Transcript
Speaker: This is the first episode of probably several on how much we just hate Ezra Klein. why we hate him. etc. Doesn't need much introduction, and on some level the answer is in the title. So I've just spoiled the episode for you, but let's do it anyway.
Speaker: Also, I put up a blog post on the Patreon following up on our last episode about chasers and comedians. It's about Michelle Wolf and the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I'm going to try to keep chasing episodes like that. It's fun, and there's always some thought we don't get to in the episode to write about.
Speaker: There's really nothing real. there is no real and that's that's what's called the post -modern mentality i couldn't receive the world racist remark the adventure of life justifies its suffering i don't want to see him having political succubus with god Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin and turn against us like Darth Vader?
Speaker: Do it live! Now listen, you prick. I'll suck you in your goddamn face and you'll... stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker but the person I had invited in died.
Speaker: Some level of masochism.
Speaker: This is Helen. This is Sarah. Welcome to Odium Symposium, a podcast about the production of bigotry. Just a reminder, you can join our Patreon at patreon .com slash odium symposium for $5 a month. We'll read your message on the show, you'll get early access to episodes, and we're going to continue to produce connoisseur -only episodes from time to time.
Speaker: Mostly you're just being nice to us. You can find Odium Symposium mugs and other merch at www .odiumsymposium .com, designed by Quinny, who does our episode art. also all listeners are welcome to join our discord you can find links for all of that in the description we've got this new thing we're going to be doing and it's kind of like a sub -series A mini podcast.
Speaker: Just... an indefinite spooling out of our personal loathing. for Ezra Klein. We both thought, okay. As a figure for Odium, like, really clear candidate is Ezra Klein.
Speaker: We had a couple problems. One was like... We both already know who Ezra Klein is and have our own personal relationships to Ezra Klein. You know, I don't want to share, like, too many personal details, but, like, I have someone in my life who is, like, a big fan of Ezra Klein, or not even at this point a big fan, has has even come around to saying, like, okay, Ezra Klein is not that great.
Speaker: but has periodically been recommending me various episodes of the Ezra Klein podcast. And so I've checked him out occasionally and he always seems to have like the dumbest take on any issue that's not that's that's a little reductive but that was like my impression Sarah, do you want to talk a little bit about your... relating to ezra klein so when we were talking about doing this series or whatever this develops into I kept saying something we should bring to this is like radical honesty, radical honesty. And I assume you're like, what the fuck is Sarah talking about?
Speaker: First off, I was a snotty economist reader as a teenager. And then for a while, I was like, you know what, I'm going to be kind of like apolitical.
Speaker: because my life just didn't involve politics very much i was very depressed i was just living at my mom's house i wasn't doing much it just kind of like wasn't relevant to me with how like how inactive my life was and then 2016 hit. And I was like...
Speaker: Oh shit. Things are like getting... Whew. really really bad in our politics in a way that like i have to be activated to And so I went back into politics, but I was kind of still like a snotty economist reader. I was an elitist, a technocrat. And I bought... Atlantic shirts.
Speaker: Amazing. They were like... too tight. End. It was really embarrassing in retrospect. Over time... I drifted more and more to the left.
Speaker: But on my way there I made a little stop. Helen? I'm like vibrating with shame as I tell you this. I was a neoliberal. I was secretly a neoliberal. This was like an object of shame for me at the time. As in like,
Speaker: I went on the r neoliberal subreddit. And sometimes I would post in their discussion threads. And I would listen to the Ezra Klein podcast because Ezra Klein is a neoliberal. And I would like pay attention to Vox and like all these other little media things that the neoliberals are super into. and then And gradually I was like, wait, these guys are...
Speaker: These guys are so full of shit. This is like actually awful. A big part of what... drew me to them was that they were really interested in concepts of urbanism like walkability, reducing the cost of housing, including by methods like building a bunch of housing i was like okay that That seems like good policy.
Speaker: And like over time, but like the left broadly has been like, yeah, we're into that. and basically just like stolen the only issue neoliberals were like actually kind of good on but also a big part of my shifting away from that was just seeing this like wishy -washy bullshit.
Speaker: Over and over. From people like... Ezra Klein and the episode we're going to listen to today is one that came out not long after he left Vox, the media company he co -founded.
Speaker: and started working for the New York Times. and doing a podcast with that. And he's going to talk a little bit about one of the things he wants the mission of his New York Times podcast to be. And it's a little different from what he was doing at Vox. And it's really...
Speaker: Bad he's gonna interview a conservative and he's not gonna be good at it you know having listened to the episode It's not even that he doesn't do a good job Although I think he doesn't do a good job. It's... how close he gets to doing a good job or like how easily he could have done a good job. There's something really frustrating about listening to it more than anything else for me right now. The thing is that's like part of his purpose.
Speaker: yeah we'll get into it as we go along but like that's that's very intentional i feel like He's like an intellectual condom. He gives you the sensation of critical thinking.
Speaker: But like you don't actually have to make contact with it. Yeah, without any of the risk. You know, it's funny, like I think when I think about. where I was politically in like 2015, 2016, and then through the first Trump administration. I never got into The Economist, mostly because... I would start reading it and then I would be like...
Speaker: this is very dry and also i think i was able to clock very quickly how often it's just like racist against Chinese people. I think I kind of got lucky in a way that like some of the first times that I... like went to go look at The Economist and I was like, what's...
Speaker: what is this magazine about were like issues where they were particularly bad because i've looked through their stuff since and it's like not always at that level but there were like a couple issues around when i started looking at them where it was like china is a sleeping dragon that's getting ready to wake right and i think there were moments where i read the economist and i thought like oh this is this is sort of interesting maybe or there's something here and i definitely was like a big Pro. capitalism.
Speaker: Person like in high school and I think I also again got lucky because I met some really I happened to meet some really obnoxious people in college that like other friends of mine took seriously but who like literally believed that like everything could be reduced to economics and like the only reason somebody would ever take on like anti -racism.
Speaker: was like virtue signaling. i got negatively polarized at the right times but i've definitely had moments where i'm like sympathetic to these like kind of neoliberal ideas and it wasn't until really I think the same kind of.
Speaker: thing in like the first Trump administration like looking at you know at some point the oh we just have to hold on long enough in any moment muller is gonna like come out and like destroy trump and everything will be saved like At some point that was enough. Like, my shame was enough to, like...
Speaker: Snap me out of that. So I think we were in like different spaces, but I think we had like kind of a similar arc like i never hung out on our neoliberal but like i read a lot of Scott Aronson's blog. For instance.
Speaker: I think a big part of what snapped me out is I... got on Twitter. And a lot of these conservative thinkers and pundits.
Speaker: that people like Ezra Klein present as having like serious ideas that you need to think about. They were on Twitter. and they were just lying their asses off constantly they were so full of shit when i first got on there i was like oh if i see one of these very serious intellectual types be like oh actually studies have proven that it doesn't work this way it works that way Just...
Speaker: then there must be studies that say that it doesn't work this way. It works that way. There aren't. It's total bullshit. They just lie their ass off. They're complete frauds.
Speaker: I wasn't getting any of that shit from Ezra Klein at all. You know, I'm thinking about it and I think my like turn towards. being the you know type of politics that i'm into now which is like i don't really know um if we're being totally honest.
Speaker: But... You know broadly maybe like Marxist like materialist I definitely went through also a... Like... leftist but like kind of almost reactionary leftist like Zizek phase.
Speaker: Because... For a while in college, I was also really, like, disconnected from politics and being like, okay, I'm gonna, like... you know. just not really focus on this and so i went through like a whole rabbit hole of like learning about like literary theory.
Speaker: and this kind of thing and I like studied theater in college as well along with my math undergrad and And so my first introduction to like zizek was like i read a bunch of his book the sublime object of ideology which is like pretty good in a lot of ways. Then I started listening to other stuff he was saying and then i started seeing like oh he's got all these like interesting cultural critiques and then it wasn't until i kind of i i fell for a lot of that stuff for a long time and so i was like that kind of just like reactionary leftist i think for a bit
Speaker: There's a really funny Red Scare pod episode where Zizek is on. Sorry, you used to listen to Red Scare? No, I didn't. I was looking for podcasts that Zizek was on. And so I was like, oh, he was on this podcast, a Red Scare pod that I've heard about. Let me listen to it. And the dynamic on the podcast is really funny because Zizek's whole thing is to complain that no one really understands him or gives him enough credit. But the Red Scare girls, at least at the time.
Speaker: worshipped him. And so they're trying to prove to him that they actually do. like him the way he needs to be liked but he still is like no one understands wine in yeah it's and so i listened to it and that That had kind of the function that like this thing had for you for Ezra Klein to snap me out of this kind of like particular brand of like.
