Ezra Klein’s Big-Tent Vision of the Democratic Party

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30:43This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm speaking today with New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. Now Klein might be just 41 years old, but he seems like he's been part of our political culture and conversation for a pretty long time. He was a blogger, then a Washington Post columnist, a co-founder of Vox, and now he's, of course, a writer and podcaster for the New York Times. He's also the co-author of a recent best-selling book called Abundance. Most recently, Klein has drawn the ire of some progressives for a column that he wrote about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which he praised the late conservative activist for practicing politics, in his phrase, the right way.

31:28But in addition to the news of the day, I also wanted to spend a little time getting to know what shaped Klein's thinking, what shaped his liberalism, and his way of talking with both allies and opponents. I think a lot of listeners, and myself included, want to know a little bit more about you. You've... Do they, David? Well, they're trapped, so they're going to. You have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years. Very often I will read about people in the Democratic Party wanting to know what Ezra Klein thinks or the influence you have within the Democratic Party, positive or negative, about the potential shutdown in Washington that may be coming around the corner.

32:17So I want to go back. Tell me a little bit about your family background and your political family background. What were the politics in your house? So I grew up in Irvine, California. The district I lived in did not elect a Democrat to Congress until Katie Porter in 2018. That was our first Democrat we sent to the house. My father's a professor at UCI, now retired. Taught what? Mathematics, which I am not good at. I used to joke that I'm good at math for a journalist, but not for the son. That's not saying much. It's not. So my dad's a mathematician. My mother worked with children and was an artist.

32:57They are both thankfully alive and healthy. My house was mostly Democratic. But members of my family in recent years, some of them less so. Some of them a lot less so, in fact. But it wasn't a highly political house. We did not receive the New Yorker or the New Republic. We got the LA Times, watched nightly newscasts. There wasn't talk radio. It wasn't a highly political house I grew up in. You had some political enthusiasms early on. You worked for Howard Dean. Oh, yes, when I was in college. So I got into politics. So my brother, my older brother, was a lawyer, environmental law, and used to take me to protests in L.A.

33:40where he lived. What kind of protests? Farmworkers' marches. Not the only kind, but he had a lot of great work there. So I did get into politics, but I primarily got into it through blogging. I became a blogger back when nobody knew what that was. This is when I was a freshman in college. And I got into blogging in 2003 and just loved writing about politics, reading about politics, thinking about politics, debating it with people. When I began to read you in little venues early on and then you arrived, to me, the first self-branded journalist that I knew of when you were doing Wonkblog at the Washington Post.

34:20A simpler time. Well, but an innovative person and at the same time had an analytic cast of mind when it came to politics that a lot of journalists just don't have. How did that develop? And do you accept the premise? Somebody told me recently they think of my work as a cerebral children horse for emotional ideas, which I don't think is wrong, actually. What are they getting at that you think is true? I would say I don't think this is my reputation anymore in the way it was in the WonkBlog days. But the idea that I was this cool, detached calculator of a reporter or journalist, I mean, the reason I care about these things is I care.

34:59I feel incredibly emotionally compelled by the stakes of politics, whether or not people get health care, whether or not we go to war, what kinds of people are in power. That these things are shaping our lives, whether we want them to or not, is a central, almost physical reality. we all have to face. And understanding them is one of the few ways to try to face it. But kind of like a Marxist or a certain kind of conservative of a different sort, there is this systemic look at the way things work. When you were younger, when you were 28, still at the Washington Post, you used to give a talk that was called Why Washington is Horrible in Charts, in parentheses.

35:39The main point being that we focus way too much on individuals and maybe not enough on Washington as a system. Tell me what that was about and how much has it carried over to your thinking today. That speech, which I think was either from or became my book, Why We're Polarized, which was my first book, which is sadly relevant at the moment, was about the way you needed to understand these as structures and institutions that had rules and internal logics. So, for instance, we have this functionally false idea of how our political system works based on the founders' intentions, which is, oh, we're a system of checks and balances, right?

36:19We have three co-equal branches that will jealously guard their power and prerogatives from one another. Well, that was the intention of our system. In fact, what we have is two political parties that are not mentioned anywhere in the constitution because they were not predicted or anticipated or hoped for. that compete across those branches. So right now we have a Republican-controlled Congress cooperating with a Republican-controlled executive branch. I would say cooperating with a Republican-controlled Supreme Court. Unless you have built into the way you are looking at politics, the influence and fundamental centrality of parties, which our system does not do in any rigorous way, you will not understand either how it works or how it doesn't work.

