Argument
Description
Has affirmative action gone too far? Should we abolish internet anonymity? Is liberal hypocrisy worth defending?
Welcome to The Argument, a weekly podcast from Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias, where two friends argue about politics, policy, and whatever else is on their minds.
This is a debate show for people who want the nitty-gritty without the typical screaming matches or softball interviews. Each week, one host argues a distinctive point of view — armed with facts and research, not just pundit bluster — and then Matthew and Jerusalem hash it out.
New episodes post every Thursday.
You can find The Argument on Substack, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.
www.theargumentmag.com
24 Episodes
Reverse
Watch the official trailer for The Argument — a new podcast cohosted by Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias. Has affirmative action gone too far? Should we abolish internet anonymity? Is liberal hypocrisy worth defending? Welcome to The Argument, a weekly podcast from Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias, where two friends argue about politics, policy, and whatever else is on their minds. This is a debate show for people who want the nitty-gritty without the typical screaming matches or so...
Are men naturally promiscuous and drawn to younger women? Are women obsessed with tall, older, rich men? Dating discourse is littered with pop evolutionary psychology that makes broad claims about how men and women are under a thin veneer of scientific credibility. But how much of it is backed by real science? In this episode of The Argument, host Jerusalem Demsas interviews UC Davis psychology professor Paul Eastwick about his new book, Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connec...
Economists love to say there are no free lunches. Jennifer Doleac thinks criminal justice is one of the rare places where that’s wrong. In this episode, host and Editor of The Argument, Jerusalem Demsas talks with Doleac—economist and author of The Science of Second Chances—about what happens when you treat crime policy like an empirical problem instead of a morality play. Rejecting the false choice of being "tough on crime" or "soft on crime," Doleac surfaces a surprising number of ref...
Trump didn’t just reshape the GOP—he may have ended what we used to call “the conservative movement.” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat joins host Jerusalem Demsas to map the new right: the collapse of fusionism, the rise of nationalism, and a media ecosystem where influencers matter more than institutions. Then they argue about what liberalism can and can’t solve. Can abundance and faster growth stabilize democracy, or are the deeper crises cultural, spiritual, and demographic in w...
Over less than 25 years, the opioid epidemic killed over 800,000 Americans. These deaths and the resulting economic and political ramifications were unequally distributed across the country. Some places were ravaged, others barely noticed what was happening. In this episode, host Jerusalem Demsas is joined by economist Carolina Arteaga to unpack new research linking the opioid crisis to increasing vote share for the Republican party. They dig into how a public-health catastrophe came to...
Children are a problem for liberalism -- and it’s one you can see in everything from school-board wars to fights over “indoctrination.” If all individuals are free and equal, endowed with rights by their Creator, then does that include children? Kids are fully human, yes, but they’re also dependent, impulsive, and not yet capable of adult autonomy. So when do rights actually kick in? Rita Koganzon, a political theory professor at UNC Chapel Hill, has a blunt answer: adult-style rights have to...
NIMBYism is usually explained as selfishness: homeowners protecting property values, or neighbors who just hate change. But a growing body of research suggests something simpler and harder to argue with: aesthetics. What if people oppose new housing not only because of who might move in or what it might do to traffic, but because the building just looks “wrong”? In this episode, Jerusalem Demsas talks with UC Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf about new experiments that test what actually mo...
If we want to address racism, should we talk more about race – or less? Matthew Yglesias argues liberals undermined their own principles when politics shifted from judging people as individuals to sorting them into moral categories based on group identity. We debate “the fox in liberalism’s henhouse,” collective blame, and why “accurate” generalizations can still poison a pluralistic society. The Argument is a podcast dedicated to honest, unflinching debate about the biggest questions f...
A lot of Americans are uneasy about AI, and so are many of the people building it. Yet we keep scaling and deploying these systems faster than we’re building rules to govern them. Why? The Argument's Kelsey Piper has a few explanations, from foreign competition to a sense of inevitability to a conservative party terrified of regulation. Even if the incentives are clear, our collective complacency is not, especially given AI models have already attempted blackmail and in one case a...
At the end of the year, I wanted to revisit our very first podcast conversation with some of my favorite liberal journalists. In our very first live show in Washington, D.C., Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias joined me for a disagreement-ridden conversation to tape the first episode of our new video podcast, The Argument. We talk about why Matt spends so much of his time arguing with the left, whether Ezra thinks it matters “who shot first” as the right ramps up its att...
