Politixia
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Daddy, what did you do during the woke war?
I wrote sternly worded columns.
From New York Times Opinion, I’m Michelle Cottle.
I’m Ross Douthat.
I’m Carlos Lozada.
And I’m Lydia Polgreen.
And this is “Matter of Opinion.”
OK, guys. I’ve got to say, I’m sad the summer is basically over. Are everybody’s kids getting settled back into school?
Yep. Back-to-school night coming up.
Back-to-school night. Oh, Ross.
Our three-year-old has entered school for the first time.
Ooh, congratulations.
Oh!
Our 12-year-old is entering middle school for the first time.
I’m so sorry.
And have nothing to say about either.
It’s a real good news, scary news.
It’s a lot of change. And I’m against change as a conservative. So it’s a rough period.
You’re anti-change? I respect that with children. Mine are old now, so I have reached that point where you just want to shrink them. But anyway, as the kids head back to school this seems like a good time for the question of what they’re learning, whether we’re talking about history, race, gender, sexuality, and how all that has somehow become the battleground for our latest political culture war. That’s right, folks. We are deep, deep in the woke wars.
Or are we?
Or are we? Yes, because there are some signs that the woke wars might not be such a winning political strategy anymore. I mean, it barely came up at the first Republican primary debate. Before we get to that, can we talk first about whether it even makes sense that these issues are being politicized in schools?
I mean, I think schools have always been a battleground of fights of how we tell the story of who we are as humans. I mean, there’s this ahistorical way in which every time this comes up it seems like the first time. But the so-called culture wars have played out in numerous episodes in American history. I mean, I remember a few years ago reading the great Rick Perlstein book about Barry Goldwater and American conservatism. And huge swaths of that book are about school board elections in Southern California and things like that.
Yeah.
These are issues that come up again and again. And the question of what young people learn, the things that we emphasize in our history, the way in which we talk about who we are, that’s the basic stuff of human experience and building identity. So to me, it’s not surprising at all. It’s just taken on a tenor and a ferocity, and, I think, a great deal of political opportunism that I think catches us by surprise every time.
I’m old enough to remember the ‘90s when Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition were taking over school boards so that they could build their ground level army.
Whatever happened to that? We’re living in a theocracy now, right? That was what I was told back then.
They overreached, as these things often do. I mean, I tend to think these things go in cycles. So I’m trying to figure out if people think this looks appreciably different or if it’s just now we’re where you can tweet all this stuff out every 15 seconds, so.
I mean, I think the story here is relatively simple. Somewhere in Barack Obama’s second term, American liberals, who control most of the nation’s education, schools, and are responsible for most of the new ideas that find their way into circulation in the more elite and important reaches of American education, became really, really pessimistic about America and particularly about race relations. And this pessimism was accelerated by the election of Donald Trump. And out of this you had a turn towards a bunch of big, curricular changes that can be distilled into the ideas of figures like Ibram Kendi, who basically made intense arguments about the deep, structural racism of American society.
This then in turn yielded all kinds of exciting new attempts at bringing students deeper in touch with their white privilege or their racial identity and then yielded the backlash that I guess we’re calling the war on wokeness. And that in turn yielded its own set of overreaches and conflicts, and so on. And I do think it’s possible that we’ve passed, for this phase of conflict at least, both peak woke and peak backlash, that the backlash blunted the advance of certain kinds of ideas and in blunting it made the backlash look a bit extreme, thereby blunting the appeal of the backlash. And people started to move on to some other issues. But that’s — if you want a story.
And Lydia’s laughing.
Yes. Good, good.
No, no, no. I think I’m laughing because of the — I lost track of which lash was lashing me and in what direction. I mean, I think the question of how we couch and describe the history of this country is a contested one. And it’s rightly contested. And I think that this question of pessimism, I think, grew out of the fact that so much of the way in which we think about the history of our country has been massaged, and shaped, and molded by forces that don’t really want to reckon with a lot of the hard truths about our history. And is there overreach? Are there places where things have gone too far? Perhaps. And that’s a debate that you can have.
