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Brian Lehrer:

It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today might be the second to last day of the impeachment trial. It will depend if there are enough votes tomorrow to call new witnesses. If not, President Trump will likely be acquitted before you go out for Friday night drinks. For this segment, we'll play a few of the most interesting, outrageous, or politically important moments from the senators' Q&A session and get a take on the big picture from Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, who hosts his own impeachment podcast and has a new book called Why We're Polarized.

Brian Lehrer:

Mitt Romney is the Republican considered most likely to vote for witnesses. It will take four Republicans to get there. But here's a question submitted by Romney that seems intended to suggest that the evidence is incomplete without John Bolton.

John Roberts:

Question from Senator Romney is for the counsel to the president: on what specific date did President Trump first order the hold on security assistance to Ukraine, and did he explain the reason at that time?

Brian Lehrer:

That was Chief Justice Roberts reading Romney's question. Here is Trump attorney Pat Philbin's unsatisfying response.

Patrick Philbin:

I don't think that there is evidence in the record of the specific date, but there is testimony in the record that individuals at OMB and elsewhere were aware of a hold as of July 3 and there is evidence in the record of the president's rationales from even earlier than that time.

Brian Lehrer:

Philbin admits that they can't yet answer one of the key questions: when did the president order the hold on the military aid to Ukraine, a key piece of information that could establish how much corrupt intent the president had? Bolton would likely know the answer to when Trump ordered it. The Trump defense team also had to answer for when he first expressed interest in having Ukraine investigate if Joe Biden did anything corrupt. That's a key piece of evidence because if it was only as Biden became a serious presidential candidate, it would prove Trump had no ongoing interest in fighting corruption by Burisma or in Ukraine: he only had a personal one. Bolton, as national security advisor, might also know that. Score some points for the pro-witnesses side.

Brian Lehrer:

But here's another clip. In fact, it was the first question submitted yesterday jointly by three Republicans whose votes for witnesses could be crucial. To my ear, this question looks like they're fishing for an excuse to acquit the president even if he corruptly blackmailed Ukraine. Recognize this voice?

Susan Collins:

I send a question to the desk on behalf of myself, Senator Murkowski, and Senator Romney.

Brian Lehrer:

That was Susan Collins of Maine. The chief justice reads the question.

John Roberts:

This is a question for the counsel to the president: if President Trump had more than one motive for his alleged conduct, such as the pursuit of personal-political advantage, rooting out corruption, and the promotion of national interests, how should the Senate consider more than one motive in its assessment of article one.

Brian Lehrer:

Trump attorney Philbin responds.

Patrick Philbin:

If there is something that shows a possible public interest and the president could have that possible public interest motive, that destroys their case. Once you're into mixed motive land, it's clear that their case fails. There can't possibly be an impeachable offense at all. Think about it. All elected officials, to some extent, have in mind how their conduct and how their decisions... their policy decisions... will affect the next election. There's always some personal interest in the electoral outcome of policy decisions, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's part of representative democracy.

Brian Lehrer:

Trump attorney Pat Philbin. So why does that exchange matter? Because acquitting Trump on the basis of mixed motive land, as he called it, may make Democrats' blood boil but it might be the talking point that a lot of swing state Republicans use to wriggle out of voting for witnesses. Honestly, those clips might be all you need to know from yesterday's 10 hour session, but maybe this one too. Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts tees up Adam Schiff to argue that only the Senate has the power to compel John Bolton or his deputy, Charles Kupperman, to testify. We'll hear the question and Schiff's response.

John Roberts:

Question from Senator Markey to the House managers: on Monday, President Trump tweeted, "The Democrat-controlled House never even asked John Bolton to testify," end quote. So that the record is accurate, did House impeachment investigators ask Mr. Bolton to testify?

Adam Schiff:

Senators, the answer is yes. Of course we asked John Bolton to testify in the House and he refused. We asked his deputy, Dr. Kupperman, to testify and he refused. Fortunately, we asked their deputy, Dr. Fiona Hill, to testify and she did. We asked her deputy, Colonel Vindman, to testify and he did. But we did seek the testimony of John Bolton as well as Dr. Kupperman and they refused. When we subpoenaed Dr. Kupperman, he sued us: took us to court. When we raised a subpoena with John Bolton's counsel... the same counsel for Dr. Kupperman... the answer was, "Senator, you serve with a subpoena and we will sue you too."

Adam Schiff:

We knew based on the McGahn litigation it would take months if not years to force John Bolton to come and testify.

Brian Lehrer:

Adam Schiff arguing that the only path to knowing what John Bolton knows and to having enough evidence to reach an honest verdict "runs through you, dear Republican senators."

Brian Lehrer:

With me now, Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, who hosts his own weekly impeachment podcast called Impeachment Explained and has a new book called Why We're Polarized. Hi Ezra. Thanks for coming on.

Ezra Klein:

Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer:

Did you hear those Susan Collins and Mitt Romney questions yesterday more as looking for a reason to call witnesses or an excuse to acquit, even if Trump did what he's accused of?

