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

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

For years now, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein has been at the center of debates over the future of the Democratic Party and what liberalism's political priorities ought to be.

Klein's perspective is getting even more scrutiny these days as we're in the midst of a volatile national debate over free speech and the very stability of our democracy.

As we speak, President Trump is demanding prosecutions of his political enemies.

He's claimed that it's illegal for the press to be critical of him.

And he's routinely used threatening and dehumanizing language to discredit his opponents, whom he admits he hates.

He did not hate his opponents.

He wanted

the best for them.

That's where I disagreed with Charlie.

I hate my opponent

and I don't want the best for them.

I'm sorry.

So how should Trump's critics and opponents handle this onslaught?

What can they do to win back the voters that deserted them in last year's presidential election?

I spoke to Ezra Klein about his perspective.

on the perilous moment that we find ourselves in today.

Let's start with what happened when Charlie Kirk was killed.

You pretty immediately published an essay in the Times that, of course, condemned political violence,

comparing it to a contagion or the danger of a contagion.

And you praised Charlie Kirk's willingness to debate.

You called it, quote, practicing politics the right way.

That was the phrase that resonated everywhere.

And since that terrible event, the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah, we've seen how how Trump and the MAGA movement at times has planned to use his death in a serious crackdown on the opposition.

Has your thinking about this evolved, how do you look back on that column?

What did you get right?

And how maybe has it been misinterpreted?

I think you got to separate a couple things here.

Sure.

My view is that in the, let's call it 12 hours after somebody is publicly murdered, it is a good time to sit with people in their grief.

And I believe very deeply that when you commit an act of political violence like that, it is an act of political violence against everybody who participates in politics.

I said in that piece and I believe, right, that on that stage, that day, Charlotte Kirk was practicing politics.

He was up there.

He was arguing with people.

I've heard people say, well, he's not really debating to find the truth.

And of course not.

He's a very, very effective practitioner of politics.

He's trying to persuade people.

He's trying to create content that will work in our attentional sphere.

And I think something that we liberals have to reckon with is he had been winning.

He and the people like him had been winning.

They had been beginning to win on college campuses, and there was a big Gen Z swing towards Donald Trump.

They were certainly winning on social media.

You can disagree, I disagree with him profoundly

and still,

you know, find things in him to think that there's meaning to make out of it.

I don't actually find this to be a complex part of it.

The critique of it was that you were for sure engaging with his practice of politics, of meeting people where they are, but maybe underselling what Charlie Kirk represented in terms of his positions about

race, about, quote, Jewish money funding an anti-whiteness agenda, about his views about LGBTQ people, all kinds of things.

What is your sense of his particular politics with all due respect and sympathy for a, I think we totally agree,

a horrific act of assassination.

I think this is a weird critique, genuinely.

Like,

you know, human beings, David.

If

in the moments after a murder or death, do you go to people and tell them exactly what you thought of the person they just lost?

Is your like relationship to people who you're in community with?

Right.

And I do believe myself to be in a political community with people who cared about and loved Charlotte Kirk, even as much as I'm very much on the other side from them.

Would you go to people like that when they've just watched somebody be killed?

So

Tom Hassey coast

wrote a piece in Vanity Fair, making very clear what had been

a collection of statements from Charlie Kirk that was quite representative.

Did you think that was unfair?

No.

I mean, I don't, not to me, right?

Like, I virtually agree with Tom Haasy on every view he has.

And Tom Hassey's on my show this weekend.

I agree with the things that you just said.

It's bad.

I have, as I wrote in my second piece, I have poured virtually every ounce of myself into preventing everything that Kirk poured himself into creating.

I think that for more people than I had understood, the sense that we are in any way in community together, the sense that we are still in a place where we are all practicing and doing politics has already eroded.

I think something that's very alive for me is a feeling that we are not that far from national rupture.

So many things that we like to say, it can't happen here have already been happening here.

In my...

And who do you blame for that?

I mean, I blame Donald Trump quite specifically for that.

And I think that the way he has acted in the aftermath of Kirk's murder has been an

exhibition.

of virtually everything that is wrong and dangerous right here.

I'm not 100% agreement with you.

I watched a lot of that memorial series.

What did you think of it?

I saw two remarkable things.

I saw the widow of Charlie Kirk get up and do an extraordinary thing, a woman whose world has been shattered, whose family has been shattered, who's lost the husband she adored.

Forgive, forgive the person who killed them.

I mean, I don't know that I could ever be capable of that.

And then who spoke later?

Donald Trump got up and he said, I hate my opponent.

I can't be like that.

And it wasn't just rhetoric.

