Kind: captions
Language: en
Democrats still think the currency of
politics is money and the currency of
politics is attention. And that's a huge
difference between the two sides right
now. I think the steelman is very easy
to make here. Department of government
efficiency. That sounds like an
organization that's needed if government
is inefficient. And one of the themes of
our book is just how inefficient
government can be. Not only at building
houses, building energy, often at
achieving its own ends. building
highspeed rail when it wants to build
high-spe speed rail, adding affordable
housing units when it wants to afford
add affordable housing units. You know,
I love Ezra's line that we don't just
need to think about, you know,
deregulating the market. We need to
think about deregulating government
itself, getting the rules out of the way
that keep government from achieving the
democratic outcomes that it's trying to
achieve. This is a world in which a
department of government efficiency is a
godsend. We should be absolutely
obsessed with making government work
well, especially if we're going to be
the kind of liberals who believe that
government is important in the first
place. In my lifetime, the Democratic
Party has never been
as internally fragmented and weak,
leaderless, ruerless as it is right now.
Now, it won't stay that way. You cannot
change American politics. You can't
change Democratic party if you're not
willing to upset people. Donald Trump
reformed the Republican party by willing
people to fight Republicans. He ran
against George W. Bush, against Jeb
Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the
trade deals, against a bunch of things
that were understood to be sacred cow.
Somehow this guy ran like right after
Mitt Romney and John McCain while
attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain,
right? If you are not like the
Democratic party does need to change. It
needs to attain a different form because
the Obama coalition is exhausted. It's
done. It's not going to be able to do
that if it doesn't have standard bears
who are willing to say we were wrong
about some things. We have to change our
views on some things. We have to act
differently and speak differently. When
Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at
SpaceX, when Elon's at X, I would
imagine, and you know this better than
me because you know him. And maybe most
importantly for the purposes of this
part of the conversation, you know the
people who work for him. I'll bet if you
ask the people who work under Elon at X,
Tesla, SpaceX, they say, "I know exactly
what Elon wants. This is his goal for
the Super Heavy rocket. This is his goal
in terms of humanoid robots. This is his
goal in terms of profitability of
Twitter and the growth of our
subscription business and how we're
going to integrate new features."
There's a probably a really clear mind
meld right now. I have no sense that
there's a mind meld. And in fact, I have
the exact opposite sense that rather
than an example of creative destruction,
which would be a mitzvah of
entrepreneurship, we have an act of
destruction destruction. We have
destruction for the sake of destruction.
It's much cleaner to me from an
interpretive standpoint to describe Doge
as an ideological purge of
progressivism performing an act of or
performing the job of efficiency rather
than a department of actual efficiency
itself. The following is a conversation
with Ezra Klene and Derek Thompson. Ezra
is one of the most influential voices
representing the left wing of American
politics. He is a columnist for the New
York Times, author of Why We're
Polarized, and host of the Ezra Klein
show. Derek is a writer at The Atlantic,
author of Hitmakers and On Work, and
host of the Plain English podcast.
Together, they've written a new book
simply titled Abundance that lays out a
kind of manifesto for the left. It is
already a controversial, widely debated
book, but I think it puts forward a
powerful vision for what the Democratic
Party could stand for in the coming
election. If I may, let me comment on
the fact that sometimes on this podcast,
I delve into the dark realm of politics.
Indeed, politics often divides us. and
frankly brings out the worst in some
very smart people. Plus, to me, it is
frustrating how much of the political
discourse is drama and how little of it
is rigorous, empathetic discussion of
policy. I hate this, but I guess I
understand why. If the other side is
called either Hitler or Stalin online by
swarms of chanting mobs, it's hard to
carry out a nuanced discussion about
immigration, healthcare, housing,
education, foreign policy, and so on. On
top of that, anytime I talk about
politics, half the audience is pissed
off at me. And no, there is no audience
capture. I get shit on equally by
different groups across the political
spectrum, depending on the guest. Why? I
don't know. But I'm slowly coming to
accept that this is the way of the
world. I try to maintain my cool, return
hate with compassion, and learn from the
criticism and the general madness of it
all. Still, I think it's valuable to
sometimes talk about politics. It's an
important part to the big picture of
human civilization, but indeed, it is
only still a small part.
My happy place is talking to scientists,
engineers, programmers, video game
designers, historians, philosophers,
musicians, athletes, filmmakers, and so
on. So, I apologize for the occasional
detour into politics, especially over
the past few months. I did a few
conversations with world leaders and I
have a few more coming up. So there will
be a few more political podcasts coming
out in part so I can be better prepared
to deeply understand the mind, the life,
and the perspective of each world
leader. I hope you come along with me on
this journey into the darkness of
politics as I try to shine a light in
the complex human mess of it all, hoping
to understand us humans better, always
backed, of course, by deep, rigorous
research and by empathy.
