The Pull of Andrew Yang’s Pessimism

CLEAR LAKE, Iowa—The Best Western Holiday Lodge off Route 18 in northern Iowa feels like the right place to talk about how maybe it’s too late. Accept it, deal with it, Andrew Yang tells me, but try to make the best of it, and maybe we’ll even get somewhere decent along the way. But there’s no “patching the dam,” as he put it. “The world has changed; the world is changing. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, try as we might or wish as we might,” he told me. “We have to start dealing with the world as it is.”

(Our conversation can be heard in full on the Radio Atlantic podcast below.)

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Yang has already. “We’re going to shock the world come next February,” Yang told me, referring to the Iowa caucuses on February 3, 2020.