Ezra Klein:

To step back here, I want to take a moment and say that it is constitutionally insane that we're sitting here having a conversation about whether or not four Republicans are going to break to get the testimony that has been offered by the witness who has firsthand knowledge of what the president did. The fact that this construct has been built around impeachment... that we all have to hinge on what Susan Collins says or the lift of a Mitt Romney eyebrow... this is not constitutionally how it is supposed to work. We are supposed to want to know... Congress, the branch charged with overseeing the executive in this issue of conduct, is supposed to want to know what happened and is supposed to want to let us know what happened.

Ezra Klein:

So I agree with you that there was a suggestive dimension to that question of whether or not they could wriggle away by saying, "Sure, Donald Trump might've been trying to help his own reelection but maybe he also cares about corruption in Ukraine," although I love for someone to give me an example of a non-Biden or non-DNC-related issue of corruption in Ukraine that Donald Trump had any interest in. If somebody could say, "Show me the other three pieces of Ukraine-specific corruption that he was concerned about," I would be more willing to credit this answer. Nevertheless, your point is well-taken. They might be looking for this as a way out. But it is a problem. It's a problem in our political system and a problem in our constitutional structure: that they are looking for a way out as opposed to looking for a way to the truth.

Brian Lehrer:

Honestly, I was hoping this Q&A session would be more interesting than it's been so far. Maybe it's because I think like a journalist and not a politician. But I was hoping for more cross-examination type questions to force each side to clarify their arguments, like on what you've just brought up with, "Oh yeah? When else have you ever talked about corruption except with Joe Biden in Ukraine," rather than teeing up your own side's talking points, which is mostly... to my ear... what we've been getting.

Ezra Klein:

I think that one of the difficulties of the Senate trial has been that Mitch McConnell from the beginning created this sense of certainty around it by saying that he was going to collaborate with the White House on this, people like Lindsey Graham saying that they were not entering into this with any doubt in their mind about what had happened. They do not believe the president had done anything wrong. It has created a structure where there is little room for either side to be actually looking for what happened. Instead, the Democrats are trying to increase pressure and the Republicans are trying to reduce it.

Ezra Klein:

When we move into an impeachment trial in the Senate, the Senate is supposed to recompose itself as a trial body. It is not the Senate as we know it; it is something completely different. Constitutional law professors can go through that in chapter and verse, and that's really not what we've seen. We've seen the Senate working exactly the way it does. One of the arguments in my book and an argument we've been going through on my podcast is that impeachment was designed based on the Founders' understanding that the branches of the federal government would keep each other in check. There would be ambition checking ambition. Instead, what we see very clearly is the way that two highly polarized parties... but in this case, I think more fault goes to the Republican Party... have deformed that constitutional structure. Instead, what you have is parties cooperating across branches.

Ezra Klein:

Last thing I'll say on this is that I did think there was one very telling moment in testimony. Alan Dershowitz, the president's lawyer, made an argument that it is the case that any politician... in this case, the president... will believe that their reelection is in the public interest. Therefore, if they do things in service of their election, they are doing it in their own mind... whether it is objectively true or not... in the public interest, and if they are doing it in the public interest... whether it is mediated through the role of their own election... it cannot be impeachable, and that is a...

Brian Lehrer:

That's the same argument that we heard in that Pat Philbin clip: mixed motive land.

Ezra Klein:

I think this is a much worse argument. I think this is a very dangerous argument. This is an argument that says that the president, by combining his theory of his own reelection with the theory of the public interest, nothing he can do is impeachable because by nature he has convinced himself it's in the public interest. Imagine if we applied that to crime. Imagine if we applied that to other forms of trial. "Well, I thought it was a good thing if I stole this money from somebody so it can't be a crime because I did it with only the best intentions, which is that I thought that I deserved the money more or I thought I'd be able to do more good with the money than the person who initially held it." It's a very dangerous thing for a presidential lawyer to say.

Brian Lehrer:

I did think... I didn't pull the clip of Dershowitz saying that, because I thought watching it yesterday that it was a Dershowitz being Dershowitz quirky moment that was new yesterday. This has not been a talking point for the Republicans along the way. It's hard for me to imagine Murkowski or Collins or whoever who may not vote for witnesses to hang their acquittal of the president based on that. Do you disagree?

Ezra Klein:

I don't, but that's where I think that the overly-narrow focus on Murkowski, Romney, etc., is actually narrowing our ability to see what is happening here, which is to say that I don't think there's any doubt that that is what President Trump believes. He has chosen Alan Dershowitz for his legal defense team. He's acted in this particular way throughout his presidency. You can go back through things like firing James Comey. I think the generous interpretation of President Trump's behavior over and over again has been that he understands himself... as is true for many populist leaders around the world, he conflates himself with the public interest. So as long as he's acting in what he sees as the public interest, if that means destroying the enemies of the people... be they Democrats, the media, whatever... that's all fine.

