David Remnick: For years now, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein has been at the center of debates over the future of the Democratic Party and what liberalism's political priorities ought to be. Klein's perspective is getting even more scrutiny these days as we're in the midst of a volatile national debate over free speech and the very stability of our democracy.

As we speak, President Trump is demanding prosecutions of his political enemies. He's claimed that it's illegal for the press to be critical of him, and he's routinely used threatening and dehumanizing language to discredit his opponents, whom he admits he hates.

President Trump: He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry.

David Remnick: How should Trump's critics and opponents handle this onslaught? What can they do to win back the voters that deserted them in last year's presidential election? I spoke to Ezra Klein about his perspective on the perilous moment that we find ourselves in today. Let's start with what happened when Charlie Kirk was killed. You pretty immediately published an essay in The Times that, of course, condemned political violence, comparing it to a contagion or the danger of a contagion, and you praised Charlie Kirk's willingness to debate.

You called it "practicing politics the right way." That was the phrase that resonated everywhere, and since that terrible event, the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah, we've seen how Trump and the MAGA movement, at times, has planned to use his death in a serious crackdown on the opposition. As you're thinking about this evolved, how do you look back on that column? What did you get right and how, maybe, has it been misinterpreted?

Ezra Klein: I think you got to separate a couple of things here.

David Remnick: Sure.

Ezra Klein: My view is that in, let's call it, 12 hours after somebody is publicly murdered, it is a good time to sit with people in their grief. I believe very deeply that when you commit an act of political violence like that, it is an act of political violence against everybody who participates in politics. I said in that piece, and I believe that on that stage that day, Charlie Kirk was practicing politics.

He was up there, he was arguing with people. I've heard people say, "Well, he's not really debating to find the truth," and of course not. He's a very, very effective practitioner of politics. He's trying to persuade people. He's trying to create content that will work in our attentional sphere, and I think something that we liberals have to reckon with is, he had been winning.

He and the people like him had been winning. They had been beginning to win on college campuses, and there's a big Gen Z swing towards Donald Trump. They were certainly winning on social media. You can disagree. I disagree with him profoundly and still find things in him to think that there's meaning to make out of it. I don't actually find this to be a complex part of it.

David Remnick: The critique of it was that you were, for sure, engaging with his practice of politics, of meeting people where they are, but maybe underselling what Charlie Kirk represented in terms of his positions about race, about "Jewish money funding an anti-whiteness agenda," about his views about LGBTQ people, all kinds of things. What is your sense of his particular politics? With all due respect and sympathy for, I think we totally agree, a horrific act of assassination.

Ezra Klein: I think this is a weird critique, genuinely. You know human beings, David. If in the moments after a murder or death, do you go to people and tell them exactly what you thought of the person they just lost, is your relationship to people who you're in community with, and I do believe myself to be in a political community with people who cared about and loved Charlie Kirk, even as much as I'm very much on the other side from them when you go to people like that, when they've just watched somebody be killed and say--

David Remnick: Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, wrote a piece in Vanity Fair making very clear what had been a collection of statements from Charlie Kirk that was quite representative. Did you think that was unfair?

Ezra Klein: No, I don't. Not to me, right? I virtually agree with Ta-Nehisi on every view he has, and Ta-Nehisi's on my show this weekend. I agree with the things that you just said. It's bad. As I wrote in my second piece, I have poured virtually every ounce of myself into preventing everything that Kirk poured himself into creating. I think that for more people than I had understood, the sense that we are in any way in community together, the sense that we are still in a place where we are all practicing and doing politics, has already eroded. I think something that's very alive for me is a feeling that we are not that far from national rupture. So many things that we like to say "It can't happen here" have already been happening here in my--

David Remnick: Who do you blame for that?

Ezra Klein: I blame Donald Trump quite specifically for that, and I think that the way he has acted in the aftermath of Kirk's murder has been an exhibition of virtually everything that is wrong and dangerous about him as a--

David Remnick: There, I'm in 100% agreement with you. I watched a lot of that memorial service.

Ezra Klein: What did you think of it?

David Remnick: I saw two remarkable things. I saw the widow of Charlie Kirk get up and do an extraordinary thing: a woman whose world has been shattered, whose family has been shattered, who's lost the husband she adored forgive, forgive the person who killed them. I don't know that I could ever be capable of that, and then who spoke later? Donald Trump got up and he said, "I hate my opponent. I can't be like that," and it wasn't just rhetoric. It wasn't a tossed-off comment. It was true, and that, that really struck me.

Ezra Klein: There is some part of him, I think, that would thrill to the possibility of an excuse to crack down. They're already trying it in many ways. The other thing I saw, to be honest, was a political opportunity. I think a politics of hatred is a weak politics, and a lot of people desire for something different. I found myself thinking a lot recently about the speech through which Barack Obama rose to power.

