What I Learned in 2025

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Hello, and welcome to our end of the year, Ask Me Anything. For subscribers, a story tradition here at the EK Show.
You all have sent in a bunch of questions.

Our executive producer and team have collated them and chosen them based on some judgment and algorithm. I don't actually know.

If I sound a little weird, I'm doing this from home with a cold, but I am excited to be here talking through your thoughts in conversation here with our wonderful EP, Claire Gordon.

Claire, welcome back to the show. Thank you.
Great to be here.

And we're doing this as a little bit of an experiment, structure-wise, because a lot of the listeners' questions sort of like neatly tied to our bigger episodes through the year, especially your column reads.

And so I thought we would approach this as a kind of this is your life, Ezra Klein, but a this is your life. This is my podcast.

This is your podcast. Let's go through it from the top.
Okay. So starting with,

it's February, 2025, cold outside. Trump was inaugurated just a couple of weeks ago.
And we publish your piece. Don't believe him.

In Trump's first term, people said, don't normalize him. In a second, though, the task, I think, is a little bit clearer.
Don't believe him.

So

10 months later. Should people still not believe him?

You know, it's one of those things, that piece, that I still believe what I said, but in retrospect, I wonder if I would have headlined it differently. Because I think that

many people took it to just say that Trump and his powers are a figment of the imagination.

Just sort of ignore it or refuse to accept it and let the institutions of the government do their work and it all go away. And that wasn't the argument of the piece.

The argument of the piece was that power is contested. I would say that the response early on from civil society was abysmal.
I mean, they went beyond believing him.

They went towards bending the knee to him, towards transacting with him, bribing him.

I think that in terms of moments that are going to look really bad in history, the attentional oligarchs assembled at the inauguration.

you know, Tim Cook presenting Trump with a gift of gold, functionally, in the Oval Office. There's a lot of moments like that.
Paul Weiss, the law firm, just completely rolling over.

They're going to look bad. But slowly, the law firms began to stop just accepting whatever the Trump administration wanted them to do.
The universities began to fight back.

So I think we're in a better place in many ways than we were a couple of months into the administration. I think the most disappointing dimension of this has been the Supreme Court.

I would say

the various lawyers arrayed into the opposition here have done a remarkable job challenging what the Trump administration has sought to do seven ways from Sunday.

And as we've discussed in episodes with Kate Shaw and others, when that got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has gifted Trump powers that many people thought

prior to this on a straightforward reading of the law, he just doesn't have.

Now, it didn't give him all of the powers, but I would would say, you know, maybe I thought he would get 20 or 25% of what he was asserting. And it looks to me more like he's got 50 to 75%

of it.

So there has been a lot of fighting, but, you know, you can't deny that executive power was primarily by the Supreme Court expanded over the past year in response to Trump asserting that it was much larger.

than anybody had heretofore believed.

But you think we're in a better place now, civil society-wise, in terms of people, you know,

growing a pair. Yes.

My read of it is that

there is less fear of Trump,

more sense that his political capital is waning. I think the 2025 elections were very significant here.

A recognition that this is not just going to be the full story of this regime. You know, Republicans, I think, are getting restive and nervous.
You're beginning to see retirements.

I think that a lot of American business is, particularly very large corporations, are enthusiastically transacting with the Trump administration, trying to get the best deal they can out of an administration that governs through dealmaking.

And you see this with pardons, which have been just a bizarre and corrupt dimension of all this.

Those who want to pay to play are doing that.

But

my sense is there is a much more widespread belief than there was six months ago, because it is true now in a way it wasn't, that there's a time limit on how

unrestrained this administration is going to be able to be. And that time limit is according to the natural rhythm of politics.

It's pretty typical that the first year of a new administration, they're really setting the agenda. They have a lot of of power.

And then in the second year, as you begin to get closer to the midterms, a sense of vulnerability begins to take hold and you see new things happening.

I've been somewhat cheered to see even Republicans in Congress saying that they want to investigate whether or not Pete Hegseth committed a war crime in apparently, allegedly ordering a second strike when people were hanging off of the edge of a boat after it had been bombed.

That Republicans are beginning to talk about that seems notable to me.

So that ties very neatly to my second question and the second column read of the year, a few weeks after Don't Believe Him, we publish another column read of yours about the first institution that seemed to be abdicating its power, this Republican Congress.

The most powerful branch of government, the branch with the power to check the others, is supine. It is not that it can't act to protect its power.
It's that it will not act to protect its power.

This is a non-player Congress. Behind it is a collapse of the structure of government the founders envisioned and the nationalization of the two parties.

And a big part of that piece was kind of a callback to your first book, Why We're Polarized, which tees up a question from Mark S., who's a college professor who assigns Why We're Polarized to his students.

And as a final paper, he gives his students a prompt that he was interested in hearing your response to, too.

Quote: Politics has changed in many ways since Why We're Polarized was published in 2020.