37:03In the Senate, right? It's just – maybe less so now, but it was certainly a mainstay of political reporting that we just treated everything as the president should be able to get this done. And if it's not getting done, well, what's the president doing wrong? But the filibuster was being used constantly. And unless you understood first that that was a new fact about American politics, the filibuster was rarely used. and unless you could kind of see why that had happened and then realize, oh, it's actually very hard to get to 60 votes in the Senate and in this time of polarization, it's hard to get bipartisan cooperation.

37:39I think it's important. I think it is part of our duty, our like on some level sacred duty to give people a true account of why things are happening. And that requires understanding the systems in which people operate because most of us, for better and for worse, reflect the systems which structure the logics of our lives. I want to go back to the question that I raised before about your influence in the Democratic Party and how do you feel it and not feel it? When this began being the way people saw me, it was really around Biden leaving the ticket. Right. But what I will say about that whole process where in early 2024, around the time of the Super Bowl and the Robert Hur press conference, I did a series of pieces basically saying this is going to be catastrophic for this then 81-year-old to run again.

38:29He's not up to it. But also, there is still things. The big problem to me at the party in that point was fatalism. Well, we have no choice to run because there's nobody but Biden because otherwise it'll be Kamala Harris and she'll lose, right? That was the quiet whisper response to anybody who thought Biden shouldn't run. From Biden's people. From that world of people, yes. And I one thought Harris would be a better bet and I think would have been a much better bet if he had left the ticket much earlier. But two, I believe we should have had an open convention and that if he had left early in the year or with some months to go.

39:04Even with only 107 days left on the clock. He could have left before that. No, no, without question and should have. But considering - By the time he left, there was not time for it. It was too late. It was too late. He had waited too long. When I did that series of pieces, I would say they were not influential at all. Biden gave a good State of the Union and everybody thought I was an idiot. And like, that's just where the situation sat. what changed the situation was reality. It was Joe Biden getting up in that debate and falling apart. Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if we finally beat Medicare.

39:50You know, I don't see this as some remarkable campaign of influence I ran. I think I was seeing reality a little bit. I think I was seeing it clearly. But by the way, voters had seen this long before I said anything about it, right? The supermajorities of the public had said for a long time Biden was too old to run again. And I helped create a little bit of permission structure for people to admit that when reality interceded and it was no longer something that could be denied. Would you ever go into politics? No. Absolutely not. I think we're making a Sherman statement. I'm making a Sherman statement.

40:21I think you have to know what you're good at doing. I think I'm good at doing this. Tell me a little bit about this. What is your sense of your mission as a podcaster, as a writer, as somebody who makes public appearances? What is your sense of mission? I mean, my sense of mission is simple. I have values and beliefs about how the world should work and what would make the world better. and I try to persuade people of them, but I also try to explore them in an honest way. But I do this because I care about where things are going. I'm not dispassionately observing from the sidelines. I am emotionally, intellectually, spiritually involved.

41:07But what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it has changed a lot over the years in ways that I can follow more through intuition than through some framework. You know, the version of me that was writing Wonkblog and telling everybody about healthcare aging in one chart is not what I'm doing on my podcast now. My podcast is a forum in which I'm not primarily trying to be persuasive. Over time, I think it has persuasive elements, but it's mostly other people talking. I have a lot of people on who I disagree with. And I think it acts as a space in which certain kinds of conversations can be had. and then can be put into conversation with each other.

41:50And that matters. In my column, I'm more prescriptive, right? The, what goes into eventually the book Abundance comes more from the column. And that's me trying to understand the world and trying to find ways to confront things in it that I find puzzling or unnerving. I try to take seriously questions that I don't love. I don't try to insist the world works the way I want it to work. I try to be honest with myself about the way it is working. You are an important figure at what I think is still today the most important news gathering organization on earth, the New York Times. But it's also one that everybody has opinions about.

42:30And recently, Thomas Chatterton Williams just wrote a book about the summer of 2020, which was dramatic in a lot of quarters, including the New York Times. Barry Weiss left and created Free Press. How do you look back on that? So I wasn't there. Yeah. So I just really don't know what happened internal to the Times at that time. What's your opinion about Barry Weiss' increasing influence in what seems to be she's about to be a very important figure at CBS? Yeah, it seems like she's about to take over CBS. What do you think? I mean, my thing about Barry, and I've been on her show, and I have a lot of admiration for how good she is at what she does.

43:10My disagreements with Barry, I think she's asymmetric in sympathy and generosity. Tell me what that means. Like, I've thought their work on, say, starvation in Gaza has been really bad. I think the whole thing. Spelling out. Yeah, they've done this whole thing like, well, a lot of the kids who have died and have been reported on, well, they had secondary conditions. And yes, when you starve a population, the people who die first will be the most vulnerable. That's not exculpatory. That did not feel to me like there was overwhelming evidence of how bad things were in Gaza. And I felt that they were trying to whitewash it.