Speaker: Alain Badiou, Slava Zizek, like these guys that I was definitely starting to. So it's funny what a bad podcast interview can do, I guess. um But summarizing all of that up, wrapping all of that up, we already kind of hinted at this. We thought, okay, there's a lot of Ezra Klein stuff. There's a lot of different stuff we could say.
Speaker: So instead of doing a normal odium episode where we just like go through Ezra Klein's career and try to summarize it. We're going to do a little series. Who knows how long it will last or how often it will happen.
Speaker: I think the plan is for the episodes after this one to be paywalled right? We'll see. So we'll decide. Whether they'll be paywalled or maybe sometimes we'll use them as in mainline episodes. Because all of this is just... Something we're doing. for fun.
Speaker: Yeah, we're gonna go and see, get to the bottom of who Ezra Klein is. and really the bottom of why we hate him so much, because we really do hate him. I have so much personal animus toward this guy, especially in the past year or so. He's been taking L after L after L, and it has been so viscerally satisfying for me. I hate to see this guy win, and I love to see him lose. Yeah, I have...
Speaker: not even really been trying to follow as recline. It's just every time he says something, Cyril will post like, Just a reminder, my rule is anything his recline says, assume it's stupid, and then he takes an L like a week later and so I'll be like... Got him.
Speaker: Like. Anytime he does anything, Sarah will dunk on him. It's also been really satisfying seeing people who are just like, Ezra Klein Dick writers have to take the L as well.
Speaker: Occasionally I'll look at the If Books Could Kill Subreddit? And like the people there. Have... As long as I've looked. Just been like so ready to ride Ezra Klein. Just give him the absolute night of his life every night.
Speaker: After Charlie Kirk got shot, they have been... beaten out of that position. And that's been quite satisfying. That's incredible. So I think actually this might be a good time.
Speaker: We don't know things like how often are we going to make these episodes or will they all be paywalled or what that plan is. But something pretty early we did decide on is what's the title? of this little mini series and sarah maybe you want to say because it was you you had you were very firm like right out the gate like i know what it's going to be called this is what it's going to be called so what are we what are we going to call it sarah Absolutely. This is going to be called Ezra Klein is a disgusting worm. Yeah. Now maybe we should get into the concept of wormhood a little bit.
Speaker: So I listened to several episodes of I hate Bill Maher and he does a little feature. Every week, he'll designate a guest on the show or occasionally Bill Maher as the Worm of the Week.
Speaker: And I saw him use that insult, and I was like... This is it the heavens opened up. I was like this is the perfect descriptor for Ezra Klein. I know what this man is down to the fucking...
Speaker: Adam now. A worm. is a creature with no backbone. That's like its essential feature, right? It's an invertebrate. And it's also just... Very low.
Speaker: on the hierarchy of life. It's a low creature. It wriggles in the dirt. It's defenseless. If you poke it, It'll wriggle. At your feet. If you glare at it, it'll wriggle.
Speaker: if you praise it it'll wriggle that's all it does is it wriggles wriggles wriggles wriggles wriggles wriggles around at the feet because it has no other mode. And that's his recline.
Speaker: He has no spine. He has no mode except to prostrate himself. before all those who have garnered a modicum of respect in society.
Speaker: And tell them, Yes, I worship you. i recognize you for the great thing you are he really has no ability to critique. He's a worm. He's a fucking worm.
Speaker: Yeah, and like, he takes... All of the... Like, toxicity and... toxic sludge that is produced by... just the most hateful people imaginable and he just like processes it Maybe we need to get into the episode.
Speaker: What a more responsible Republican Party would look like. recorded in March of 2021. He sets up pretty early. this concept of We want a responsible Republican Party. And so I think, you know. Listeners will...
Speaker: know what was happening in 2021 but This is, like, really hot on the heels of January 6th. Slick. but Like we're living in a moment where. Trump and his supporters made clear that if there had been any kind of competence or real plan,
Speaker: They were totally willing to... Do a coup to the US government. And the main obstacle to that was just lack of vision and planning. Not any kind of like... moral scruple or belief in.
Speaker: order or any of the other nonsense that You might. suggest here. Trump tried to get his vice president killed. They set up a gallows on the front of the fucking Capitol. The references to that in this episode are like so fleeting. So so that's the context. So Ezra Klein sits down to start recording this episode. And actually... Thinking about your radical honesty here, I want to say I'm really glad The very first thing in this episode is just a little thing.
Speaker: Ezra Klein's looking for a podcast producer. You could have applied for that job. Sorry you were listening at the time Okay, so he does say you need two years of experience.
Speaker: But like he really needs it. I don't know if you guys are going to be able to hear this on your end at all, but throughout the episode, he's like fucking slapping his mic. He's like wrestling it. like it's so fucking weird and annoying there's all these like chair creaking sounds like he's a professional he's been doing this for a long time Okay, he lays out his vision for the episode. Yeah, he wants to talk about what would it mean to have a more responsible party. Yeah, you have the clip. and let's Let's roll the clip.
Speaker: Today's episode is about one of the core obsessions or themes that the show is going to have. And that is, how do we get Can we even get? A more responsible Republican party.
Speaker: And one way I define that is a Republican Party that is more centered around an actual governing agenda. The Republican Party we actually have has spun off too much to culture war and grievance politics.
Speaker: as Depending on how you want to frame it, a distraction from.
Speaker: An absence of consensus on more direct policies that would improve the lived economic lives of the voters. Or another way of looking at it is that it is trying to distract. from opposition to those policies. But there are Republicans who are trying to diagnose the problem, who are trying to push the party back in a more policy -centric direction, and trying to push the party also— towards a policy -centric direction that I think would be healthier, towards a kind of policy direction that would make it more reasonable for Republicans to say they are actually a working person's party, or as you'll hear in this, a parent's party.
Speaker: Yeah, so... There's something fundamental here, which I feel like you can kind of clock immediately. I'm going to try my best not to just repeat myself over and over in this episode. which is... he sets up immediately this distinction between The problem of the Republican Party is a problem of responsibility.
Speaker: And there's the split between policy. and culture war. and grievance politics on the culture war side and this Split doesn't really make sense.
Speaker: because this claim that the Republican Party doesn't have a governing agenda doesn't hold any water. there actually is a governing agenda. It's just that the policies that they want are things like eradicate transgender people.
Speaker: Get rid of all immigrants. institute a nationalist and socially conservative vision. of public life and use our institutions to enforce that in all sorts of different ways like those are policies and my critique of those policies is not a critique of their Lack of responsibility.
Speaker: like It's just a totally Absurd. framework. that in advance prevents you from ever fully looking at the problem, which is...
Speaker: the fascist takeover of the United States government. So his guest today is Ramesh. Preneur. And we should talk a little bit about... or a mesh. On one level, there's like...
Speaker: Not that much to say. He's kind of a generic cog in a machine. But we can talk about the machine a bit. So he's a fellow for the American Enterprise Institute.
Speaker: And the AEI. is an organization that's been around since Oh god. The 30s, the 40s, I forget. But it used to be just kind of like a remora on...
Speaker: the US Chamber of Commerce, which is you know, like a... CEO interest group. And then in the 70s, it became pretty powerful because it presented itself as a counterweight to the liberal Brookings Institution.
Speaker: and started getting a ton of donations. from CEOs. and AEI and the Heritage Foundation. are kind of like to mass.
Speaker: for the same thing. So AEI is the corporates. like very policy focused. think tank. And the Heritage Foundation is like the culture war.
Speaker: Think Tank. But like... These are fundamentally extremely interconnected groups. Ezra, throughout his journalism career, has had a lot of connections with and experience talking to people at both of these groups he regards a bunch of people at both of these groups as friends and so he's very familiar with this kind of like
Speaker: game where one of them is like the very serious policy group and then the other one is like the culture war group He just prefers not to understand it as a game. I thought i wellll I'll...
Speaker: I will do a little research for this episode and I'll figure out like, what has this guy been writing and what has he written sort of throughout his career? And it seems one common thread is that. He is... I think in a lot of ways.
Speaker: similar vibe to Ezra Klein in the way he functions, which is He... Kind of says stuff in this very... wonky kind of technical way. But it's always just kind of like providing the sort of...
Speaker: way that you should talk about these things if you want to be deemed serious. So, like, you go, he's he's also contributing writer for the National Review, and actually I think he's one of the, like, editors for the National Review now. He is the editor for the National Review now. Okay, and if you go look at his headlines, he's written recently birth rates and immigration about how actually people saying that you know, if we care about a demographic.