Should I continue to assign why we're polarized in future semesters, or has its relevance to today's political environment declined? It's funny.

I feel my personal experience of that book is that it has roared back into focus for me in the past four or five months.

So, Why We're Polarized is about the way that the highly regionalized, ideologically diverse political parties of the 20th century, where you had very liberal and very conservative Democrats, very liberal and very conservative Republicans, how those parties collapsed or transformed

into

much more ideologically narrow and coherent groups. by the end of the 20th century and coming into the 21st century.

And so basically you went from having a Democratic Party where you could, at the same time, have a Hubert Humphrey and a Strom Thurmond in it, you know, a very, very liberal and then a very, very conservative and later a very conservative Republican figure in Thurmond, and a Republican Party that genuinely had liberal figures in it, people we would today recognize as more liberal than many Democrats.

And

how that all falls apart is a story for the book, and I do think it's worth reading.

But the question of whether we can recapture any of it

has become more and more on my mind. When I was writing that book, I was treating

that

sorting of the parties into these much more coherent units as an inevitability of media, of technology. of politics.

And now I think we've gone so far in that direction and the parties have become so narrow that the party that wants to win any kind of enduring majority is going to have to find a way

to

become broader than this moment has thus far allowed for. And so to me, the question that why we're polarized now poses is: can we depolarize even just a little bit?

And when I say depolarize, I don't mean stop arguing with each other or stop disagreeing with each other. I mean create more space for disagreement and diversity,

ideological, regional, et cetera, inside the parties. And so when I keep saying on the show,

can you imagine that in 2010, Democrats had Senate seats in South Dakota and North Dakota and West Virginia and Ohio and Nebraska and Missouri and Arkansas and Louisiana?

That's the question on my mind.

Because in a political system governed by place in the way ours is,

there is no enduring answer to Trumpism and MAGA in a Democratic Party that

is only competitive in, let's call it, 26-ish states. And so I think why we're polarized is pretty relevant.

I will say the thing that why we're polarized did not talk about enough in the new versions, there's an afterword talking about it, but it did not talk enough about educational polarization, that that as a decisive form of polarization, that the Democratic Party was sorting into the higher educated coalition, the Republican Party moving into a less educated structure,

that that being a master key

for the way polarization is functioning, particularly in the Trump era, that's the part where the book is the weakest. But the other stories it's telling, I think, are pretty relevant.

Well, it sounds like you maybe already answered this, but part of Mark S.'s question was also that part of the argument of that book was that, you know, our polarization was so potent and dangerous because it was becoming less about policy disagreement and really about these like layered group identities and that you had race and geography and religion and all these things kind of like coalescing around these

around the two parties. But given the recent election results, there has been some racial depolarization.
Does that challenge the thesis at all?

It challenges it in the sense that the thesis is incomplete in the forms of polarization it's looking at.

I mean, the thing you see happening in the past couple of elections is functionally that educational polarization is beginning to overwhelm racial polarization, and ideological polarization is beginning to overwhelm racial polarization.

Again, beginning to, because we might be seeing a snapback among Hispanic voters that would change how that looks quite a bit.

I mean, Democratic voter margin among black voters remains huge, even if it went down a little bit from, you know, 2012 to, or went down a significant amount actually from 2012 to 2024.

But racial polarization is still there. And yeah, educational polarization and its sort of linked ideological polarization began to eat away at it.

Now, that didn't mean that we don't have polarization of stacked identities, but it does mean that the polarization and the particular way the identities are stacking looks a little bit different than it did at the end of the Obama era, which is when I began writing that book.

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All right, it's March now and your book with Derek Thompson, Abundance, came out. For folks who haven't read the book, we handily adapted a part of it into audio and video.

The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government and markets to make sure there is enough of it.

Question from Gabe Jay. Is abundance centrist?

I've read the book and it seems manifestly left-wing. And he goes to list the ways it seems so.

I feel like the debate over abundance has been absolutely abstracted from the actual principles of the book.

Thoughts?

I mean, my view is that abundance is best understood as a fairly left-wing project, which is to say that

there are certain things that liberals and I think in this case also leftists want government to deliver.

Housing and a lot more of it, particularly a lot more affordable housing, clean energy,

and

capable state capacity, the ability to build things like public infrastructure, high-speed rail, roads rapidly.

So some of the backlash and the tendency to see it as a more centrist project surprised me.

I think over time, I've come to understand it as having a couple dimensions, which I'm not going to tell you there's no kernel of truth to them.

I don't think they describe the project, but let me try to be fair to it. So one is that I have found there's a kind of pushback from a populist left that has a much cleaner delineation

of good guys and villains in politics.

And they feel that abundance

doesn't name corporations and billionaires as its enemies.

As I think the most simple way to put it, if you listen to the show I did with Stephra Teach Out, who sort of comes from this tradition and is one of the critics, I think you'll hear her say that pretty directly.