It wasn't a tossed-off comment.

It was true.

And that

really struck me.

There is some part of him, I think, that would thrill

to the possibility of an excuse

to crack down.

They're already trying it in many ways.

The other thing I saw, to be honest, was a political opportunity.

I think a politics of hatred is a weak politics.

And a lot of people desire for something different.

I found myself thinking a lot recently about the speech through which Barack Obama rose to power.

The fundaments like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states, red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats.

But I've got news for them too.

We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states.

We coach Little League in the Blue States, and yes, we've got some gay friends in the red States.

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

At the

Boston Convention speech.

I think a lot of people now have almost given up on that politics.

And I also think that

you remember what Obama said about it, that it wasn't a statement of here's the the condition of it's it was an aspiration of course

aspiration is very powerful in politics

and I

both because I am genuinely worried about rupture but also because I'm genuinely uh

determined to try to be useful in making our politics better and having people who I trust more holding power

I think we should not engage in oppositional mirroring where whatever the other side does, we do, right?

You hate me.

Oh, well, you know what?

I hate you.

Do you see that on

the liberal side that there's a lot of mirroring of that?

I see on the liberal side that one huge strategic mistake we have made for well over, or at least a decade now, let's call it, is yes, oppositional mirroring.

Not on the word hate, right?

That's specifically with Trump.

How could I illustrate that?

So let me give you an example.

Sketch it out.

Obama was a very, very effective politician.

And he was a very effective politician because he was very good at containing opposites inside of him you wrote a biography of him you know this about him better than just about anybody so he was very good at having a sense that if you're going to push the country you also need to create space in yourself in your political movement in your rhetoric for the disagreement for the concern for the pushback and so he was this

generationally capable political balancer, right?

Like sort of holding both our liberalism and our illiberalism inside himself.

After him, I think this began to break down.

So Trump rises and you have, say, the Hillary Clinton deplorable speech.

You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.

Right?

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.

Now, some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not American.

The worst word in that is irredeemable.

I agree.

Right?

That's really, when you talk like that, a severing of political community.

What begins to happen as Trump then wins, which I think is taken as truly shocking,

is you begin to see the, and this is not even a painting, this just literally happens.

The Democratic Party begins to take on the opposite positions of Trump in many ways.

So Trump is the most anti-immigrant president of our lifetime, right?

Not just in his wanting to desire to build a wall, but emotionally anti-immigrant.

The Democratic Party becomes much more pro-immigrant, right?

If you're going to build a wall, we're going to debate legalizing, decriminalizing illegal border crossing.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But that wasn't true across the board.

There were a lot of discussions.

Almost every

decisions on that statement.

There were, but almost everybody on that stage, except Joe Biden,

and not express with

a similar, much less equivalent hatred.

I agree that Donald Trump is very unique in the way he radiates hatred.

And I think you know this, even as you're pushing me on this.

If you talk to people on the right,

and I'm not talking about Donald Trump or people at the top of politics, I'm talking about the people in my life who ended up voting for Trump.

that they felt in these years

profoundly rejected.

I do think this politics of deplorables was very real.

There is certainly people

who don't agree with the things I believe in the world, right?

They began to feel that the Democratic Party genuinely didn't like them.

And one of my strongest, most strongly held views about politics.

One sec.

One of my most strongly held views about politics is that the most important question for a voter is not whether they like you, but whether you like them.

If they're going to entrust you with power, the first thing is not whether they agree with you.

The first thing is just whether or not they feel you like like them and will take them into consideration.

But do you think any of that was centered on Obama himself?

Oh, there's no doubt.

Why?

But I think Obama?

Because he was black and foreign.

There you go.

People.

But, and I'll ask you this question.

Do you think Obama would have won in 2016 if he could have run again?

I do.

So there you go.

Politics,

politics is about power.

And I think people have missed this.

Politics is not about self-expression.

There's room for that.

It's not just about a dispassionate analysis of ideas.

There's room for that.

It's a lot of what I do, a lot of what you do.

Politics is about building coalitions capable of winning power and making the decisions you need to do to do that.

So I said recently in a podcast with my colleague Russ Douthed that I feel that there's been a lot of fatalism among Democrats, right?

They've just accepted places where they cannot compete.

And I said that I want to see

real decisions being made to try to compete in Kansas and Missouri and Ohio and then in red states, right?

Meaning better than that.

I'd like to see us running running pro-life Democrats again.

When Obamacare passed, 40 House Democrats are pro-life.

People got very upset about that.

I get why, but I think it's worth thinking about this.

Has it been bad for the Republican Party that Susan Collins, who is nominally pro-choice, wins in Maine?