Speaker: changes and the fact that like there's fewer young people then maybe we should want immigration and he says no actually that's not going to solve the problem but he you know he dances around actually saying the the explicitly nationalist thing there, right? But he's saying like, oh, here's how to talk about birth rates, immigration, or what democratic socialists believe, right? Oh, keep in mind that like the democratic socialists are actually radical or He wrote one called...
Speaker: Apocalypse Not, Why the Birthright Citizenship Decree Isn't a Disaster. about why Republicans shouldn't be too down on the decision to uphold birthright citizenship because it fundamentally won't affect the anti -immigration.
Speaker: agenda of the party. So this is all more recent stuff. Now, I didn't want to say, you know... Ezra Klein knew about all this stuff when he interviewed him because obviously this interview was years ago. So I went back and His positions really haven't changed at all, like... very soon before Ezra Klein interviewed him, he was publishing stuff, bipartisan folly on opioids, and why going after, like, opioid overprescription wasn't the right way to fight the opioid epidemic.
Speaker: Right? And it's like, okay, he's just been doing kind of the same stuff. He dresses up. just right -wing culture war issues in these kinds of serious ways and says let's let's talk about the real you know economic questions or whatever but it's he just plays this game and it's it's totally ridiculous
Speaker: So he introduces this guy as someone who like... you know he often disagrees with but he always makes a point of listening to because he's serious unlike all these other guys who aren't serious this guy is serious right and that's How they kind of set the table for this conversation is that they're both serious. They're both serious guys, and they're going to have a serious conversation about serious issues and how to be more serious.
Speaker: And so they get into it. So what are the you know what's the first question? Well, you know, Trump just lost reelection, but... If Trump had managed to pass a COVID stimulus, Do you think that would affect the election?
Speaker: Like that's... Ezra Klein's first question for this guy. Yeah, and this guy is like... Yeah, maybe Ends Ezra Klein is laying a cunning trap here.
Speaker: Because his next question is like... Okay. Then why didn't they? The reason I'm interested in this counterfactual... To your point, there are many things Donald Trump could have done differently, but many of them he didn't want to do differently. He didn't want to stop being a maniac on Twitter. He didn't want to stop giving his. press conferences.
Speaker: But this is one where Donald Trump. certainly at times wanted to do a a bigger stimulus. And it seemed like the Republican Party's incentives were aligned to do it. But they didn't. so So why do you think they did it? Why didn't Mitch McConnell and Trump come together on this one, given their electoral interests?
Speaker: Yeah, like this is actually... A good question from Ezra Klein. Like... This is... This is what I meant when I said it's not even that he does a... bad job it's that he is so close to doing a good job he has immediately located this problem which is The narrative. that.
Speaker: You know Trump lost because he's a maniac Which is what? This guy wants to say right easy wants to say like the Republican Party has lost a governing agenda. It's lost this year He's like well actually If we believe this counterfactual, then...
Speaker: The thing that lost was like... not this attempt at a, it was the rest of the Republican Party and not Trump. This is mostly pretty easy for Ramesh to fend off because He can say,
Speaker: that the reason that Trump didn't get this passed is because Trump is a child and and he doesn't really give a shit about policy. Ramesh is like enough on the respectable side of this AEI heritage division that he's allowed to say something like that.
Speaker: But when it comes to McConnell, it's a little bit trickier. So here's what he says about that. And I've never had a clear handle on that. I do think there's an assumption that the legislation wouldn't actually have any real world effects that you need to care about, that it's just a sort of a political game, which I think was actually. a pretty widespread assumption.
Speaker: among republicans and then there's just the you know We don't want to spend money. We'll spend money if we have to, but it's not our comfort zone. Yeah, so it's... In a lot of ways, a non -answer. It's like, because they didn't want to, but... He does at one point say like the reason trump didn't do it because he didn't know how to
Speaker: engage in political negotiation in a sustained way. He basically gives this like non -answer, which is like, well, Trump didn't know how to like do politics and... mcconnell you know had this analysis which is that it actually might not have helped and and you know that was the that was the conversation that was the the belief at the time and doesn't really address Like...
Speaker: the fundamental question that Klein is asking here. And you also just kind of lies. Like, neither of the two things he said there were actually true. like Oh, it wouldn't really have an impact.
Speaker: Oh. What are you talking about? there was he was saying like there was an analysis that it wouldn't really have an impact right like Mitch McConnell did believe that it wouldn't have an impact and he's like I don't really have a handle on where that analysis came from but that's the thing that I'm saying like that's a non -answer like in a way that's the question Ezra Klein is asking which is like How could you come to this?
Speaker: sort of political decision. one.
Speaker: sort of It's bad politically, and it's clear this is what people wanted, and it's clear that it would have these these effects. like His answer is basically a completely empty, like oh, McConnell had a serious political analysis that told him not to do it, and that's why. right The answer was like a serious inquiry into politics. And it's like, can we see this serious inquiry this serious inquiry in politics? right like You have a serious policy analysis like located entirely within your kitchen? like Can I see it? No. right And that's how a lot of this conversation goes.
Speaker: There's also this fundamental confusion that comes up throughout this episode that's on display here. Ezra is kind of trying to push him on the idea that... what's happening here is that the republican party like Doesn't care about thinking about policy anymore. and Something he's failing to locate there?
Speaker: is the importance of real -world impacts. Like... This is... The biggest? wettest meatball.
Speaker: Getting thrown down home plate right here. Which is just like... wait this would have a huge impact on everyday people's lives. like It's very easy to see.
Speaker: Republicans just like... Aren't interested in that like what's going on with that? But... Ezra isn't really interested in pursuing that because he doesn't want the issue with the republican party to be something about their actual effects on everyday people he wants it to be an intellectual issue He wants it to be this lack of seriousness. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is how this lack of seriousness question functions, right? Which is to say... If it's really a...
Speaker: culture war grievance question, then you can critique that, right? But as long as Ramesh says, no, no, no, don't worry, it was a serious analysis that came to a different conclusion well, reasonable people can disagree about what the effects of a COVID stimulus bill would have been, right? Like, that's the kind of thing you can get away with, just sweeping under the rug of being reasonable and having disagreements.
Speaker: even though like it's obvious that this would have a huge effect and because we had had COVID stimulus bills and they had had huge effects and you could measure those effects and you could see What would happen? Yeah, the truth is that...
Speaker: The effects are just things Republicans don't like. Which is... Poor people not feeling precarious. They kind of go from here into a broader discussion about Trump's first term and how Trump transformed the Republican Party. And I think...
Speaker: There's sort of something interesting here, which is... As I was listening to it... I almost started having this like derealizing moment, which is. They were describing a first Trump term. That was just completely unrecognizable to my experience of the first Trump term.
Speaker: And I think there's... something to be said about how fundamentally the first Trump term actually did change like American politics and It actually is hard to look back and think about like what things were like politically pre -COVID in a lot of ways, because it is both.
Speaker: Like years ago, but also so recent there is a lot of forgetting that happens and so i don't want to say like It is entirely on them, but... They have this vision of the first Trump term that just... Doesn't correspond to anything I think I experienced.
Speaker: So Klein says, like, This is really when Republicans detached from policy. like detached from policy and towards culture war. I really don't know how you make that case.
Speaker: Well, this is a very agreeable story for both of them. It's agreeable for Klein because It helps keep him from facing the... extreme barbarism at the center of the Republican Party.
Speaker: And it's nice for a mesh because His whole job is to be like... The Republicans need more like serious policy stuff going on. Ezra Klein has basically invited this guy on to be like,
Speaker: My job is more necessary and important than ever. Yeah. And... He also he puts this in a very direct way, which I was like begging for Klein to actually challenge, which is, you know, he points out, well, you know, you say that.
Speaker: republicans are are post policy which again like Not really true. It's just that you don't want to think about the things that there are their policies as policies, right? You want to think of them as these empty things as opposed to these very real policies And he says, well, you know, the voters aren't really punishing them. The voters actually want that, right? And this is...
Speaker: This is actually a pretty, I think... reasonable claim, it's just that we sit on like exact opposite sides of like whether that's a good thing or not or what it means for society, right? Which is like... Actually, we should take seriously the idea that people voted for the guy.
Speaker: knowing the things that he said out loud and wanting the world that he described, as opposed to playing this game of seriousness or unseriousness. And Klein doesn't really manage to challenge this at all. i Have a clip I want to key in on that assumption that passing a big COVID relief bill would have just been a political game because one of your big themes in pieces you've been writing recently. is that the republican party has detached itself from policy from putting forward proactive agendas and turned to focus on
Speaker: cultural grievance and conservative entertainment. Why do you think that's happened? I mean, I think it's it's hard to deny that it has happened. You can certainly see that in the way Republicans have.