Ezra Klein:

So for a presidential lawyer to say that and say it in context for what is likely to happen here... no matter whether or not those four Republicans vote for witnesses or not... is acquittal because there's not going to two thirds of a supermajority in the Senate to convict the president. For the president to get away with this and one of the arguments on which he gets away with it is that as long as he thinks it is helping his reelection and he thinks his reelection helps the country, anything goes. That's a very scary situation because he's going to be the president the day after all of this anyway, and he will have all that power and he will have the freedom of knowing that even when something like this comes to light there are no true consequences, so why not keep going with this kind of strategy in the future?

Brian Lehrer:

My guest if you're just joining us is Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, who also hosts his own weekly impeachment podcast called Impeachment Explained and has a new book called Why We're Polarized. As we go, we'll get into some non-impeachment related big thoughts from why we're polarized and take your calls on that, but for now if you want to call and react to anything that Ezra has been saying or add your own thoughts about the Q&A session between the senators and the House managers and the Trump defense team: 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

Brian Lehrer:

Your podcast, Impeachment Explained, focused a lot on Mitch McConnell last week. You argue in that segment that McConnell isn't the source of our political disfunction: he's the manifestation of it, obviously related to your book, Why We're Polarized. Want to make that case?

Ezra Klein:

Yeah. One of the things that tends to happen in political journals and with politics generally is that personalize or narrativize the story of American politics through individuals. So we look at Mitch McConnell and the particular way he's managing something like the impeachment trial and we decide, "If only he wasn't there doing this in this way. If only he hadn't gone on Fox News and said he's going to run this in collaboration with the White House. Maybe it would all be working." The reason Mitch McConnell's strategies work the way they do... the reason he chooses them in the first place and his Republican colleagues vote to uphold... is because he is correctly, on some level, following the incentives of American politics as structured. That was true for Merrick Garland. It's true here. It's true on the Democratic side, too.

Ezra Klein:

Almost all politicians are incentive-based creatures. They're rationally responding to the system as it's set up. If you took McConnell out and you replaced him with a deputy... you replaced him with a John Kyle, say... we wouldn't see something different, and we know that because actually in impeachment McConnell doesn't have the powers he normally has as Senate majority leader. He doesn't have control of the floor. There is somebody else presiding over the Senate, in this case Chief Justice John Roberts. It is simply not the case that McConnell colleagues are breaking en masse. There is the possibility of three or four Republicans defecting on a witnesses vote, but McConnell does what he does because that is what Republicans want him to do. If somebody else was in the chair, they would do the same thing, and you know that because all the Republicans are lock-step behind the same strategy.

Brian Lehrer:

In your study of why we're polarized, did you land anywhere to the Republican defense talking point that Trump is being impeached because the Democrats have such partisan hatred for him rather than because he's so high-crimes-and-misdemeanory?

Ezra Klein:

I don't think that's true, but I don't think that there's no kernel of truth to it, which is this: there's no doubt that Democrats have a lot of enmity and loathing of Donald Trump. People can argue whether it is justified or unjustified but it is 100% there. The idea that Democrats dislike Trump is true. That is not why, in this case, they are impeaching him. In fact, Nancy Pelosi fought very hard to not have impeachment. After Mueller, they didn't do impeachment. When Al Green introduced articles of impeachment, they didn't do impeachment. There were arguments that you should impeach over what Donald Trump was doing on policy, what he was saying.

Ezra Klein:

They did not move to impeachment, and the reason is that impeachment is itself an unpopular and divisive thing to do. It didn't poll well for most of Trump's presidency. It was only when Trump more-or-less forced their hand by trying to intervene in the coming election... which shook Democrats faith that they'd be able to fairly beat him in an election, because if Donald Trump is able to change the structure of the election by getting Ukraine to investigate Biden... and imagine if it had worked and that story had begun coming out after Biden was the nominee. That's a way of changing the political process. In general, Democrats very much dislike Donald Trump, but that's not why they went to impeachment or they would've done it much before this whole Ukraine affair.

Brian Lehrer:

In fact, you wrote on Vox that you first well down the impeachment rabbit hole in 2017 when Trump was treating recklessly about nuclear war with North Korea. Why did you have impeachment thoughts that early rather than just bad, dangerous president thoughts?

Ezra Klein:

I have a different view on impeachment than a lot of people do, which is that my study of impeachment... I think this is correct. If you go back to what James Madison wrote about it, he says that early on in the republic that impeachment can be a usable remedy if the president fires meritorious officers without cause. There's a lot of maladministration in early theories of impeachment. There's a lot of just, "What if a president is doing a very bad job?" My view of Donald Trump presidency at that point... at it hasn't changed all that much... when he was tweeting inflammatory things at North Korea and saying that we were going to destroy them with fire, was that impeachment should be understood and not just as something that is a response to crimes or even to high crimes and misdemeanors, because that term meant something very different. It meant an abuse of power.

