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The podcast dissects Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee and sees plenty of silver linings in his scathing indictments of Trump for Republicans. When it comes to the president’s aborted summit with North Korean despot Kim Jong-un, however, there is a little less to cheer about.
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Is anyone else a little sick of Noah’s whining? There comes a time for every political nerd when they must learn to accept that politics != policy. The policy and the political worlds are entirely different. As far as I can tell this is Noah’s biggest hangup; he can’t seem to get over the fact that politics isn’t a debating society of wonky nerdy types like himself.
Politics is all about influencing the exercise of power, public and private. Policy is simply how the broad goals and interests of powerful people are translated into action. The former is a much bigger sphere than the latter. Having a powerful civil society and a large private sector implies messy, incoherent politics, because people won’t just engage in politics to lobby the government; they’ll do it to lobby every other power center in society to, from large corporations to churches to Hollywood to universities. If your first reaction to some bit of politics is to say “This makes no sense, how is that supposed to change public policy?” then you don’t understand American politics at all.