Speaker: conducted recent elections, and not just in the way that the Republican politicians have behaved, but in the way the various factions of the party have responded to that. It's not as though you've got significant actors in the Republican Party who are demanding. that Republicans run different kinds of campaigns that have...
Speaker: more of a policy focus on it. And I think to a large extent, Republican voters. are behind this the republican voters themselves have become post policy Ezra Klein is completely unable to recognize issues that are flagged as culture war issues.
Speaker: as entailing policy. To him, those are separate things. And in reality, they're just not. Ice smashing in doors and kidnapping people in cities is a matter of policy. It's also a culture war issue.
Speaker: The State Department prohibiting me from renewing my passport. is a culture war issue. It's also policy. These are not genuinely distinct things.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think we're seeing... you know the thing that i also talked earlier when i said when you go through this guy's headlines when you go through a meshpreneur's headlines it's really clear that this is his function he's able to describe this in this sort of abstract language He's able to make it sound like this serious thing.
Speaker: and mask the reality of what he's saying, which is... the Republican Party is doing the thing that the Republican voters wanted to do. That is why they keep voting for it and why it keeps doing this thing. And we should take that seriously. But neither of them really can afford to take that seriously and continue to be who they are. So they have to kind of say, well, you know.
Speaker: We want to get back to the serious version of this. But again, it's like this claim is like that the problem is somehow seriousness and responsibility as opposed to These things are actually. harmful and Have.
Speaker: you know, cost lives and destroy people's lives. So... Klein invites him into this. this this category of the wonk the policy wonk he's like you know you and i were wonks so embarrassing they're like jerking each other off about it Like I've never heard someone use wonk.
Speaker: with like no pejorative connotation to it like which is so bizarre to me i guess you need to read the our neoliberal subreddit more like people love that that's like the whole premise of vox that's the whole premise of matt iglesias and ezra klein and all the sort of muppets that imitate them is to be this very self -conscious and self -styled wonk and perform deep policy knowledge Well, what's funny is that I have seen this kind of thing and like...
Speaker: You know, i had ah I had a brief regrettable phase of being... pro Elizabeth Warren in like 2019. And... You know, I kind of fell for her whole like.
Speaker: I've got a plan for that thing, right? And that's wonkiness, right? That is like the same kind of wonkiness. It's just like a little bit of a different flavor. It's just funny to me, like... In my mind, there's just such a negative connotation to the word wonk. I have just such distaste for people who... refer to themselves as wonks, right? Do you remember Paul Ryan? God, I remember Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan who gifted his staffers copies of Atlas Shrugged. Yeah, that guy. He was the Republican House leader for most of Trump 1. And his...
Speaker: whole thing was that he was going to get rid of this like chaotic and personal politics of previous republican house leaders and he was going to govern by being a wonk oh my god yeah he was super into how nerdy he was and all this shit and of course that was just a performance.
Speaker: I think there's actually like a pretty big demand and politics. for People who will reflect the technocratic impulses. of listeners but the reality is that this concept of a general public policy walk is kind of Bullshit.
Speaker: Like you need people with actual specific deep expertise. And even then, it's not like you can just follow them unthinkingly or whatever. Yeah. And so this analysis leads them to say, like, oh, you know, we we look at we we want to we want to pick apart. Like, what were the the policy threads of the Trump administration? Right. Their analysis.
Speaker: comes down to, well, you know, Trump really only attempted two major pieces of legislation. undoing Obamacare. And I forgot what the other one was. But. It's a really convenient fence because They're ignoring and this is one of the things that I sang like...
Speaker: feels to me a description of a completely different Trump administration. he was doing shit the whole first term it's just that he didn't need to go through passing bills through congress and so he didn't right he was doing things by executive order right there were all these sorts of right democrats did manage to like obstruct some legislative things.
Speaker: But he did a lot of stuff. It's just that... If you're only able to see because of your wonkiness, you're only able to see, you know, major pieces of legislation that go through Congress as him doing something, then you're going to say, oh, well, he only did two things or he only attempted two things. And then it was and it's like, no, he achieved.
Speaker: a pretty significant transformation of American culture and vision for American life. and A lot of that was policy. A lot of that was through executive order. And sure, like Biden was able to overturn some of that, but actually not all of it. And this expansion of ICE and all these other things happened. And it's just to describe this as like, well, we're wonks. And so we understand that he really only tried to do two things.
Speaker: It just doesn't make any sense. So at some point they have to get into a piece of policy that the two of them can agree on. Because otherwise, like... What is this discussion even about?
Speaker: And the one they land on is this child tax credit idea. I've been struck. that one of the most interesting populist ideas to come out from the Republican, at least Senate.
Speaker: caucus after the election was not from one of the post -Trump populist players like Hawley or Cotton, but it was from Mitt Romney. right the 2012 Republican nominee. And he's got this idea, which I think is genuinely exciting and plausibly bipartisan. for a child allowance. But but I haven't seen even one other Republican senator endorse it. So can you walk me through the idea first and then the debate over it on the right?
Speaker: So. Romney's idea was, it is for a child allowance, which is a monthly payment to nearly all parents in the U .S. for each child that they have. If I remember correctly, it's between the age of zero and six, it will be $4 ,200 a year. And then thereafter, until they're 17. it was 3 ,300 a year.
Speaker: Are you fucking kidding me? Of course the Republicans aren't going to do that. You think they want to give money to poor parents and Black parents? Ezra are you fucking stupid? What planet are you from?
Speaker: So actually just a little aside that you know, I just wanted to It's a flag here because I think it's kind of funny. and Gives like a tiny bit of context so in between their discussion about Trump won.
Speaker: And when they get into this conversation about the Romney tax credit, there is an ad. There is an ad for the New York Times modern love podcast and I remember this incredible episode of the Modern Love podcast, and it was based on and a Modern Love column and from 2011.
Speaker: It. is one of the most atrocious things i've ever read so i just wanted to like give you a sense of the mood here and we can cut some of this but i just think it's
Speaker: Good to remember that the New York Times has been on this for a while. No, this is important. I think it's important to hear from trans widows. The alarm sounded at 4am on a Tuesday last November. My husband and I had been told to arrive two hours early as if for a flight. My eyelids were puffy from the night before when he had held me and said he was sorry, so very sorry. This goes for like several paragraphs of like going into this surgery.
Speaker: until finally... We get like, oh, it turns out that he forgot and drank some water and he wasn't supposed to and that was against the thing. And then we get to... He checked in. His transgression. Still on this day, when my husband would take his first surgical step into womanhood, I continued to say him, his, and he, even though our therapist had suggested for months that I use female pronouns at home.
Speaker: Then it goes on to talk about how this woman has like struggled to use the correct pronouns because she's very still much saw her spouse as a man and had all this inner pain that no one was really a acknowledging And then finally, like seeing the sort of difficulty and pain of the surgery, she recognized that like.
Speaker: This trans woman was also having all this outer pain and so now they were even. Like it is horrible. It was a horrible poem. Like like she'd she'd been punished for the cruelty of transitioning? The writer does not think of it that way.
Speaker: I don't know. It's just terrible. And like... I can never, like, hear Modern Love and not immediately think of this on and the editorial decision that, like, this is the thing we're gonna publish. this is This is who's publishing this podcast. And so I think it's funny to contrast that because then they go into this conversation about the child. Child allowance is what they call it.
Speaker: Okay, a lot of this is like a very wonky discussion of like... how this thing would function and what the numbers are and things that I think are not irrelevant, but... they don't really do anything to contextualize those numbers. like they have you know As you heard in the clip, like they say like how much it is a month and what the cutoffs are.
Speaker: But there's no conversation, really, which, if there were a sense of deep expertise here, like, I would want, like... What is the analysis that, like, these are the numbers that are correct? Why not more? And then they also talk about how it's going to replace all these other welfare things, and they spend more time on talking about how it's going to be, like, deficit neutral.
Speaker: And it's going to be cancelling some tax credit and all these things. I don't really know too much about this thing. And so I'm not going to like weigh in on like, this is what I think is correct or not. i't I don't want to get into that wonky discussion. I, of course, support.
Speaker: giving money to help poor families. But their conversation is like very abstract and detached from like... Even talking about what those effects would be.
Speaker: Yeah, I've got a clip for that. They spend so much time talking about how this compares to like the pre -90s welfare system. It's very strange. It certainly is true that... if you create the conditions for a flourishing economy, which can include promoting work, that this can be good for families and can be good for family life. So here I actually will defend Lee and Rubio. Sometimes you'll get people who will say things like, we shouldn't care about incentives on work at all. if we're...
Speaker: helping people if we're bringing people out of poverty. You have to care about magnitudes, you know, the size of these effects. But I also do think that they're right. You know, the old welfare system did by creating these poverty traps and discouraging work harm families. I think that to some extent.