Long term, I hope for political
discussions to be only a small
percentage of this podcast. If it's not
your thing, please just skip these
episodes or maybe come along anyway
since both you and I are reluctant
travelers on this road trip. But who
knows what we'll learn together about
the world and about
ourselves. This is the Lex Ruben
podcast. To support it, please check out
our sponsors in the description. And
now, dear friends, here's Ezra Klene and
Derek
Thompson. You are both firmly on the
left of the US political spectrum. Ezra,
I've been a fan of yours for a long
time. Uh, you're often referred to, at
least I think of you as one of the most
intellectually rigorous voices on the
left. Can you try to define Can you
define the ideals and the vision of the
American left? Oh, good. We're starting
small here. And maybe contrast them with
the American right. Sure. Um, so the
thing I should say here is that you can
define the left in different ways. I
think the left has a couple fundamental
views. One is that life is
unfair. We are born with different
talents. We are born into different
nations, right? The the luck of being
born into America is very different than
the luck of being born into Venezuela.
Um, we are born into different families.
We have luck operating as an ominant
presence across our entire lives. And as
such, the people for whom it works out
well, we don't deserve all of that. We
got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard
and we also had talent and we also
applied that talent. But at a very
fundamental level that we are sitting
here is unfair and that so many other
people are in conditions that are much
worse, much more precarious, much more
exploited is unfair. And one of the
fundamental roles of government should
not necessarily be to turn that
unfairness into perfect equality, but to
rectify that unfairness into a kind of
universal dignity, right? So people can
have lives of flourishing. So I'd say
that's one thing. The left is
fundamentally more skeptical of
capitalism and particularly unchecked
forms of capitalism than the right. I
always think this is hard to talk about
because what we call unchecked
capitalism is nevertheless very much
supported by government. So I think in
in a way you have both like markets are
things that are enforced by government.
Whether they are you know how you set
the rules of them is what ends up
differing between the left and the
right. But the left is tends to be more
worried about the fact that you could
get rich uh building coal fired power
plants, belching pollution into the air,
and you could get rich laying down solar
panels, and the market doesn't know the
difference between the two. And so
there's a set of goals about regulating
the the unchecked uh potential of
capitalism that also uh relates to sort
of exploitation of workers. Um there's
like very fundamental questions about
how much people get paid, how much power
they have. Again, the rectification of
economic and other forms of power is
very fundamental to to the left. When
you think about what the minimum wage
is, I am a successful podcast host. When
I go into a negotiation with the New
York Times, I have a certain amount of
market power in that negotiation because
other firms want to hire me. When you
are a minimum wage worker, um the reason
we have a minimum wage is in part to
rectify a power problem. A lot of
workers do not have market power. They
do not have a bunch of job
opportunities. They are not working with
firms. Um and by the way, without
certain kinds of regulation, those firms
would cartilize and make it so they can
hold down wages anyway. So trying to
rectify power imbalances is I think
another thing folks on the left take
more seriously. That would be a start of
things that I think broadly unite the
maybe let's call it the intuitions. Um,
I want to say that's a podcast answer,
not a book. I'm sure I left a million a
million things out here, but but I'll
start there. I mean, there's a lot of
fascinating things there on on the
unfairness of life. That could be the
interperson unfairness. So, one person
getting more money than another person,
more skills or more natural abilities
than another person. And then there's
the just the general unfairness of the
environment, the luck of the draw, the
things that happen. all of a sudden you
cross a street and the car runs a red
light and runs you over and you're in
the hospital. So that unfairness of life
and in general I guess the left sees
there's some role or a lot of role for
government to help you when that
unfairness strikes and then maybe
there's also a general notion of u the
size of government. I think the left is
more comfortable with a larger
government as long as it's effective and
efficient at least in its that's
certainly true in the last 100 years. Uh
it was New Deal liberals who enlarged
the government in the 1930s. It was
Republicans who acquiesced to that
larger government in the 1950s and then
starting in the 1970s 1980s it's
typically been conservatives who've
tried to constrict governments.
Sometimes they failed um while liberals
have typically tried to expand certainly
taxing and spending. Well, one thing
that I was thinking as Ezra was talking
and I was just writing this down because
I thought Ezra's answer was really
lovely, but like at a really high level,
I thought maybe disagree with this. I
thought about distinguishing between
liberals and conservatives based on
three factors. What each side fears,
what each side values, and what each
side tolerates. I think liberals fear
injustice and conservatives often fear
cultural radicalism or the destruction
of society and as a result they value
different things. Liberals I think tend
to value change and at the level of
government that can mean change in terms
of creating new programs that don't
previously exist. It's typically been
liberals for example who've been trying
to expand health coverage while
conservatives have tried to cut it back.
Just in the last few years, it was Biden
who tried to add a bunch of programs,
whether it was infrastructure, the chips
and science act, the IRA, and then Trump
comes into office and is unwinding it.
And then I also think they tolerate
different things. I think liberals are
more likely to tolerate a little bit of
overreach, a little bit of radicalism in
terms of trying to push society into a
world where it hasn't been. Well, I
think conservatives are more likely to
tolerate injustice. they're more likely
to say there's a kind of natural
inequality in the nature of the world
and we're not going to try to
overcorrect for it with our policies.
