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Podcast Episode Notes: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 129: Trump’s America: Fear, Polarisation, and The Future (Ezra Klein)
Overview In this episode of *The Rest Is Politics*, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart are joined by Ezra Klein, coauthor of *Abundance: How We Build A Better Future*. They delve into the themes of censorship, polarization, and the current state of American politics, particularly in the context of Donald Trump's influence.
Key Themes and Discussions
- Censorship and Political Polarization
- Historical Context: The conversation begins with the concern over how a society rooted in liberty has become susceptible to censorship.
- Polarization Dynamics: Klein discusses whether polarization is a self-inflicted wound by society or a deliberate strategy by political actors. He argues it is both:
- Self-Sustaining Feedback Loop: Once polarization begins, it feeds on itself, creating a cycle where more extreme candidates dominate.
- Media Influence: Changes in media, like the rise of platforms catering to extreme viewpoints, have exacerbated polarization.
- Nature of Fear in Politics
- Trump’s Strategy: Klein highlights Trump's approach to governance as a collection of leverage against perceived enemies, which has heightened fears within American institutions.
- Surveillance Culture: Concerns about increased governmental surveillance and attacks on the press are discussed as reflections of historical patterns of autocracy.
- Observations on Democratic Leadership
- Leadership Challenges: Klein critiques the Democratic Party for its complacency and failure to adapt to the changing political landscape, specifically citing Joe Biden's age and leadership style as factors in upcoming elections.
- Need for New Strategies: Democrats need to reassess their messaging and strategies to connect with a broader base beyond traditional party lines.
- Impact of Technology and Silicon Valley
- Tech CEOs' Polarization: Klein notes a shift in Silicon Valley, where tech leaders have become more aligned with conservative politics, partly due to backlash from their employees and changing media narratives.
- Influence of Figures Like Elon Musk: The conversation highlights how these shifts reflect a broader trend of business leaders embracing populism and anti-establishment sentiments.
- Cultural Dynamics and the Political Landscape
- Cultural Reactions: Klein discusses how the Democratic Party’s reaction to Trump has led to cultural shifts that may not resonate with the broader electorate, such as extreme stances on immigration and identity politics.
- Voter Alienation: The Democrats' move towards representing marginalized groups has left behind traditional working-class voters.
Key Takeaways
- Complexity of Polarization: Polarization is neither entirely manufactured nor purely organic; it is a complex interplay of political, social, and media influences.
- Importance of Civic Responsibility: Klein stresses the need for civic courage among leaders to stand against authoritarian impulses and maintain a robust democracy.
- Evolving Political Strategies: For the Democratic Party to be successful, a reevaluation of its strategy and messaging is crucial, especially given the shifting dynamics in American politics.
- Historical Perspectives: Understanding past political shifts can provide insights into current and future electoral challenges.
Recommended Reading
- *Abundance: How We Build A Better Future* by Ezra Klein
- *Hillbilly Elegy* by J.D. Vance
- *The American Century* by Walter Lippmann
Conclusion This episode of *The Rest Is Politics* offers a deep and thoughtful analysis of the current political climate in the United States through the lens of Ezra Klein's expertise. The discussion reflects on the implications of leadership, media, and cultural shifts on the future of American democracy and provides a rationale for the necessity of transformative political strategies.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
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0:48Welcome to The Rest of Sponet is Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And a real treat today because we have with us Ezra Klein. And Ezra Klein is, I suppose, to some extent, people might compare what Ezra does at a sort of bigger, grander American scale to the rest of his politics. He is the core of – well, I mean, I'm going to praise Ezra. Don't take this as us sort of blowing our own trumpet, by the way. Yeah, you are. Ezra is – but anyway, Ezra is the most articulate, thoughtful analyst of American politics, certainly from the progressive side. but he's very much a product of the new media culture i mean he's worked with these great institutions like the washington post and the new york times but he was also right at the very beginning of blogging at the setting up of new forms of media he's been an incredibly successful podcaster and he's been very very smart about identifying people who are up and coming so a lot of the great stars the democratic party he found them before they were big news so that we go back and listen to them.
1:56And he's now got right in the heart of the debate, which we're going to get into about what on earth is going on in America. He's done an enormous amount of polarization. He's got a new book now out called Abundance, which is looking at the question of basically why policy screws up and why we're not delivering for people. But I'm going to hand over to Alistair for the opening question. And Ezra, thank you so much. I know you a very little bit, but it's great to have you on the show. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here and I'm learning so much from the structure of that introduction. I'm from now on going to introduce people by saying, you're a lot like me and then compliment them a bunch.
2:30That was just a graceful beyond measure. I'm learning a lot from the Brits. I know this is going to be absolutely lucky to you, but with your facial hair, you now look like somebody called Root van Nistelrooy, who is a very famous footballer, real footballer, as opposed to your ridiculous version. My father's Brazilian. I agree with you on what football is. Okay, good, Matt. Of course, your dad's Brazilian. Yeah. But do you know Root van Nistelrooy? you don't do you he was a great player no and i can't say when i'm walking down the street people are like you really look like what was his name he used to play for manchester united he's now the manager of leicester he's not doing as well as your podcast put it that way i want to start on journalism i read an interview the other day with your new york times publisher who said that he felt that the paper and the media more generally was under more political pressure than they've ever been.
3:27And I just wondered what it's like for you trying to explain to people, Rory and I tried to explain what's going on in the United States, but you're an American, you're right in the middle of it. And are you as scared as a lot of people seem to be about where this could all head? And what is the role of journalism right now? I think you would have to be historically illiterate, not to be scared about where this can all head. you have a administration that from the moment it entered office has not just acted lawlessly though it has done that but has acted with its central organizing principle being to collect leverage wherever it can find it and then use that leverage on those it perceives to be its enemies or even those it understands to be its friends but it worries might be disloyal friends.
4:22And so you have versions of that that are more bureaucratically familiar in a way that tariffs, in Donald Trump's view, are a form of leverage. I've talked to people in the administration who say what he understood is that America had all this surplus leverage simply sitting around, and now it's going to use it. And it's going to make everybody come and bend the knee and give him concessions. We'll see if he even accepts them. But that's a version of leverage. But you Eric Adams, right, where he was under investigation for political corruption and they basically came to him or he went to them, whichever way it went down, and tried to cut a deal.
4:59We will keep you safe from prosecution as long as you stay in our pocket. You see what they're doing with ICE agents and the picking up of basically random people to inspire fear over what anybody with a green card can say in this country. You saw the pressure they've put, the defamation suits, et cetera, against media organizations. And you see that they have done a lot to put loyalists who have no future in politics except for Donald Trump's favor in charge of the military and security sides of the American state. So you have Kash Patel at the FBI, you have Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense, you have Tulsi Gabbard at the DNI.