Speaker: And here I get back to disagreeing with him. I think that they are misapplying those lessons in thinking about this current proposal, which is a different proposal from the old welfare system. And it's in a different. context than the old system was for example like you know as i was saying earlier
Speaker: We're talking about a flat benefit, which doesn't create that same kind of trap that you had in the old system. Right. I just want to cut in here to say that in the old welfare system, it had a structure where oftentimes for somebody on welfare. getting a dollar in. paid labor wages would cut a dollar in welfare earnings. So it was a situation, I've spoken to Kathy Eden, the researcher about this, where
Speaker: Unless you could get a job in 96 that was, or 95, let's say, before the reforms, that was above $8 an hour, which for for many single parents was hard, it actually wasn't economically worth it to go back to work.
Speaker: okay so the subtext of their comparison with the old welfare system is that this child allowance concept has a serious hole which is that It doesn't punish poor people enough.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that that's, broadly speaking, what they're talking about. I think that there's like a couple other things going on as well. So they talk earlier about... Like... You know, in... in Panera's account in the first part of the discussion of like how did the Republican Party get here? He makes this pretty wild claim that Like...
Speaker: the libertarianism and small government thing of like obama years Republican Party. was he refers to it as an ideological cul -de -sac that actually that wasn't historically the Republican Party and actually Ronald Reagan didn't touch entitlements and This was like a big signal to me of like what's going on here, because there's a way in which you can make this claim that Ronald Reagan didn't touch entitlements. What did he do? Well, he just he put all these, you know, he eliminated fraud and he eliminated. But in reality, he.
Speaker: instituted a lot of austerity right but it's like oh you're the guy who explains what the official narrative is so that you can like destroy the lives of poor people.
Speaker: You know and pretend that that's not what you're doing Did you know that the current administration is not touching Snap? Actually, all it's doing... is forcing people who are on snap to go through wave after wave of onerous paperwork and if they fuck any of it up they get kicked off.
Speaker: And so there's this discussion about the welfare system, right? and and I mean... This is a bad thing that welfare was set up such that you would get a particular amount. And then if your income increased by a dollar, right, as Klein explains, like you would lose a dollar. Hang on, hang on. I don't deny that that kind of thing can be... Like a real trap, a real issue.
Speaker: For example... If you happen to be on certain kinds of disability support today, you are not allowed to have more than $2 ,000 in your bank account at a time. Or you just get kicked off. Which means that if you...
Speaker: subject yourself really to any measures to prevent yourself from living a life of constant precarity and fear and in fact dependence on the government.
Speaker: then You're screwed. you don't have a way up or out Okay, so that's a real thing. At the same time...
Speaker: Why exactly is it important? that people be incentivized to go work jobs that pay eight dollars an hour. Like, why is that something that we need in the economy? Why is that something that we need to push people toward?
Speaker: It's not clear to me that that's like... that That's a real... positive policy goal. Why was the system set up that way? Like is exactly to produce this precarity And that's something that neither of them will touch and like the amount of money and Klein even mentions this in the conversation the amount of money they're talking about for this child allowance is not enough to like eliminate precarity right like
Speaker: Klein says you know this idea that somehow By getting this child allowance, you're going to be. disincentivizing work completely. which you know, it is this kind of two -step thing which is you know you're exactly right like why is the incentivization of work like the first part of this conversation right why is that really entering into it But also this claim that it will disincentivize work just doesn't make any sense because the numbers are so small that it's like it's not actually going to.
Speaker: And so. I guess to summarize all that up like I think you're right that what he's saying is like it doesn't punish poor people enough and that's his critique of it and like If there were a you know ah problem with this bill, it's that it actually...
Speaker: Will not really do enough that like a lot of it is going to be constructed like in order to replace this other system but that's just going to mean that sort of people who have the most need are going to be fucked over the most like usual right because we're not going to have this thing that actually figures out like what do people actually need and get it to them we're just going to be like oh yeah we have this allowance and that's fine and and you should be working anyway and there's there's plenty of jobs that will pay you nothing that you should just go and work But they do have a more abstracted reason why it's really important for parents to work.
Speaker: I mean, if we're talking about this sort of the value of work, I mean, one of the harms of unemployment or prolonged spells of unemployment, involuntary unemployment and is what I'm talking about here, is its effect on kids. And it's not just the material effect on them, although that's obviously an important, severe one. But also, I yeah do think it is good for kids to see their parents.
Speaker: making a living and setting that example. Yeah, it's... They are... having this conversation where the untouched assumptions are this like extremely socially conservative vision of life. right? Like it's just Klein doesn't really do anything to challenge that at this point.
Speaker: Actually... By this point in the conversation, he does, finally. say something which is like Well, wait a minute, you know. this isn't enough money to raise people out of poverty and you know the the sorts of situations that a lot of these things are help are people who are in desperate poverty or have an illness or situations where people are not able to work or not able to get jobs. I mean, he...
Speaker: is sort of unable to really Push this far enough. So he. He makes this kind of weird distinction where he's like, oh, well, you know, a lot of people are forced into exploitative jobs. Like, it's good for my kid to see me go work for The New York Times. I don't think that's true at all, Ezra Klein. I think that your kid probably is going to grow up.
Speaker: Either. A complete. rube like you or is going to feel a lot of shame about your job i actually hang on a second i think it actually might be good for ezra klein's children to see him work at the new york times because These people are like rich as shit.
Speaker: I think there's this concept here that if people don't see their parents go work then they're just like not going to go work. But in the US system, that's... Not something you can...
Speaker: Do. That's not an option unless... Your family happens to be rich as fuck. Like, I think basically the prescription here is that like, oh yeah, kids need to see their parents go work because otherwise they'll be rich fail sons.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, and I think Klein is like... Wait a minute... He has this moment here, which is like, wait a minute. There's people from families who aren't rich as fuck what about someone who like And he just he describes like a real person he's talked to. he does He does push back a little bit, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: And he he like he starts to mount this argument, which is like, well, I talked to this woman who she works two jobs and she's actually never able to be around because like. Both of her jobs have just -in -time scheduling and she works 60 hours a week and she's not able to spend time with her kids. And so this idea that it's good for her kids to see her working doesn't really hold water when it's like she can't actually go to any of their...
Speaker: things they have going on she can't be there when she said she's going to be there because she has to do all this work and why is it you know why would it be bad for her Right. Like this is what this is actually supposed to help is.
Speaker: She should get some money so that she can have a little bit of flexibility to say no to jobs that suck. and Be with her kid. Yeah.
Speaker: Let's see what the end result of that pushback is. Where I'm going with this is that. One, I think a Republican party based on being a parent's party would be actually electorally lethal for the Democrats. I mean, I think it's a very scary thing for the Democrats to consider. But two, that party would have to actually want to make work. better you know that party might want to do things like a higher minimum wage. um you know there is There is some interest in wage subsidies, so I don't want to take away from that.
Speaker: So he's talking about a party when he says a parent's party, right? What he's talking about is a party that actually supports. that That has a plan to help parents who are economically So he kind of doesn't quite put the Lego pieces together, but he's kind of talking about a party that like supports working class parents, right? He says a parent's party, but not a parent's party in the way of like only being for... parents who you know want conservative economic reform.
Speaker: So he's basically saying like... This party would be lethal for Democrats. okay shouldn't the next step be like oh the democrats could also do that The Democrats could also adopt progressive policies that actually support working class parents.
Speaker: That would be economic. That would be lethal as well, wouldn't it? no you See, everybody is constantly looking for an excuse to support Republicans. And that's the thing, he's basically saying...
Speaker: Like... If the Republicans became... a kind of socially conservative but economically socialist party.
Speaker: But only in support of... Traditional families that would be electorally lethal and I think in a way Yeah, he's right, like... I mean, he's kind of describing fascism.
Speaker: Yes. But he's describing it like exactly right. Like if you really dig down on what he's saying, which like I cannot stress enough. That his whole job hinges on him never doing that. as far as I can tell in this podcast, right? Like it is so important to his whole project that he never dig down despite the fact that he's supposedly a wonk. He's actually like so close to discovering.
Speaker: That. Fascist. politics are able to capitalize on resentment that people feel because of the failures of liberals to support the working class.
Speaker: He's so close. He's so maddeningly close, Sarah. Okay, let's continue the clip. But for a party that cares so much about work, I often see it less interested in like how that work actually functions in in a family specific life than in a sort of idealized abstract conception about the inherent dignity of. wage labor it seems to me that one of the things that that social conservatives in particular but although not only my fellow social conservatives should look at.