Ezra Klein:

Impeachment is a way of firing underperforming or a dangerously performing chief executive, and in that case it was always understood by the Founding Fathers... and there's vast documentary evidence of this... as a way that you could remove somebody who was doing a very bad job. The first impeachment in American history was of Judge John Pickering, who was a federal judge. He was an appointee. He had not committed a crime. He had not even committed what we would understand as a high crime and misdemeanor. He was probably suffering from early onset dementia. He was a drunkard. He was ranting on the bench. He was saying some crazy things, so he was impeached.

Ezra Klein:

My argument there, which is not really an argument about what Congress is going to do given how divisive impeachment is, but that we have become too precious about the ability to fire the person doing the most important job in the world if they underperform or dangerously perform between quadrennial elections. The idea that the president is the only person with that kind of job security, given how dangerous it becomes if they're not performing their job well, is a strange way for us to run a republic.

Brian Lehrer:

And we have a caller question relevant to what you were saying about the Founders. Hi Lisa. You're on with Ezra Klein from Vox. Hi.

Lisa:

Hi. Oh my gosh, Ezra, I just want you to know I'm one of your biggest fans.

Ezra Klein:

That's so kind of you.

Lisa:

I ordered your book as soon as I heard it existed. Here's my question for you, or just if you could comment on this, please. When the Founders included impeachment in the Constitution, a president could be elected indefinitely. I'm wondering if that colors what they meant by it at all, in your opinion.

Brian Lehrer:

Interesting. That two term limit wasn't enacted until the 20th century.

Ezra Klein:

It's an interesting point. I don't think so, but it doesn't mean that wouldn't have thought differently if you had a two-term limit. I just can't speculate on that that well. What I can say is when they debated impeachment... and there was a real debate over this. In fact, there were some who didn't want impeachment to be in the Constitution at all and argued against it, and they eventually came around. There were a couple different schools of thought, but the main one is that if you didn't have something like this what you would have was the executive being able to aggregate power so that they were able to continue winning elections, continue winning power, continue destroying their enemies, and you would lose the ability to hold them accountable. Some executives can do that quickly. Some executives could, as you say, possibly do that over three or four or five terms.

Ezra Klein:

In either case, what they were worried about was that the power of the executive could be used to ensure the executive kept power. The canonical way you would think about impeachment is that if the executive is doing something that is going to distort the ability to run free and fair elections... While I think on a personal and moral level there are things that Donald Trump has done that are much worse and more offensive in the policy realm than what he did with Ukraine, I don't think those things are actually impeachable while I do think the Ukraine affair was because the Ukraine affair was about distorting what you could actually do through elections.

Brian Lehrer:

Mike in Brooklyn has a McConnell-related question. Hi Mike. You're on with Ezra Klein.

Mike:

Good morning. It's good to hear you both. In my own experience, I lobbied for Vietnam veterans in Congress. I testified to the House and Senate. I think I know the process. But in this case, McConnell tried to hijack it and the only way the Democrats have is to play it out to the end of the line.

Brian Lehrer:

What's the end of the line?

Mike:

Ask questions, finish the questions, come to a vote on witnesses. If they lose the vote, there won't be witnesses and documents, and then if they call the questions to impeach... the impeachment vote itself... they should walk out.

Brian Lehrer:

Walk out. Mike, thank you very much.

Brian Lehrer:

How far can the Democrats push it? He's making the point that the Democrats should make a big stink, make a big show, rather than just let this vote happen.

Ezra Klein:

I don't know about not letting the vote happen, but I do think that the idea that you should try to run this out as much as you can is plausible. That's why the witnesses are important to the Democrats, because one, you're trying to get as much of a clear historical record in place as to what happened, and remember the Senate is not the only trial judge here in some cosmic sense. This is the only impeachment in modern times to be happening in a president's first term. Both Nixon and Clinton were in the president's second term. This impeachment is also happening in an election year, so the public is going to be a relevant jury in all this. Anything that helps the public pay attention is important.

Ezra Klein:

One of the things that McConnell has done well is he's made the acquittal almost a sense of settled fact. I know a lot of people who really care about this who are finding it hard to follow it day in and day out because it has this sense of futility. But that sense of futility is constructed. It is not futile if the American people are convinced and it changes the shape of the election in a way that helps hold Donald Trump accountable and set a lesson for future executives who would do this. So anything you can do that can ensure you're breaking through to the public and make sure they understand their citizen authority in this is important.

Brian Lehrer:

Two things relevant to your book, Why We're Polarized: one thing we're hearing is that most swing state Republican senators who have tough reelections this year have decided already to vote no on witnesses. We'll see if that's true. But reportedly it includes Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Cory Gardner of Colorado at least, deciding not to cater to the majority of their states who want witnesses... polls suggest 70% of all Americans do... but rather that there's too much risk in alienating the Trump Republican base who they need to get reelected. How much would that calculation be an indicator of how we're polarized?

Ezra Klein:

It's an extremely large indicator. I have a chapter in the book about... One of the themes of the book is the way polarization... which is separating the parties into ideologically and demographically distinct collations... has changed elections in particular. One of the ways it's changed elections: it has sharply reduced the number of what we would think of as persuadable voters or floating voters. There's a lot of political science literature on this but also political consultants who talk about it and how they've run elections over time. You still run elections by trying to appeal, both run a candidate, run a message, and run ads and ground game appealing to this mythical but often real voter who could move to either side, who could vote Democrat or Republican.