OK, I want to add a wrinkle to Ross’s position on why this became such an issue. I think these things cycle through. They pop up. They die down. There’s a group on each side that just goes all in on culture war no matter what the topic. They’re just raring for a fight.
But I do think because of the pandemic, you were able to get the attention of legions of middle-of-the-road suburbanites whose kids were out of school, struggling to deal with the pandemic, virtual learning. I can’t tell you how many, just personally, moms I knew whose kids melted down. The stories are tragic.
And the Democrats did not respond properly when people would voice these concerns. I mean, most famously in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin in the 2021 governor’s race ran on a platform of parents’ rights, which swept in everything from CRT to mask mandates. The Democrats — Terry McAuliffe, who was running against Youngkin — didn’t take that fury nearly seriously enough. And Glenn Youngkin quite rightly shoved it down his throat.
And by having that as a wedge, you could then go in there and pick off people, and get people really fired up about critical race theory, which no one had ever even heard. The idea that this was rampant in the schools in Virginia was absurd. But because of the pandemic, you could expand who you could have this resonate with.
Michelle, that was the theory. Show me the results. I feel like we’re fighting the same war over and over again, and we’re overlearning the, quote unquote, “lesson of Virginia.” Has there been another example of a state that has turned on this question?
What I’m saying is people are back in school.
Yes.
And suburban Republicans, and centrists, and moderates have lost their desire to fight out the critical race theory things and the trans issues. And so you saw a lot of losing in the 2022 primary. It was not the popular issue that they thought it was going to be. And thus going into 2024, everybody thought that the presidential race was going to hinge on this.
And Trump and DeSantis went all in early on. But then by the time we came to the debate the other night, nobody was really talking about the war on wokeness in schools. They were talking about a return to things like smacking teachers’ unions and devolving power to the states. Carlos, is there something that you want to throw into this mix before I drag this into the sewer of big P politics?
I think you’re going to regret asking that. I just —
Oh. Hit me.
No, like —
No regrets.
I mean — OK, so I don’t want to derail us.
Oh, please do.
Derail.
Feel free.
I would feel dishonest if I didn’t — before we get too deep into that, I have to make a confession. I mean, not a confession in the sense of a sin I must atone for. It’s more of an admission.
It’s more that you’ve scrutinized your privilege as a columnist.
Oh, daily.
And you’re coming to terms.
No. It’s that for the last couple of days I’ve had this deep dread and despair weighing on me, knowing we were going to talk about this. The discussions over woke, and anti-woke, and culture wars are soul sucking to me. I think it’s good to have specific debates over affirmative action in college admissions, the problems with boys, the way we teach history. I mean, that’s terrific. And we’ve had that on this podcast, and we should continue to have it. But when we talk about the culture war, that’s not about debating issues. The culture war is about joining a side. It is about picking a team. And the problem with picking a team in the culture wars is that you inevitably end up with lunatics on your team. And the craziest ones are often the captains of the team. And they may want to go much further than you might want to go.
But you’re on the team, and you don’t want the other side to win. So you end up supporting what the team is defending. So you end up fighting vociferously over things you may not know a lot about. You end up policing language and dogma with the zeal of the convert.
And you end up speaking not just for yourself, but for this amorphous community that never necessarily granted you the rights to speak for it. There’s so many great writers and thinkers who get baited into this, and then they have difficulty writing about anything else because they’re no longer making an argument or exploring an issue. They are defending turf.
The irony of the culture war is that the purpose of the war is not to win it. It is to continue to wage it. You are never going to hear a culture war activist saying, you know what? The cause is won. The fight is over. Let’s close up shop. I don’t need any more funding. It’s like a business lobbyist saying, our profits are pretty healthy. I don’t need more loopholes in the tax code. That’s not a thing that happens in a culture war. The fight is never over. The stakes are always rising. There’s a new front, a new trench you have to dig, a new hill you have to die on.
And it becomes a reason for being. It becomes your emotional, and your financial, and your intellectual sustenance. And that’s why I limit the amount of time I write about this or think about this because it is incredibly frustrating to me.