And so I think that even at a layer
above what Ezra was articulating with
the um the policy differences between
liberals and conservatives, there's
almost like an an archetypal difference
between what they fear and value and
tolerate. um liberals fearing injustice,
seeking change, tolerating sometimes a
bit of what people might think of as as
overreach, while conservatives fear that
overreach, value tradition, and often
tolerate injustice. The the only thing I
I I would say is that I do think this
sort of the left likes big government,
the right likes small government
oversimplifies. The the left is pretty
comfortable with an expansive government
that is trying to correct for some of
the the imbalances of power and
injustices and imbalances of luck I
talked about earlier. The right is very
comfortable with a very powerful police
and surveillance and national security
state. Uh I always think about the uh
sort of George W. Bush era although
right now with ICE agents hassling all
kinds of green card holders you can use
you can think about this moment too. But
the rights view that on the one hand the
government is incompetent and on the
other hand we could send our army across
oceans invade Afghanistan and Iraq and
then rebuild these societies we don't
understand into fully functioning
liberal democracies that will be our
allies was an extraordinary level of
trust in a very big government. I mean,
that was expensive. That took manpower.
That was compared to we're going to set
up, you know, the Affordable Care Act in
America. That took a lot more faith in
the US government being able to do
something that was extraordinarily
difficult. But the left has more
confidence in the government of the
check. And the right has more confidence
in the government of the gun. You're
right. There's some degree to which what
the right when the right speaks about
the size of government, it's a little
bit rhetoric and not actual policy
because they seem to always grow the
size of government anyway. They just
kind of say small government, but they
don't. It's, you know, in the
surveillance state, in the in the
foreign policy, in terms of military
involvement abroad, and really in every
every program, they're not very good at
cutting either. They just kind of like
to say it. Cutting is really hard. If
you government spends trillions of
dollars and if you cut billions of
dollars, someone is going to feel that
pain and they're going to scream. And so
you look at defense spending under
Reagan, you look at overall spending
under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the
most archetypally conservative
presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He
utterly failed in his attempt to shrink
government. Government grew under
Reagan. Defense grew. All sorts of
programs grew. So I think that one thing
we're sort of scrambling around in our
answers is that at a really high level
there are differences between liberalism
and conservatism in American history.
But often at the level of implementation
it can be a little bit messy. Even
Bush's foreign policy that Ezra was
describing sort of from a big sense of
American history is very like Wilsonian,
right? This sense of like it's America's
duty to go out and change the world or
to use a current example McKinley or or
McKinley, right? And a lot of people
compare um Donald Trump's foreign policy
to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need
to pull back from the world, America
first, we need to care about what's
inside of our borders and care much less
about what's outside of our borders.
Sometimes the differences between
Republican and Democrat administrations
don't fall cleanly into the lines of
liberal versus conservative. Um because
those definitions can be mushy. All
right. So to descend down from the
platonic ideals of the left and the
right, who is actually running the show
on the right and the left, who are the
dominant forces? Maybe you could
describe and you mentioned democratic
socialists, the progressives, maybe
liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream
uh left and the same on the right with
Trump and Trumpism. So on the right,
it's pretty straightforward at the
moment. The right is composed
differently than it was 10 years ago.
But the right is run by Donald Trump and
the people who have been given the nod
of power by Donald Trump. So that is
right now Elon Musk. But Elon Musk's
power is coming from Donald Trump. That
is, you know, maybe in some degrees JD
Vance, maybe in some degrees Russ V,
maybe sometimes um, you know, Homeman's
over at uh, DHS.
the right beneath that the Republicans
in Congress are extraordinarily
disempowered compared to in other
administrations. They are sort of being
told what to do and they are doing what
they are told. Republicans in Congress,
Senate Republicans, they didn't want
Pete Haggsf. They didn't want Cash
Patel. They didn't want Tulsi Gabbard.
They didn't want RFK Jr. Nobody got
elected to be a Republican in the Senate
hoping that they would confirm Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., a member of the Kennedys, a
Democrat who is pro-choice and running
as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But
Donald Trump told him to do it and and
they did. So the the right has developed
a very very top- down structure. And one
of Trump's talents, one of the things
that makes him a disruptive force in
politics is his ability to upend the
sort of coalitional structure, the
interest group structure that used to uh
prevail. Um you know, the Koch brothers
were the big enemy of the left, you
know, 1015 years ago. The view is that
in many ways they set the agenda of the
right. The Koch brother network is much
less powerful under Donald Trump because
he just disagrees with them and has
disempowered them. Not to say none of
their people or none of their groups are
meaningful at all. They are, but you
wouldn't put them at the forefront in
the way that you might have at another
time. Right this second, uh we're using
the left, but Democrats are in
fundamental disarray. There is no
leader. Democrats, Senate Democrats, uh,
decided to vote for the contining
resolution avoiding a shutdown, or a
critical mass of them
did. Uh, Hakee Jeff, the leader of the
House Democrats, and Chuck Schumer, the
leader of Senate Democrats, are in
bitter disagreement over whether or not
they should have done that. Democratic
leadership, isn't even united on the
single biggest point of leverage they
might have had. They disagree over
whether or not it was even a point of
leverage. Outside of them, the party is
no leader, which is fairly normal after
a pretty crushing defeat. Uh but there
isn't the next in line. Uh so you know
you go back right and it was pretty
clear that you know after Barack Obama
it was going to be Hillary Clinton.