Ezra Klein:

As those voters have shrunk, elections have become about base mobilization. What you want to do is make sure that you're in very good standing with your side and that the set of issues that are being discussed are issues that activate your side and depress the other side. Those swing state Republicans, what you're seeing there is that 20 years ago they'd be very worried about a voter who might defect from them to the Democrats. Now they're much more worried about having the election take place on ground that is going to be depressing to Republican turnout, which impeachment is.

Brian Lehrer:

One of the things I've been hearing from political reporters covering Iowa ahead of Monday's caucuses is that impeachment isn't landing one way or another on Joe Biden. It isn't helping him, because Trump's false accusations are making him more of a hero, or alienating them from him because they think that even if Trump is a fascist, Biden shouldn't gotten himself into that conflict of interest with his son. Neither is happening because the voters at events aren't even thinking about the issue, reporters in the field are telling me and my listeners on the show. Is that your sense? If so, does it tell us anything about Washington being polarized differently from the rest of the country?

Ezra Klein:

Yes. There's no doubt that Washington and political elites in generally are much more polarized, but not just more polarized. They're more attentive to whatever the news cycle issue is of the moment, whereas when... This is an old thing. It goes back to Jim Fallows: Why Americans Hate the Media. But when you listen to the questions reporters will ask candidates, it will be whatever happened in the news that day, what's going in the polls, "Did you see this scandal? So and so said this. What do you think of that?" Then you go to a town hall and the person says, "My healthcare is too expensive. How will you help me?" Concerns Americans have for their candidates are always different than the kinds political reporters push them towards, but I do think it's interesting that impeachment isn't helping or hurting Joe Biden one way or the other. I don't know that we really know how it would play out for him.

Ezra Klein:

I think something that's interesting here about witnesses is that something that's kept the witness conversation a bit stymied is that Republicans have had this counter-argument: "Okay, what if we did it but we did a witness trade?" Not all of them had said that they would embrace this, but some of them have floated it. One reason that Democrats have been reticent on that is that the witness trade the Republicans would want is for Hunter or Joe Biden. If Joe Biden was in a stronger position as a candidate and he were more confident in his performance, in some ways it would be a good thing for him to be able to come into the Senate and show that if this is truly ridiculous then show it's ridiculous. I think it speaks to his weakness that there's a lot of fear about that happening.

Brian Lehrer:

We'll continue in a minute with Ezra Klein and we'll the turn the page from impeachment to other things related to his book, Why We're Polarized, including why Barack Obama tried but failed to un-polarize, and why Ezra thinks Democrats don't have the luxury that President Trump has... and those swing state Republicans we were just talking about... of just playing to their base. Stay with us.

Brian Lehrer:

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We continue now with Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox and author of Why We're Polarized, his new book. You argue that politics has become a larger part of our identities than it was in the past. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Ezra Klein:

The key thing here is that, number one, we all have identities. We have this word identity politics and we tend to apply it to marginalized groups. African Americans rallying around Black Lives Matter? That's identity politics. But if you just have white Americans who are worried about rural gun rights, that's politics. One thing to recognize is that we all have identities and many of them. I'm Californian. I'm a father. I'm a journalist. I'm a liberal. I'm Jewish. Etc.

Ezra Klein:

What's been happening in politics over the past 50 or 60 years what we call identity stacking. We used to have these identities and they didn't tell you much about what party you were in. You had liberal Republicans. Conservative Democrats. A lot of African American Republicans. The parties were not shifted very much by geography, by religiosity, by race, by all kinds of things that we think about now. But over time... and this has a lot to do with the Civil Rights and the Democratic Party becoming the party of not just liberalism but also racial liberalism, and the Republican Party becoming a party of conservatism and racial conservatism... that set off a period of sorting. Now we have these mega-identities where you're not just a Democrat, but you live in an urban. You're Hispanic. You're the son of an immigrant, etc.

Ezra Klein:

It's when you link a lot of these identities together that they become these... what the political scientist Liliana Mason calls... political mega-identities. It's not that our political identities, the politics part, got bigger. It's that our political identities have become the center of almost web of our other identities, and that's made them stronger and it gets them activated much more. Controversies that in other times would've been very divisive in America and were very divisive in America but didn't fall cleanly across party lines... Think about the Vietnam War, or the Civil Rights Act, which had a higher proportion of congressional Republicans voting for it than Democrats. This is a very different situation where it's all cut by party in addition to whatever the underlying dispute is, too.

Brian Lehrer:

You wrote in a New York Times op-ed... that some of our listeners might have seen the other day, based on your book... that argues that Democrats still have to appeal to the center, but Republicans don't. Want to take a minute and lay out the difference?