Has that been a weakness for them?

Has it been bad for the Republican Party that Donald Trump welcomed RFK Jr.

and all of his voters, everybody who liked RFK Jr., Joe Rogan all the way down, into their coalition?

No, it has expanded their power.

Trump built coalitions when he thought it would serve him.

He is, among many other things that he is, a ruthlessly political animal.

And I think there are things to take seriously in that that we have begun to demean.

I hear you.

The problem is, the difficulty is, is juggling these plates all at once.

Sure.

Right now, you're talking the language of conciliation and broadening the scope and the tent, temperamentally and politically, of the Democratic Party.

I hear you on that.

At the same time, you have, I think we agree on this, you have a president who, in fact, is uniquely authoritarian in his instincts and

it would seem in his policies as well.

And to do those things at the same time, to fight that battle at the same time, is

hard to do.

It seems almost irreconcilable temperamentally within the Democratic Party.

Jr.: I mean, I think some of this reflects the absence of right now a leader in the Democratic Party who can sort of make decisions on behalf of it.

But to me, these two things are the same thing.

If you're facing Mitt Romney, you have margin for loss.

If you lose, it's a shame, but it's Mitt Romney.

Nothing that bad is going to happen.

If you keep losing to MAGA, then at least under the way I look at the world,

terrible things are going to happen, truly terrible things.

And the risk of catastrophic things happening, the risk of what we understand to be the American political system cracking into something else becomes very real.

So if you think that, hold on.

If you think the threat, if you think that.

I'm asking for a certain kind of equanimity within the Democratic.

No, I'm asking for strategic discipline.

What's the difference?

It means that what I am saying we should do is we should

take on

an approach to politics that we think will expand our coalition such that we are not always within two points of losing to Donald Trump or the people around him.

And if that means doing things that are uncomfortable, yeah, if a war or a battle or a project, I mean, when people get terrible diseases, they don't take the medicines because they enjoy the side effects.

They do it because it might work.

So who would you, who exemplifies this

temperament of leadership and of the way he or she looks at the world?

I'm not sure I have that person right now.

I mean, in some ways, I think I am saying we should rediscover the politics of Barack Obama.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with the writer and podcaster, Ezra Klein.

Now, Ezra, you just said that we need to rediscover the politics of Barack Obama.

Tell me a little more about that.

I don't think it's an accident that the last two Democrats to win nationally and serve two terms had this very open-palmed approach to politics and were very good at balancing these different forces and dynamics in them.

And that doesn't mean, by the way, that their presidencies, their power, their assent did not drive many people on the other side crazy.

Clinton, in ways that in retrospect, look ridiculous, drove the right crazy.

I mean, you remember the

conspiracies about Vince Foster and all the rest of it.

And Obama, by virtue of who he is, no matter how

he was, by virtue of his identity, by virtue of his skin color, by virtue of his name, he drove the right nuts.

Aaron Powell, are you happy with how present or not Barack Obama is in the the national conversation and debate?

No.

I think we could use more of his leadership and voice right now.

Like I've said this on my show.

I'll say it on yours.

I wish he were more out there.

But I think that he is still playing by the rules where it is ⁇ I mean, increasingly less.

He's starting to do a little bit more, but I think he's still playing by the rules wherein

it would be unseemly.

for a former president to take a very public role.

I also think he believes if he does that, he will choke off oxygen for the next generation Democratic leaders to rise.

But I would like to see Barack Obama on Joe Rogan.

I would like to see that in the end of the election.

And I think we both know that he would do it in a second.

I can't speak for him, but I think so.

Exactly.

I think it would be good for him to be in places.

Again, this is a very big thing for me.

Talking to people who don't often hear from us, you have to win in the attentional sphere right now.

And there are very few people who can do it as well as he can.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Barack Obama, who was a hero of liberalism at a certain point in time, now takes a lot of criticism from the left or the left-left, depending on how you look at it.

I wonder how you look at that phenomenon now.

Aaron Powell, I've been thinking actually a ton about this.

How does Obama go in a pretty compressed number of years from nearly an impossibility,

the very act of his election seeming

like a

pivotal moment in the country to many people, to by the end of his term.

I mean, still, by the way, the most popular national-level politician in America today.

It's very easy, I think, to overstate

the Obama backlash.

He's doing better than any other figure.

This is why I like to see him out there more.

But I think it reflects a couple of things.

One is, I think it reflects that

the

hopes that his campaign aroused in people

were

not

capable of being delivered upon by either the pros of actual governing, you know, through Congress and the filibuster and all these blockages.

He did a lot.