Why is far-right populism on the rise? Political scientist Gabriele Gratton has a controversial theory: For decades, technocrats moved policy decisions — on austerity, climate, and more – away from the realm of mass politics and toward independent authorities, courts, and experts. The result? A populist backlash fueled by the desire to reassert control over policy. In Gratton's telling, the populist backlash isn't irrational; it's a democratic response to elite failure. But his prescription i...
America's literacy problem is a policy choice. As schools shifted away from phonics toward guessing-based instruction, a generation of kids paid the price. But a quiet reversal is underway in an unexpected place. Mississippi rebuilt reading instruction from the ground up and saw real gains. If it worked there, why are other states so resistant to copying it? The Argument is a podcast dedicated to honest, unflinching debate about the biggest questions facing democracy, culture, and our future....
Why do so many people believe immigrants are screwing them even when the evidence says otherwise? Economist Sahil Chinoy joins host Jerusalem Demsas to break down his massive 20,000-person study on zero-sum thinking — the worldview that assumes someone else’s gain must be your loss. They dig into how family histories of enslavement and immigration shape attitudes today, why young Americans are so much more zero-sum than older generations, and how economic stagnation fuels a sense of sca...
1Rising income inequality hurts democracy, health, happiness, and basically anything you can think of … right? Sociologist Lane Kenworthy doesn't think so. In his new book Is Inequality The Problem? Kenworthy argued that inequality is overrated as “the” cause of our problems — and discussed why the data pushes him toward a different set of priorities. Host Jerusalem Demsas is skeptical. Together, they dig into happiness, health, and populism, and they discuss why expanding the social wel...
Climate activists spent a decade arguing that if Democrats passed a huge climate bill, created green jobs, and centered “climate justice,” voters—especially the young—would reward them. They got their bill: the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in U.S. history. Then youth support for Democrats, Republicans tore key pieces out all while red states took the money and blue states made it almost impossible to build wind, solar, or transmission. In this episode, Jerusalem Demsas tal...
Silicon Valley’s sharp right turn didn’t come out of nowhere. Former tech worker and current tech writer Jasmine Sun walks us through how a once-solidly liberal sector became MAGA-curious. We talk about: The rise of “effective accelerationism” (E/acc)Why parts of the tech elite feel betrayed by the Biden administrationHow backlash to regulation, internal employee revolts, crypto crackdowns, and AI safety debates pushed founders toward Trumpworld Sun maps the ideological split betwe...
What if climate policy can’t survive voters, courts, and NIMBYs? Bill McKibben is a pioneering climate writer and activist whose books and campaigns helped mainstream the case for rapidly replacing fossil fuels with clean energy. On today's episode, McKibben and host, Jerusalem Demsas, argue about the politics and economics of climate and discuss his new book Here Comes The Sun. McKibben's case: sun, wind, and batteries are now the cheapest new power on earth and China is sprinting ahead...
Why is free speech losing ground? From crackdowns on immigrants, protesters, and law firms to campus speech codes, social-media “jawboning,” and government pressure – we're witnessing the erosion of the free speech culture that once defined American democracy. Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech organization. In this episode, he and Jerusalem discuss why defending free speech always means defending the unpopular, how bur...
Economics writer Joey Politano joins host Jerusalem Demsas to explain the great tariff comeback story. From bananas and coffee to washing machines and Christmas ornaments, Trump’s new trade war is making life more expensive – but why? They unpack how tariffs actually work, why Trump’s obsession with them never went away, and what it says about America’s growing economic nationalism. Plus: why are politicians obsessed with reviving a 1950s manufacturing economy and can tariffs even make ...
Was everything we did during COVID-19 a mistake — or are critics rewriting history? In this episode, Jerusalem Demsas talked with The Atlantic's Roge Karma about his reporting on “COVID revisionism,” which is gaining popularity across the political spectrum. The belief posits that not only were lockdowns, masking, and other public-health measures ineffective, but officials knew they wouldn’t work. Together, they traced how early uncertainty, mixed messaging, and political polarization c...
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States
There was not enough talk about parents and their contribution to educational failures. They bear 100% of the responsibility: 1. They don't vote AT ALL. 2. They vote for parties that are actively dismantling public education. 3. They demand NO HOMEWORK policies and tout biased research to bolster this fallacy. Thus, they NEVER see or hear their own children's inability to do math or read fluently. 4. Parents threaten MS & HS teachers. Grade inflation and passing along is a parental construct.