Ezra Klein:

Yeah. Polarization has not made the parties symmetric. In fact, it's made them structurally asymmetric. The Democratic Party is a coalition of a lot of different groups. It is 50% liberal where the Republican Party is 75% conservative. Its single largest religious group is religiously unaffiliated. The Republican Party is overwhelmingly Christian. It is 50% non-white whereas the Republican Party is overwhelmingly white. I mention all that because what it means is that win power in the Democratic Party, you have to be very coalitional. You see that happening in the primary right now. The question is not just who can win liberal white voters in New Hampshire and Iowa, but you have to be able to win traditionalist African American voters in South Carolina and Hispanic voters in Nevada. It really pushes towards coalitional candidates who are good at making different kinds of groups that have different needs in certain respects sign on to their campaign.

Ezra Klein:

But the other thing that is more important than that is the way American politics structures power through geography. The Republican Party right now controls the Senate and the White House just by getting fewer votes in the relevant elections for both chambers and because of that the Supreme Court, despite getting fewer votes in the elections that would've led to the nomination of Supreme Court justices. What that is a reflection of is the electoral college, the Senate's equal representation, and in the House gerrymandering and geography give Republicans a path to power despite not winning a popular vote majority the Democrats do not have. If Democrats won the kinds of minorities that Republicans win in these elections... if they won 46% of the two-party vote, as Donald Trump did in 2016... they wouldn't be in the White House right now. They would've been wiped out in an electoral landslide.

Ezra Klein:

Democrats, in addition to having to be more coalitional internally to their party, have to win over center-right voters who are a bit to the right of the median American in order to win power nationally. That forces a discipline in the party about how far left and confrontational it can become. The Republican Party doesn't have to deal with... Democrats have become polarized, it's just that's a kind of disciplining force that keeps them from going as far as Republicans have.

Brian Lehrer:

What implications does that have, if any, for Democratic primary voters just looking for the personal who's most likely to beat Trump?

Ezra Klein:

I don't know, actually. I know this is not the answer people love, but I think there's a simple way to cut that where people say, "You should elect an ideological centrist," and I don't know that's actually what voters who are technically in the center or center right even want. There's an argument here that... One, I would think about polarization as happening on a lot of different levels. There's policy. Bernie Sanders is understood to be quite left on policy. If you poll people, they understand that he's much more liberal or even socialistic than your average Democrat, but there are other things that pull Sanders back... the fact that he's from a state that is heavily rural, he's an older white man, etc... has given him other identities that are cross-cutting to his liberalism and appeal to people in different ways. He comes off to people as very authentic.

Ezra Klein:

There are different ways of understanding what these voters want. Some people think they want populism. Some people think they want an anti-establishment candidate. You have to understand where they are, and an important thing for people who are very into politics to realize is that the way super-politically invested people understand politics in this very sharp left-to-right ideologically policy spectrum is not the way a lot of people understand it. The question of how you win over these voters who don't normally love Democrats is often a more complicated answer than just elect a Democrat who on a policy level is closer to Republicans. People experience politics much more culturally.

Ezra Klein:

Very importantly, a question that I think people need to ask more often is... People understand politics in terms of how politicians feel about them. So the question of "Does this person like me and want me to do well?" is really important. That often transcends policy differences.

Brian Lehrer:

My guest is Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox. Maybe you read him there or listen to his podcasts that Vox produces. He's the author of a new book called Why We're Polarized. We can take your questions for Ezra Klein at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. In your book you write about the failure of Barack Obama to de-polarize the country. To set this up as you do in the book, I'm going to play the famous one minute from his 2004 Democratic Convention Speech. We should hear this every 16 years whether we need to or not. This is the minute that put him on the path to being elected president four years later.

Barack Obama:

Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us: the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers, who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight there is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and Asian America, there is the United States of America. The pundits 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.

Brian Lehrer:

Obama in 2004. I purposefully played a slightly longer version of that than we usually hear in the historical sound bytes. That was over a minute. Most of the media, when they echo that, they don't get to the federal agents poking around your libraries or the coaching little leagues. That clip reminds us that we were already concerned about polarization in 2004. Compare and contrast.

Ezra Klein:

That's such a good and important point. Also, that speech is so good. It is such an amazing speech. It's a speech that changes the course of American history, right? Barack Obama is not president without that speech. And yet, Barack Obama... as somebody who deeply distrusts and rejects the logic of polarization... The system says it's my fault as a political pundit, slicing and dicing us into red and blue. He becomes the single most polarizing president in the record of polling up until that point. Donald Trump then goes on and takes the crown from him. I think those of us trying to understand American politics have to grapple with the fact that Obama... who is in my view the most talented politician of our generation, and who is somebody who really did try... and I reported on him and talked with him in the White House often on these and I interviewed him about polarization in 2015... who really did try in his own ways to tamp down on polarization and have a political approach, both rhetorically and substantively, that brings people together.

Ezra Klein:

How does he end up becoming so polarizing? How does presidency end in Donald Trump's election? That, I think, speaks to the underlying logic of polarization that is powerful at a system-wide level that it can absorb even a politician like him. I think that's something that... I understand his politics and why you do not want to run for office on the kind of argument I am making, but in understanding the way the logic of American politics absorbs individuals it's important to deal with and grapple with the failure of that politics to actually de-polarize the country.

