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Late last month, the New York Times quietly bid farewell to my favorite weekly hate-read. “The Conversation,” as its title implied, was a breezy weekly chat between Times op-ed columnists Gail Collins, a liberal, and Bret Stephens, a Trump-critical conservative. For eight years, the two ideological opponents sparred weekly over Trump-era politics, in the jaunty manner of affluent people who did not themselves feel endangered by any of the policies or portents under discussion. “Hanging out with you like this for eight years was such a pleasure,” Collins said to Stephens in their final joint column. Unfortunately, the pleasure was all theirs.
For as long as opinion journalism has existed, overworked editors and program directors have sought to fill space and time by bringing together politically mismatched pundits and directing them to duke it out—but respectfully. These sorts of conversations can be entertaining, even illuminating, and can help build empathy and consensus in polarized times. The Conversation wasn’t that sort of conversation. Stephens is a tedious bore, and Collins is excessively nice, and in practice what this meant is that Stephens dominated the conversations while Collins laughed at his wordplay and rarely pushed back on his fatuous both-sidesism. In the context of this country’s most prestigious op-ed section, the Conversation always seemed like a bizarre waste of column inches—and, in the context of Donald Trump’s political resurgence over the past few years, its commitment to cocktail-party politesse struck me as tone-deaf, if not downright embarrassing. In the Conversation, civility reigned—and actual, productive debate was nowhere to be found.
In the abstract, I’m all for political civility. I suppose I would rather discuss current events with someone who’s willing to respect my viewpoints than with someone who keeps interrupting to tell me how much I suck. (My running inner monologue already does quite enough of that, thank you very much.) But most paeans to political civility tend to be uttered by the sorts of people whose arguments tend to wilt under scrutiny. These empty pundits are the ones who benefit most from the cover that civility brings; they get to serve up their bad takes with relative impunity, secure in the knowledge that their counterparts will not want to appear rude by pushing back too hard.
This dynamic played out regularly in the Conversation, with special frequency during the 2024 presidential campaign. While Stephens was no Trump supporter, neither was he inclined to give too much credence to those who claimed—correctly, it turns out—that a second Trump administration would have devastating consequences for the United States. Collins never seemed to try too hard to convince him of this, perhaps because the act of convincing might have made both of them momentarily uncomfortable. In July 2024, for instance, Stephens asked Collins if she thought “a second Trump term would be fundamentally worse and scarier than the first one? I’m inclined to think it would be frequently foolish and damaging but not catastrophic. But I’m often too optimistic.” Rather than take the opportunity to cite some of the more outlandish—and now very plausible—proposals of Project 2025, or to identify some of the low-quality leaders who would be in line for Cabinet roles if Trump won, Collins praised Stephens for asking “a good, if terrifying, question, ” and then basically left it there.
That same July, after Biden had withdrawn from the presidential race but before Kamala Harris had secured the Democratic nomination, Stephens argued that “Harris is an even weaker candidate than Biden. Not that I’ll vote for Trump, but I don’t think I can vote for her.” Upon receiving some gentle pushback from Collins, Stephens clarified his position: “I won’t vote for just any Democrat at all on the theory that definitionally they’re all better than Trump. I don’t believe that. And I don’t believe that Trump means the end of democracy or civilization or life on Earth. We lived through four bumpy Trump years before, and I’m pretty sure we can survive another four.” Collins left it there and moved on to talking about J.D. Vance.
A week later, when Harris had secured the Democratic nomination, Stephens was still wondering why he should vote “in favor of a politician whose views I oppose and whose judgment I doubt. Persuade me that I’m wrong.” Instead of doing exactly that, Collins noted that plenty of elections “feature two unwelcome options,” and that refusing “to pick a less-bad choice is being, well, a kinda snob.” (“Guilty as charged,” Stephens replied.)
A week after that, although Stephens was showing some begrudging respect for Harris—“She appears competent and in command, and she is connecting to voters”—he was still full of advice for how Democrats ought to conduct their campaign. “Democrats need to stay away from epithets like ‘weird,’ ” Stephens said, echoing a point that his colleague Thomas Friedman had also recently made. “It risks being this election’s version of ‘deplorables.’ Also, it gives Republicans the opening for a killer comeback. As in: ‘The left calls us ‘weird,’ but they want biological males to participate in women’s sports. They call us ‘weird’ but want us to forget their calls to defund the police.’ ” “Not gonna fight with Tom. Or you, at least on that point,” was Collins’ response.
Fight with him! Go ahead! That’s what you’re there for! If you’re not going to push back on his lazy groveling, then what are you even doing? What’s even the point of putting a liberal in dialogue with a conservative in an election year if the liberal can’t be bothered to make the point that the right is going to make those sorts of tendentious arguments no matter what the left does or doesn’t say?
Bipartisan dialogue doesn’t have to be this lame. In June of last year, for instance, Stephens found himself in conversation with his colleague Jamelle Bouie, a former Slate columnist. Unsurprisingly, the two men clashed, and although the dialogue was respectful, Bouie showed no interest in letting Stephens slide off the hook. After Stephens made his standard point that the Democrats shouldn’t just hand the nomination to Kamala Harris and instead should consider other candidates, such as the governor of Maryland, Bouie pushed back.
“The argument for muscling Harris aside in favor of a nationally untested governor without deep and proven ties to key constituencies is much weaker than it looks,” he said. “And that the downside risks of fracturing the Democratic Party should be considered as much as the upside chance of finding a Goldilocks candidate who offends no one, unifies the party, escapes the burden of Biden’s unpopularity, runs a competent campaign on the fly, and goes toe-to-toe with Trump.”
Stephens didn’t seem to like this. “I don’t know what ‘muscling Harris aside’ means, exactly,” he replied—but Bouie refused to back down. “I’m not sure how else one describes the spectacle of party elites coordinating to keep the sitting vice president from getting the nomination after the president unexpectedly declines to continue his campaign,” he wrote. I haven’t seen the Times put the two men in conversation since.
Collins and Stephens, meanwhile, kept at it until the end of April, when they set the column aside apparently so that they could both work on books. Their final installment was all cheery good humor and self-congratulation. As Stephens put it, “There’s a silent majority of people who prefer our style of good-humored disagreement to the endless food fight that is today’s politics.” But the thing that those who valorize civil bipartisanship for its own sake tend to miss is that there is often a reason why politics are fractious and polarized. Right now, for instance, what Stephens calls a “food fight” is perhaps more accurately described as racist bullying invective from the right; appropriate anger from the left over the anti-democratic policies of the gaudy would-be despot in the White House; and general frustration that so many of the remaining so-called “reasonable” conservatives seem intent on insisting that everything is fine. I’m sure that Stephens and Collins will miss their weekly conversation. The rest of us can only say good riddance.
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