Speaker: is this. Thing that you mentioned about scheduling practices about these flexible scheduling practices and it may be You know, one would want to do some empirical work on sort of, you know, if you put restrictions on that, what kinds of effects would it have on employment?
Speaker: Ramesh is like... Oh. Klein's doing something he's not supposed to do here. He's like talking about like actual impacts on actual families. Maybe I'll give a little bit of a concession. I'll be like,
Speaker: Oh that scheduling thing you mentioned. i'm sure we could get rid of well well well hang on hang on we'd have to do like a bunch of studies about whether we could get rid of it but like maybe we could do studies about it like he's halfway through his concession then he's like oh hang on hang on that's that's too much Yeah, because if you...
Speaker: Like... Again, I mean Klein goes on and and continues this thing. He's like, well, what would it be to be a ah a family party in this way i mean just to really Underscore the point I was making before he says a higher minimum wage And like. transforming people's working conditions, right? So he's actually pointing to Like...
Speaker: ameliorating material conditions for the working class but like do so in a way that only helps traditional families right like that's that's kind of what he's describing here so so he is actually saying this and so they get to this thing about scheduling and I was kind of losing my mind at this point because they're doing it in the same boring technocratic and he talks about these policies, but The idea of a legislation that actually tells companies that they're not allowed to do just -in -time scheduling would give so much power to workers, like...
Speaker: The amount of... power. That's just so far from... like people's actual working conditions today that if they actually had this like federally protected power to control their scheduling like even to to have like advanced notice of scheduling like this, like that would be a huge socialist win.
Speaker: So they're not going to do it. They're totally lying, right? But it's just like... If you think about like what would it mean to actually implement that who would actually go about doing that like You would need...
Speaker: like a labor board that actually has teeth that can enforce this kind of thing, right? Like you would need a socialist transformation of the country to even begin to do that. And so it's just. It's another like, oh, this is a very wonky thing, and we're going to look at studies to do this, and maybe this is a good idea, but no one's ever going to do it, right? like You know what direction we've headed in instead?
Speaker: Gate work. like We've taken this whole like scheduling concept. and just found a way to just turn the exploitation up to 3 000. you log on whenever you want to doordash right it's like well okay but you have to do it all the time and you have to get the trait It's...
Speaker: So much worse. Because, of course, the thing they were talking about is not. socialism, it's fascism, right? It is a fascist politics that is designed to capitalize on the resentments produced by horrible living conditions.
Speaker: Okay, so Ramesh gives this... not actually a concession. And. Ezra, of course. Sensing blood. goes in for the ad break.
Speaker: And when they come back, they've completely dropped the topic. Yeah, like this is a moment where... he has led it to this point where the only way to proceed would be to conclude that actually this whole project is meaningless because there's actually the problem isn't one of responsibility it's a problem of bad faith But...
Speaker: He said up top, one of the obsessions and themes of this podcast is going to be lying to you that the problem is one of responsibility and so he can't do that so time for the ad break and now we're going to talk about biden we're going to talk about the Biden years and what's what to expect from the Biden presidency. here It's wild how easy this is, too. Ezra Klein. basically cornered this guy by Brownian motion.
Speaker: It was completely accidental. Yeah, like... He asked... a couple follow -up questions that are sort of the most obvious possible follow -up questions if you really were going to take this idea seriously.
Speaker: It's just maddening. I mean, it reminds me again of like. my take whenever i see a new like isaac chotner interview which is like you know chotner is like a good or whatever in a bunch of ways but like He really is just like the only guy who will ask the next follow -up question, right? Like the difference between Ezra Klein and Chotner is like Chotner has the...
Speaker: Shatner has the courage to ask one more follow -up question. like not go to the ad break there and it's like Night and day difference, right? like Cod.
Speaker: Okay, yeah, so they start talking about Biden, and they talk about the Biden years, and they talk about, like, what's gonna happen for Biden, and they make a bunch of... predictions and claims that are going to like age like milk. And so the first one is...
Speaker: Panura makes this claim. Biden is really benefiting from Trump. Because by sticking around and not letting anyone else succeed him... Trump is eating up all the oxygen in the Republican Party.
Speaker: And what's really funny here is. Panura has earlier talked about how he underestimated Trump in 2015. Because he's like, oh, Trump is this like. mad candidate that is kind of is coming from the far right, and it's like Michelle Bachman. like This part of the party never never picks a candidate, and he's not going to be able to come from the center and do the the centrist thing that that we all have to pretend is how politics works when we're when we're talking to Ezra Klein.
Speaker: And he's like, you know what, I underestimated him. He did manage to pull this together and make this coalition, right? And then he does the exact same move now, which is like, it's such a gift to Biden that Trump is like still sticking around. And it's like, listening to this.
Speaker: in The second year. of the second Trump administration. It was like... These guys never go away. Like you can make these predictions. over and over and just eat shit over and over and no one is ever gonna like hold you to the fact that you were so stunningly wrong in the same way twice about American politics. Like, it just doesn't matter.
Speaker: They also talked about, you know, What is Biden's policy? Biden is being really ambitious. Biden has all these ambitious goals, right? And like... They talk about, you know, Klein is like, well, you know, there's going to be this problem because, you know, we, you know, mansion and cinema are.
Speaker: saying absolutely never are we going to get rid of the filibuster and so there's all sorts of limits to what we can do because we can't get rid of the filibuster and like the republicans can filibuster things but don't worry of course he blames it on the bisexual Typical bigotry.
Speaker: He says, we're going to be able to do a lot of things through budget reconciliation. And I immediately remembered something that I had completely blocked from my mind. Remember that like three weeks when we all learned who the Senate parliamentarian is?
Speaker: Remember when there was this like, he describes this whole ambitious thing and Biden is going to get all this stuff done. And... At this point, I was already like... a shitty leftist or whatever. And I was like, that's not going to happen. And Klein was here saying, no, he's going to use budget reconciliation. It's this amazing tool. And then it turned out that at the smallest fig leaf, right, what was going to happen? The same thing that always happens. The Democrats were going to invent this fake procedural thing.
Speaker: the senate parliamentarian who serves at the pleasure of the head of the senate right like that's not an elected position but the senate parliamentarian said we couldn't do it so we couldn't do it So then we get into the conversation about. election stealing. So if you want to play the clip.
Speaker: So we're looking at somewhere between two thirds. to four fifths of the Republican Party saying the election was stolen from Donald Trump. That is ah a hell of a thing to. believe. How do you understand that belief and and how do you think it changes? political incentives and and and strategies.
Speaker: for people who want to lead that party going forward. So the the theory that the election was stolen is so amorphous, right? So some of the people say yes to that mean, well, those Facebook algorithms were ah were unfairly twisted. And some of them mean vote totals were altered and changed. And some of them just mean, well, um the Washington Post.
Speaker: its coverage was not as even -handed as we believe it should have been. I've listened to that clip so many times while we prepped for this episode, and I'm still losing my fucking mind hearing it.
Speaker: What do you mean the election is stolen means that editorials were unfavorable? What? I mean, it's again, it's the same thing. What's his job is to take the most outrageous claim possible. There is a constitutional question about whether birthright citizenship is guaranteed and turn it into something that could be the subject of the wonk, right? Like the wonk is not able.
Speaker: to Face. Just like... An actual threat, right? I'm just this is just amazed by how brazen this is. He's just sitting there lying up to Ezra's face. And Ezra's just like... Oh yeah, I'm cool with that. Yeah, interesting interesting insight.
Speaker: Yeah, he's lying the most, like, absurd bald -faced... ridiculous claim it's not even a lie because it's so like There's not even really substance to the claim, and what does Ezra do? No, you don't even have to go out into the world to, like, check the facts here. You don't have to do, like, even the most basic background. He wriggles like the worm that he is. He just fucking wriggles.
Speaker: I feel like if we cut Ezra Klein in half, we'd have two Ezra Kleins. So he's like, he he then at at one point says like, oh, you know. you get this this range from the people who you know so would storm the capital to quote And I wrote this down.
Speaker: Standard -issue Republican who doesn't trust the media. I don't know, there's different versions of saying you don't trust the media, right? Like... you could You could take that.
Speaker: in a couple different ways, but like... I don't know, there's something... There's a lot of Hitler particles coming off of the phrase standard is issue Republican who doesn't trust the media. Let me just put it that way. My Hitler particle detector is going crazy. So then Panura...
Speaker: Like... proceeds to give a pretty... clear description. of how How? Like... fascist cultural movements coalesce.
Speaker: He actually just admits and says, and Klein like sort of helps him out here, and they the two describe the way that like you don't have to believe something on its face in order to act politically in a way that...