Brian Lehrer:

So he was just beaten down by forces more powerful than he was?

Ezra Klein:

Absorbed, I would say. The Affordable Care Act is a very good example of this, in my view. What he does when he comes into office is he makes a call that the way that Democrats are going to try to expand healthcare is to take Mitt Romney's approach in Massachusetts: an approach that they believe has Republican support. Use things like an individual mandate, which is an initially Republican idea. It comes out of the Conservative Heritage Foundation and is supported by conservative economist Milton Friedman. They go forward on this grounds. They don't do Medicare for all or a full government takeover of healthcare. They're going to try to split the difference. And Obamacare itself becomes the most polarizing policy issue in American politics for a decade.

Ezra Klein:

You have to look at that and ask what happens. The answer in large part is that the structure of American politics is set up to be polarizing. The parties have deep disagreements and differences, but even when the actual policy disagreements aren't that big they do have this deep disagreement over who should win the next election. If all the Republicans had rallied around Obamacare and said, "This is great. He's compromised with us. What a good bill. We're going to pass it," Obama would've won reelection in a huge landslide. Democrats probably would've won more seats in Congress and the Republican Party would've been hurt.

Ezra Klein:

A big problem in our system is not polarization. I cannot say that clearly enough. It is the way polarization interacts with our political system, which requires high levels of bipartisan consensus in order to govern. Other systems do not work like that. Polarized parties win majorities, they get into power, and then they govern. It's in our system where you can't do that. As such, the minority party does not have an incentive to help the majority party succeed and you get these polarized outcomes because it is the incentive of the minority party to polarize everything. We played some Barack Obama clips here, but Mitch McConnell's comment in that period is actually more important. He says, "My top priority is to make Barack Obama a one-term president." In a world where the minority party is going to act like that, the president cannot control bipartisanship himself.

Brian Lehrer:

Is that what Nancy Pelosi is doing?

Ezra Klein:

I don't think at that level. I think you can at something like the USMCA... the trade deal she passed during impeachment above the concerns of some of her people... and say that she's not playing it out at that level, but there's no doubt that in general that's more how Nancy Pelosi sees it. She disagrees with Donald Trump. Whether or not she would work with him on an infrastructure bill, I don't know, but she wants Donald Trump out of office. She's actually he should be in jail.

Ezra Klein:

One of the things I argue over and over again in the book is that polarization is a rational response to sharp and real differences. Nancy Pelosi authentically believes Donald Trump is a bad president. Mitch McConnell, to give him credit, authentically believed Barack Obama was a bad president, and if you believe that and if you believe these people are doing terrible harm to the country, then structuring your approach to politics such that the people who shouldn't be running it are voted out and the people who should be running it are voted in so that they can do all the good that they want to do, that's not them acting in contradiction to the needs of the American people. That's them believing they are serving the American people, which is why you can't rest an entire system on the minority party doing what it is not in its interest to do.

Brian Lehrer:

Ellie in Tompkin's Cove, New York, you're on WNYC with Ezra Klein. Hi Ellie.

Ellie:

Hi Brian. We recently traded a couple of letters, so it's nice to speak to you in person. I was wondering about the cross section of big data when we talk about these mega-identities and how the consolidation of those mega-identities and being able to track those identities has polarized our parties and changed our elections.

Ezra Klein:

This is a really interesting question. The capacity of advertisers, political advertisers, political campaigns on Facebook, to use big data to microtarget people and sort them and split them... The two things I would say is that first this new technological advance comes after a lot of the run-up in polarization, so it is not the causal factor. We began going way up in polarization in the early '80s, into the '90s, into the '00s, and now we're in this era of big data but it's pretty recent. It's clearly not the primary driver but that doesn't mean it's not an accelerant or will not become an accelerant. I'm quite skeptical of how effective a lot of this work is at this juncture. I don't know if you guys have the same experience on the internet that I do, but the way I experience microtargeted internet advertising data is I will buy a bike online and then for six months everybody on the internet is like, "Would like to buy another bike?"

Ezra Klein:

I'm skeptical is as magical as its proponents declare. I don't think Cambridge Analytica had any effect on the election. I don't think it was effective at all. But nevertheless, I think we're seeing something that when it becomes effect can certainly be an accelerant. I think social media in general is a polarization accelerant just by splitting people into identity groups and driving what people see by the comments and politicians who elicit the strongest emotional reactions.

Brian Lehrer:

John in Nyack, you're on WNYC with Ezra Klein, author of Why We're Polarized. Hi John.

John:

Hi, good morning. Ezra Klein, I'm interested to know... Over the last 30 years, you've seen the center in this country drift further and further to the right where we have alt-right ideas in the midst of our national dialogue. If the Democrats can't push further to the left, how can we maintain a rational center in this country? We're even looking at Obamacare, which is originally a Republican idea, as some kind of moderate center idea.