I share a lot of your frustrations. I don’t think of myself as having any sort of combatant role in any kind of culture war. It’s not a topic of great interest to me.
I’m excluding the participants of this podcast, obviously.
Of course. No, sure. But I think that what’s really striking to me in a lot of the reading that I was doing and thinking that I was doing, knowing that we were going to talk about this topic — and this is something that I have written about — is that I feel like the culture war is struggling to sign up sufficient conscripts. If you just look at the polling and — talking about politics often feels like a way to cheapen a conversation. But in this case, I feel like the message that’s coming across from the voting public that is participating in these polls is like, actually, we don’t want to be combatants in this war either. These issues don’t seem to be lighting even the Republican electorate on fire.
There’s this thing in politics called wedge issues. And they’re called wedge issues because they’re things that you can use to try and peel off lightly committed or uncommitted voters from their side over to your side. And these wedge issues are often cultural issues. And you have your target for that wedge issue, whether it’s suburban soccer moms worried about crime or whatever. And what’s really striking to me is that a lot of these issues that seem to be designed to be wedge issues, whether it’s over transgender kids or critical race theory in schools and so on, they seem to be just completely ineffective as wedge issues and maybe not even that effective within the Republican electorate. So I actually think that there is a really interesting pacifist slash non-combatant movement that is starting that is maybe, frankly like you, Carlos, really fed up with the culture war.
Right. I’ve got to work my way back because I disagree with all of you here. So let’s start with the last point, which is why wokeness, or critical race theory, or any of these things are not looming as large in the Republican primary as maybe was expected. And I think the answer there is pretty simple, that basically Republican politicians made a set of moves against the teaching of critical race theory in schools, a set of moves to assert political authority over public education with Ron DeSantis being the primary example. But Glenn Youngkin and other figures like this, those moves are perceived by Republican voters at having been successful in arresting what had in 2020 seemed like a rolling, statue toppling, prominent people firing cultural revolution.
And as is often the case, once you are perceived to be winning, then that’s less of a motivation for you to vote. So if Republicans felt like they were just losing the culture war the way they did feel — I can assure you they did feel this in 2020 — then Ron DeSantis promising to fight the woke on the beaches and fight them in the streets and so on would be a more appealing battle cry. That’s to your last point.
On the larger point though, of course I agree with you, Carlos, that these things are brain breaking. They put people on the side of the looniest activists of left and right, and you can get trapped in endless cycles of pointless recrimination. That is true.
At the same time, the reason that these issues recur in this way is that they’re actually really important. And people really care about them, like who we are as Americans, the stories we tell about our national history, what we think about the Civil War, the statues that we put up, what we think about religion in schools and prayer in schools, and so on. If you look back at the sweep of American history, we remember the culture war battles much more than we remember a lot of arguments about tariffs, and trade, and economic policy. Everyone remembers the great culture war over alcohol. Everyone remembers prohibition. Many fewer people remember Warren G. Harding’s economic policy.
And that’s because these things are legitimately important. And it’s not just a sort of, oh, no, the schools are getting politicized. What should politics be about if not the schools that are run by the government that teach the children who will be future Americans? So I’m an apologist. I am an apologist for —
I want to jump in here and —
— political debates about education.
I agree 100 percent. No, no. I’m going to do the thing they did in the Republican debate where it’s like, he mentioned me, so I get to respond.
Yes, you get to go. You get to go.
Yeah.
Mr. Ramaswamy.
Yeah, so — oh!
Low blow. Low blow.
Damn. OK. I agree. I agree 100 percent that these things are incredibly important. I think I ended up writing quite a bit for the Times about how we think and talk about history.