After Hillary Clinton it was either
going to be uh Joe Biden or Bernie
Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in
second in the primary. Joe Biden had
been the vice president. You often have
a presumptive next nominee who the party
can look to for a kind of leadership.
Even after 2000 Al Gore was still giving
big speeches. There was a question about
Al Gore running again. There is no
presumptive in the Democratic party
right now. You can't turn around and
say, "Oh, it's going to be Pete
Budachedge. It's going to be Josh
Shapiro. It's going to be Gretchen
Whitmer." Absent parties are given
force, modern parties, which are are
quite weak by historical standards.
Modern parties tend to be given force by
a centralizing personality. Donald Trump
being a very strong example of that on
the right, but Barack Obama was the the
person who held together the Democratic
party for a long time.
In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has
never been
as internally fragmented and weak,
leaderless, ruerless as it is right now.
Now, it won't stay that way. There's a
rhythm to these things. There'll be a
midterm. They're probably going to pick
up a bunch of seats in the midterm. Um,
if that means Hakee Jeff becomes speaker
after the midterm, he's going to have a
much louder voice because he's going to
have power. Uh, it's going to be a
harder road for Schumer to get back to
the majority because of the Senate map.
and then we'll start having a primary uh
on the left and you'll begin to see
voices emerge out of that. But right now
the you know the Democratic party it
doesn't have points of power. There's
simply outside of you know at the
national level there is no Democrat who
wields control over a branch of
government, right? They don't have the
Supreme Court, they don't have the
House, they don't have the Senate, they
don't have the presidency, and they
don't have a next in line. So you're
you're looking at a you're looking at an
organization without any of the people
in a position to structure it. And the
the head of the DNC, the new head Ken
Martin, doesn't have power in that way.
So it's uh they're pretty fractured. You
were you got a lot of criticism for
this, but you were one of the people
that early on said that Biden should
step down. Why is the Democratic Party
at this stage in its history so bad at
generating the truly inspiring person?
to me personally, you know,
AC is an example of a person that might
be that person. You should have her on
the show. What I would watch that
definitely. But, you know, I really try
to and we'll talk about this. I try to
do like 2 three hours and there's a
hesitancy uh on the left especially to
do these kinds of long programs. I think
it's a trust issue. I'm not exactly sure
what it is. 80% of the people on the
show are leftwing. I'm pretty good faith
and I try to bring out the best in
people. Have you invited her? Is that
what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. We'll
see what happens when when people get
closer to 2028.
Sure. Maybe people begin taking taking
that you know Bernie's up there in age
so he can't, you know, he can't do it
anymore. Why is the Democratic party so
bad at generating I don't think it's so
bad at generating them. I think that it
was it turned out to be bad at
generating them this year. Look, like I
yeah, as you mentioned, you know, back
in February 2023, I was somebody who
came out and said like Biden can't run
again. This isn't going to work. And my
view, and that was really what that set
of pieces was about. Um was about the
argument that even though Biden was
clearly going to win the primary, that
there was still time for Democrats to do
something the parties had done in the
past and have an open convention. And
you could structure the leadup to an
open convention in a number of different
ways, right? You could have something
like a mini primary, but but basically
you'd have Democrats out in the media
out giving speeches and their ultimate
audience would be the delegates, the
delegates at the Democratic National
Convention. And and my hope was through
that you would find the person for this
moment. The thing for Kla Harris that
was really difficult was she was for
another moment. She was picked by Joe
Biden in 2020 amidst um just a very
different political equilibrium, a sense
that you had a a transitionary moment
between two versions of the Democratic
party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little
bit back to the past to these sort of
lunch pale, you know, bluecollar
Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big a
big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But
also Biden never has a chance if he's
not Barack Obama's vice president. And
so you have this sort of weird set of
historical factors like operating at the
same time. There's a desire for
stability and experience amidst the
chaos of Donald Trump and the pandemic.
There is Biden as Obama's vice president
who nevertheless did not run in the
election after Obama. Um I think a lot
of people look back at 2016 and think,
you know what, if Biden had been the
candidate, he would have beaten Trump
and we would live in a different
reality. And then Biden chose Harris as
an effort to shore up his own uh at
least assumed weaknesses, right? He's a
white man in the Democratic party at a
time when the Democratic Party is
diversifying. And when the view of how
you win elections is you put to is you
put back together the Obama coalition.
And the Obama coalition is young people.
It's uh you know voters of color um and
it's enough working-class white voters
and then college educated white voters,
right? That's the Obama coalition. And
so Biden picks Harris, you know, for
different reasons. My view at that time
was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth
person and thought I should have picked
Tammy Duckworth. Uh but but there are
different people out there and then the
kind of moment that Harris was running
in just sort of dissipates. Um first she
has a particular background from
California where she's a tough on crime.