And they would like to say that American politics should be about breaking the power of corporations, breaking the power of billionaires. And if you can do that, you can achieve your goals.

And

I understood that as a sort of separate project. There are certainly places where I would like to break the power of corporations, break the power of billionaires, tax them more, regulate them more.

But then also, if we're going to decarbonize the economy and build all this clean energy infrastructure, corporations are going to do a lot of it.

If we're going to build all this housing and if we're going to move to something like modular housing, corporations are going to do a lot of that.

And so I understand corporations as simply one more social and economic force among many that you can orient their energy and their power and their money for good with sort of wise regulation and incentives and structures.

or they can be doing things that harm the public good.

And

I mean, billionaires, I would tax billionaires a lot more, but again, I understand them also as complicated and lined up on different sides of different issues.

And so I think that there is a, you know, what a lot of the people on the left would say is

that they had a different theory of power than I do.

And that's probably true so far as it goes. I just think their theory of power is incomplete and doesn't illuminate well a bunch of the issues I was looking at in that book.

As I kind of say ad nauseum, the reason Texas builds so much more housing than California isn't that Texas solved oligarchy and California didn't.

So I think it's been absorbed into factional battles that don't quite reflect the theory of the book. At the same time, opponents has been fairly well embraced by actual left-leaning politicians.

I mean, Zora Mamdani has talked about it. Small businesses employ nearly half of all New Yorkers in the private sector.
They keep the city running. But the last four years have been hard.

Just released videos on Small Business Day talking about cutting regulations and making things move faster.

That's why as mayor, I'll appoint a mom-and-pop czar with the clear goal of making it easier to run a small business.

The mom and pop czar will coordinate with agencies to speed up turnaround times, cut red tape, and let New Yorkers start businesses sooner.

Because you shouldn't have to fill out 24 forms and go through seven agencies to start a barbershop.

But most of all, Bernie Sanders was asked about abundance by my colleague David Leonhardt and gave this, I thought, very funny answer where he talked about how hard it was to get just two community health centers built in vermont you cannot believe the level of bureaucracy to build a bloody health center it's still not built all right so i don't need to be lectured on the nature of bureaucracy it is horrendous and that is real but that is not an ideology that is common sense i don't think you can accomplish left-wing goals without something like the policy program we're pointing towards and the reform program we're pointing towards in abundance But I think that there are a lot of people on the left who feel that

I represent a form of politics that in order for their form of politics to triumph, mine needs to be knocked off the pedestal or knocked out of contention.

Again, it's not my view of it. I think these things are going to be more positive sum, more complex, more synthetic and synthesized.

than that zero-sum competition for influence and power and attention implies. But I think it has

generated certainly a fair amount of the anger at the book. But yeah, to the question of, is it Buttons a left-wing project? I certainly understood it as one.

And I would just add also to be fair to the critics, as you sort of admit in the book, a lot of these issues are difficult for liberals. They push in many cases against parts of the liberal coalition.

A lot of these issues are going to involve things that unions don't like or that environmental conservationists don't like.

And then at the same time, folks see tech billionaires and Republicans say nice things about the book or speak at a conference called Abundance and, you know, generates a reaction.

Yeah, I think I have two thoughts on that. So one is I think that people in these arguments are very selective about when they see Odd Bedfellows coalitions as good and when they see them as bad.

So it was a common talking point that one reason Lena Khan is great is that J.D. Vance liked her.

That was something the populist left thought was evidence of how well they were doing and how their arguments were winning converts in strange places. And by the way, I agreed with that argument.

But what I don't accept is a view of politics where you can say, it's great when J.D.

Vance likes my people, But the idea that anybody unusual would find something valuable in abundance and any tech billionaire who wants to see California governance be more effective would

read abundance and think, yeah, I have run into this. Like I do think it's too hard to build.
And that that would be seen as a negative for the project as opposed to a positive.

That's a part I probably don't buy and that I think reflects a

fundamental inconsistency in the way they are looking at politics. I see the broadness of the coalition's abundance can, on some issues, build as evidence of

its viability as a political project. I mean, I am not trying to create ideas that only people,

quote unquote, on my side, like.

What's strange to me about

the reception abundance got is the people who it criticized most were in fact the most open to it. In a way, you would expect Gavin Newsom or Kathy Hochul

or,

you know, name your

sitting mayor or governor or members of the Biden administration like Jake Sullivan and Brian Deese to be incredibly defensive on that thesis because the, you know, the governance in the crosshairs was specifically their governance.

And instead, they have mostly said,

yeah, that's what it looked like to me. I lived this book.
I don't actually see it as

obvious that parts of the liberal to left coalition that were not in power and were not responsible for many of these mistakes

should see it as so much more difficult to swallow. And in truth, I don't think they will.

I think that if Zoran Mamdani decides he really wants to get things done using the New York City government, and by the way, a bunch of the people he's picked on his transition teams have been very, very promising from an abundance perspective.