43:45What I see her doing is trying to do something that used to be somewhat more common, which is try to self-consciously be what she would define as the center. And I see them tacking back and forth around that. So they're much more sort of pro-Trump, I would say, when he's running and Democrats are in power. But then now that he's in, it's like, oh, no, they're the vandals. And it's a little bit more to me like the old New Republic, things they used to do. Like when I came into Washington, I felt there were more – actually, it's funny. When I was a blogger, this was something we all used to complain about all the time.

44:22All of these organizations that we felt were using this concept, this amorphous concept of the center as a positioning device. That instead of sometimes being guided – That it was a dodge. No, that it wasn't a dodge. It was navigational. They weren't dodging. They were just kind of – there were a lot of politicians like this and a lot of players like this who had felt like their politics were hewing to some idea of the center as opposed to a very, very consistent set of views and principles. And as media polarized, many fewer places are doing that. And I think Barry saw a market opportunity in that.

45:03Is her center what I think is a center? No. but I recognize a lot of editorial skill there. You are now in a position, I would imagine, Ezra, that if you decided, you know what, I'm going to go out on my own. I'm going to do a podcast called The Ezra Klein Show and I'm going to get a staff of X, Y, and Z and probably you could make, you know, a great deal more money than you do now. Why is it important for you to be at The Times as opposed to out on your own? I believe in journalistic institutions. When I went out and did Vox, I was trying to build an institution, not just go out on my own and capture the most of my revenue that I could.

45:42I think that the mix of the news is exciting, and I'm committed to the news as an industry. I don't think the thing I – I think if you carve out all the national politics, et cetera, then it's much harder to also have the foreign reporting, the local reporting, the cultural reporting, right? All the things that make up the bundle. and those are the things I often care about and I think I'm just in this way it goes to the way I look at the world but also does me I think I'm an institutionalist I like being at institutions and I admire them when they are doing good and I want them to succeed because I think we need them I'm speaking with the political commentator and journalist Ezra Klein we'll be back with the conclusion of our conversation in just a moment

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51:18This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And today I've been speaking with Ezra Klein. On his podcast and in his columns for the New York Times and in his book Abundance, he's been making a case for how the Democrats can reemerge from the political wilderness. But some of his ideas have invited their fair share of detractors as well. I spoke to Klein about the deep divides within the Democratic Party and whether the party can overcome its divisions and disarray in time to mount a real challenge to the Republicans' dominance of the federal government, both in the midterm elections a year from now and then in 2028 for the presidency.

52:02Let me ask you about an institution that we were talking about earlier, the Democratic Party. You talk a lot to people within the Democratic Party, leaders of the Democratic Party. It looks like a mess at this point. You have some promising people. What makes you say that, David? I just conjured it out of thin air. In New York City, it looks like Zoran Mamdani is going to be the next mayor of New York City. If I read you right, you have ambivalence about Mamdani. or have you come around in some way? No, I don't think I've ever had a particularly different – I mean, I wrote a piece during the mayoral primary where I said I thought Brad Lander was the best choice.

52:45But I think Momdani is like an amazing political talent. I agree with him on many issues. My concerns about Momdani really just have to do with can he first get the revenue he needs for a very, very pricey agenda? And can he – I mean, he's talked a bunch about abundance and done interviews with my co-author, Derek. You know, can he actually rebuild the government such that he can achieve the kinds of things he wants to achieve? And what is going to happen when the Trump administration moves into a confrontational mode with him? Because I think they will, right? They're going to want to break him, send, you know, escalate ICE raids, send in the National Guard here, occupy New York City.

53:25He's inexperienced as an executive. New York City is a very hard thing to run at the best of times. He has not run much. But I don't think of those as terrible demerits to somebody. You could have said some of the same things about Barack Obama on one level. And we're just going to have to see how it plays out. I think it is genuinely strange the way the leadership of the Democratic Party has treated him. It's extraordinary. I have never – The state chairman I think is still on the sidelines. At this point, you know, they – I have just not heard an account that makes sense. If they're trying to keep it at arm's length, it will not work.

54:06He is going to be the mayor of New York as a Democrat. Saying that they're friendly to him but not endorsing him is not going to save them from being painted by what he does. on the other hand to all the people who are inspired by him and like him they look feckless I've said this on other shows I would on some level respect it more if they don't want to endorse him if they think he'd be a bad choice then they should say that but this weird ambivalence dance they're doing is I just think much more bizarre well the ambivalence I assume comes from a kind of fear of his popularity and his talent I don't think it comes from there where do you think it comes from I think they They are afraid that he will open up gigantic surfaces that they will have to defend and will have trouble doing.