Her book is called Smart on Crime
Prosecutor, but she runs in the
Democratic party at a time when it's
turned on that kind of politics. people
want a lot from her personally, but they
don't want a sort of prosectoratorial
uh character. So, she sort of abandons
that and never, I think, really finds
another political identity, certainly
before she begins running, you know, in
in 2024 that works. But she's a talented
debater. Um she's a very talented
performer on the stump, but she doesn't
really have a theory of politics and
policy that she's identified with. But
she's a way for Biden to signal that he
understands that him being, you know, in
2020 a 78-year-old white guy, he
understands the future is not him or at
least not just him. And he's sort of
trying to make a coalitional pick that
uh speaks to his own, you know,
potential weaknesses. I think by 2024,
you have two problems, right? Once he
only steps down, what is it June? Like
they are weeks from the DNC. They don't
have time anymore for an open
convention. You now have the B
administration is very unpopular for a
number of reasons, but particularly
inflation, cost of living. So now you
have Kla Harris running with a sort of
anvil of being associated. It's a Biden
Harris administration. Um she doesn't
really have a lane on cost of living.
It's not something she's known for
working on in the Senate. It's not
something she has a bunch of great ideas
about. Not something she's great at
talking about. It's probably not the
candidate you would pick for a cost of
living election. And she's had no time
to build that out, right? Maybe if she
had been running in a primary for, you
know, a year and a half, having to fend
off Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders
and Pete Budajedge and whomever else,
she either would have figured out how to
do it, right? Primaries are periods of
education and learning for the
candidates, too, or they would have
found somebody else who could do it. Um,
but she doesn't get any of that, right?
She's thrown into the game with 3 months
to go. So, you know, they picked the
candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you
think Biden's inspiring or not, he was
probably he was a reasonable pick for
that moment. He should have never run
for a second term. and he sort of
implied to a lot of people that he
wouldn't. And then the the handover to
Harris was a very difficult handover to
a candidate who didn't go through any
kind of selection process for the moment
in which he was running. We'll see what
they do in in 2028, but the the
consequences of of what they did in 2024
have been severe. There's two really big
questions on the table that I think
click together in an interesting way.
You asked one, why did Trump win? and
two, why do Democrats have this certain
communication style that might make them
less interested in coming onto an
unstructured three-hour conversation
with you? Let me try to tell a story
that connects them. I think Trump's
victory in 2024 was overdetermined.
There are a lot of factors here. Number
one, if you look internationally,
incumbents lost all over the world. They
lost in the US. They lost in Europe.
They lost in pretty much every developed
country at rates that we really haven't
seen in 50 years. And that's largely
because the inflation crisis that came
after CO created an absolute disaster
for incumbent establishment power.
People couldn't bring prices down.
Voters were furious and they were
destroying establishment orders all over
the world. Democrats happen to be in
power and as a result they got the brunt
of it. That's number one. Number two, if
you look at elections over the 21st
century, two things are true. One,
almost every election is unbelievably
close. For reasons that I'm not sure I
entirely understand, the parties have
gotten really good, historically,
bizarrely good at getting each group to
come to the polls with about 48% such
that every election is a battle over the
next 1.5%. And in a world like that,
little thermostatic swings are very
important. And what we've seen over the
last few years, and there's this theory
about thermostatic public opinion in
American politics that says that what
often happens in politics is one party
has a very compelling message of change.
They become the establishment and then
they become the victims of exactly the
weapon that they marshaled that then the
next outroup party says, "We have a
theory of change and we're going to
throw out the bums." And the next party
comes in and they overreach and then
they lose. in a worldview of
thermostatic change and every election
is very close, you tend to have
elections swinging back and forth. So,
um I think that also explains why
Democrats and Republicans have struggled
to hold on to power for 6 year, 8year,
12-year terms the same way they did say
in the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you
have to look at what kind of character
Donald Trump is and what kind of a media
figure he is. We were just talking off
camera about how every age of
communications technology revolution
clicks into focus a new skill that is
suddenly in critical demand for the
electorate. Right? The world of radio
technology is a world in which Franklin
Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a
way that he can't be in the 1890s. And
then you have the 1950s. Dwight
Eisenhower in 1956 I believe was the
first televised um national convention.
famously the 1960 presidential debates
between JFK and Richard Nixon. Take an
election that is leaning toward Nixon
and make an election that's leaning
toward JFK because he's so damn handsome
and also just electrically compelling on
a screen. We have a new screen
technology right now which is not just
television on steroids. It's a different
species entirely. And it seems to favor,
it seems to provide value for
individuals, influencers, and even
celebrities and politicians who are good
at something like livewire authenticity.
They're good at performing authenticity.
