GD POLITICS

On today’s podcast, we’re taking a break from American politics and diving into the seemingly consensus-driven — but in reality quite messy — politics of Japan.
I spoke with Kenneth Mori McElwain, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Tokyo, on the final day of my two-week trip to Japan. It was a welcome chance to step off the American news-cycle hamster wheel and use the time to get a sense Japanese politics.
The stereotype of Japanese politics is that it is staid and steady, conservative in both the capital-“C” and lowercase-“c” meanings of the word. The conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party, has governed Japan for 66 of the 70 years it has existed. But even with this apparent political consensus, a bias for the status quo has made it difficult, at times, to tackle big questions.
The LDP remains in power today, but Japanese politics has not felt especially staid or steady lately. Last month, Sanae Takaichi, the country’s first female prime minister, secured the largest majority in Japan’s postwar history — a two-thirds supermajority in the lower house. That came less than two years after scandal cost the LDP 28 percent of its seats and forced it into minority government.
Now Takaichi is confronting a daunting set of problems. Japan has finally emerged from decades of deflation, but wages have not kept pace with rising prices, contributing to a cost-of-living crisis. While I was visiting, gas prices hit a record high.
At the same time, Japan’s pacifist constitution is once again a live political issue. Drafted during the U.S. occupation after World War II, it renounced Japan’s right to wage war. In its 80-year history, it has never been amended, making it the world’s longest-lived unamended national constitution. Takaichi says she wants to change that.
Japan also famously faces a rapidly aging population. Takaichi has promised to deliver economic growth, while maintaining tough limits on immigration and avoiding a further expansion of the national debt.
And that is before getting to some of the country’s other high-profile cultural debates, including whether women should be allowed to become reigning empresses and whether married couples should be allowed to keep separate surnames. At the moment, the answer to both is no and Takaichi wants to keep it that way.
The big question facing Takaichi at the moment is whether she can translate her sky-high popularity into tangible results for the Japanese people.


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I am back from Japan and I hope you enjoyed the evergreen conversations we published while I was away. Today it’s back to the news cycle, although in a somewhat different format.
I’d planned on getting up to speed on the news I missed and talking to Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe about it. However, when I woke up from an in-flight nap on Saturday, Nathaniel and Mary had messaged me telling me that they had planned the whole podcast already and that it would be best if I didn’t go on twitter or read up on the news ahead of time. Just show up and turn the show over to them.
So (and this is how much I trust them) that is what we did on today’s podcast. I relinquished hosting duties to Mary and Nathaniel and they quizzed me on the twists and turns of the past two weeks.


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Democrats are in the midst of an intraparty debate over how to win their way out of the wilderness. There are arguments about ideology, strategy, identity, and more. And while these debates always feel urgent for the party out of power, they are, at the very least, not new.
Parties and politicians have been trying to figure out how to shore up their vulnerabilities, enhance their strengths, and fight another day for just about as long as representative politics have existed.
Today we are going to focus on one such instance. We’re looking back at late-20th-century Nevada and the beginnings of a political machine built by former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
It’s the subject of a new book by CEO of the Nevada Independent Jon Ralston, titled, “The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight.”

If you’ve spent time reading think pieces on the internet during the past handful of years, you might have come across the following ideas: first, that American men are suffering from a loneliness epidemic and, second, that conservatives are happier than liberals.
If you aren’t familiar with these takes, then you probably aren’t online enough to experience the sad loneliness of the American male liberal, so please carry on as you were. I joke, I joke.
In any case, these ideas have caught on enough that friend of the pod Lakshya Jain — a machine learning engineer by day and head of political data at The Argument in his spare time — wanted to do more research into what differences actually exist across the political spectrum and between men and women.
In this episode, he breaks down what he found and also gets into his latest research on affordability and whether Americans are lying to pollsters about how much they read.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.
Depending on who you ask, we’re either living through a moment that feels totally unprecedented or alarmingly familiar.
Today’s guest argues it’s alarmingly familiar: great powers jostling for influence, nationalism on the rise, trade and technology turning into weapons, and festering conflicts with the potential to spiral.
In his new book, “The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History,” Yale historian Odd Arne Westad compares today’s geopolitical landscape to the decades leading up to World War I.
A hundred-plus years ago, the world looked modern, interconnected, and — at least to many people — too prosperous and rational for a major war. Then, in a matter of weeks, a localized conflict became a continent-wide crisis that ended in 40 million casualties.
The percentage of people alive today who have experienced great power conflict is vanishingly small, and after 80 years of great power peace, it can be easy to think of the prospect as far-fetched. Westad argues that this, too, may be a similarity to the early 20th century.
Today we talk about those similarities and differences and what lessons we can learn.