54:53I am truly horrified at Israel's conduct in Gaza at this point. I think it's – I mean, I think we're well past war crimes. I think we're, you know, we're into something generational. but Mamdani's promise to say direct the New York City police to arrest Netanyahu the moment Netanyahu steps foot in New York City say to attend a UN meeting which I think Netanyahu would probably love this confrontation I can understand as would Trump I can understand why the Democratic Party's leadership is just afraid of what might combust right Israel is a very hard issue for them. It splits their base very badly.

55:34So I can see if I like squint. I don't think what they're afraid of is talent. I think they're afraid of something that goes off the rails that they're then trying to defend. But I just don't think what they're doing makes sense. I think you have to accept – one thing I've been saying about the big tent of the Democratic Party is the theory of having a big tent doesn't just mean moving to the right. It also means accepting in the left. And Momdani is going to be one of the left's standard bearers. In the last two weeks, there have been stories about AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and what the future might hold for her, either running for Senate or even president.

56:15When you think about her, do you see her as a potential president? I don't know. We'd have to see how she performed in a primary, what her agenda was, what her campaign looked like, how she performed under that kind of scrutiny. I think you have to see her as one of the people who is a serious contender for that role. She would naturally inherit Bernie's lane in most of his sport. So he doesn't have full control over supporters, of course, right? Some people might have liked him who wouldn't like her. But I think the anti-oligarchy tour they were doing was in certain ways the passing of the torch from him to her.

56:52And so Bernie has been incredibly powerful in Democratic primaries and has come very near winning in 2016 and 2020. And I think that you have to assume that she would just start with a more solid base of support than all but a couple other people. When I've seen the early polling, and you should be extraordinarily skeptical of 2025 polling for a 2028 primary. I'd be skeptical of it in 2027. Fair enough. But she is polling behind only Buttigieg and Newsom. This in polls where Kamala Harris is not included. And so you're looking at somebody who starts out with one of the clearest lanes because so many other candidates are going to be competing in the non-Bernie lane.

57:38And so it'd be pretty straightforward how you would imagine her winning the primary. You were describing Obama before and his talents, but also his more capacious ideology. Who's in that lane? I don't know that we know it yet. I have not seen – probably the closest person in the way he thinks about politics is Buttigieg. But whether or not Buttigieg can do what Obama was able to do, and I mean part of what made Obama such an extraordinary force in the Democratic Party was his support for black voters. which Buttigieg really struggles with. And continues to. And Kamala Harris just admitted in her new book that the reason she didn't select Pete Buttigieg as her vice president was that he's gay.

58:26And that would have been, I don't know. Really? She says that in the book? Too much identity in one ticket. That was her, yes, that she would have gone for Buttigieg. I've not read it yet, but that is interesting. How do you mean interesting? It's just interesting. I'm surprised she said that. So, we are at the close of our conversation, but I have to ask you a crucial question. You go to Burning Man? I have been known to go to Burning Man. Would I enjoy it? No, David, you would not. You sleep on the ground, that sort of thing? I mean, you could do it in different ways. You could take an RV. You could go to what's called a plug-and-play camp.

59:02I mean, I think it's an amazing thing for anybody to see once. So, you might enjoy it in the sense that— Once a philosopher, twice a pervert, as they say. Yeah. Applies probably better to there than most places. No doubt. So I would hate it. I mean, you know, you might have depths and multitudes inside of you that I don't know. But when I see the musicians that you profile, they're not the ones who play there. No, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. I don't think they could sleep on the ground either. In fact, most of them are under the ground. Ezra Klein, thank you so much. David, really appreciate it.

59:40Ezra Klein is the co-author of Abundance and the host of The Ezra Klein Show. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for this week. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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1:01:16if I could give you only one reason to subscribe to the New Yorker it would be maybe this is not the answer you're looking for but I just don't think that there is any other magazine in America that combines so many different types of things into a single issue as a New Yorker you know like you have poetry you have theater reviews you have restaurant recommendations, which for some reason I read even though I don't live in New York City. And all of those things are great, but I haven't even mentioned the other half of the magazine, which is deeply reported stories that honestly are the first things that I read.

1:01:53You know, I'm a big fan of gymnastics and people will say, oh, we're so lucky to live in the era of Simone Biles, which I agree. We're also so lucky to live in the era of Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Raddenkief. And so to me, it's like I can't imagine not reading these writers.

1:02:15You can have all the journalism, the fiction, the film, book, and TV reviews, all the cartoons, just by going right now to newyorker.com slash dark. Plus, there's an incredible archive, a century's worth of award-winning work just waiting for you. That's newyorker.com slash dark. And thanks. you