As paradoxical as that sounds, Trump is
an absolute marvel at performing
authenticity even when the audience
somehow acknowledges that he might be
bullshitting. He's just an amazing
performer for this age. And it speaks to
the fact that he seems to be, to borrow
Ezra's term, remarkably disinhibited in
front of every single audience. There
doesn't seem to be the sort of
background algorithm in his head
calculating exactly how to craft his
message to to different audiences. He
just seems to be like a livewire animal
in front of every audience. And I think
that compares very distinctly to the
democratic character of bureaucratic
caution in our age. And there is an a
really important distinction between
this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the
vibe of the rule follower. And the vibe
of the bureaucratic rule follower is a
little bit afraid of unstructured
conversation is always performing the
background algorithm of how do I
communicate in a way that balances all
of the coalitions on my side because if
you look at the Democratic party right
now to compare to the Republican party I
mean in 2015 I think there were four
political parties in America. There was
MAGA, there was the center right, there
was the Bernie wing and there was the
Biden Clinton Obama wing. And what
happened is that Trump killed and
skinned the center right and is now
wearing it as a hat. The entire
Republican party is Donald Trump wearing
the skins of the old center right, the
Romney wing. And the Republic and the
Democratic party is still a fight. It's
exactly what Ezra described. It's a
jungle. And maybe there's something
about that jungle nature of the
Democratic Party that is making some of
its leaders perform the sort of
coalitional calculation when they're
communicating such that it makes them
less interested in appearing in settings
that might cost them that might not
benefit them in exactly the sort of
pre-calculated way they have to get
their message across. And so there's not
necessarily a whole lot of empirics to
that theory. I'm a little bit going on
vibes here and maybe Ezra sees some
flaws to theory. It's an age of the
vibe. It is the age of the vibe. Yeah,
exactly. I'm trying to perform the live
wire authenticity that I'm describing,
but but I I do think that might begin to
explain why you, Lex, might be picking
up on a difference between the political
vibes, an eagerness and a willingness on
the one hand to have kind of
unstructured and even chaotic
conversations and a care on the other
side about not letting conversations
become too unstructured or too careless.
Can I build on that? I know we're
supposed to talk about abundance, but I
I want to talk about this.
There's an abundance of time. An
abundance of time. We're on the Lex
Freedman show. So, uh, two or three
things. One is Democrats still think the
currency of politics is money, and the
currency of politics is attention. And
that's a huge difference between the two
sides right now. So, what did Kla Harris
come in and do? She came in and raised a
shit ton of money, right? Like a billion
dollars in, you know, record time.
Basically, she had more money than
Donald Trump did and used it to try to
buy attention. What it meant for
Democrats to be good at social media is
to have a good social media team. People
in your office somewhere in your
campaign headquarters who put out cool
things on social media, good memes and
and you know, good advertisements so on.
What it means on the right to be good at
social media is to be you personally
good at social media. You're Vivc
Ramaswami, you're JD Vance, you're
Donald Trump, you're Elon Musk. And what
you understand is you are the product.
What it means to be good at attention is
you are good at attention. Now Harris, I
think was actually better at some
dimensions of this. They were just
slightly older dimensions than people
always gave her credit for. Hell of a
performer on the stump. She was way
better on the stump than people realized
she would be. And a good debater. She'd
always been a good debater. She trashed
Donald Trump in that debate. But she
does not do social media herself at any
level, right? Because she's not going to
take risk. Democrats, most Democrats
still live in a world where the thing
that they are optimizing for in
attention is to not get negative
attention. And what the Trumpist wing of
the Republican party understands, and
this is truer for them than it probably
would be for Democrats, because for them
the media is the enemy, or at least the
mainstream media is, etc., but is
that attention, a volume of attention is
itself good, and you can only get a
critical mass of it if you're willing to
accept negative attention. Agenda
control doesn't come from positive
attention. It comes from conflict. You
get agenda control by doing things the
other side disagrees with. So, they
enter into functioning agreement with
you to keep the thing you're doing at
the front. Now, that doesn't make you
highly popular. Donald Trump is the most
unpopular modern president at this stage
of his presidency except for Donald
Trump's first term. It took, I think
Nate Silver said it was 221 days for Joe
Biden's net uh favorability to go
negative. It's taken something like 55
days for Donald Trump to do the same. So
what Donald Trump is doing does not
optimize for favorability. It does not
optimize, by the way, for big wins.
Democrats feel like they got trashed in
in in 2024. And in a way they did. But
Trump's popular vote victory was the
smallest popular vote victory since 2000
when uh Al Gore, you know, beat George
W. Bush by 17 dogs and three old men or
whatever it was. And so attention works
really differently. And while I don't I
think some of the like you know the
Rogan of the left discourse has been
frankly overstated because honestly the
the most parsimmonious model of 2024 and
2020 is in 2020 you have a 4848 nation
something like that or maybe you have
something that's more like a 49 Democrat
47 Republican nation and in 2020 because
of the pandemic uh Donald Trump suffered
a let's call it a 2.5 point incumbent
penalty. People were mad about the
pandemic. They're mad about things being
chaotic. So, he loses 2.5 points. That
gives, given the natural split of the
electorate, Joe Biden a 4.5 point
popular vote victory. In 2024, people
are mad about uh inflation. They're
somewhat mad about the border. You have
a 2.5 point penalty applied to the
incumbent administration. Now, it's
Harris. And you get a 1.5 point popular
vote victory for Donald Trump. I
genuinely don't think, and this held
internationally too, right? All right. I
generally don't think you need a lot
more to explain the election right now
than that. But you do need something
more than that to explain Donald Trump's
now since 2016 almost decadel long
dominance of all attention in American
politics. Starting when he came down the
golden escalator in 2015. Donald uh
Donald Trump American politics from 2015
to 2020 when Joe Biden won was about
Donald Trump. Then from 2020 to 2024
when Joe Biden was president, it was
about Donald Trump. And then from 2024
on, it's about Donald Trump. Joe Biden
was an intentional
void. Be it his age, be it their
strategy, they agreed that the topic of
the nation should be Donald Trump,
right? When he went back to begin his
campaign in 2024, he goes to Valley
Forge and gives a speech about January 6
and Donald Trump, right? It wasn't about
his own achievements. It was about
Donald Trump. Joe Biden didn't do the
Super Bowl interview, right, in 2023.