Speaker: you know, to act on it in a political way. Like, they they basically do Sartre on antisemitism, but from the inside. They literally say, like, well, you know, you can accept, you know, without believing something straightforward, you can accept that a thing is a belief that someone might have, or you can sort of...
Speaker: adopt it and without truly believing it you can behave as if it's true and you don't believe it in your heart and this is still a problem and something we have to pay attention to. And then they just kind of leave it there.
Speaker: They don't actually address, like... the extent to which that strikes at the heart of this entire conversation. Like... the extent to which like Yes, it is possible to coalesce political movements around claims that not everyone thinks of as like...
Speaker: this is a thing I believe, they can have this sort of ironic detachment or they can believe that it doesn't matter and that this is actually fundamentally a political problem for their whole wonkery concept. Yeah, they're just sitting here talking about like... What is our good faith future going to look like?
Speaker: And meanwhile, they casually happened to bring up, like... Oh, by the way. the right wing operates entirely on bad faith and that just like functions and that works great. Alright, well, next topic. At one point, I didn't even write down...
Speaker: I didn't even write down which one of them says this because it kind of doesn't matter. You can act on something you embrace? but don't believe. And it's like, yes, that is called being...
Speaker: In bad faith, like. Oh, but then, but but... Klein says oh, but You know, your work, Panuru, is to remind Republicans that politics is still a contest of ideas.
Speaker: Right, let's let's end on that idea politics, you know for all that we want to talk about this politics is still a contest of ideas and it's like it's maddening It's like, how did you get there?
Speaker: from just exactly saying the opposite thing which is like politics is actually not a contest of ideas you've actually described a way in which in a very real sense It is a contest of power.
Speaker: It is a contest of material conditions. It is a contest of what people are willing to do, not... of what they say they believe. Nah, don't worry about it. Now, hold on.
Speaker: Ezra does recognize. that Ramesh has not always contributed positively to the discussion. And he's ready to absolutely destroy this fucking guy. So he brings up a book. that Ramesh wrote previously. Listen to this shit.
Speaker: one thing i see you doing in a lot of your work is trying to reassure republicans that the stakes of Democratic victories, big D Democratic victories, Democratic Party victories aren't so existential that that politics is still. a contest of ideas that you can lose and it'll be okay. You have a ah a piece about how Republicans should be optimistic in opposition. Again.
Speaker: this guy's job is to be like Republicans need more ideas. and Republicans have ideas, and Republicans can profit from ideas. That's what this institute is about.
Speaker: There have been these guys who are like we're gonna provide the ideas right and it's like who have we talked about on this Podcast. Like, that's who Roger Scruton was. That's who Enoch Powell was. Anytime someone is like, we're going to provide the ideas to the conservative movement, it's like, it's always just the most...
Speaker: Oh my god. And that you can then win back and and it'll be OK. In 06, you wrote this book about Democrats called Party of of Death, which. the the argument had to do with um things like abortion and and and death with dignity ideas but obviously was a a pretty hot title i'm curious if watching the escalation of sort of political stakes in people's minds how you feel about sort of the title and the rhetoric around that looking back I thought at the time it was a usefully provocative title.
Speaker: and i overestimated the extent to which people would actually you know kind of at least read the introduction. I certainly think that. Over the last...
Speaker: 15 years. It has become more and more central to my political thinking that we have a real difficulty understanding the beliefs of people who are unlike us or who disagree with us.
Speaker: Okay, hang on. Hang on. It was a provocative title. I thought people would at least read the introduction.
Speaker: suggesting obviously that the book actually once you get into it is like pretty intellectual, pretty serious. Not so dramatic as this might seem. Helen, would you like to read a couple excerpts from the introduction of this book?
Speaker: I would love to. The party of death started with abortion, but its sickle has gone from threatening the unborn to the elderly to the disabled. It has swept from the maternity ward to the cloning laboratory to a generalized disregard for inconvenient human life.
Speaker: Legal abortion came to America. because many Americans felt that in some cases it was the least bad response to tragedy. Only a small minority of Americans profess to have no qualms about abortion at all.
Speaker: to see it as no different from an appendectomy. Many more people were persuaded that it was better for a woman to get a legal abortion than resort to the coat hanger. Advocates of legal abortion said that as many as 1 million illegal abortions were taking place every year, and 5 to 10 ,000 women were dying annually as a result.
Speaker: Many people continue to support the legality of abortion for reasons like these. President Bill Clinton was politically astute in saying that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. a slogan that pointed to the back alley.
Speaker: There was some self -deception in this resigned acceptance of abortion and some plain old deception as well. American women weren't dying by the thousands in illegal abortions, and pro -abortion legislation seemed more modest than it was. In 1967, Ronald Reagan, the new governor of California, reluctantly signed a law to allow therapeutic abortions. Reagan soon discovered that some doctors were willing to call any abortion therapeutic.
Speaker: A year later, he already regretted his decision. The abortion license would not be confined. to the hard cases. Again.
Speaker: Much like with... this conversation about The child allowance, like... Okay. We legalized abortion, but we didn't punish poor people enough.
Speaker: The pretense that there is some like reasonable middle ground here is just... so absurd and This is not at all the reasonable middle ground thing he's describing it as. No.
Speaker: Okay, so... Two things he's saying here. One is he's saying that these pro -abortion types are going to come and kill the disabled and the elderly and whoever they want that's like right at the top and then right down at the bottom he's saying that you can't allow Exceptions.
Speaker: to protect women. For example, if the woman's life is threatened. Like, that's a... therapeutic abortion. Apparently that's too far because that allows people to slip under. Bands on all other kinds of abortion. He's making very, very clear right here in the introduction that he is the most extreme sort of anti -abortion advocate.
Speaker: Like, this is not moderate rhetoric. No, this is pretty pretty extreme. And I mean... This is in 2006, right? And so what is the the common refrain, which, you know, it's become cliche, but I think has...
Speaker: still some juice in it, which is Or it's you know I think it's still worth pointing out, even though it has been pointed out to death. like this is early in the iraq war right like There's not a moment where I think like the conservative movement isn't.
Speaker: A huge machine of death. but to look at American politics in 2006 and be like The Democrats are a party of death. Meanwhile, like the republicans are expanding our technology and ability to like liquefy entire villages It's just...
Speaker: it's So. disconnected from reality. and This high -minded rhetoric is just so... Disgusting. The Democrats are... Gonna kill... like the sick and elderly and it's like
Speaker: This was in a moment before obamacare who was responsible for the deaths of the elderly and the disabled is like not that i'm saying the democrats were doing a good job but this claim that like that's the the purview of the democrats and the and the republicans actually give a fuck about the elderly and the disabled is really really sick and in particular when he talks about like the democrats want to kill the elderly and the disabled right This.
Speaker: is the rhetoric people used to oppose things like obamacare because they just made shit up about like obama wants to institute i think they call them death panels right like oh if you have socialized medicine then you're gonna have to decide who you give health care to and they're the government is going to kill your grandmother because it's too inconvenient that shit never happened that shit isn't going to happen the people who decide that your grandmother is going and to die because it's inconvenient to to save her are health care ceos Oh, but their lives are sacrosanct. oh my god Yeah.
Speaker: It's such bad faith. Second excerpt. And we may not have reached the end of the line. Today the country's leading newspaper considers the killing of sick infants, for their own good you understand, a debatable proposition. It is the linkage among these issues that make it possible to speak of a party of death. The phrase is meant to be descriptive, not purely pejorative. The party's core members are those who explicitly - Okay, I'm sorry.
Speaker: That's... Fucking stupid. Like... This is if you read this and believe it like you are a worm The goal of this is to turn you into a worm like the phrase is meant to be descriptive not purely pejorative Like, oh!
Speaker: When I said, That you're... Like... A worshipper of death. I'm just speaking literally and in my capacity as a wonk, I don't mean that to be an insult.
Speaker: Fuck you. I'm not that stupid, right? Oh my god. The party's core members are those who explicitly deny that all human beings are equal in having right to life and who propose the creation of a category of human non -persons who can be treated as expendable.
Speaker: They are an influential minority in America, as in the developed world and the world generally, their views can be defended with intelligence and sophistication and are almost entirely coherent. The party of death is a vanguard, to borrow a term from another dismal chapter of the world's political history, made up of people who defend those views and all of their entailments, up to and including support for infanticide.
Speaker: What is he talking about with infanticide here? Like, I don't... This is like not hitting a like. button that I even can recognize. It's just right -wing fever swamp shit. Like...
Speaker: See, this is exactly the kind of shit that I saw one I went on Twitter. I saw conservative intellectuals and so on saying all this kind of shit and then i'd always just like look it up and It was all just made up. It was total fiction.
