Announcing The Cross Section by Paul Waldman
Slicing politics open to peer inside its disturbing innards and determine how it all works
Welcome, concerned citizens! Much of what I tell you here can be found on the “About” page of The Cross Section, but I’m offering a longer version here as an introduction to the newsletter.
What’s this newsletter about?
The primary topic is politics: not just what’s going on in the presidential campaign or Congress, but the broader economic, social, and cultural undercurrents that determine how politics works, what influences it, and what it does to us. We’ll be talking about rhetoric, and persuasion, and policy, and media. There will be interviews with smart and interesting people. There will be passion and indignation and nuance and ambivalence. There will, from time to time, be graphs.
But it won’t all be grim! In addition to exploring the often disturbing depths of politics, we’ll have occasional dose of culture or technology or whatever else deserves deep consideration.
And I want it to do some things that aren’t possible within the confines of an 800-word opinion column. Not that there’s anything wrong with 800-word opinion columns — I’ve written a few thousand of them, and I’ll continue to do so. But every news organization has its own interests, habits, and theories about what its audience wants, which have sometimes conflicted with the way I thought a particular story ought to be told or an argument ought to be made. Here at The Cross Section, I’m not bound by any of those constraints.
Among other things, that means The Cross Section will not be the place you come to find out what happened yesterday, but (hopefully) it will be a place you come to get a deeper understanding of what happened yesterday, or last week, or last month: why these events occurred, how they fit into our recent history, what impulses and movements they reflect, and what they might suggest about our future.
Who are you?
A brief history: As a young pup I worked for a series of losing political candidates, then after a short stint in political consulting I went to grad school, thinking I’d be anointed with elbow patches and enjoy the life of the mind forevermore. But after completing a Ph.D. in communication, including writing a lengthy dissertation whose entire readership numbered in the mid-single digits, I began to feel that talking only to a tiny number of fellow academics was too isolating. So I started writing articles for newspapers and magazines, then a couple of years later left academia to co-found an online magazine (the late lamented Gadflyer) during the golden age of the blogosphere. It was exciting, but sadly short-lived.
After a few years at a progressive advocacy group, I became a full-time writer, first for The American Prospect, then for The Week, and then The Washington Post, where I was an opinion columnist for the better part of a decade, writing The Plum Line with Greg Sargent. Along the way I wrote a few books about media and politics.
Today I write columns for MSNBC and freelance articles for other publications. I also have a new book coming out in February with my friend and colleague Tom Schaller.
Yes, I heard you’ve written a terribly cruel book about rural Americans. What’s that about?
The book in question is called White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. Provocative, I know! I’ll be writing about the book itself and the issues around it a good deal more in the coming months, but for now suffice to say that when you hear some conservative talking head say “Aha, those elitist cosmopolitan libs hate real Americans!” you can be sure that they haven’t actually read it, because it’s a nuanced yet forthright examination of the rural-urban political conflict.
Do you have a podcast? Everybody is supposed to have a podcast.
Hell yeah I do! Or rather, I will soon; the podcast is in preparation. I will be co-hosting with my sister Ayelet, the renowned novelist/TV writer/provocateur. Episodes will be posted here, as well as, as the saying goes, wherever you get your podcasts.
What do I get if I upgrade to a paid subscription?
For now, I haven’t created any “premium” content only available to paid subscribers, though I may later on. One thing I didn’t want to do is put everything behind a paywall, because I want all my work to be as easily available as possible to as many people as possible. I’m not sure if that means I’ll get fewer paid subscriptions; maybe it will. But it feels like the better approach for both myself and anyone who wants to read what I write. I’ll be honest: Over the long term, it’s difficult to know how financially viable this newsletter will be. It’s a lot of work, and if I only wind up with a small number of paid subscribers, there’s only so long it can be sustainable. I’ve seen that happen; with the aforementioned Gadflyer, we produced terrific journalism and analysis, but we couldn’t generate the revenue to keep it going.
But I’m committed to this new enterprise. Having written for many different kinds of publications — big newspapers, small magazines, TV networks, and everything in between — I believe this format offers the kind of freedom and independence that could produce some of my most valuable work.
All of which is to say, upgrade to paid if you can. It’ll mean a lot.
Thanks for this. Sad to hear about WaPo going further to shit with your departure. If Jennifer Rubin is their idea of a top pundit, they’ve already screwed the pooch... talking about billionaires co-opting the discourse at the Post, of all places, is shockingly bad and foolish.
My main question for you is: how tied is this publication to the 11 months until the next presidential election? It’s not necessarily right or wrong to take the long view, but it does seem necessary to repel MAGA and the orange man with many stories with significantly more vigor than we are used to, if we want these spaces for freedom of political speech to survive and thrive.