5:38And I think if you put all this together and you look at what kinds of leaders Donald Trump himself respects and what kind of power he himself wants to wield, you have to accept the reality that somewhere on this bell curve, this probabilistic world we live in of possible outcomes are outcomes we see in other countries all the time where the ruling regime tries to break the press over its knee. I don't really even know what to do with this feeling, but in some ways I have this sneaking like fear, like something that one of the few things that might save the American political system is that Donald Trump has a completely insane view of global trade and macroeconomic management.
6:27And rather than building the political capital, he would need to destroy American institutions. He is going to spend it all on an insane trade war, drive himself into horrific unpopularity, drive the economy into recession, and give back a lot of power to the opposition, which can then begin to curb his actions. But that is not an unbelievably comforting theory of the future, and it's not the only possible timeline we might be living in. Are you scared for yourself and your colleagues? Yes. Because? I don't think this is the most useful thing for me to be talking about, because it's talking about speculation and hypotheticals.
7:03But look, in every autocratic regime around the world, you have, and by the way, in the American past and in the American recent past, you have high levels of wiretapping, of surveillance, of spying, including on whoever gets perceived as a domestic enemy. Like the moment that Kash Patel was named FBI, it became much more realistic to me. As a plausible world, the things that I or my colleagues say might be spied on, might be surveilled, might be investigated. Again, Richard Nixon tried things like this. You don't need any gigantic historical jumps. It is, I think, often a function of American naivete that we consider this so outlandish, even though it is true in our country within living memory.
7:48And it is true all across the world all of the time. I don't really know what to do about it. If the FBI wants to turn the force of its powers against, you know, some schmuck journalist somewhere is going to be able to do that. But yes, I worry about it. I don't see how you could not. Let's just complete this. So part of the problem without overly flattering you is you're not just some schmuck journalist nowhere. You are a very, very influential voice, which millions of people listen to, consistently producing a reasonable critique. I mean, I think that that is quite threatening. I mean, my sense when I got into a temporary spat with J.D.
8:28Vance is that one of the things that's particularly threatening to them is attacks from people who sound more reasonable, more center ground. And of course, quite a lot of what you say has been critical of the Democratic Party acknowledging problems in American society. So I imagine it may be quite tempting for them to make an example of somebody like you. And they do it in different ways. They could do it by trying to discredit you, shame you, expose you in some other way. And I guess my other anxiety is that the way America's going, you may find that you're not getting the sympathy that one would expect.
9:08I mean, one imagines a world in which a prominent commentator like you gets attacked and the liberal world's outrage and everybody jumps to your defense. But presumably there are people in the MAGA crowd who would just kind of revel in it. I mean, they wouldn't particularly feel much sympathy for you if your life was torn to pieces. Well, let's not give anybody any ideas here, Rory. Look, I both think all this is worth worrying about. I don't want to be realistic at the moment. The people that are coming after are powerless so far. And I don't want to say I am unconcerned and I've tried to harden my own communications and other things like that.
9:49I mean, they are throwing green card holders into ICE prisons. They're deporting, in certain cases, random people to foreign jails. So even though if you ask me directly, I have these concerns, but I think it would be a little outside of the moment to focus on hypothetical dangers to me as opposed to... They are really trying to create a climate of fear. And the thing that works best for creating a climate of fear at the beginning is somewhat random attacks on the powerless. So you never really know where it will strike. And that is what I see them doing. The thing that connects what Doge has done is not an obsession with saving money, but a desire to, as Rassvath put it, traumatize the federal bureaucracy to show that nothing in it is safe.
10:36No one in it is safe. There are no civil service protections. If you've ever uttered the word diversity in your life, you can be torn out of a job. that you've spent 20 years in and cast out into the street. And, you know, you sort of go through what they're doing to universities. I mean, everything they are doing is trying to break power centers and take them over. The press in America has more protections than most power centers. We do not take at the New York Times money from the federal government. So we have distance from them that, you know, Columbia University, although I don't think they've covered themselves in glory here, does not.
11:12Although I do wonder, what are all these endowments for? if not to give you a bit of independence in a moment like this. You're sitting on, Columbia specifically is sitting on an endowment that went in a year, last year or the year before, from 13.6, I think it was, billion to 14.2. I might have these numbers off by a decimal point or two. It went up by hundreds of millions of dollars with them doing nothing. What is all that for? If not to say in these moments, we have independence here. But you see with the law firms, they're looking for where they have leverage. They have the most leverage where they have funding.
11:43And so they're using that. They are weaponizing every dollar the U.S. government spends or controls against anybody they can from other countries to, you know, and then ICE has leverage over green card holders. So I worry about all this. I think that the possible set of worlds we could live in is one where you begin to have the FBI used as it was under Hoover and used to sort of try to compromise people. but I think it's also important to stay in the thing that is happening in front of us right now because it is here if they are able to succeed in the set of plays they are making right now that will give them the confidence and give them the strength to move on to harder and more dangerous ones later it's one reason I've been very disappointed by how many players in civil society have bent the knee and gone and done pay-to-play moves with them because every time they do it, they make it harder for the next person.
12:41And all these people at the top of the heap in American life should have a little bit more courage and, in my view, patriotism than that. Ezra, can I just develop that? Because that is something that surprises me. I was talking to a friend who's a deep American analyst, and he said, don't worry about Trump. America is this unbelievably vigorous, rebellious society. And this is a society which will not accept this. the real risk of America is not compliance with Trump. The real risk is civil wars. Americans will resist. But actually, from a distance, what we've seen is Columbia University not standing for its academic freedom, but apparently humiliating itself and saying, okay, you're going to take our money away, so we'll concede.
13:25We haven't seen Republican senators and congress people over the last eight years coming out against the president in a way, you know, And my conservative colleagues in parliament did ultimately turn against Boris Johnson, resign, bring him down because they profoundly disapproved. What's going on here? I mean, how is it possible that the society that is so defined by kind of liberty and revolution now has these weird things like, you know, what Bezos is up to with his newspaper, what Colombia is doing, what these Republican politicians do? What's the sense of shame? We live in a time in which shamelessness is highly rewarded.
14:05What is Donald Trump if not shameless? What is Elon Musk if not shameless? And I just don't agree with your deep American analysts perspective on the American psyche, certainly not in 2025, but not over history either. Americans have obeyed or accepted all manner of intolerable realities. And they have supported all manner of terrifying violations of other people's civil liberties and freedoms. What they don't like is when it comes for them. That, again, is why the tariffs and the global financial panic that Trump is sparking is an important player here. because one of the ways that autocracy can triumph is if it acts in the background of people's daily lives.
14:52It is not affecting them until it's too late for them to do anything about it. But right now, Trump is using the power he has to affect them, which is going to create a lot of resistance and a lot of anger because people don't like seeing their 401ks go down. So the fact that he is pairing his attempt to wield ultimate power with a policy meant to inflict pain on ordinary Americans is one of very few things that could connect the plug into the socket there and create the level of resistance I think we're going to need to see and weaken him in a way that further institutions are not going to want to line up.