I mean, the Fort Lebel Care Act is not a small thing.

The Dodd-Frank financial reforms are not a small thing, but it wasn't enough.

And so there was a letdown.

And then he's followed by Trump.

And I think the Obama legacy looks different to people because it seems to have ended not in,

you know, this arc bending towards justice.

You know, he's succeeded by Hillary Clinton and she gets things done.

You keep sort of building a new era in American politics incrementally.

Instead, it's followed by very rapid regression.

And I think, you know, one of the ways I view politics is that the communication mediums upon which it happens are very, very determinative in what then becomes powerful and popular and energetic.

And I think that the move to social media and algorithmic media, it was really a move towards a style of political communication that is somewhat hostile to the liberal project, the deliberative, open-minded, thoughtful on the one hand, on the other hand, mode of discourse that Obama is good at.

He's bad at Twitter.

You ever read Obama on Twitter?

It's bad.

No,

it's not his thing.

Trump is good at Twitter.

And so I think that it all gets taken for granted.

It actually is a sort of remarkable experiment what we're doing here.

And the idea that a country this big and this diverse

nationally.

No, I'm in here on this podcast.

I see.

The idea that a country as big and diverse with as much political argumentation and division as we have, that we actually would live together, that we can make this work, that would keep getting better, that a black man with a middle name Hussein could get elected.

That

doing the work of democracy, doing the work of politics, that's actually amazing.

And I think he wasn't able to keep that story going and nobody kept it going after him.

But I do think there is a lot of power

in

actually reconnecting people at this moment when I think they feel, I certainly feel it.

We're like, oh, this could break.

We could just break this.

Somebody like Trump could just break this.

One of my deep, I mean, there's a lot I disagree with Trump on, but one thing I really

find offensive about him,

and I would say this about J.D.

Vance now too, is I don't think they believe in this project anymore.

I'm not sure they did, or actually J.D.

Vance at one point did.

I think for Vance, there's something, a more kind of scarily ideological structure around that.

I think he's very influenced by people who believe America was lost at some point in the past 50 years.

They differ on exactly when it was, and you need some kind of counter-revolution to restore it to the heritage Americans who are really supposed to have ownership over this.

They, I mean, I think there's a profound contempt and anger that radiates from both of them.

And I think that they both intend, Trump in his intuitive way, Vance in his more systematic way to instantiate that into policy and power.

And things can get really bad when you attempt to do that.

And so

we defeat that.

In other words, we began our conversation

with

an

endorsement of the ability to sit down with people who you disagree with ferociously, not over tax policy, but ferociously on fundamental things.

But

how is this rupture to be prevented?

This is the work of politics.

And one thing I believe is we've begun to demean the work of politics.

One of the things I am worried about is I actually think a little bit on both sides, but it's particularly true for me in the Democratic Party is that work,

that work of building political coalitions around disagreement, of sitting in that kind of disagreement, has become seen as often something quite akin to betrayal.

So I'm interested to see who Democrats run in 2026.

And I would like to see in places where it has become very hard for Democrats to win, very unusual candidates.

You know, I would like to see them trying more things.

So Graham Plattner in Maine is an interesting,

you know, tried to do that from an economic populist perspective, but Maine is not a red state.

So I don't think that's not what's going to win you in Texas.

You know, you see James Tellarico in Texas, he's kind of an interesting candidate.

Who are they going to run in Kansas?

Who are they going to run in Missouri?

Sherrod Brown in Ohio is a very strong candidate.

I do think over a four, eight, 12 year period, we need to repolarize

this country in a safer way than we have, right?

Not this sort of system anti-system polarization.

And that means mixing up the parties a little bit again.

This sense that you will need to build bridges right now to survive that maybe are not the ones you most prefer building.

I think that's very real.

And I think that requires us to see the work of politics as honorable work, even when it includes like a lot of compromise and a lot of working with people who we have very, very deep disagreements with.

But

you're trying to build power and you're trying to do good things with that power.

I'm speaking with Ezra Klein, columnist and podcaster of the New York Times.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

More to come.

This episode is brought to you by Huggies Little Movers.

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When I go up,

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Asserting dominance, showing affection,

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Get it wherever you got podcasts.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

And I'm speaking today with New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein.

Now, Klein might be just 41 years old, but

he seems like he's been part of our political culture and conversation for a pretty long time.

He was a blogger, then a Washington Post columnist, a co-founder of Vox, and now he's, of course, a writer and podcaster for the New York Times.

He's also the co-author of a recent best-selling book called Abundance.

Most recently, Klein has drawn the ire of some progressives for a column that he wrote about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which he praised the late conservative activist for practicing politics in his phrase, the right way.