[applause]

Barack Obama: 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. [applause] We coach Little League in the blue states, and yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. [applause] There are patriots who oppose the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

[applause]

Ezra Klein: At the Boston--

David Remnick: DNC Boston Convention speech. I think a lot of people now have almost given up on that politics, and I also think that--

Ezra Klein: Well, you remember what Obama said about it, that that wasn't a statement of, "Here's the condition of." It was an aspirational speech.

David Remnick: Of course.

[00:08:01] Ezra Klein: Aspiration is very powerful in politics, and both because I am genuinely worried about rupture, but also because I'm genuinely determined to try to be useful in making our politics better and having people who I trust more holding power. I think we should not engage in oppositional mirroring, where whatever the other side does, we do, right? "You hate me. Oh, well, you know what? I hate you."

David Remnick: Do you see that on the liberal side, that there's a lot of mirroring of that?

Ezra Klein: I see on the liberal side that one huge strategic mistake we have made for well over at least a decade now, let's call it, is yes, oppositional mirroring, not on the word hate, right? That's a specific thing with Trump.

David Remnick: How would you illustrate that?

Ezra Klein: Let me give you an example.

David Remnick: Sketch it out. Yes.

Ezra Klein: Obama was a very, very effective politician, and he's a very effective politician because he was very good at containing opposites inside of him. You wrote a biography of him. You know this about him better than just about anybody. He was very good at having a sense that if you're going to push the country, you also needed to create space in yourself, in your political movement, in your rhetoric, for the disagreement, for the concern, for the pushback, and so he was this generationally capable political balancer, right?

Like sort of holding both our liberalism and our illiberalism inside himself. After him, I think this began to break down. Trump rises, and you have, say, the Hillary Clinton deplorable speech.

Hillary Clinton: You can put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. [laughter] Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. Now, some of those folks, they are irredeemable, and thankfully, they are not American.

Ezra Klein: The worst word in that is "irredeemable."

David Remnick: I agree.

Ezra Klein: Right? That's really, when you talk like that, a severing of political community. What begins to happen as Trump then wins, which I think is taken as truly shocking, is you begin to see the-- and this is not even a painting, this just literally happens. The Democratic Party begins to take on the opposite positions of Trump in many ways. Trump is the most anti-immigrant president of our lifetime, right?

Not just in his desire to build a wall, but emotionally anti-immigrant. Democratic Party becomes much more pro-immigrant, right? "If you're going to build a wall, we're going to debate legalizing, decriminalizing illegal border crossing."

David Remnick: That wasn't true across the board. There were a lot of different positions on immigration.

Ezra Klein: There were, but almost everybody on that stage except Joe Biden and Bennett.

David Remnick: And not express with a similar, much less equivalent hatred in more quarters.

Ezra Klein: I agree that Donald Trump is very unique in the way he radiates hatred, and I think you know this even as you're pushing me on this. If you talk to people on the right, and I'm not talking about Donald Trump or people at the top of politics, I'm talking about the people in my life who ended up voting for Trump, that they felt, in these years, profoundly rejected.

I do think this politics of deplorables was very real. There are certainly people who don't agree with the things I believe in the world, right? They began to feel that the Democratic Party genuinely didn't like them, and one of my strongest, most strongly held views about politics. One sec.

David Remnick: Go ahead.

Ezra Klein: One of my strongly held views about politics is that the most important question for a voter is not whether they like you, but whether you like them. If they're going to entrust you with power, the first thing is not whether they agree with you; the first thing is just whether or not they feel you like them and will take them into consideration.

David Remnick: Do you think any of that was centered on Obama himself?

Ezra Klein: Oh, there's no doubt.

David Remnick: Why?

Ezra Klein: I think Obama.

David Remnick: Because of his character?

Ezra Klein: Because he was Black and foreign-

David Remnick: There you go.

Ezra Klein: -to people. I'll ask you this question: do you think Obama would have won in 2016 if he could have run again?

David Remnick: I do.

Ezra Klein: There we go.

David Remnick: I do.

Ezra Klein: Politics is about power, and I think people have missed this. Politics is not about self-expression. There's room for that. It's not just about a dispassionate analysis of ideas. There's room for that. It's a lot of what I do, a lot of what you do. Politics is about building coalitions capable of winning power and making the decisions you need to do to do that. I said recently in a podcast with my colleague Ross Douthat that I feel that there's been a lot of fatalism among Democrats, right?

They've just accepted places where they cannot compete. I said that I want to see real decisions being made to try to compete in Kansas, in Missouri, and in Ohio, and then in red states, right? Meaning rather than that, I'd like to see us running pro-life Democrats again. When Obamacare passed, 40 House Democrats were pro-life. People got very upset about that. I get why, but I think it's worth thinking about this.