15:22But it is just not the case that we always resent or resist tyrannical impulses. In terms of Trump two versus Trump one, which I think you're getting at something a little bit different with that, with, say, Jeff Bezos. I mean, Jeff Bezos is a guy who, owning the Washington Post, I believe personally greenlit, democracy dies in darkness and made a big part of his own public persona that he was part of civil society resistance to a kind of intolerable executive. And then come Trump too, he's out there dining with him and Amazon Prime is bidding$40 million to Melania Trump. You know, I think, what was it?
16:04Twice or three times what the next highest bid was or two thirds more or something like that. And a thing that's functionally a payoff to her. Nobody really thinks her two documentaries are worth that much money. And I think a lot of people after Trump won the second time said, you know, we went too far the first time. This is where the spirit of the age is. This is where America is right now. You know, I have a duty to my shareholders or I have other interests that matter to me. I want, you know, you're Jeff Bezos. I want contracts to get to space through blue origin. And they decided to pay to play.
16:34And again, there's nothing more normal in a way than that decision. That is how most systems work. They are pay to play. They are transactional. Trump is also a kind of genius of transaction and leverage. There is a lot he does not understand about the world, but he does understand this. People can be broken. People have other things they want more than they want to resist you. He understood about the Republican Party. He put enough of them in danger of losing primaries that the ones who fought him revealed themselves were eventually ejected from the party. And now all that is left is functionally loyalists or those who are willing to pretend to be loyalists when it matters.
17:11And then he's running this play throughout American society. We will see how far it goes. I mean, there are real places of resistance here. There are places of civic strength. And there's also a reality that Trump is not as powerful as he pretends to be. He is an unpopular president who is driving himself further into unpopularity. He is a lame duck president. He is running an administration that is quite inept in a bunch of different ways. and he is going to endanger the careers of many of the Republicans he is currently relying on their support come the midterms. I mean, it was very telling.
17:46They had to withdraw their offer to Elise Stefanik to make her the UN ambassador because they were worried they were going to lose her seat in the House, which is a highly Republican seat. They should have been in no danger of losing. So I'm not saying that this, you know, what gets called an autocratic attempt is going to completely breakthrough and work. But Trump's sense, which he has deployed in his business career and then in politics for some time, that people will bend and they will break if the cost is too high for them to do otherwise, is something he has deployed with a real stunning level of success in this term.
18:25What that all amounts to, we're going to see, but I think it should be looked at in its fullness and understood as genuinely dangerous. I've said from the beginning of this administration, this is not a change in administration. It is not a change or what it is attempting to be is not a change in precedent. It is a change in the structure of regime, a change in the rules of American life and politics. It is much more totalizing than the movement from George W. Bush to Barack Obama or the movement from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney would have been. Those would have changed ideas. They would have changed personnel.
18:59They would have changed the president. But the fundamental regime of American life would have stayed the same. The explicit, often self-described effort among all of the MAGA people from J.D. Vance to Donald Trump to their sort of in-house philosophers has always been to change the regime, to destroy what they call the cathedral. They are completely upfront about trying to reconstruct the way American governance works and the norms and rules on which it rolls forward. That's what we're watching. Five years ago, you wrote a piece, Why We're Polarized. And you kind of trace that as far back to the Civil War and the sense that politics didn't really address the underlying issues and that minorities were mistreated.
19:49and then the Civil Rights Act sort of split the parties in a way that they're still split. When you say why we're polarised, are we polarised because we, the people, chose to be polarised? Or were we the object of polarisation? Was polarisation something that has been done to us? And was that a political strategy, the consequences of which we're now seeing? It's always both. So I published Why We're Polarized in 2020, a couple months before the pandemic. And as you say, I'm telling in part there a historical story about how the ideologically mixed parties that dominated in American life for much of, say, the 20th century, where you had conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, gave way to a highly unified set of parties, right, where there are no, you know, highly conservative Democrats or no very liberal Republicans.
20:44But the thing that I try to describe in that book, that book, unlike my new book, Abundance, that book is an effort to create a model of politics. It's not a book. It's not normative. It's descriptive. And I'm trying to show how a particular mechanism works. And the thing that I'm trying to show is that when the mechanism of polarization takes hold, it is a process of ricochet. It is a self-sustaining feedback loop where, yes, like say, you know, it's an elite strategy. You have different players running in a primary. Some are running with more polarizing messages, you know, that do more to break the country into two halves, some with less.
21:19and the more polarizing candidate wins. But then that candidate is also in a relationship with a base that wants something very specific from them. And they need to keep offering that up or they face challenge from people even further to their right. Or if you look at it in the media, you have something like Fox News. And there are moments when Fox News actually tries to moderate over the past 10 or 15 years. In the first debate in 2016, they sort of very famously, Megyn Kelly and Brett Baier and Chris Wallace, they're trying to take Trump out. They're trying to confront him with all the ways he's been a bad Republican, a bad conservative.
21:52He said terrible things about women. And Fox News loses. And in trying a couple of different times to take on Donald Trump, they can always lose market share to something they created on their right. Fox News and showing how big of an audience there was for a truly right-wing propagandistic outlet creates things like the One American News Network and Newsmax that are always out there ready to pick up anything that Fox News leaves on the table. And so maybe that was a strategy from Fox News, but eventually creates an audience that has control of Fox News itself because if Fox News begins to move, it won't keep its audience.
22:29So this is this sort of complicated set of relationships you begin to build in polarization. Once you create the incentives for a market of polarization, it's very hard to know where that stops. Now, one thing that's quite different from 2020 to 2025 is that I would have said during the writing of much of that book that much more of the polarization was ideological, that we used to debate taxes in this country and Obamacare was the central threat to human freedom. And the polarization has moved from being as policy-oriented or ideological as it once was to being really about the structure and nature of the system itself, the legitimacy of the institutions of the elections.
23:11We've moved from highly ideological polarization to what gets called system-level polarization. We are polarized over the legitimacy of the American political system itself. And there's a party that has now attracted a lot of different factions of American life that are deeply anti-institutional. So why does RFK Jr. and his followers fit in Donald Trump's Republican Party? It's not because RFK Jr., who was a Democrat until like 20 minutes ago, it's not because he believed all the things Donald Trump believed. He was running as a Democrat in 2023. It's because RFK Jr., like Donald Trump, is fundamentally opposed to the system.
23:44Now, he was opposed to it from a sort of left-wing populist perspective. But what Trump's coalition is, is a coalition of people who have come to doubt or have accepted a high level of doubt in the system and in its legitimacy. That has also created in the Democratic Party, I think, too much of a pro-system response where under Joe Biden and under Kamala Harris, Democrats became, I don't want to say unthinking, but much too complacent defenders of the entire political system and the sort of appeal in American politics they were making for a lot of the 2024 election was, You can't elect these guys.