That's when I did my thing about this is
not going to work. like probably because
at that point he was not capable of good
extemporaneous, you know, interviews. I
mean, I think that was my view of them,
right? That the revealed thing here was
that they didn't trust him to do
interviews. I didn't have some inside
information about anything. I just
looked at what they were doing and what
they weren't doing. They're behind in
the polls. They weren't doing things
like the Super Bowl interview. If you
can't turn your candidate into the
product, if you don't trust your
candidate to be the product in an
election, you're fucked, right? And so
that was that was to me the tell. Um,
but attention is the coin of the realm.
Now, there are better and worse ways of
doing it. I don't think Donald Trump is
doing himself huge favors right now. I
think they had there's a path they could
have walked to be a majority party. I
think that if he was more restrained,
more inhibited, if he was able to not do
a bunch of things that are mobilizing
opposition to
him, you know, you could talk about what
they would or wouldn't achieve that way,
but I think they could be in a much
stronger political position. That would
make them stronger for the midterms. It
would eventually make, you know, JD
Vance stronger as a successor. I think
they're running a very high-risisk
strategy that has a very reasonable
chance of you know if they don't make a
you know what I would call like an
autocratic breakthrough they might yeah
they might completely blow up their own
movement right it's all very high risk
so for them like for everybody for
everything what makes them good at
politics is also what makes them bad at
politics but for democrats the caution
the sort of bureaucratic culture the
fear of saying anything that will make
anybody mad it is optimized for a
different attentional error era. And one
of the things I am watching when you
were saying about leaders, one of the
things I'm watching in in in the people
coming up, the the ones who want to run
in 2028 is who seems like they have
adapted to this era, not in the way
Trump did or Vance did or Musk did. I
think they're going to need something
different. They fully represent the
Twitter era of politics. I mean, Musk
bought Twitter. Uh they're they're sort
of allin on what politics right now,
what online politics feels like. I think
the thing that will come next is someone
who's able
to synthesize both the lessons of it and
the feeling that we all have that it's
kind of sick and poisoned, right? That
Twitter's not a good place. X is not a
good place. Tik Tok politics is not a
good place, that we're all being turned
on each other. Somehow you need to be
authentic and authentically angry at
what we've all become in the way that
Obama ran as a political reformer who
hated the red and blue cut of America
who hated what political consultants and
pollsters were doing to us. You're not
going to have somebody who just echoes.
There's no not going to be there will be
no Joe Rogan of the left. There will be
no Donald Trump of the left because the
left is different than the right. But it
will have to be something authentically
of this era, but also authentic to the
backlash to it, which I think as we
enter into this period where the
president and everybody around him fully
embraces this attentional economy, I
think people are going to want something
different from the from this attentional
economy in four years and be okay with
the negative attention that comes with
being authentic. You're going to have to
have some of it, right? You you you
cannot change American politics. can't
change Democratic party if you're not
willing to upset people. Donald Trump
reformed the Republican party by willing
people to fight Republicans. He ran
against George W. Bush, against Jeb
Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the
trade deals, against a bunch of things
that were understood to be sacred cow.
Somehow this guy ran like right after
Mitt Romney and John McCain while
attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain,
right? If you are not like the
Democratic party does need to change. It
needs to attain a different form because
the Obama coalition is exhausted. It's
done. It's not going to be able to do
that if it doesn't have standard bears
who are willing to say we were wrong
about some things. We have to change our
views on some things. We have to act
differently and speak differently. Is
there a degree to which the left
uh uniquely attacks its own more
intensely than u maybe uh other parts of
the political spectrum? It's possible.
You know, you go back to the model that
I gave you of 2015 where there used to
be these four large parties, MAGA,
center right, center left, and left.
Right now, the Republican party is all
MAGA. So, there is no coalitional fight
to be had. It's all Donald Trump. And if
Donald Trump wants to name a former
left-wing environmentalist to be be the
HHS secretary, everyone says, "Okay,
that sounds like a fantastic idea.
That's exactly who we were going to
nominate, too." Thank you, Donald.