Ezra Klein:

It's an interesting question of what's happened to the center here. One is that it's simply shrunk in the way we would think of it. It's become much more affiliated with parties. I'll say a stat that I think is amazing. Independents today are as reliable in their party choice in elections as self-described strong partisans were in the '70s. If you told pollsters in the '70s, "I'm a strong Democrat. I love the Democratic Party," you were as likely to vote for Democrats as an independent is to vote for the same party over and over again today, and that's because you had a lot more party splitting and the parties were similar then. You might love Democrats, but sometimes there were Republicans that felt like a Democrat to you.

Ezra Klein:

That's one thing. The question of what's ideologically happened to the center is a mass public way is tricky. As the caller says, there are things like Obamacare that show that the center has become somewhat to the right. That was definitely moved to the right from past healthcare proposals. In many ways, it looked a lot like Richard Nixon's proposal in the '70s. On the flip side, there's a lot of polling evidence that the center is moving left, particularly on social and cultural issues. Think about things like gay marriage, like marijuana decriminalization or legalization, think about things like racial issues and even immigration.

Ezra Klein:

It isn't clear that the public's attitudes are moving so much to the right, but I do think that what's happened is that the political system has become more and more paralyzed and the ability to actually get the consensus to do anything has become narrower and narrower. That in its nature pulls policy to the right because you're trying to win over an ever more unwilling Republican Party, at least if you're a Democrat, whereas the Republican Party doesn't tend to pass as much legislation or worry about it as much because they want government to be smaller. It's not as much of a problem for them if government doesn't work.

Brian Lehrer:

Also, you wrote about democratization in the book, meaning that the way we become polarized happens to be along metropolitan area versus rural area lines. Therefore, the small states which get two senators apiece just like New York and California do are therefore vastly overrepresented in our democracy, which means the way we're culturally polarized is that the Republicans are vastly overrepresented.

Ezra Klein:

That's a crucial point. Imagine the exact same elections we've had in a slightly different political system where majorities rule. Today we're looking at Hilary Clinton as president because she won three million more votes than Donald Trump did. We're looking at Chuck Schumer as majority leader in the Senate. There's a real question about whether in that system we'd be saying the country has moved a lot to the right. Clinton ran much to the left of her husband in 1992. If you compare their party platforms, the Democratic Party really has moved left. If the Democratic Party was exercising power at the same rate that it's winning the popular votes in elections, I think the country would feel like it has moved a lot to the left.

Ezra Klein:

One thing that I worry about in general for American politics... and this is true for the right and the left... is that it has simply become unresponsive to what the country decides, wants, what the public will express itself as. Not only can popular majorities not win power, but even when they do win power they can't effectively govern. Some of the frustration in the country politically is not simply that it is too far left or too far right, it's that no matter what it is nothing is happening. Problems aren't getting solved. We're not in a feedback loop where people in power govern and we can decide if we like what they did. Instead, we're in this loop of people kind of win power, they can't govern, and then we argue over who's to blame.

Brian Lehrer:

Last thing, and we're already over time, but this has been so interesting. You ask Obama in your 2015 interview with him for advice to his successor about tamping down polarization, not knowing of course who his successor turned out to be.

Ezra Klein:

It seems a bit ironic now.

Brian Lehrer:

But you concluded that Obama offered you the right explanation for polarization for the wrong reason. Briefly... because I know you have to go to your next interview... what was that? What do you come away with in this book as ways that we can tamp down polarization, if that's a goal?

Ezra Klein:

Obama's big picture explanation for polarization was that we have many political identities, but as he said in that speech our truest ones are not our political ones. We are little league coaches. We are church goers in blue states. If we can get out of these political frames and act more as just people, it will really help. He felt this way on media. One of his suggestions to his successors was to go around highly politicized media. The problem is that our political identities have become so big and so strong that even when you go around media... you go into new places... they tend to reoccur there, too.

Ezra Klein:

My argument is that you have to accept that polarization is here. You have to accept that you're not going to be able to sweep it off the board any time soon. What you have to do instead is democratize and change the political system so it can work amidst conditions of polarization. Polarization isn't the problem. Government paralysis when we are polarized is. I think there's a lot we could do in a straightforward way to make the system work by doing things like getting rid of the filibuster or the electoral college as opposed to hoping that we are going to start agreeing more when our disagreements and divisions are this deep.

Brian Lehrer:

Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox and now the author of Why We're Polarized. If you want to see him in person without going to California where he lives, there's an event tonight at the 92nd Street Y. I hear that one is sold out. I think they also stream their events. You're with Malcolm Gladwell tonight at the Y, right?

Ezra Klein:

Yes. There will be a couple that are... I'm releasing all these live events on my podcast, the Ezra Klein Show, so you can hear them there.

Brian Lehrer:

The one other I have coming up this Sunday is at Saint Joseph's College in Brooklyn with Ta-Nehisi Coates. There's another one. Check the Saint Joseph's College event site I guess for Ezra Klein with Ta-Nehisi Coates this coming Sunday. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

Ezra Klein:

Thank you.

 

 

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