24:18They don't believe in American democracy. You can't elect them. They don't believe in science. And that sort of turned the Democrats into this party of the institutional status quo, which is not a winning hand to play in politics. this goes to the heart in a way of what the democrats should do now the first thing they need to do is to try to work out what they should have done where their strategy went wrong what they could have done either to resist this polarization so that the center could hold or to exploit it in a way that benefited them rather than the right so two questions really what do you think they should have done that they didn't and i guess more importantly what do you think they should do now to get themselves back in the game?
25:00I mean, the first thing they shouldn't have done that they did was let Joe Biden run for re-election at 81 or 82. That was, of everything, the essential mistake because he was no longer a strong enough political communicator and figure to structure an appeal. I think Joe Biden at 65 would have won re-election. He was a talented communicator. He would have, I think, been in many ways a very strong party leader. But they allowed that to happen. And then by the time he was pressured out of the race and it moved to Kamala Harris, there wasn't time for a primary to see who was the right candidate for this moment.
25:36There were a lot of mistakes made there. I'm probably not exactly where you are on this, although you're a political professional and I'm not. The most important thing for them is to look back at 2024 and figure out what went wrong. Because I don't think you win the next election by refighting the last one. Republicans in 2012 have this big post-election autopsy. It basically counsels doing the opposite of what then Donald Trump does. And Donald Trump wins and kind of sets off a new era in American politics. after 04, Democrats think they need to moderate and win back the heartland. They end up going for Barack Hussein Obama, who sets off a new era in American politics.
26:12So I think you often have to figure out what the next moment is. But I do think within that, what Democrats need to accept is that the way the country has polarized has not been good for them. They are losing the working class. They are losing the kinds of voters they believe, not just politically they need to represent, but spiritually they need to represent. And what they need to do is accept that the Obama coalition is over and they need to restructure American politics. They need to have a candidate and an appeal as a party that is not saying, vote for us and we'll do for you what we did before.
26:48they need to decide what it is they don't like about themselves in the way that Donald Trump is highly critical of what the Republican Party became under George W. Bush, and then push forward into something that scrambles the chessboard of American politics. Now, I obviously in abundance have my set of ideas for what that should be. And I'm doing this and trying to find the right people to come on my show and talk about politics right now. It is very, very important to be sensing into the next moment, not just refighting the last moment, because Donald Trump will change the last moment. The world of 2024, where Democrats lost an election very heavily on the cost of living because people trusted Donald Trump to lower the prices of everyday goods, is not going to be the world of 2028 after four years of Donald Trump's tariffs, economic uncertainty, and God knows what's going to happen in foreign policy and civil liberties.
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27:38You know, you can't refight the last war. The next one is going to be so different. One of the challenges that confuses me is obviously when Trump won in 2016, there was a huge effort of analysis and panic by people on the central and progressive left. And they put a lot of energy into thinking through what it was. And, you know, people would read books like Deaths to Despair. They'd worry about opioid crises. Jake Sullivan coming in as a national security advisor starts thinking about a foreign policy for the middle class. Biden obviously has an idea that he's going to bring blue collar workers back.
28:16They trial this stuff. Now, maybe not very well, Ezra, and maybe you can explain why not very well. But there's no doubt they were trying. It wasn't that they were totally immune to the fact that a populist had won the presidency and they needed to somehow have a message that resonated more. So what's going on there? What didn't quite work? What was wrong with that analysis? Or maybe right enough about the analysis to win in 2020, but not strong enough to win again in 2024? It's such a good and deep question. And I think one place to start with it is to take seriously that there were different analyses that were all being adopted at the same time.
28:52I know a lot of Democrats, you know, look back at what gets called the resistance in Trump's first term, and they look back on it with this sense of shame and humiliation. The resistance failed. It was embarrassing. All those, you know, pussy hats and Hamilton clips. But it worked, and it's time. Democrats won in 2018. They won in 2020. What didn't work was the alternative they became. And I think this has a couple different streams. So let's hold economics and blue-collar jobs to the side for a moment. There was a cultural reaction inside liberalism to Donald Trump, and it was to become roughly the opposite of what he was.
29:29Trump is masterful at creating negative polarization that pushes his opponents in the opposite direction. So on immigration, for instance, Democrats have for a very long time had a sort of three-pronged strategy to immigration that heavily emphasized border enforcement and security and used credibility on that to try to build support for immigration reform. But Trump had been so cruel to immigrants and you had the family separations that Democrats began treating illegal immigrants as almost a marginalized, protected class. And, you know, so you had in the 2020 campaign, these sort of fights at the debates led by Julian Castro about whether or not Democrats would all agree to decriminalize unauthorized border crossing, which was just a politically insane and lethal idea.
30:15But it reflected something broader happening, which was that if Trump was going to be this, Democrats are going to be not this. And so even though Joe Biden was one of the very few candidates, maybe the only one, but someone of very few who did not sign on to that idea in office, his administration allowed a huge amount of border chaos, which actually did create huge problems in the country and has been a kind of continuing point of weakness for them. And there are a bunch of things like that on gender identity. I think Democrats are right to protect the rights of trans people, but they allowed themselves to get pushed into all kinds of edge cases around trans participation in sports.
30:51It became very symbolic in American life. You just had a lot happening, the sort of era of wokeness, which I'm not the critic of that some other people are, but it had real excesses. And it created a sense in the Democratic Party, and I was around for this, so I know this was true, that you almost couldn't make an argument for any kind of moderation because Trump had so made those positions toxic that to be anywhere near them was politically lethal. So in this period you're talking about where Democrats are absorbing these lessons, they're absorbing some lessons that are, you know, we need to try to sap the energy out of Trump's policies.
31:28Biden is tough on China. Biden cares a lot about blue collar jobs. But at the same time, the cultural orientation of the Democratic Party is to represent the opposite of what Donald Trump is. If Trump is the dying gasp of white supremacy in this country, they are going to be the party that is pushing us into a post-racial, you know, racial reckoning, Me Too, etc. future. And they just get very culturally out of step. So that's one thing that is going on. I don't think it's the only thing going on. then look, they suffer. Whatever you want to say about Biden's economic policies, those policies do not bear fruit under his administration.
32:03Building things in the real world under the structure of legislation and judicial review that Democrats have helped to create in this country, they cannot do it fast enough. Even if you look at the infrastructure bill, which he passes in his first year in office, the projected average date of the road work in that bill is 2027. None of that is happening really on Biden's watch. And then there is inflation. And you all know this story overseas better than I do, but inflation is a global phenomenon. It is battering incumbent parties all across the world. The American Rescue Plan makes it a bit worse, but I think worse than that is that the Democratic Party under Biden never makes a strong pivot into cost of living.