I think Zoron has enough trust from them that if he is rebuilding process in a way that is making it easier to achieve his goals and build affordable housing and all the other things he might want to do, that they're going to cheer him.

So I think there's a lot of affective and symbolic and factional fighting happening here that sometimes obscures how much more mixed the reality is, both the reality of who is being critiqued in that book and what that book is trying to achieve, and the reality of who is responding to it and being willing to bring some of its ideas into play.

Yeah, things being flattened and simplified feels like the story of our time. Yeah, particularly online, right?

I mean, the online fights are much more flattened and simplified than actual governance or, for that matter, actual politics.

I was debating whether or not to ask this question because it's such a whiplash, but I actually think that's kind of the point because the next column read was in April. The emergency is here.

The emergency is here. The crisis is now.
It's not six months away. It's not another Supreme Court ruling from happening.
It is happening now.

So this has been like part of the whole challenge of this year in that so much of the theme of the show has been Democrats in the wilderness, Democrats rebuilding, while also turning and covering the Trump administration and trying to figure out.

what timeline we're on, where we are on that timeline. I mean, I'm curious in general about how you feel about how those things have balanced through the year for you and the show.

But we also had a question from Jess C

in terms of just threshold moments. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, and she's just watching aghast from afar.

As Trump's policies tend closer and closer to autocracy and fascism, I wonder whether you and your family community have a threshold that would trigger you emigrating.

Have you had these conversations amongst yourselves? And if not, what would make you start to consider it? I certainly know of conversations like those. They've happened around me.

I will be honest that I have not had them.

And

I'm American. I don't plan to leave.

You know, I'm not saying things could not get so bad,

but they're not there yet, at least for me.

Doesn't mean they're not there yet for other people.

But

I don't think we are in any respect

beyond

stopping this from falling into various nightmare scenarios. And I think maybe that gets to the way you set the question up.

There's been a feeling I have heard from others that there is some tension in the show

between

things like the emergency is here and the pretty relentless examination of where Democratic Party politics went wrong. And to me, those things are wholly one project,

wholly one way of looking at the moment. Because if you really believe the emergency is here, and I do,

then you have to get very disciplined and

cold-eyed about what it would mean

for the coalition that wants to end the emergency

to wield power more safely and more in line with liberal, and I mean that here in the more classical sense, values to win.

And there are strategies you will use,

reckonings you will

confront, compromises you will make.

when things are really bad that you won't make when the stakes are lower. People don't do chemotherapy because they enjoy it.
They do it because cancer will kill them.

And the trying to be very rigorous about where the Democratic Party has gone wrong, why it has shrunk, why so many people have come to see value and possibility in Trumpism

is to me a reaction to recognizing this is now really an emergency. There's a certain margin of

if the other side of the electoral coin is Mitt Romney, well, maybe there are painful things you don't want to do because if Mitt Romney wins, it's not that bad.

And if it's Donald Trump or J.D. Vance,

then the question of how are you competitive in Ohio, in Missouri, in Alaska, in Kansas,

in Louisiana becomes paramount because you need to start building a wall.

So I've said this on the show in many different forms. I've made people very angry in things I've been willing to countenance because of it.

But I really, really, really reject any kind of political nihilism right now.

And I really reject the idea that all the answers will be the ones we want.

Yeah, something you said earlier this year about how if you're comfortable in this Democratic Party, then there's a good chance that the Democratic Party will become a little uncomfortable for you if it's going to change enough to be a Democratic Party that can win has stayed with me.

And I've been thinking about what what are the things that I'm willing to

personal principles, policies I care deeply about that I'm trying to crack that open for myself.

I do think people have, and this goes back to why we're polarized, I do think people have lost

the

instinct or the felt reality that parties are not meant to just be one thing.

America has two political parties functionally that are supposed to represent some 300 and what is it, 30, 50 million people.

And to do that, you cannot have two

very narrow coalitions. They have to be very diverse.

Obviously, the most comfortable party is the imaginary one where you disagree with nothing and nobody, but you wield massive levels of majority power.

But it's very uncomfortable, I think, to be in this period where the Democratic Party is more purified and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are running the country and Stephen Miller.

In a nice line, Gavin Newsom said he thinks the Democratic Party should be from Manchin, where we met Joe Manchin to Mom Donny, right?

And I would find it more comfortable to be in a Democratic Party that could have Mom Donnie winning in New York City and that could be winning elections of more conservative Democrats in West Virginia and thus wielding power in more places and getting more things done and negotiating out these questions within itself.

I don't think people would in practice find that less comfortable. I think in theory they find it less comfortable.
But I think what's really uncomfortable is losing when the stakes are this high.

We're in early September now, and we release another column read calling on Democrats to strongly consider shutting down the government. Democrats did shut down the government.

They did it over health care. And you were somewhat critical of that as a choice.
And of Democrats in general this year, I'd say, who haven't always played all the cards they maybe could have played.

