Peter Suderman

speaker

62 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Dec 2024

Peter Suderman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Bulwark Daily · 'The Hottest Circle of Hell Is for Those Who Stay Neutral' · 27 Dec 2024 podcast

I'm Peter Suderman, I'm gonna be your moderator tonight, and full disclosure, I do work at Reason. But I also appear on a podcast that is run through the bulwark, so I'll try to be fair and not take sides. However, that might be a little bit complicated given our resolution, which is you don't have to pick a side in politics. So if I'm not taking sides, am I actually kind of taking sides?

I think that's the sort of thing that's gonna come up in tonight's debate. Now, because this is a debate, there will be a winner, and that winner will be decided by you, the audience. The way this is gonna work is there are going to be two votes.

The first vote, you've either already voted or you should vote right now, and then there's gonna be another vote after the debate happens, and the team that wins will be the team that moves the most number of people towards their position. So if you have not yet cast your vote, Please follow the instructions on the screen and vote now.

As you do that, I want you to think just a little bit about the resolution before us tonight. What does it mean to pick a side in politics? We are gathered here this evening in Washington, DC, where national politics is dominated by two political parties that are constantly asking you to pick a side. When Americans go to the voting booth, most of them pull the lever for one of those two parties.

And in the vast majority of races, one of those two parties wins. Fundamentally, voting in a democracy is about picking sides. The very structure of American politics all but forces you to do so. And if you decide not to, are you throwing away your influence? Are you abdicating your democratic responsibility?

Are you just shrugging your shoulders and saying, you know, it doesn't really matter who wins. But then there's the flip side of this. Doesn't picking a side make it harder to hold politicians accountable? It's often said that politics is a team sport. But if you have already declared your allegiance to one team or another, what incentive is there for politicians to change?

Shouldn't politics be about issues and policies and governance rather than teams and partisan victories? There's a reason that people often praise bipartisanship. Americans tend to like it when politicians work together for better policy and better government rather than against the other side, just so that their own team can win. And then there's that old saw about both sides.

Press critics love to trash journalists who engage in lazy both-sides-ing, in creating false equivalences. And look, sometimes that can happen. Both-sides-ing can be an easy way to duck controversy and avoid responsibility. On the other hand, just look at the dismal approval ratings for Congress and some of our recent presidential candidates.

In the judgment of the American people, both sides are often pretty terrible.

so why pick one to discuss these questions tonight we have four top-notch debaters from the bulwark we have sarah longwell and tim miller tim is a tim is a former spokesperson for the republican national committee longwell is the publisher of the bulwark where she hosts the focus group podcast from reason we have nick gillespie and matt welch both of whom are editors at large.

So if you haven't cast your vote, time's running out. Time's running out. I think it's just about time to start the debate. So we are going to start with opening statements from each of our debaters. It's going to go reason bulwark, reason bulwark the whole night. Reason will have the first word. The bulwark will have the last word.

And we are going to start with Matt Welch, who will be defending the proposition. You don't have to pick a side in politics.

Thank you, Matt Welch. Since you brought up the Congressional Budget Office, I will just say that I am the moderator, which means I'm asking the questions, not answering them, but it has been about 30 years since we passed all 12 appropriations bills. Sarah Longwell, would you like to make an opening statement? Step on up to the podium.

Nick Gillespie.

You will have an opportunity to ask questions of the debaters a little later. But now we're going to move into a segment where the debaters are going to be able to ask questions of each other. However, as the moderator, I'm going to take this opportunity to ask two questions first. And the first question is going to go to Matt and Nick, the Reason side.

I think the strongest argument or one of the strongest arguments that I heard from from the bulwark was that in the age of Trump, who is deeply anti-libertarian. And Sarah gave us this incredibly long list of anti-libertarian ideas and policies that Trump supports. Don't you have to pick a side against him? Nick, Matt, what do you say to that?

We should just poll you and then find out who's going to win. But it's somebody else. I agree. My idea is silver and keys. Yeah. I mean, does Nate Silver incorporate you into his models?

This is what happened. Okay, so we are about halfway through this segment, and it has been dominated by talk of Donald Trump, and that's appropriate.

I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad, Tim. This is exactly the energy I wanted, but I also want to think about this. We could have talked about cancel culture. Oh, man. Let's keep it to the people who are actually on stage. And I want to see if we can shift this just a little bit to thinking beyond Donald Trump. Again, I don't think it's inappropriate to be talking about him. He was president.

He was elected president again. At the same time, This question isn't just about Donald Trump. And one of the things I heard from the reason side of this argument is that Americans obviously don't pick a side in many cases. Something like what is a third of Americans don't vote because they don't have to. And in some ways that just supports the reason case that the Matt Welch argument here is.

Showing 1–20 of 62 · page 1 of 4