32:45They're sort of still a little bit trapped in theories that they had in 2020. And then in a changed reality in 2022, in 2023, Biden, who's by then a very weak communicator and very focused on foreign crises in Ukraine and then later in Gaza, is not able to reposition the Democratic Party for what the economic problem of that era is, which is cost of living has become out of control. Out of control in a straightforward way with goods and then out of control in a broader way with a sort of affordability crisis in housing and health care and education, et cetera, that's been gaining steam for a long time.
33:20Okay, Ezra, Rory, let's have a quick break and then we'll be back in a minute.
33:31Ezra, you said there that one of the things that you do on your podcast is you get people on who are talking about the future of the Democrat Party. And you mentioned the importance of an individual emerging. Have you spotted anybody that you think might be that person that can do today what Obama did when he sort of emerged? I don't think it's clear yet. There is no for me, this is the person. One thing I'm trying to do, and to put some flesh on that, I am trying to find voices that feel to me like they are grappling in an honest way with this moment. Not running on the fumes of the past moment.
34:10not giving me the talking points you know every time a democrat comes out and i'm not saying it's not good messaging they got to do what they got to do but every time i hear them go you know in front of the cameras and they just say like the real problem is donald trump is not focused on the price of eggs i get it i get why polls well i get why they're doing it but it does not feel true either to what they're really worried about or where the country really is look you both know this better than me so i feel weird saying it to you but great politicians weave something new out of the threads of the moment that they are in and you can tell the ones who are doing it the ones who are thinking aloud in real time and trying to work their way to a new narrative of where the country is at that moment in its history look i can tell you people i think are doing interesting things right give me some of that give me some of that like i think cory booker's a long filibuster, right?
35:07Breaking the record from Strom Thurmond and Ted Cruz before him. What was it was an interesting attentional play. Booker to me has always been a very interesting politician. And one of the reasons he's an interesting politician is he's a genuinely good and moral person, which a lot of them aren't, or at least it is not the front of mind thing for a lot of them. And in 2020, in a year when Biden had taken up the moderate lane, so there wasn't really room for others like this. Booker was in that scrum with this idea of the politics of love and tolerance or beyond tolerance, I think, as he used to put it, fellowship.
35:38But I don't think he was ever able to define what it was he was talking about. The moral impulse was there, but the practical outcome of it wasn't. And I'm watching him in real time try to grope towards what that might look like at a time when the country's bonds of fellowship are going to be much more frayed or shattered than they have been at other times. But if you look around, like who's in you know interesting positions pete buddhij and wes moore and josh shapiro and gretchen i mean it's the the list everybody knows about i have not seen the person who looks to me yet like they're standing up and finding their footing in the moment but i don't think it would happen yet i mean it hadn't when we were at this stage in 2005 barack obama wasn't barack obama yet he wasn't running for president and it was considered a little bit ridiculous to say that this guy who got elected a year ago, less actually at that point, would be running for president.
36:34I think we're in the rhythm right now of opposition, not alternative. And the key figure, I think, of 06, not of 08, was Rahm Emanuel and the sort of recreation of a Democratic congressional majority that could block George W. Bush. And you didn't do that by coming to one theory of what the Democratic Party was. Emanuel's genius and that of the other people working on elections at that time was to go out and do relentless candidate recruitment of people who fit their own districts or their own states in very different ways than maybe the National Democratic Party would have done if it was all being chosen by a central command of highly ideological liberals.
37:17So I always think, and this was not Emmanuel, this was at the Senate side, but the recruitment of Jim Webb in Virginia, who had served as Secretary of the Navy, I believe it was, under Ronald Reagan, who was a very sort of Scots-Irish warrior type, had very unusual views for a Democrat, but ran against George Allen, who then was considered a possible presidential contender, and won that election in Virginia to give Democrats a Senate majority back. And so the period we're in is a period, I think, of building a democratic party that reflects enough of the country to wield congressional power again.
37:52After that, you'll begin having the real fight over who is the individual who is able to weave something singular out of that pluralism. A. Ezra, Jim Webb triggered me to think about J.D. Vance because bizarrely, as a sort of conservative who'd been briefly in the military and then the Foreign Service and came from a more sort of romantic traditional vision of conservatism, there was a sort of attempt to kind of bracket Jim Webb and J.D. Vance's kind of visions of kind of more thoughtful, historically informed conservatism. and now we have this new jd vance can you sort of give us a sense of this guy how did he go from being somebody who you know 10 years ago i was being encouraged to hang out with and learn from and read his book and talk about conservatism and to this figure that we see now can you tell us a little bit about him it's very hard i struggle a lot with how to talk about jd vance because more so than most politicians, he demands a form of psychoanalysis.
38:51Jim Webb had been Jim Webb for a very long time. He had thought through on a very deep level his ideas and who he was, and he had been highly stable. J.D. Vance, his fundamental characteristic is a kind of instability in his own personality, not just in his ideas, though there is that too, but in the way he acts in the world i almost did a big piece on this during the election i decided not to but i reread hillbilly elegy during the election it was one of the eeriest reading experiences i've ever had because throughout that book jd vance is predicting in the form of condemning the person he is about to become.
39:43That book is brutally, relentlessly critical of the way that the communities J.D. Vance comes from have reacted to the world, their tendency to blame everyone else, their anger at foreigners, the sort of cruelty they will engage in when they feel under threat. Vance talks about it again and again. He gives example of it again and again. And if you read it, he just becomes this exact person. The book now reads much more as Vance in a moment of struggle with his own lineage. And at that moment, given what he wanted to do in life and who he had become and having gone to the Ivy League and, you know, working at a VC firm, having come to this view that he has ascended beyond his own roots, right?
40:34He's not going to become this kind of person. And he's looking back at this and trying to tell you how bad it has gotten. And then he does become this person. And it's hard to know what to make of that. I mean, I take him at his word. I believe insincerity is an overused explanation for people's political actions. Most people are very good at convincing themselves of whatever it is they now need to become. And I think J.D. Vance is in particular very good at this. but vance what is so striking about him i mean so many in the republican party have undergone personality transplants as they have aligned themselves to donald trump but vance was a person who cared so much at one time about the virtue with which you accord yourself in the world and now is just not that person you know as does everybody who serves trump or so many who serve trump he delights in a sort of public attack and indecency that is just not who he was before i I don't have a view on who the real J.D.
41:32Vance is or was or one day will be. I am not by any means certain we have seen the last transformation of J.D. Vance. But it is truly eerie to read his book. And I just like it is now full for me of these highlights. I'll just say one thing I found very creepy when reading it. Of all countries, there is actually a mention of Haiti in the book. And it comes at the end of Vance talking about what he learned in the military. And he just says, and it comes with no story behind it, and it comes with no forewarning, and is then not reflected upon again. But he just mentions how extraordinarily affected he had been by seeing the level of poverty and desperation in Haiti.