This was a question from Tra H.

Democrats this year have opted instead to strategically engage on key issues where they demonstrate strength, like healthcare during the shutdown.

Despite criticism, this approach appears to be yielding notable results, reclaiming the affordability argument, achieving a strong election showing, and a right-wing movement increasingly defined by internal divisions and extremism.

Is it possible that Democratic leadership's restraint has been a key factor in these successes and that maintaining the strategy remains the most effective path forward?

The problem I always saw with the healthcare shutdown was that it was going to end in an incredibly unsatisfying way. And I think it did that because the truth is that

if you couldn't get them to negotiate the right on premium subsidies, there wasn't going to be enough energy in the long run on destroying the workings of the federal government

to stop the Trump administration from doing something that, you know, they did legally and fairly normally. But just to pause you here, just because the question is sort of like moving beyond just

how the shutdown specifically and how it went, but just like a broader report card on the Democratic Party and how they've played their chips this year.

I mean, I think it's mixed. I don't think they've been incredible.
I don't think they've been catastrophic.

But the thing that is really happening, you know, that I think you see in New Jersey Jersey, in Virginia, in New York City, in, you know, the Georgia utility elections, in the

redistricting ballot initiative in California, is that the anti-Trump coalition is incredibly motivated. And I don't think they are primarily motivated at the moment from democratic messaging.

I think they are motivated by a mix of one, the reality of what Trumpism has meant from the tariffs to the deportations to the craziness and the cruelty of it all.

And two, a lot of those same policies depressing Trump's own supporters, particularly the more fly-by-night ones who were disappointed in the Biden-Harris administration, but were never MAGA ideologues who were trying to create an ethno-nationalist country that prized heritage Americans above all else.

They just wanted cheaper groceries and they didn't get it. So they're staying home.
And it's always been the case that many of Trump's own supporters stay home when he's not on the ballot.

So I don't want to take anything away from Democrats. Trump has managed with tariffs and other policies to put himself strongly on the wrong side of affordability.

So I do think the Democratic Party has been very consistent and disciplined in making these arguments. But, you know, the person who is really harming Donald Trump the most day to day

is

Donald Trump or possibly, you know, Stephen Miller and Russ Vought.

But does this feel like a path, a strategic path for Democrats going forward? Just turn everything around and back to affordability, to health care.

It was like amazing for many reasons watching the Mamdani Trump presser in the Oval Office where every question thrown at the Mamdani just put affordability in the answer. Mr.

Momdani, does New York City love President Trump? New York City loves a future that is affordable.

And I can tell you that there were more New Yorkers who voted for President Trump in the most recent presidential election because of that focus on cost of living.

And I'm looking forward to working together to deliver on that affordability agenda.

I mean, is that what the Democratic Party writ large really should be doing? I mean, I think so, certainly in the midterms,

where it's much harder to break through with a message.

Now, the question, then you get into, I don't think right now the Democratic Party understands what affordability would mean as a governing agenda.

If you take power and you don't deliver, people are going to be mad at you again and they're going to boomerang back to the other side.

So you're going to need to figure out how to govern in a way that reconnects people to the fruits of effective government, where they can feel that you are doing something for them.

And I think what we're going to see in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City is early tests of that, where you have politicians who are elected in this moment on this kind of agenda, trying to show they can deliver.

And Democrats can take some lessons from that.

And then, and this is something you'll probably hear us explore more in 2026. I think there's going to have to be more than affordability on the governing agenda, too.

I think there are big questions of human experience and national experience right now, to say nothing of foreign policy, that affordability misses.

And you need to both know where the puck is at the moment and also be

trying to both see and shape where it's going, right? Great politicians, great political leaders, they don't just respond to the moment. They also shape the next moment.

They have a vision of what it should be about. And

that'll become more fundamental questions as well.

Well, speaking of what Democrats should stand for, last month we published our last column read of the year, unless you get some brilliant idea in the next couple of weeks.

This is how we're going to be.

You would never allow me to do that at this point.

People need a vacation.

This is how Democrats win, calling for Democrats to become a bigger tent. We already talked about it a bit, but a lot of listeners wrote in wondering

how should the big tent really work? And Daniel L. wrote, opening up a brand to include everything and everyone can very quickly leave that brand meaning nothing to anyone.
So what's a Democrat?

I think a Democrat is somebody who believes that the fundamental nature of the economy is unfair and that the working class and the middle class need both a better deal than they're getting and more resources than they're getting.

I think a Democrat is somebody who believes you can solve big problems through a government able to act strongly and capably and agilely.

And I would add from the abundance perspective, a Democrat is someone who makes governments that actually work that way, as opposed to governments that don't work that way.

And I think a Democrat is somebody who believes that this country is forever trying to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, that we are far from equality right now, and you need to keep in the incremental, difficult, transformational way we've always done it, keep moving forward on that.