For example, what I was trying to articulate and apparently not well is that I feel that sometimes these all become coalesced. And depending on what team you’re on, there is a position to have on how you teach history in school. There is a position to have on affirmative action. There is a position to have on gender identity. There’s a position to have —
And you get pushed. You get nudged into flying the flag that your team flies. Whether or not you actually happen — as sentient humans, we can have different views across an array of subjects. I think the least interesting people that I’ve ever spoken to are people whose views are entirely predictable given their political identity. And my concern is that the culture wars force a lot of people into corners that they may not deep down actually want to inhabit, but because they’re opposed to X over on the other side that that’s where they end up having to stand for things that they haven’t even thought about. Can I ask you something, Ross?
Yeah.
My thought is that — I mean, I wonder if we’re drawing too much from the fact that the word “woke” wasn’t uttered too often at the debate. I have no knowledge of the future, but I imagine that if Trump, or DeSantis, or Ramaswamy is the nominee, my guess is you’re going to hear a lot about woke in the general election. Woke will ride back in on top of a border caravan next to a transgender swimmer crossing the Rio Grande. It’s going to be —
Well, there’s a campaign poster.
It feels to me that that’s something that will be relied on heavily.
I mean, I think there’s going to be a narrative from Republicans that says it’s basically trying to do a version of what Michelle said happened. And I think this is right with pandemic-era closures and so on, saying the wokeness is part of the weakness. They’re woke, and that’s why they can’t control the southern border. They closed your schools, and they changed the curriculum at the same time, like trying to link a practical set of issues to progressive activist ideology.
The woke military rhetoric fits into that.
The military — if we lost a war, if China invaded Taiwan and we lost, every Republican would be running on how the woke military led us to defeat.
Yeah, they would blame the transgender soldiers.
But my sense, guys, is that even the polls suggest that this is not what parents care about. So there are better issues even for Republicans to talk about. I do think teachers’ unions are going to be a big one. What’s your sense about others?
I think, though, there’s been a shift here that is also a consequence of this, where a lot of Republican states in the aftermath of 2020 and those school closures have gone a lot further in terms of letting parents opt out of the public school system. I think one of the effects of the pandemic was that a lot of centrist and conservative parents got a look at the curriculum that their kids were following in public schools and didn’t like it — sometimes had political objections, sometimes had practical objections. And you’ve ended up having a lot more opting out and exiting from the public school system.
And that’s not a political story. Again, that’s not a national-level political issue where you’re like, I’m going to vote for DeSantis or Trump because that way I can leave my local public school system. On that point, Carlos, about being trapped on a partisan side with people who you feel like you have to be on their team, I think one fascinating dynamic to me as a conservative with many liberal friends in the last few years has been the phenomenon of the center-left parent who would never publicly be caught dead endorsing Ron DeSantis or Moms for Liberty, but is privately happy that there are these wild Republicans out there doing pushback against progressivism. Because the liberal parent would like there to be pushback, doesn’t want to commit themselves to the pushback personally, and is happy —
Or publicly.
Or publicly, but is like, well, I don’t want Moms for Liberty in charge of my school, but I’m glad somebody is out there.
But I’m glad they’re there.
This is why I think it’s actually really useful to look at polling. I mean, polling is incredibly — it’s imprecise. But one issue that I follow really closely is the way that the issues around LGBTQ people are seen and perceived in this country and how it plays out in politics. And I think the signal-to-noise ratio is really, really hard to know.
But on the issue of transgender kids, one thing that seems really clear is that a lot of people are really, really uncomfortable with the pace of change around gender identity. And all of these questions are scary and unfamiliar. And there’s — I think the latest — I don’t remember if it was Pew or Gallup polling, saying it’s just not possible — a majority saying it’s just not possible for someone’s gender to change, which is — you wouldn’t think that, that the majority would think that based on what we see in the culture more broadly. But I think that there is a mistaken leap that a lot of people make from that, which is that harsh anti-trans treatment legislation is what’s called for, whereas I think most people are more comfortable with the idea of families, and their doctors, and religious counselors, and therapists, and things like that working things out in a private setting, which is the way that family decisions usually get made in America.
And so I think that there is this sort of like, oh my god, everyone’s freaked out about this that shows up in polling. But when you drill down and think about what do people actually want the government to do about it, the answer will be quite different. So I just think it’s worth thinking about the way that people’s actual lived experience and beliefs relate to their politics.