42:17That's it. It's like a sentence. And I'm reading this at the time that he is out there accusing, with no evidence, Haitians in his own state of eating cats and dogs. I mean, it's functionally a blood libel against them. and to go from this person who was moved enough by the poverty in Haiti to mention it in his book when it had no real place there and then goes to being somebody who will demonize Haitians trying to escape that poverty and just earn a living. You're talking about something deeper than ideas for that to happen. I guess the only last thing I'll say in this very long answer is the thing that there's so many things that upset and anger me about the Trump administration and the effect Trump has on the world.
43:02But the way he has persuaded so many in his coalition to embrace a politics of public cruelty, I think it is very telling that the official White House ex-account has adopted this 4chan -like celebration of mimetic cruelty. so they have you know immigrant asmr and it's the sound of the manacles and the you know the arrested immigrants dragging on the floor or when there was a day on the internet when people were using the new release from open ai to create you know studio ghibli like memes and they have one of an immigrant woman weeping as she's being deported as ice agents stand looking sternly at them and they've memified it into a cartoon.
43:51When you crush that part of yourself that knows that that is wrong, you've crushed something really important, a really, speaking of shame, a really important guardrail between you and a descent into a kind of inhumanity. And I think the really dangerous thing about MAGA under Donald Trump is it's not just a movement of ideas about tariffs and immigration, but it is a movement about the political virtues of cruelty. And the need to signal that as a kind of important reclamation of strength and nationalism in politics. Well, this is one of our previous interviewees, Tim Snyder, who called it sadopopulism.
44:30And this was when it was in the planning, but I think it's what we're now seeing. Can I ask you, Ezra, did you ever think about going into politics yourself? I am in politics myself. Well, you know what I mean. You know what I mean. You fought in the Gary Hart campaign. You fought for Howard Dean when he was a big thing for a while. But have you ever thought that maybe, you know, okay, writing about it, talking about it is interesting. It has a role, but maybe I should get my head right above the parapet. I mean, I don't feel like I keep my head below it. Been retweeted by Elon Musk all week this week.
45:00If you're asking, have I thought about running for office? I think it's very important to know where you are well-suited to be. And I think that I do hopefully a pretty good job in my job as a journalist and somebody working with ideas and interviewing. And I don't think for a million different reasons I am cut out to be a politician or that I would be better at that. I think there are a lot of people who have that set of talents and hopefully my set of talents and hopefully what, you know, Abundance is doing as a book right now is creating one of the threads that somebody who's talented at that set of things will weave into a tapestry that creates a better era in American politics than what we've come from.
45:44But no, I don't think anybody needs me running for office. You keep using this weave word, which, of course, is one of Trump's favorite words. He talks about his weave and what have you. You talked there about J.D. Vance changing. We'll probably get another version of J.D. Vance. Do you think Trump fundamentally has always been the same person? Yes. And one of the dangerous things about him is that he's not a person who changes his mind in relationship to new evidence. So there are all these people in the administration or in the broader MAGA movement who are right now trying to give you these, I call it theory washing, these highly intellectualized accounts of what Donald Trump is doing on trade.
46:18And the problem is that all the accounts that they're giving conflict because there is not any particular theory that the trade policies that Donald Trump has willed into being aligns to. But Donald Trump has had his theories on trade since before China was a major trade competitor of the U.S. He has had these exact same views on trade since it was all about Japan. And this view that any country where we are on the wrong side, the wrong side, quote unquote, of a trade balance with them is ripping us off. he's a person of in a way highly stable intuitions who applies them relentlessly to any situation he might be in be those intuitions about how to break other people and how to corrupt them and how to transact with them to his intuitions about trade and in a way immigration and so he's been selling the same song for a very very long time and now he simply has enough power to apply it esra you've been very generous with your time and we're now coming to the end so it's my final question and and i'd like to you know encourage people listening to the podcast to to read abundance which is a wonderful and interesting book and maybe we'll have a little chance to touch on that at the end but i i struck by the fact that the last time i i glimpsed you briefly was in a coffee shop in california and at that moment i saw you as being very much located in the world of tech and Silicon Valley.
47:48And there you were in this very new form of media surrounded by all these figures. And of course, a lot of these figures, Androsom, Elon Musk, et cetera, are becoming more and more prominent. So I just wonder whether you can help us understand why kind of business, and in particular high-tech business, has become so central. Why these people have become, A, great heroes for bits of the American public, and B, how they've migrated it to a position of endorsing Trump. As you say, I grew up in California. I then lived in DC for 13 years. And then I came back to California where I wrote most of the book along with Derek Thompson from 2018 to 2023.
48:26So I am fairly plugged into the politics of Silicon Valley. And the thing that I think people under emphasize about what happened to the Silicon Valley CEO class and VC class was how radicalized they became against their own employees during this period. And this was in part their fault. They had created a bunch of tools like Slack that led to the capacity for employees to be talking to each other, pushing them, taking confrontations with them public onto Twitter. And there was a period from, I don't know, called 2018 to 2022 or something where the employee bases took a lot of power from them.
49:06And at the same time, the broader country was turning against them. I mean, Mark Andreessen has said this very, very straightforwardly, that he feels that there had been a deal. You get rich and you support the right causes and you make some jobs and you then donate some money to philanthropy and then everybody thinks you're great. And during this period, as a lot of the things that these people are funding and creating are leading to a lot of harm, social media and so on, they also feel the media turning against them. They feel the institutions turning against them. They're supporting the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party has put Lena Kahn at the FTC, and she's against them and is investigating them and is pushing them.
49:43and their employees are demanding they be more woke and put tampons in the bathrooms. And at some point, they have a collective enough of this. And what they've been doing, and Musk has been their leader in it, is taking back power. Musk's takeover of Twitter, where he went in and he sliced through the staff. He treated it like a power center, destroyed the power center and took it over for himself and showed he can run the thing with a fraction of its previous staff and showed he could survive all of these talented engineers leaving, that actually they did not have him over a barrel. He had them over a barrel.
50:21That was the moment it changed. And Musk, who has been involved in forms of technology that most of them envy, most of them who work in the world of bits and social media platforms and advertising tech, envy Musk's hardcore industrialist accomplishments, right? He makes cars and spacecraft. They follow him. And so, you know, Andreessen had been a Bromney supporter. He's kind of a Republican. I don't think his movement on this is all that surprising. But Musk was, I think, very, very influential in this. But it's inseparable from how angry they all were in 2020 and how angry they all were by 2024.