But in addition to the news of the day, I also wanted to spend a little time getting to know what shaped Klein's thinking, what shaped his liberalism, and his way of talking with both allies and opponents.

I think a lot of listeners, and myself included, want to know a little bit more about you.

You've...

Do they, David?

trapped, so they're going to.

You have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years.

Very often I will read about people in the Democratic Party wanting to know what Ezra Klein thinks or the influence you have within the Democratic Party.

positive or negative about the potential shutdown

in Washington that may be coming around the corner.

So I want to go back.

Tell me a a little bit about your

family background and your political family background.

What were the politics in your house?

So I grew up in Irvine, California.

The district I lived in did not elect a Democrat to Congress until Katie Porter in 2018.

That was our first Democrat we sent to the House.

My father's a professor at UCI, now retired.

Taught what?

Mathematics, which I am not good at.

I used to joke that I'm good at math for a journalist, but not for the son.

That's not saying much.

It's not.

So my dad's a mathematician.

My mother worked with children and was an artist,

but they are both thankfully alive and healthy.

My house was mostly Democratic.

But members of my family in recent years, some of them less so, some of them a lot less so, in fact.

But it wasn't a highly political.

house.

We did not receive the New Yorker or the New Republic.

We got the L.A.

Times,

you know, watched nightly newscasts.

I was in talk radio.

It wasn't a highly political house I grew up in.

And you had some political enthusiasms early on.

You worked for Howard Dean.

Oh, yes, when I was in college.

So I got into politics.

So my brother, my older brother,

was a lawyer, environmental law, and used to take me to protests in L.A.

where he lived.

What kind of protests?

Farm workers' marches.

Not the only kind, but he did a lot of great work there.

So I did get into politics, but I primarily got into it through blogging.

I became a blogger back when nobody knew what that was.

So this is when I was a freshman in college.

And I got into blogging in 2003 and just loved writing about politics, reading about politics, thinking about politics, debating it with people.

Aaron Trevor Bowie, when I began to read you in little venues early on, and then you arrived, to me, the first self-branded journalist that I knew of when you were doing wonk blog

at the Washington Post.

Simpler time.

Well,

but an innovative person, and at the same time had an analytic cast of mind when it came to politics that a lot of journalists just don't have.

How did that develop?

And do you accept the premise?

Somebody told me recently they think of my work as a cerebral Trojan horse for emotional ideas, which I don't think is wrong, actually.

What are they getting at?

That you think is true.

I would say I don't think this is my reputation anymore in the way it was in the wonk blog days.

But the idea that I was this

cool, detached calculator of a reporter or journalist.

I mean, the reason I care about these things is I care, I feel incredibly emotionally compelled by the stakes of politics, whether or not people get health care, whether or not we go to war, what kinds of people are in power.

That these things are shaping our lives, whether we want them to or not, is a central, like almost physical reality we all have to face.

And understanding them is one of the few ways to try to face that.

But kind of like a Marxist or a certain kind of conservative of a different sort, there is this systemic look at the way things work.

When you were younger, when you were 28, still at the Washington Post, you used to give a talk that was called Why Washington is Horrible in Charts in parentheses.

The main point being that we focus way too much on individuals and maybe not enough on Washington as a system.

Tell me what that was about and how much has it carried over to your thinking today?

That speech, which I think was either from or became my book, Why We're Polarized, which was my first book, which is sadly relevant at the moment,

was about the way you needed to understand these as structures and institutions that had rules and internal logics.

So, for instance, we have this functionally false idea of how our political system works based on the founders' intentions, which is, oh, we're a system of checks and balances, right?

We have three co-equal branches that will jealously guard their power and prerogatives from one another.

Well, that was the intention of our system.

In fact, what we have is two political parties that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution because they were not predicted or anticipated or hoped for, that compete across those branches.

So right now, we have a Republican-controlled Congress cooperating with a Republican-controlled executive branch.

I would say cooperating with a Republican-controlled Supreme Court.

Unless you have built into the way you are looking at politics, the influence and fundamental centrality of parties, which our system does not do in any rigorous way, you will not understand either how it works or how it doesn't work.

In the Senate, right?

It's just,

maybe less so now, but it was certainly a mainstay of political reporting that we just treated everything as

the president should be able to get this done.

And if it's not getting done, well, what's the president doing wrong?

But the filibuster was being used constantly.

And unless you understood, first that that was a new fact about American politics, the filibuster was rarely used.

And unless you could kind of see why that had happened and then realize, oh, it's actually very hard to get to 60 votes in the Senate.