There’s a definite pattern in every culture war debate where the side that is perceived to be on the offensive and especially employing government power, that side alienates a lot of people very quickly. And this is part of why you get these pendulum swings, where it’s like, well, if it’s the Obama administration forcing local schools to change their bathroom rules, then people are going to be against that. But if it’s the Trump administration forcing a different kind of change or a red state government banning certain medical procedures, then people may swing back against that. That’s a persistent feature of these debates.
And here again you get back to the pandemic, where people lost faith in the education system as a whole. They got the feeling that decisions were being made not because of children, but because of teachers’ unions or politicians. And so that was an opening to make people uneasy in general about what was going on in their schools with the curriculum, with the gender identity discussions. It just had a whole different layer to it. And I do think now that the pandemic is over, it is going to fade somewhat.
Let’s take a quick break with this. And when we come back, we’ll talk about how we escape the woke war.
And we’re back. So how do we get schools back to normal? What does belong in the classrooms? I assume somebody has a thought. Ross, do you have notes?
I mean, I have a detailed curriculum —
Oh, tell.
— Michelle, under my desk —
Item one.
— ready to go.
Subset A.
I mean, I think that one way to look at this is to take a figure like my former Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose work was, I think, a really instigating force for new thinking about racial history. A lot of what we think of as late-2010’s progressivism, anti-racism, and so on kicks off when Coates writes his essays calling for reparations for slavery and other things in that zone. And to me, part of what he became famous for was this excavation of the depths of African American suffering under not just slavery, but segregation — the depths and severity of the wound, how long subjugation and violence endured against Black people in American life.
And I think there’s a chunk of what Coatesian progressivism wants to talk about that should be integrated into whatever kind of curriculum we’re offering to kids. The problem is that it’s laced with this incredibly deep pessimism about America and the possibility of racial equality and racial improvement, and so on that runs through the big, subsequent progressive, anti-racist authors. The question is for public schools teaching kids about America, people are going to want and, I think, are reasonable in wanting a historical narrative that tries to instill love of country, optimism about the country, hope for the country’s future, including around issues of race.
And if I were offering progressives a challenge, I would say, OK, you want more depth about the sins of the American past? That’s fine. That’s good. What is the story about the American present that you’re going to tell that is doing the kind of patriotic work that if we’re going to have a public school system, a government school system, people are going to want from their history curriculum? You’re never going to have a consensus around a history curriculum that just teaches kids America’s pretty much just a bad, racist place.
You brought up Coates, and I remember I went to hear him speak at some event here in Washington. And he talked about precisely what you are raising, Ross, which is that everyone both wanted to hear — especially his white progressive audiences, which were legion. They wanted the tongue lashing. They wanted this is how bad it all is.
But they wanted hope at the end. And he was like, why is that my job? This is my analysis of the situation. Why am I supposed to make you feel good at the end?
But I guess I would imagine that if I was a schoolchild today, particularly a kid in middle school or high school, I would want to, unlike the students at the South Carolina school where a teacher was told to stop teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, I would want kids to have access to that and access to lots of different stories and interpretations of American history, and talk about those, and argue them out. And maybe that’s a result of the kind of education that I received.
It feels to me like, do I want Ta-Nehisi Coates to be the curriculum of American history? No. Do I want it to be an incredibly important ingredient and a new perspective on thinking about what American history is? Absolutely. And I think that’s that the piece of it. It’s like where do you point your lens, and how wide is its aperture?
I took a trip to Savannah recently, and I went to a museum. And it is set in the house of a very wealthy merchant of some kind. And it’s a very popular museum in Savannah. And a friend of mine who’s a historian of African American history participated in the rethinking of the programming at this museum. And they basically have infused the lives of enslaved people into the story that they tell at this museum.
I found it very moving. It was really interesting. I learned a lot. You’d go into the kids bedroom, and they’d be like, hey, that’s where the slave girl would sleep, that corner over there. And it wasn’t saying that America was bad because there was a slave girl sleeping in the corner. It’s just like, hey, this is what happened. And I thought it was really interesting. But the thing that I noticed on this tour — and this is, I think, probably what’s happening in a lot of schools — is most people on the tour were basically like, huh, so was that wallpaper original, or is that a reproduction?