50:56This feeling that they had been betrayed. They had treated their own workers like they treated them better than they felt any workers had ever been treated before. They got slides and candy and lunch at the office. And here they were facing revolt after revolt after revolt. They had supported the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party didn't like them anymore. The media was against them. Everybody was against them. It wasn't really just that they were being taxed or investigated, but they were being deprived of the thing that they were supposed to have, which was social capital. And so then when somebody comes along and says, the whole problem with this is that the people who are fit to rule have been deprived of rulership.
51:37and we're going to bring back into vogue in America, not just a politics, but a culture of strength and masculine virtue, a recognition that there are the masters of the universe and you are them. It becomes very attractive. And Trump is a little bit during the campaign for many of them, I think quite wrongly now they see or some of them see, but Trump is a bit of a blank slate. You can project that onto. And then, you know, he stands up after the assassination attempt and he pumps his fist in the air and a lot of them turn. But whether they will stay there as Trump destroys the global economy, tariffs their products, I don't know.
52:16I think that they were there for their own reasons, not his reasons. They weren't hardcore MAGA. They began to see Trump as symbolic, symbolic of masculinity and strength and virtue and a sort of reassertion of a hierarchy in American life that they believe to be a better one. And now that he's doing his own thing i'm not sure how many of them are going to stick around for it but we will see ezra i go swimming every morning and i swim with a guy called jim down who's a intensive care doctor and he's always asking me what roy and i are going to talk about and then he tells me what he thought about what we said and who we're going to interview and blah blah blah and he said to me who's your next interview with and i said ezra klein and i've never seen him so excited uh and he said i love ezra klein ezra klein just explains everything so clearly and da da da da da da so i said okay give me one question for ezra klein and he says well you want to be really cheesy say to give me your three book recommendations so my final question said a question is give me three book recommendations so i'm going to tell you just some things i've been reading and that have been useful for me.
53:26So I've been reading Wolf Howell by Hilary Mandel, which is just an amazing book that I simply had not read. Right. Can I just tell you a story, Ezra? She did an interview trying to explain to a modern reader the sense of the hero. And she said, imagine Alastair Campbell with an axe. Oh, see, there you go. So Wolf Howell, which now I will picture as you with an axe, is a sort of amazing book. It's a book about power, right? And it's an interesting book to think about right now. It's about power and somebody who is serving a somewhat mad king in power. Along that, I've been reading Ada Palmer's book, Inventing the Renaissance, which is sort of of the same time period, which I happened to pick up because I did an event with her, but it's just a fantastic book.
54:11And it's helpful, I think, right now to throw your mind into other eras. And I've been reading Walter Lippman in the American century, which is a sort of great biography of, you know, Walter Lippmann, the great sort of mid-century American opinion writer. But through his eyes and through his actions, a lot of the way American politics was transforming mid-century and transforming as it went through this period, you know, running from, you know, pre-World War I to modernity. So I've been trying to be a little bit connected to history at the moment because I think trying to see this moment from this moment is almost destined to fail.
54:53You need to recognize or to force yourself to see that the range of outcomes is very, very wide. The range to something we were talking about earlier of what Americans or just human beings will accept is insanely wide. And the boundaries that you might think exist for what can and cannot happen do not. There are laws of physics, but there are not many laws as a politics. Great to talk to you, Ezra. Thank you both. Really, really enjoyed it. Have a great day. Thanks again. Bye-bye. Thank you. Well, Alistair, what did you think? I think actually we're a bit skeptical because sometimes your view is we want to try to avoid people who might be described as journalists, but I guess to some extent, he's like an American version of us.
55:34Well, you said that and then went on to say how brilliant and amazing and truly stupendous he is. You're like an American version of us, Ezra. No, I do think there is merit in not having journalists on the podcast, because one of the roles of modern journalism now is just to sort of be a talking head. And there are too many of them. But I think that we can make exceptions when they have led, been leaders or are leaders in a certain field. And I think where he's a leader is in the way that he's developed what his journalism has become. So I think, as you said, he's become an important voice. And that's, to be honest, that's why I was asking about whether he'd ever thought about going to politics.
56:19It's because I can see that he would have quite a lot of skills that you might need for politics, but then he probably lacks and admits that he lacks some of those skills that ultimately you also need in politics, maybe you don't need in what he does now. So no, I thought he was great. I was incredibly clever, very articulate. And he does look like Rud van Nisselrooy. I thought actually it was quite interesting also. I was struck just in a small way by the sort of confidence and self-knowledge with which he's just like, you know, I know what I'm good at, know what I'm not good at. There was another thing that I thought would appeal to you very much, which is when he said the key thing in these elections is not to think about the past, not to think about how you lost the last election, but the next one, very much relates to your obsession with Wayne Gritsky and skating where the puck is going and how difficult that is.
57:09Because of course, what happens is people are deeply involved in the last election. They go through the pain and the trauma and sometimes obviously there are decent lessons i mean presumably there were lessons that you drew in 97 from what went wrong in 92 or what went wrong in 87 yeah but then there were other ways in which you had to sense that the world had changed and you couldn't just undo the mistakes of 87 and 92 you needed to project something quite novel yeah i think he slightly misunderstood what I was saying about that I I was expressing my disquiet that there didn't seem to be a real analysis of what had gone wrong for the Democrats which I think you need to do to work out then how you need to kind of go forward I completely got his point though and he's absolutely right it's always got to be about the future by the way Rory you mentioned Wayne Gretzky you're obviously trying to sort of burnish your sporting credentials you know that he's now been overtaken in the National Hockey League career goals record just last week.
58:11I didn't know that. Did you not know that? Oh, it's a huge story in Canada and in Russia because he's a Russian. Alex Avekchin. Very good. There you go. I bet you didn't even look up a picture of Rukvan Dissaroy, did you? I didn't. No, no, no. When we're doing the rest of his hockey, we can have a look at that. Well, Mark Hardy would be good on that. Something else I thought was really interesting that he was talking about, He's obviously talking a lot about the way politics and journalism have changed. I thought that thing he said, and this is another way where he couldn't be a politician in a way, when he said that the overall effect of TikTok is that it's making us more stupid.
58:52Can you imagine if a politician said that? You know, you're all stupid TikTok users, says Rory Stewart, Alastair Campbell, whoever it might be. But you know what? He's absolutely right, I think. And in fact, funnily enough, this morning I was looking at David Brooks in the New York Times, and he's written a column which is on the same theme. He basically says, and he's got the stats and the data to back it up, that Americans are becoming more stupid, that their ability to reason, their ability to hold information. and he says that when you go through the data of educational attainment 2012 and maybe we should plug that we've also recently interviewed it will be coming out soon Jonathan Haidt he of the anxious generation who sort of blames social media for a lot of current ills 2012 was when this dip in educational attainment seemed to start I thought that was really interesting and what I like about him I guess this is what makes him really good at what he does he does write in a very journalistic kind of way and he sort of assembles the facts and he assimilates in my view but he then develops these sort of bigger arguments over the top of them and and ultimately that that's why i think he has quite a strategic mind uh which i do think you need in politics you've raised david brooks who's spent some time here as one of my colleagues um at yale and he was here two days ago and interestingly he had a slightly different analysis of jd vance and i wonder where your instinct was on this, and maybe we could do more on J.D.