And then, and this to me is more about liberalism, although that's involved in the Democratic Party as well. I think there is something in there that we're gonna have to hash out

about what it means to live in a polity this big, diverse, and disagreeable.

And that there are modes of engaging with each other, modes of being in political community with each other that need to be rediscovered.

And I don't think being a Democrat is going to mean you have to engage in politics in one way, but I think that it is not accidental that if you look at the Democrats who have won nationally, you know, in the past couple of decades, and you look at Bill Clinton and you look at Barack Obama and you look to some degree at Joe Biden,

you are dealing with figures who are fundamentally pluralistic in remarkable ways. All of them, and particularly Clinton and Obama, had this

almost eerie capacity to contain the contradictions and pluralism of this country within themselves.

We will build an American community again.

The choice we offer is not conservative or liberal. In many ways, it's not even Republican or Democratic.
It's different, it's new, and it will

work.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America.

There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America. There's the United States of America.

And this capacity to exist in a

state of grace amidst disagreement, in a state of fellowship amidst

profound division, I think is a very important political project, that it has an aspiration and an ambition and a mission unto itself. And so I think there is a policy level to politics.

I think there's like a political level to politics. And I think there is a spiritual and a communal level to politics.
And I think that Democrats are going to need to have answers on all of them.

And I think too often they just want to have the policy answers. And they believe they're right and they're going to tell you why they're right.

And if you don't agree and you've turned on them, well, so much the worse for you.

But I think that question of how you do politics in places where people have come to not like you or feel more to the point that you don't like them.

And I think this question of what is your relationship to people you disagree with, right? I've been very critical over this year on the sort of turn to what I think of as deplorables politics.

And I think that was a very, very dangerous turn in Democratic politics. And it needs to be something that the sort of next iteration of the Democratic Party really purges from its system.

Because, you know, creating a sense of community even over big disagreement with tens of millions of this country's inhabitants and residents is going to be a very important part of being an effective political party, but also just making this a politically livable place again.

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We got a number of questions about what the Democratic Party would offer young men. You've acknowledged on the show that young men seem by various measures to be struggling.

What's the policy offer or even just the messaging offer to young men?

Ooh, okay.

I think if you listen to what I've been saying, you can hear me kind of hinting at some thinking I've been doing.

And

I'm not there yet on this. So you're hearing sketches of what I think.
There's obvious policy answers, right? There is making housing affordable.

That is a clear policy for young people just across the board, men, women, everybody. There's labor market policy.
There's AI policy and particularly what AI is going to mean for young workers.

There is this set of policies that I think we know are out there and many people have come to acknowledge already. And also, I don't think that is going to end up being quite enough.

Particularly once AI wipes out

a significant percentage of entry-level jobs.

Well, I mean, we'll see, but yes, maybe.

I think there is something

about the way in which

liberalism,

you know, it's sometimes hard for me to know exactly the unit I want to talk about here, the coalitional unit,

but has lost a sense of,

you know, what at another time you would have called civic formation or just like being a good person or being a good man or being a good citizen

and having genuine views about the nature of the good, the nature of virtue. the nature of the kind of world we want to inhabit

that is not simply set up according to the dictates of the market.

People have all kinds of definitions of neoliberalism, and I think a lot of them don't hold up. But one that has influenced me a lot is from Wendy Brown, who's a theorist at UC Berkeley.

And she talks about neoliberalism as the logic of market exchange, becoming a kind of public logic. It is as if we become the market and look at everything the way the market would.

And among other things, I think that creates this desire to solve everything in terms of market answers. You know, bring down the price of this, bring up the wages of that.
That's all important.

It's all worth doing.

But I think it has robbed us

of a language for,

you know, what does it mean to live well?

What does it mean to be decent?

What does it mean to succeed? And then it has also robbed us then of

a policy standing to enforce some boundaries on really what we allow in society. I think flooding society with online gambling, with porn,

with

algorithmic social media and now AI, which I think in the darker corners is going to prove to be much worse right now than we even currently have any idea.

And

with commercialized cannabis, which I very much supported, and now I think commercialization is probably a bad idea that's been very bad for a segment of society, even though I don't want it to be illegal.

I think these are really hard because the

refrain that who are you to tell adults what they should and shouldn't be doing is very powerful. And at the same time, the abdication.

of having views about what is good and bad in society, what we mean by human flourishing, men flourishing, you know, women, like anybody,

I think it's a real mistake. I think if you look where a lot of the energy on the new right is, it is in arguing over these kinds of questions.

Yeah, I was going to say, as you're talking, I can hear Christians on the right saying, yeah, where you've been.

I find that there is much more discourse about this in Christian and particularly Catholic circles than almost anywhere else.

And I think that's in part because it's maintained within those religious and ethical frameworks, much more of a structure of talking about virtue and the good and flourishing that does not need to be stretched over market scaffold.