Oh.
That people just didn’t listen to or they just — it went right past them because they just weren’t showing up for that. They weren’t interested in it. And that’s, to me, one of the questions that I ask, is how much are we talking about these fights in ways that seem so life or death, but actually don’t really have any impact on kids at all?
I mean, one, there is a default here, a default assumption where most kids in grade school or high school, they’re not sitting around absorbing these controversies in a profound way one way or another. And that’s in a way the strongest argument at any point against overthinking the culture wars as they relate to schools, is just your memory of what actually being in high school is like. I think that there’s, though, to simplify the conservative error in teaching US history, where you say, look, it’s really important to make kids love America and think America is great. And therefore, we always have to have an explanation for any bad thing that happened.
I think the liberal and progressive weakness is to assume that kids are somewhere going to get the basic story, and we can just focus on making sure that they understand the complicated, harder truths and so on. So there is a tendency to be like, well, I’m sure they’ll learn about the founders at some point. And so we can skip on to complicating what they know about the founders. But then the kids never actually learn about the founders except via “Hamilton” or something like that.
And I think that the question is whether there is a synthesis here where you’re able to have a fundamentally positive story about America, which, again, I think you can’t have a public school curriculum that doesn’t do that in some way that also seriously integrates the harder, harsher truths. To make a plug, there’s this series of graphic novels, which — I hate graphic novels, for the record. I’m not endorsing the concept of the graphic novel.
Aww.
But these graphic novels —
There are some great ones out there.
— they’re called Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales. And my kids like them.
My kids love those, Ross.
My son absolutely loves them. And there’s one about Lafayette. There’s one about World War I that’s actually incredibly good. There’s one about the Underground Railroad. There’s one about Haiti and the Haitian slave revolt and the Louisiana Purchase. And they are not always perfect, but they do a lot of work of being serious, dark, and grisly where it’s appropriate to be dark and grisly, not shying away from the darkness, but also giving you a sense of the American story as a really cool and interesting thing.
My worry about a certain progressive history is that it’s like you read it, and you’re like, man, you really hate everybody in the past. The past just sucks. And that’s the best way to get people to tune out, to get kids to tune out history entirely, I think.
But what if you’re just fascinated by the past? I mean, what if you’re not making a value judgment about it one way or the other? I mean, we all loved “Succession.” And those people were horrible.
I judge them every Sunday night, Lydia.
Ross, I like that they’re dark and grisly. Because in my experience, kids like — we used to get these tiny, little books about Rasputin or —
Oh, yeah.
— Hannibal, or Alexander the Great, or whatever. And the kids totally dug them because they were into the dark and grisly parts of history.
One of these books, just so you know, is literally called “Donner Dinner Party.”
Wow. I love it. I want that.
And for a long time we refused to buy that one, but then it was actually really interesting, and I learned a lot.
Your kids probably loved it.
That’s the “Donner Party” that I had not known before.
But isn’t this the irony of this whole debate, is that I grew up reading the “Tintin” books, and “Asterix and Obelix.” You don’t like graphic novels, but I love comic books.
I read “Tintin” too. I’m a hypocrite.
There’s so much stuff in there that’s politically incorrect and stuff that is actually racist and whatnot. And I think those books are thought of differently now. But I would not want a childhood where I was cut off from things that were shocking or offensive. I worry now that if the Ron DeSantises of the world get their way that no one will ever be confronted with anything that will offend their delicate sensibilities.
So I have kids in middle school, high school, and elementary school. And so this is a live issue for me. But what’s weird about it for me is that I never went through it. I didn’t go to middle school or high school here, so I never had to imbibe whatever sanitized version of American history was given to kids.
You just learned about the evils of Yankee imperialism straight up.
The ‘70s and ‘80s, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Yankee, go home.
Yeah.