1:00:21Vance. So Brooks's view basically is that Vance is a total opportunist. I mean, he's completely horrified because he says that two and a half, three years ago, Vance privately was excoriating about Trump and really kind of presented himself as a sort of conservative man of virtue who totally despised what Trump represented. Now, we've had this flip. Now, Brooks's view is that this just shows you that you shouldn't believe anything Vance says, and he's just a total opportunist and careerist. Ezra Klein's view seemed to be more that this is deep psychology. There's something very, very strange going on that you can almost read in Hillbilly Elegy that Vance is changing.
1:01:05And he had this idea, I thought three interesting psychological ideas. Vance changes, Trump doesn't change. Trump's the same person all the way through. And when it came to Musk and Zuckerberg, a strong sense that what motivated them was a sense of bitterness and anger about the way they were treated by their employees, the way they were treated by the Democratic Party, the way they were treated by the media. I mean, to what extent do you buy into this idea that a lot of this is personal psychology, as opposed to the Brooks view, which would be more, now this is political opportunism, and probably, I don't know with David, but if you were to ask him about what had happened to Mark Musk and Zuckerberg, he'd say, listen, don't be fooled into thinking these guys are kind of deeply traumatized by something that happened.
1:01:51They're just looking for business opportunities and power. Over to you. Look, the short answer is, I just don't know. I was fascinated by what Ezra was saying about his rereading. I almost thought he must be a conservative when he said he was rereading Hillbilly Elegy. But of course, unlike most of the conservatives when they say they're rereading, this is a relevant rereading. he was thinking because i must have it i've reread hillbilly elegy because when i read it jd vance was a coming thing he wasn't the thing that he's become and obviously now thinks that he's going to be the next president god help us what i saw lent itself more particularly with some of the commentary that's been laid over jd vance by people who've known him a long time from his own area lends itself more to the opportunism i think i think when i read it back Yes, he was critical of a lot of the things, but I felt it was more that he was exploiting his background to lay a political platform for himself.
1:02:48And then he had to change other things to seize the moment when Trump came along and MAGA came along. And he obviously had to change the way that he projected his thoughts about things. But I don't know, because I don't know the guy. I don't know the guy. I mean, I think there's got to be a sense. I had this slightly with Liz Truss and to some sense other people who got strongly in behind Boris, that if the change is really, really astonishing and radical, as it was for a lot of those people who were very active in the Remain campaign and suddenly became aggressive Brexiteers or were great champions of Theresa May and suddenly became great champions of Boris Johnson, you can't quite believe that there's been a massive ideological shift in their soul.
1:03:35You just have to believe that basically what matters to them is promotion and that the other stuff is done after the event. You know, when we did Q &A the other day and we talked about Birmingham, you asked me about John Prescott. Funnily enough, I say John is somebody who fundamentally never changed in terms of his core values and beliefs and principles, but did change and did actually become more of a Labour Party moderniser, more of a Blairite, if you like, than he started out because he genuinely thought about it. And I can remember once actually downstairs here with this hilarious light when he came round and Fiona was out.
1:04:15You know, I can't cook, as you know. So John said he fancied a Chinese. We went down to the local Chinese and walked in there and they were a bit surprised to see his wandering there because I don't like Chinese food. But John sort of ordering absolutely everything and then bringing it back here. Anyway, but I remember him saying that Tony had sort of persuaded him of the merits of what he was trying to do. And that was the main reason why he swung in behind it, even whilst also protecting his own position as somebody who was seen as being more left-wing. So I think it's possible. But no, J.D.
1:04:50Vance strikes me as a very, I think probably quite troubled sort of person because I don't know how you live with yourself if you are one of those people who's just gone with Liz Truss or Boris Johnson because you think that's where the main chance is. I couldn't do that. It's very weird. So your John Prescott story, I think, is a good segue into a little bit of a plug for Ezra Klein's book, Abundance, which is an attempt to basically look at what a new economic theory could be. So he basically says that and i think a lot of listeners would sympathize the conservatives and the progressive left are bankrupt of ideas they don't really have a vision of how to get the economy going we're sort of stuck yeah in a kind of doom cycle of this world that we've had where rising inequality medium wage is stagnated productivity not really going anywhere and a lot of people struggling and in america it's a little bit hidden because on the surface looks like this great gdp growth but actually if you're on a low income, your life is really bad and hasn't improved.
1:05:51So his book Abundance is a real attempt to think about what it would mean to really create a radically more prosperous equal society. And in particular, the positive role government can play in providing things like housing, access to education, healthcare, and harnessing AI and technology to do that so not everybody will agree with it but but i think that that's another thing that along with his very thoughtful um analysis of individuals is is the sense that he's beginning to lay out a platform for what change could look yeah because he was so interesting about all the other stuff we probably didn't give him that much time to talk about his book let's be honest he probably fancied an hour with us partly to flog a few copies of abundance what i had written down actually from reading the book that i did want to talk to we just ran out of time It relates to this idea about the difference between having political ideas and being a politician.
1:06:47So he had this quote, what we can build is much more important than what we consume. Now, I completely agree with that. But how do you, how do you politically challenge and change the power of the consumer society in a place like the United States of America? I think that's very, very hard. That's a big political challenge. So it's easy to say what we can build more is more important than what we consume, how does that then translate into policy? Quite difficult. I also thought it was really interesting. I think this is reflected in the way that he talks about politics a lot. When he talks about what's gone wrong in politics, he doesn't just blame the right.
1:07:24He, you know, he's very, very critical of the way that the more liberal side of politics has gone as well. I think both sides of politics have got a lot to learn from that kind of approach. It's so easy and you know this especially in the tribal system you keep making the point that labor just thought well we're better than conservatives so we'll be we'll come in and we'll fix everything because you can persuade yourself that they're just very very bad people doing bad things whereas we're good people who want to do good things and therefore it'll be quite straightforward and likewise i think the democrat party are really struggling at the moment because they can't understand how they're lost to this monster they're still locked in thinking this guy's a monster how what why is he doing this now but they should be what i meant by analyzing is they've got to work out how the hell do we lose to this guy okay rory well that was great thank you for ezra klein and um see you soon see you soon thank you very much indeed bye
From the publisher
How does a society defined by liberty and revolution become so easy to censor? Is polarisation something that has been done to us as an active political strategy or did we do this to ourselves? How did the Silicon Valley CEOs’ friction with their workers drive them towards camp MAGA?
Alastair and Rory are joined by Ezra Klein, coauthor of Abundance: How We Build A Better Future, to discuss all this and more.
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