And in this time of polarization, it's hard to get bipartisan cooperation.

I think it's important.

I think it is part of our duty, our...

like on some level sacred duty to give people a true account of why things are happening.

And that requires understanding the systems in which people operate, because most of us, for better and for worse, reflect the systems which structure the logics of our lives.

Aaron Powell, I want to go back to the question that I raised before about your influence in the Democratic Party and

how do you feel it and not feel it?

Aaron Powell, when this began being the way people saw me, it was really around

Biden leaving the ticket.

But what I will say about that whole process, where in early 2024,

around the time of the Super Bowl and the Robert Herr press conference, I did a series of pieces basically saying

this is going to be catastrophic for this then 81-year-old to run again.

He's not up to it.

But also, there is still things.

The big problem to me at the party and that point was fatalism.

Well, we have no choice to run because there's nobody but Biden, because otherwise it'll be Kamala Harris and she'll lose.

Right.

That was the quiet whisper response to anybody who thought Biden.

From Biden's people.

From that world of people, yes.

And

I, one, thought Harris would be a better bet, and I think would have been a much better bet if he had left the ticket much earlier.

But two, I believed we should have had an open convention and that if he had left early in the year or with some other

seven days left on the clock, he could have left before that.

No, no, no, without question and should have.

But

by the time he left, there was not time for it.

It was too late.

It was too late.

He had waited too long.

When I did that series of pieces, I would say they were not influential at all.

Biden gave a good state of the union, union, and everybody thought I was an idiot.

And that's just where the situation sat.

What changed the situation was reality.

It was Joe Biden getting up in that debate and falling apart.

Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person

eligible for what I've been able to do with

the COVID, excuse me, with

dealing with everything we have to do with.

Look,

if

we finally beat Medicare.

You know, I don't see this as some remarkable campaign of influence I ran.

I think I was seeing reality a little bit.

I think I was seeing it clearly.

But by the way, voters had seen this long before I said anything about it, right?

The super majorities of the public had said for a long time Biden was too old to run again.

And I helped create a little bit of permission structure for people to admit that when reality interceded and it was no longer something that could be denied.

Would you ever go into politics?

No.

Absolutely not.

What are you making a Sherman statement?

I'm making a Sherman statement.

I don't.

I think you have to know what you're good at doing.

I think I'm good at doing this.

Tell me a little bit about this.

What is your sense of your mission as a podcaster,

as a writer, as somebody who makes public appearances?

What is your sense of mission?

I mean, my sense of mission is simple.

I have

values and beliefs about how the world should work and what would make the world better.

And I

try to persuade people of them, but I also try to explore them in an honest way.

But I do this because I care about where things are going.

I'm not dispassionately observing from the sidelines.

I am emotionally, intellectually, spiritually involved.

But what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it has changed a lot over the years in ways that

I can follow more through intuition than through some framework.

You know, the version of me that was writing Wonk blog and telling everybody about healthcare aging in one chart is not what I'm doing on my podcast now.

My podcast is a forum in which I'm not primarily trying to be persuasive.

Over time, I think it has persuasive elements, but it's mostly other people talking.

I have a lot of people on who I disagree with.

And

I think it acts as a

space in which certain kinds of conversations can be had and then can be put into conversation with with each other and that matters.

In my column, I'm more prescriptive, right?

What goes into eventually the book Abundance comes more from the column.

And that's me trying to understand the world and trying to find ways to confront things in it that I find puzzling or unnerving.

I try to take seriously questions that I don't love.

I don't try to insist the world works.

the way I want it to work.

I try to be honest with myself about the way it is working.

You are an important figure at what I think is still today the most important news gathering organization on earth, the New York Times.

But it's also one that everybody has opinions about.

And recently,

Thomas Chatterton Williams just wrote a book about the summer of 2020, which was dramatic in a lot of quarters, including the New York Times.

Barry Weiss left and created the free press.

How do you look back on that moment?

So I wasn't there.

So I just really don't know what happened internal to the Times at that time.

time.

What's your opinion about Barry Weiss's increasing influence in what seems to be, she's about to be a very important person.

She's about to, seems like she's about to take over CBS.

What do you think?

I mean, my thing about Barry, and I've been on her show, and

I have a lot of

admiration for how good she is at what she does.

My disagreements with Barry, I think she's asymmetric in sympathy and generosity.

Tell me what that means.

Like, I've thought their work on, say, starvation in Gaza has been really bad.

I think the whole thing,

yeah, they've done this whole thing like, well, a lot of the kids who have died and have been, you know, reported on, well, they had secondary conditions.