Speaker: Yeah, like I think a younger version of me, I would be like, oh, well, you know, like there's cases where perhaps a child who... you know, an infant who's born with like a serious birth, you know, some kind of birth defect or something where like life expectancy is, like, nothing. And so the expectation is just that, like, they're going to live an extremely painful life for three days. Like, maybe we should allow in those cases. But you know what? Like... There's so much work I'm doing there to try to cook up something reasonable. And it's like, I don't...
Speaker: I don't actually think that's true. I actually think that I am doing a lot of work to pretend this and like... part of i think my political evolution has been to to stop doing that, right? So... How much work is Ezra Klein doing to normalize it?
Speaker: He has researchers. I mean so much. He's one of the leading lights of the New York Times. Yeah, so... I mean... That I think leads us into a good thing like kind of we're getting to the end of their episode here like they talk about okay how do we move past these kinds of conversations, right? like Ramesh Panura was like, you know, maybe I shouldn't have called it that. And he gives it gives a very bad faith thing. He's like, oh, I thought people would take, you know, understand that this was a provocation. And it's like, well.
Speaker: You mean it, and you're saying it. Would it shock you to learn that he's a Catholic convert? Oh, not at all. And in fact, in looking up reviews for this book, I saw people say, like, the book is conspicuously secular in the sense that it...
Speaker: It always lands on the Catholic. position on something? but it never... uses Catholicism as an argument. He at one point. in an interview responding to this. Suggestion that he's just doing Catholic propaganda. He says no I'm playing the game of the intellectual correctly which is that I know the conclusions in advance but I make sure that I have rigorous arguments to support them. and It's like, that's not...
Speaker: actually how you should engage with things and You're explicitly saying that like it's a game. The whole thing is a game. like Actually, he's engaging in a rich intellectual tradition going all the way back to francis bacon helen We all know that reason must support the conclusions of religion.
Speaker: Because religion is correct. So you just need to apply reason so as to reach the correct targets. So... You know, Klein, I think, asked him, okay. So now we' we've gone to this problem here. We've gone to There's all this rhetoric. There's this notion of the party of death.
Speaker: There's a conflict. That I was, like, waiting for Ezra Klein to, like, notice. And he actually, like, does. He says, look. The stakes are actually very high. Like you can say we shouldn't have these kinds of high -minded things and we should not You know, maybe party of death is a bad idea. You agree now party of death is a bad idea, but actually The stakes of politics.
Speaker: can be life and death. like If we don't have healthcare, care People will die. So... How do we bridge this gap between wanting things to be reasonable and respectful and have discourse properly?
Speaker: without pretending. that the stakes aren't life and death. And Panuru says, well, I don't think we should pretend the stakes aren't high.
Speaker: but And then he lists a bunch of situations in which Republicans... spoke apocalyptically in bad faith about things and is like, you know, and I think we could just turn down the temperature a little bit. And just doesn't answer the question that Klein is posing at all.
Speaker: And then Klein goes, well... I think that's a good spot to end it. What books would you recommend people read?
Speaker: And check out who he recommends. If I want to understand where the Republican Party is going.
Speaker: Who are some folks I should be reading? Well, I have to to commend some of my colleagues at at National Review, like ah Michael Brendan Doherty and and Robert Verbruggen. I'd mentioned Joshua Hammer, Helen Andrews, Coleman Hughes. There are a lot of there are a lot of voices. I find that they are increasingly people who are younger than me, which is a little dismaying.
Speaker: Friend of the pod, Helen Andrews. Friend of the pod, Helen Andrews, author of The Great Feminization. All the other people he listed? they're absolutely nobodies if you wanted to understand where the republican party was heading like you could hardly do worse than looking up random national review columnists Yeah, and then I mean Klein is like okay, so those are some colonists like who are what are some books like if you wanted if you Wanted a progressive.
Speaker: To read a book. His recommendation is this book. by Eval Levin The Great Debate, which is just a book about like... the debate about federalism between Edward Burke and Thomas Paine. like It's just not about current politics. Go back and read this high -minded discussion of this. like 18th century debate between philosophers and then you know Just believe that that's...
Speaker: telling us anything about where we are now not that it you know not that understanding those kinds of things isn't like all helpful but it just it's so revealing about the whole vision of politics here. Would you believe that Klein has a...
Speaker: absolutely terrible episode interviewing the author of that book. I don't think we should do it because it's actually like... Super boring. It's basically the same thing as this episode except more boring and more chummy They're literally like, oh, we used to have lunch and like talk all the time. And that was so cool.
Speaker: Pretty pathetic. So then, you know, they end on the question of like, oh, you have your kids running around there. like What's a children's book you recommend? And of course, the the Catholic convert is like, you should read Narnia. I love Narnia.
Speaker: There's just something really funny about that to me like the long line of Catholic converts. I don't know, I enjoyed Narnia as a kid, but... it is not the best children's book i'm sorry to say well if you really want to understand it The skeleton key, I find,
Speaker: is to realize that Aslan is something of a Jesus metaphor.
Speaker: I don't know. This is... This is you, you crazy leftists and your theories and you're always trying to, you know, this is this is what Hemingway called the detective school of literary fiction. You're always just trying to fit things on top of it and you're just reading into stuff that isn't there. Do you remember how that series ends with, like, there's a train crash and everyone dies and everyone goes to heaven except for the girl who, like, isn't a lipstick and pantyhose? I honestly didn't remember that. I don't know if I ever read the last book. I think I... i read them too slowly and i was like starting to realize like oh these are bad
Speaker: or they're not bad i don't know like i was just the the shtick was wearing off by the time i was like getting through them So that's the episode. I came out of it having I think far less respect for Ezra Klein.
Speaker: Until this point I had never really looked deeply into his work. I knew him about him as the guy who wrote that book, Why We're Polarized, and who wrote... the more recent book. about abundance and he just like has all these like seemingly empty ideas but listening to this i really realized like He is so close to having a good analysis.
Speaker: If he just had like... 10 % more courage to like draw a conclusion from something. He could do something real. That's what I'm telling you. That's his role. His role is to get you close enough to actually figuring something out that you get the catharsis of it. deduction, but it doesn't actually happen. He substitutes himself in for it.
Speaker: I think there's also an extent to which his role is as a kind of modeling. Like. How do you... Accept the the humiliation. of Being.
Speaker: an American. In 2026.
Speaker: How can you wormify yourself? I think all the time about like... the game Disco Elysium. you know Disco Elysium has its various political quest lines, and each one has its own requirements for making it through the political quest line. And and then the one for fascism. And I'm not going to spoil anything because I think people should play Disco Elysium without spoilers. but For fascism, you basically...
Speaker: Just have to have enough. like emotional endurance There's just a bunch of checks to make sure, like, can you be Can you, like... Survive the embarrassment that comes with like believing all this shit And I think there's a way in which you know, I'm not saying Ezra Klein is a fascist But there's a way in which like Ezra Klein is sort of doing this right? He's showing you how There's a kind of saintliness there, right? He's sort of martyring himself to the humiliation of being a centrist liberal. who like fundamentally believes in the American project.
Speaker: now when it is so clearly... falling apart and like How do you keep? playing the game of pretending to believe the obvious lies. that the Heritage Foundation. and the American Enterprise Institute. are telling you and it's like He shows you how to do that. Bye.
Speaker: asking one follow -up question, but not a second one. And never drawing a complete conclusion. I also was thinking a bunch about disco Elysium while I was listening to this.
Speaker: and i feel like his role is to introduce you to a character named the sunday friend who you know you play a detective in that game and so you're always like querying people for answers and The Sunday Friend is a wonk type.
Speaker: His job is to control inflation And he... Answers. Zero. of your questions. He evades you and yet he makes clear that.
Speaker: All of this structure of stability, and control that he represents has some fundamentally Evil character. but he never... lets you...
Speaker: see it. He just keeps you dancing around it for as long as you're willing to put up with talking to him. And I think Ezra Klein's role is not precisely to be the Sunday friend.
Speaker: but to acclimate you to talking to that guy. and to convince you to take him seriously. Yeah, you should not listen to Ezra Klein. um you should go play disco elysium that's my recommendation that's my if you want to understand where we are in America right now, go play Disco Elysium.
Speaker: yeah don't go read helen andrews or josh hammer butts or whoever the fuck he was talking about So we're not going to do FAG ratings. Because... We haven't yet decided.
Speaker: Ezra Klein, who he is and where he stands, you know. And it's an ongoing project. We don't want to try and nail it down on the first episode. Maybe we'll get to a point where we say we've done it. we figured out who Ezra Klein is, here's the ratings, but...
Speaker: There's so much more to go, so... I think we'll just leave it here. Bye. Bye.