That's wonderful. tip of my tongue on
the on the Democratic side. There is a
fight and it's happening right now and
our book is trying to win a certain
intral coalitional fight about defining
the future of liberalism in the
Democratic Party. So, I'm not of the
left. I'm certainly not of the far-left.
I have centerleft politics and maybe
even like a center-left personality
style, if we can even call it that. But
I do not begrudge the left for fighting
because there's a fight to be had. In
many ways, I think sometimes they see
I'm not endorsing this. I'm I'm
describing it. I think they see their
nearterm
opposition as not always the Republican
party but as the forces in the
Democratic party that are in the way for
them controlling one of the two major
parties in this country. And so they do
have an oppositional style and maybe
that's personality based. They are
fighting the center left. They are
criticizing the center left consistency
consistently.
But I want to be good faith about this
even though I don't share their politics
and say that they're they're doing it
because they're trying to win power on
the left of center. And so that's why
they're criticizing the way they are.
Now, our book and much of my writing is
an attempt to do a little bit of a of of
a very specific dance. Ezra touched on
this, I think, really beautifully. We're
in an era right now of
anti-institution politics,
anti-establishment politics, and
Democrats are at risk right now as being
seen as the party that always defends
institutions, the party that always
defends the establishment status quo.
And that is an absolute death nail, I
think, for this century's angry
anti-establishment politics. So what
we're trying to do is essentially say
here's a way to channel the anger that
people have at the establishment but
toward our own ends. Right? We believe
that we have answers on housing and
energy and highquality governance and
science and technology. Really good
answers that are fiercely critical of
the status quo in Democrat-led cities
and Democrat-led states. Um we're trying
to be oppositional in a way that's
that's
constructive rather than just
destructive. Just to put a nice pretty
bow tie in the whole thing, let me ask
for
advice. What do I need to do for AOC to
do a three-hour interview with me, Ezra?
From your throne of wisdom. I I that I I
don't think I know how you get AOC
herself to do it. Um I I would not I
would not pretend to know her offices or
her particular views on this. I do think
though
that you can see different Democrats
taking on different kinds of risks.
Right now we're sort of in the age of
Gavin Newsome starting a I mean Gavin
Newsome is the governor of California
and he's spending some percentage of his
time doing a podcast with Charlie Cook
and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon.
Gavin Newsome realizes that one lane for
a Democrat is to be high risk and
talking to virtually everybody. I think
Pete Buddhajed in a different way is
somebody who wants to take uh media
risks. Now I think he's going to my gut
on him is he's going to hold his powder
a little bit. So he'll probably want to
do the Lex Friedman podcast assuming he
runs in 2028. In 2027
Judge, right? I think a lot of them are
trying to figure out what is the lane
for right now and there's a lane for the
next two years and there's a lane for
the two years after that and you're
going to see a lot of people begin to
blanket media in the two years after
that. Now, that'd be interesting. I
would be curious to know, would Hakeem
Jeff come on and do your show right now?
That'd be interesting. I mean, would you
do it for four hours? I don't know. Uh
the the 4h hour ask, the 3 to four hour
ask somebody who also books politicians
is hard. I have trouble. I like to book
people for 90 minutes to two hours. And
I tend to negot be get negotiated down
to I try not to go under 75 or
65. But even as somebody I think well
regarded in that world, you know, it's
very very very hard for me to get
politicians to sit for 2 hours. I don't
have the sense that the three-hour ask
is a big ask because of scheduling. I
think they it still is grounded in the
fear of saying the wrong thing. I just
think they're used to something else,
right? I think that when you talk I mean
they are scheduled by schedulers, right?
that if you talk to them yourself, if
you end up having a personal
relationship with Wes Moore of Maryland,
and he wants to do your show, he will
tell his scheduler, I want 3 to four
hours to do the show. But the scheduler
is used to a world, the staff is used to
a world where nobody gets 3 to four
hours for the boss. Reporters don't,
donors don't, policy staffers don't. So
then when some interview comes in and
they say, "Hey, I want 3 to four hours."
The answer is no because culturally it's
not done. You need Donald Trump himself,
uh, Pete Booty Judge himself, AOC
herself, to say to their staff, "No, no,
no. We're making time for this, right?
Because it's not how they make time for
things normally." I don't know how much
it is fear. I do think they're unus. But
I suspect a lot of it is simply booking
culture. Uh, like I run into it, too.
They're not used to saying yes to 3 to
four hours for anything. It's not that
they don't have it. They have 3 to four
hours if their kid is having a
graduation, right? I mean, they're human
beings. they can make time, but um but
it would have to come in a way from
them. My sense is this is part of the
the Rogan, it's very unclear because
there are very differing stories on what
happened in the Rogan Harris
negotiations, but it does seem that time
was one of the the sticking points. It's
also possible that you're going to find
as you try to interview Democratic
politicians that the exact same thing
that happened with tech CEOs is going to
happen among Democratic politicians. You
interviewed some tech CEOs and then they
did a great job and their friends were
like, "You were fantastic on the Lex
Freedman podcast. That was such a great
thing that you said in, you know, minute
97 and then there becomes a bit of a
meme that you can create really high
val