So when I had John Haidt on the show, I think earlier in the year, I remember saying to him that my critique of his book, my critique of the anxious generation, which I really liked on a lot of levels, was that it was very thin on these questions of flourishing.

And it just ended up in these big arguments about, well, how well could you identify the effects of social media starting when you were young on literacy or income when you were older?

or depression, right? Like how everything had to be visible on a chart. And everybody who's followed my career knows I love a good chart.

But I think that is robbing us of some unquantifiable dimension of human experience.

And the ability, I think, even to have opinions about it and debate them publicly, even if we don't know what the answers to them are.

And I think, I'm not saying this is a full answer for young men, and nor do I think it is just about young men, but I think there is an adriftness in our society that reflects a

weakening of,

you know, structures of formation and flourishing for young people.

And

I think that a successful party will at least be able to speak to that in a way that Democrats now can't.

There's just this big case where the FTC lost its effort to sue Meta for antitrust violations for purchasing Instagram.

And if you look at the lawsuit and the judge's decision, what the judge basically says is the way, or one of the things the judge says, is the way that the FTC tried to define the market that Facebook was a monopolist in

didn't hold together. Meta said, how can you say we're not competing with TikTok? Of course Instagram is competing with TikTok.
And on some level, I find that persuasive.

Of course, Instagram is competing with TikTok. Instagram looks more like TikTok every single day.
But

I think it also speaks to some thinness in the remedy we were trying to think about there, some way we were trying to fit that into the framework of antitrust and competition, because the fact that TikTok emerged and created more competition for meta, for Instagram, for Facebook, to me, that didn't make society better off.

It created more innovation in terms of how to addict people to algorithmically suggested vertical video, but I think that was bad.

And my remedy for it isn't that Facebook should be given a monopoly, of course, or meta should be given a monopoly, but we need some way of describing what we do think should happen here.

I think we keep trying to address it in a logic that does not fit it, that is not just about market failures or cost or competition, that has to somehow move into an idea that is a little bit more spiritual.

That is a tough charge, right?

And a tricky thing for politics to have in it.

But I think that the problem of young men, the problem of young people, the problem of our society is bigger than politics, but politics is going to have to be able to speak to it.

So the guiding light for the Democratic Party for the future is to be able to stand up and say that being a gooner is bad.

You know, I think one reason that Harper's article on gooners, which look it up if you are so inclined, struck such an incredible chord

is it in finding such an extreme manifestation of the adriftness and lack of moral structure in our society and seeing people who have fallen into

a space where they're not doing anything illegal,

but they are living in a way that I think many of us would consider to be living poorly,

even as that language is very judgmental. I think the reason it struck a chord is because it felt like it was an extreme manifestation.

of a truth we all know, that there is something about living in your masturbation cave, cave endlessly scrolling and receding from contact with the outside world that is

unnervingly similar

to living in your TikTok or Instagram cave and receding from contact.

And it's not the same and the gooning is an intense manifestation of it, but it would not have struck a chord if it didn't feel like a spectrum condition.

One last wrap-up question, Ezra. This is from RSQ.

I have the sense that the show has been under more heat than ever this year, both because of particular episodes that strongly divided opinions that Ezra has chosen to confront directly, and that Ezra's public profile has grown a lot.

How do you know when to keep pushing on a topic? How do you decide when it's better to cool things down and release something like the Brian Eno episode?

How do you plan without knowing how this heat is going to increase or not? And lastly, do you feel that this pressure has had consequences on you personally? And how do you cope with that?

I think that's all accurate.

As Claire knows, it's a thing on my mind a lot. And

I have a lot of different thoughts about this.

I also want to be thoughtful about how much of them I put out publicly, because I think one of the things that most scares me. is allowing it to get too much in my head.
There is some way in which

I simultaneously have to hear criticism and hear the signals of anger or frustration or disagreement and be able to respond to that

openly, which does not always mean for me responding in the moment, but sometimes it means scheduling episodes that won't come out for months where I am engaging in a different way with ideas that feel

distant or more in conflict. Sometimes it does mean responding in the moment, like having Tanahasian.

But I need to somehow do that without getting so in the meta-narrative about me, which has exploded to new levels this year for all kinds of different reasons,

that I am seeing myself in the third person and that this show or my work becomes an exercise in brand management as opposed to an authentic exploration and engagement with the world.

And so the danger to me or to the show, in my view, isn't the heat,

although the heat can be, you know, tricky,

so much as it is the

pressure

to

be programming from

a space of defensiveness as opposed to an honest space.

And

I don't know, I'm not going to tell you, I figured out. I think something you'll probably see on the show over this year is there is some engagement I want to do with

people who have

proven to be more opposed to me than I would have thought or to see in me something that I don't recognize in myself.

Like, I can't tell you how often I see pieces about me or about abundance that will often be like,

you know, this is all an effort to dodge a wealth tax. But I support a wealth.
I have always supported wealth taxes.

You can go all the way back in my old, but like I have been a consistent supporter of wealth taxes my entire career.