And yes, when you starve a population, the people who die first will be the most vulnerable.

That's not exculpatory.

That did not feel to me like there was overwhelming evidence of how bad things were in Gaza.

And I felt that they were trying to whitewash it.

What I see her doing

is trying to do something that used to be somewhat more common, which is try to self-consciously be what she would define as the center.

And I see them tacking back and forth around that.

So they're much more sort of pro-Trump, I would say, when he's running and, you know, Democrats are in power.

But then now that he's in, it's like, oh, no, they're the vandals.

And it's a little bit more to me, like the old New Republic things they used to do.

Like when I came into Washington,

I felt there were more.

Actually, it's funny.

When I was a blogger, this was something we all used to complain about all the time.

All of these organizations that we felt were using this concept, this amorphous concept of the center as a positioning device.

That instead of sometimes being guided, that it was a dodge.

No, that it wasn't a dodge, it was navigational.

They weren't dodging, they were just kind of, there are a lot of politicians like this, and a lot of players like this who had felt like their politics were hewing to some idea of the center as opposed to a very, very consistent set of views and principles.

And

as media polarized, many fewer places are doing that.

And I think Barry saw a market opportunity in that.

Is her center what I think is a center?

No.

But I recognize a lot of editorial skill there.

You are now in a position, I would imagine, Ezra, that if you decided, you know what, I'm going to go out on my own.

I'm going to do a podcast called The Ezra Klein Show, and I'm going going to get a staff of X, Y, and Z.

And

probably you could make, you know, a great deal more money than you do now.

Why is it important for you to be at the Times as opposed to out on your own?

I believe in journalistic institutions.

When I went out and did Vox, I was trying to build an institution, not just, you know, go out on my own and capture the most of my revenue that I could.

I think that the mix of the news is exciting, and I'm committed to the news as an industry.

I don't think the thing I, I think if you carve out, you know, all the national politics, et cetera, then it's much harder to also have the foreign reporting, the local reporting, the cultural reporting, right?

All the things that make up the bundle.

And those are the things I often care about.

And I think I'm just in this way.

It goes to the way I look at the world, but also just me.

I think I'm an institutionalist.

I like being at institutions and I admire them when they are doing good and I want them to succeed because I think we need them.

I'm speaking with the political commentator and journalist, Ezra Klein.

We'll be back with the conclusion of our conversation in just a moment.

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Taking Tylenol is

not good.

This week, Donald Trump claimed without evidence that autism is linked to acetametophen use during pregnancy.

We've done this research, and it's so frustrating that the people that are running these programs, they have no idea about the science.

As research budgets are slashed, brace for much more bad science to come on this week's On the Media from WNYC.

Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick, and today I've been speaking with Ezra Klein.

On his podcast and in his columns for the New York Times and in his book Abundance, He's been making a case for how the Democrats can re-emerge from the political wilderness.

But some of his ideas have invited their fair share of detractors as well.

I spoke to Klein about the deep divides within the Democratic Party and whether the party can overcome its divisions and disarray in time to mount a real challenge to the Republicans' dominance of the federal government, both in the midterm elections a year from now and then in 2028 for the presidency.

Let me ask you about an institution that we were talking about earlier, the Democratic Party.

You talk a lot to people within the Democratic Party, leaders of the Democratic Party.

It looks like a mess at this point.

You have some promising people.

Well, can you say that, Dave?

I just conjured it out of thin air.

In New York City, it looks like Zoran Mamdani is going to be the next mayor of New York City.

If I read you right,

you have ambivalence about Mom Dhani.

Or have you come around in some way?

No, I would say I've never had a particularly different.

I mean, I wrote a piece during the mayoral primary where I said I thought Brad Lander was the best choice.

But I think Mom Dani is like an amazing political talent.

I agree with him on many issues.

My concerns about Mom Dhani really just have to do with can he first get the revenue he needs for a very, very pricey agenda?

And can he, I mean, he's talked a bunch about abundance and done interviews with my co-author, Derek.

You know, can he actually rebuild the government such that he can achieve the kinds of things he wants to achieve?

And what is going to happen when the Trump administration moves into a confrontational mode with him?

Because I think they will, right?

They're going to want to break him, send, you know, escalate ICE raids, send in the National Guard here, occupy New York City.

He's inexperienced as an executive.

New York City is a very hard thing to run at the best of times.

He has not run much.

But I don't think of those as

terrible demerits to somebody.

You could have said some of the same things about Barack Obama on one level.

And we're just going to have to see how it plays out.

I think it is genuinely strange the way the leadership of the Democratic Party has treated him.

It's extraordinary.

I have never.