So the way I actually learned American history was through reading the John Jakes “Bicentennial Series” of historical fiction, which my dad had. And they were great because every 23 pages or so there was a pretty reliable sex scene. And for this middle schooler, that was great. But then I learned about Valley Forge.
And yet later, I learned more. There are different ways — your learning of American history comes to you in unexpected ways and unexpected moments. Hopefully, the learning of the American story continues. In many ways, I think that what I got in all sorts of subjects in high school was a simplified version that I went on to deepen throughout my life.
Joe Biden is always talking about the soul of America. And that’s based on John Meacham’s book by the same name. And Meacham in that book gives some version, a synthesis of the bad and the good story of America is. He says, “For all our darker impulses, for all our shortcomings, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight.”
The word that sticks out for me is the word “fight.” If I were to design the curriculum, I would emphasize that that’s what this place is. This is a fight. This is a constant, constant fight not just over which policies predominate, but over which stories predominate. And I think that’s the nature of this beast.
I love it. Well, with that, on this very philosophical note, we’re going to leave it, guys. And when we come back from break, we’re going to get hot or cold.
All right. And finally, it is time for Hot/Cold, where every week one of us shares something we’re into, over, or somewhere in between. So who’s going to hot/cold us?
I think it’s going to be me, Michelle.
You.
So do you guys remember the movie “Super Size Me?”
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
Yeah. So the movie was — it was a documentary, like a stunt documentary. The guy would go — was only going to eat at McDonald’s. And any time they asked him, do you want that Super Sized, which is a thing that McDonald’s used to do and, in fact, stopped doing after this movie came out, they would give you an extra-large Coke and an order of fries with your order.
And he always said yes. That was the deal?
Part of the documentary was that he had to say yes. I’ve been thinking about that movie lately because I relatively recently discovered these little miniature cans of soda.
I love those.
Super shrink me.
It’s a super mini.
OK, so this is like 7 1/2 ounces. It’s a little bit more than half the size of a regular can of soda. And I feel like after years, and years, and years of things getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, we’re finally at a place now where we’re actually being served things in the quantities that we might actually want to consume them. And what’s perfect about it is that it’s exactly how much you’d want to consume in one sitting. It doesn’t get warm. It stays fizzy.
See, I love this. I’m a child, and I don’t need much caffeine. So I would get a big can of Coke, I would drink about a third of it, and then I would leave them around the house. And it would make my husband completely mental.
Exactly.
But now that these have come out, our marriage is much better.
Lydia, do you find yourself consuming more of them though?
I don’t, actually. It turns out that it just scratches that itch of like, I want something sweet, and caffeinated, and fizzy. It’s great also for alcoholic beverages, which I think should all be smaller.
Definitely.
But I think just like more broadly — and Carlos, you’re going to hate this because I’m going to say one of your least favorite phrases, which is I feel like I’m just entering a phase of life where I think less is more.
I am with you.
So we are — my wife and I are moving from a pretty big, sprawling, rather rundown loft apartment to a smaller, one-bedroom apartment in New York City. And so we’ve been downsizing in general, even though we don’t have kids. And usually, that’s a thing that you do when you have kids. And so I think I’m just really excited about small things.
Like I love these little, tiny notebooks that I get that are perfect to fit in my pocket so that I can write down my thoughts rather than pulling out my phone. So anyway, small is beautiful. I’m hot on small things. That is my hot/cold today.
Go small. Go small, or go home.
I’m going to have to try those sodas now. OK.
No, they’re brilliant. I love them. That’s just perfection.
The truth is that with any carbonated beverage, you are buying the initial swig.
Yes, that is so true.
And so shrinking it is a way of getting closer to — you’re just buying —
That first hit.
— that first hit.
Amen, brother.
On that note, I think it’s time to say goodbye, guys.
All right. Thanks, everyone.
See you next week.
I’m going to open my can of fizzy water to say goodbye.
Thanks for joining our conversation. Be sure to give “Matter of Opinion” a follow on your favorite podcast app. This episode was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Annie-Rose Strasser.
Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