And so some of it might mean I need to re-emphasize, you know, parts of myself and my ideology or my views that have just been quieter as I've been doing the abundance work because to me, that was a different topic.

So I want to engage with the reaction the show creates openly and charitably and recognize that I can learn from it, but not fearfully.

Because at the same time, I do see some of these dynamics as ways of imposing social discipline within a group that if you question things you get this terrible backlash particularly online and see that's a lesson to you don't question that and i don't think that's healthy i think that these dynamics were stronger you know in the call 2018 to 2023 period or something like that online i think it took the sort of left coalition in a lot of bad directions and so i you know one reason i don't do much social media and try to maintain some distance is to maintain some independence in my own thoughts So I know what I actually think of things, not just what I think everybody else would think of me thinking about things.

And then, yeah, personally,

the amount of parasociality in my life has dramatically increased.

I mean, even just on the street, in a way that, again, it creates this tendency to see yourself in the third person, to be looking at yourself from outside yourself, how other people view you.

It can be strangely alienating from yourself, but there's nothing more, I think, irksome than hearing people complain about conditions that they have actively sought. Right.

Like I chose to make this a video podcast, recognizing that would make me a more recognizable figure. So I think I'll leave that one at that.
That brings us to rapid fire round.

You have,

say, three seconds to think of your answer, but ideally just shout it right out. Because you know what I like is to be unprepared and off the guff.

How many packs of splendid do you eat in a day? Four to six. If you could time travel, would you travel to the past or the future? Ooh.

I would have thought the future, but the feeling that really came up in me was maybe the past?

The Roman Empire?

No, not the Roman Empire. I'm really fascinated by the American 60s and 70s, and there's a lot I would like to see.
A lot of people I would have liked to talk to.

What is a piece of culture you love that would surprise people? My favorite book, growing up, and which I still have a lot of

love for, I keep in my house, was Anne McCaffrey's The Dragon Riders of Pern trilogy. Maybe that won't surprise people, that I was very into a fantasy novel.
I never read it, but I feel not surprised.

Yeah, about having a fantasy novel, about having dragons as friends. I don't know, Claire, you know me.
What's a piece of culture I'm into that you think would surprise people?

I mean, we were joking on the team that you would bust out some great reality TV show, but you're not that surprising a person. I'm worried I'm just not that surprising of a person.
And I think my

love of esoteric electronic music is now well enough known that that's not surprising either. We all know it, Ezra.
It's part of the brand.

I actually read a lot more, probably, theology than people realize I do, including not just a lot of Buddhist stuff, but a lot of Christian theology. and Jewish too.

So maybe my, when I was in college, before I almost became a religious studies major and some part of me, you know, still wishes I could spend my time thinking about that. I didn't know that.

The Democratic Party is putting up billboards all over America with a new slogan on it, five words or less. What should it be?

I don't think I have a slogan off the top of my head for the entire Democratic Party. I will say once,

Ben Wickler, the former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said to me that, Democrats are the people who make government work for you.

And I loved that as a description of it. And I didn't quite think it was true about the Democratic Party as it exists, but I think it should be true of the Democratic Party.

And if it was, then they could use that slogan: the party that makes government work for you. I was trying to make it five, five words.
Government that works for you.

I'll take it. Oh, don't be such a stickler.

2025 in one word.

Rough.

And I think that's a wrap.

It's been a good year.

Thank you so much, Claire.

And as this is our end of the year AMA, I just want to say, I think from the outside of this show, it is impossible to know how much work this team does, people whose voices are not regularly in the microphone or faces are not regularly on YouTube, to make this happen.

I mean, the producers, the video editors, the audio engineers, I mean,

there are so the fact-checking, the, you know, just the logistics of production.

It really is so much more complicated of a project than it was when i started it and people on it work so hard to give it the production values and the

integrity that it hopefully has and still move

anywhere near the speed of the news and it's just it's such a big team effort and so many people put in long nights and early mornings and you know then drop everything to move in a different direction because something happened.

I just want to say for me, but also to recognize the audience, to thank you. Like

this was a rough year. It was a hard year to do this show in the way we did it.

And it only happened because, you know, the people behind it are amazing and excellent and worked like hell, all of us, a lot of times and at a lot of times when we might have preferred not to be working to make it.

happen. So I hope it's been a good show, a useful show for the audience this year, even when it's been maybe challenging or frustrating.

But the effort that goes into this behind the scenes is really tremendous. And I'm so grateful to the people who do it.
Well, I will second that for the rest of the team.

It's the best in the business. They really are.
Thank you, Claire. Thanks, Ezra.

This episode of Astral Clan Show is produced by Claire Gordon, Kristen Lynn, and Marie Cassione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris.
Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld.

Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Koble.

Original music by Carol Sabaro and Pat McCusker. Audience Strategy by Christina Samilski and Shannon Busta.
The director of of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rosstrasser.

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