His state chairman, I think, is still on the

response.

At this point, you know, they I have just not heard an account that makes sense.

If they're trying to keep him at arm's length, it will not work.

He is going to be the mayor of New York as a Democrat.

Saying that they're friendly to him, but not endorsing him is not going to save them from being painted by what he does.

On the other hand, to all the people who are inspired by him and like him, they look feckless.

I've said this on other shows.

I would on some level respect it more.

If they don't want to endorse him, if they think he'd be a bad choice, then they should say that.

But this weird ambivalence dance they're doing is I just think much more bizarre.

Well, the ambivalence, I assume, comes from a kind of fear of his popularity and his talent.

Don't think it comes from there.

Where do you think it comes from?

I think they are afraid that he will open up gigantic

surfaces that they will have to defend and will have trouble doing.

I am

truly horrified at Israel's conduct in Gaza at this point.

I think it's,

I mean, I think we're well past war crimes.

I think we're, you know, we're into something generational.

Um,

but Mamdani's promise to say, direct the New York City police to arrest Netanyahu

the moment Netyo

steps foot in New York City, say, to attend a UN meeting, which I think Netanyahu would probably love this confrontation.

I can understand.

I can understand why the Democratic Party's leadership is just afraid of what might combust, right?

Israel is a very hard issue for them.

It splits their base very badly.

So I can see, if I like squint, I don't think what they're afraid of is talent.

I think they're afraid of

something that goes off the rails that they're then trying to defend.

But I just don't think what they're doing makes sense.

I think you have to accept one thing I've been saying about the big tent of the Democratic Party is the theory of having a big tent doesn't just mean moving to the right.

It also means accepting in the left.

And Mom Dani is going to be one of the left's standard bearers.

In the last two weeks, there have been stories about AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and what the future might hold for her, either running for Senate or even president.

When you think about her, do you see her as a potential president?

I don't know.

We'd have to see how she performed in a primary, what her agenda was, what her campaign looked like, how she performed under that kind of scrutiny.

I think you have to see her as one of the people who is a serious contender for that role.

She would naturally inherit Bernie's lane in most of his sport.

So he doesn't have full control over his supporters, of course, right?

Some people might have liked him who wouldn't like her.

But

I think the anti-oligarchy tour they were doing was in certain ways a passing of the torch from him to her.

And so Bernie has been incredibly powerful in Democratic primaries and has come very near winning in 2016 and 2020.

And I think that you have to assume that she would just start with a more solid base of support than all but a couple other people.

When I've seen the early polling, and you should be extraordinarily skeptical of 2025 polling for a 2028 primary, but

skeptical of it in 2026.

Fair enough.

But she is polling behind only Buddha Jej and Newsom.

That's in polls where Kamala Harris is not included.

And so you're looking at somebody who starts out with one of the clearest lanes because so many other candidates are going to be competing in the non-Bernie lane.

And so it'd be pretty straightforward how you would imagine her winning the primary.

You were describing Obama before and his talents, but also his

more capacious ideology.

Who's in that lane?

I don't know that we know it yet.

I have not seen

Probably the closest person in the way he thinks about politics is Buttigieg,

but whether or not Budajudge can do what Obama was able to do, and I mean, part of what made Obama such an extraordinary force in the Democratic Party was his support for black voters, which Buddhajudge really struggles with.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And continues to.

And Kamala Harris just admitted in her new book that the reason she didn't select Pete Buttigiege as her vice president was that he's gay.

And that would have been, I don't know, she says that in

too much identity in one ticket.

That was her.

Yes, that she would have have gone for the judge.

I've not

read it yet, but that is

interesting.

How do you mean interesting?

It's just interesting.

I'm surprised she said that.

So we are at the close of our conversation, but I have to ask you a crucial question.

You go to Burning Man?

I've been known to go to Burning Man.

Would I enjoy it?

No,

you would not.

You sleep on the ground, that sort of thing?

I mean, you could do it in different ways.

You could take an RV.

You could go to what's called a plug-and-play camp.

I mean,

I think it's an amazing thing for anybody to see once.

So you might enjoy it.

Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.

Exactly.

Applies probably better to there than most places.

So I would hate it.

I mean, you know, you might have depths and multitudes inside of you that I don't know.

But when I see the musicians that you profile, they're not the ones who play.

Oh, I hear you.

I hear you.

Yeah.

I don't think they could sleep on the ground either.

In fact, most of them are under the ground.

Ezra Klein, thank you so much.

David, really appreciate it.

Ezra Klein is the co-author of Abundance and the host of the Ezra Klein Show.

I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for this week.

Thanks for listening.

See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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