Has it been bad for the Republican Party that Susan Collins, who is nominally pro-choice, wins in Maine? Has that been a weakness for them? Has it been bad for the Republican Party that Donald Trump welcomed RFK Jr., all of his voters, everybody who liked RFK Jr., Joe Rogan, all the way down into their coalition? No. It has expanded their power. Trump built coalitions when he thought it would serve him. He is, among many other things, that he is a ruthlessly political animal, and I think there are things to take seriously in that that we have begun to demean.

David Remnick: I hear you. The problem is, the difficulty is juggling these plates all at once.

Ezra Klein: Sure is. [laughs]

David Remnick: Right now, you're talking the language of conciliation and broadening the scope and the tent, temperamentally and politically, of the Democratic Party. I hear you on that. At the same time, I think we agree on this: you have a president who, in fact, is uniquely authoritarian in his instincts, and, it would seem, in his policies as well, and to do those things at the same time, to fight that battle at the same time, is hard to do. It seems almost irreconcilable temperamentally within the Democratic Party.

Ezra Klein: I think some of this reflects the absence of right now a leader in the Democratic Party who can sort of make decisions on behalf of it, but to me, these two things are the same thing. If you're facing Mitt Romney, you have margin for loss. If you lose, it's a shame, but it's Mitt Romney. Nothing that bad is going to happen. If you keep losing to MAGA, then at least, under the way I look at the world, terrible things are going to happen, truly terrible things, and the risk of catastrophic things happening, the risk of what we understand to be the American political system cracking into something else, becomes very real. Hold on. If you think the threat is [unintelligible 00:14:59]

David Remnick: Ezra, you're asking for a certain kind of equanimity within the Democratic Party.

Ezra Klein: No, I'm asking for strategic discipline.

David Remnick: What's the difference?

Ezra Klein: It means that what I'm saying we should do is we should take on an approach to politics that we think will expand our coalition, such that we are not always within two points of losing to Donald Trump or the people around him.

David Remnick: Fair enough.

Ezra Klein: If that means doing things that are uncomfortable, yes, if a war or a battle, or a project, when people get terrible diseases, they don't take the medicines because they enjoy the side effects; they do it because it might work.

David Remnick: Who exemplifies this temperament of leadership and of the way he or she looks at the world in the Democratic Party?

Ezra Klein: I'm not sure I have that person right now. In some ways, I think I am saying we should rediscover the politics of Barack Obama.

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with the writer and podcaster Ezra Klein. Now, Ezra, you just said that we need to rediscover the politics of Barack Obama. Tell me a little more about that.

Ezra Klein: I don't think it's an accident that the last two Democrats to win nationally and serve two terms had this very open-palmed approach to politics and were very good at balancing these different forces and dynamics in them, and that doesn't mean, by the way, that their presidencies, their power, their assent did not drive many people on the other side crazy.

Clinton, in ways that in retrospect look ridiculous, drove the right crazy. You remember the conspiracies about Vince Foster and all the rest of it, and Obama, by virtue of who he is, no matter how-

David Remnick: By virtue of his identity.

Ezra Klein: -conciliatory he was, by virtue of his identity, by virtue of his skin color, by virtue of his name, he drove the right nuts.

David Remnick: Are you happy with how present or not Barack Obama is in the national conversation and debate?

Ezra Klein: No, I think we could use more of his leadership and voice right now. Look, I've said this on my show, and I'll say it on yours. I wish he were more out there, but I think that he is still playing by the rules, where it is increasingly less. He's starting to do a little bit more, but I think he's still playing by the rules, wherein it would be unseemly for a former president to take a very public role. I also think he believes, if he does that, he will choke off oxygen for the next generation of Democratic leaders to rise, but I would like to see Barack Obama on Joe Rogan. I would like to see that in the end of the election, right?

David Remnick: I think we both know that he would do it in a second.

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

David Remnick: Exactly.

Ezra Klein: I think it would be good for him to be in places, again, this is a very big thing for me, talking to people who don't often hear from us. You have to win in the attentional sphere right now, and there are very few people who can do it as well as he can.

David Remnick: Barack Obama, who was a hero of liberalism at a certain point in time, now takes a lot of criticism from the left or the left left, depending on how you look at it. I wonder how you look at that phenomenon now.

Ezra Klein: I've been thinking, actually, a ton about this. How does Obama go in a pretty compressed number of years from nearly an impossibility, the very act of his election seeming like a pivotal moment in the country to many people, to by the end of his term, still, by the way, the most popular national-level politician in America today? It's very easy, I think, to overstate the Obama backlash.

He's doing better than any other figure. This is why I'd like to see him out there more, but I think it reflects a couple of things. One is, I think, it reflects that the hopes that his campaign aroused in people were not capable of being delivered upon by either the pros of actual governing through Congress and the filibuster, and all these blockages. He did a lot. The Affordable Care Act is not a small thing.

The Dodd-Frank financial reforms are not a small thing, but it wasn't enough, and so there was a letdown, and then he's followed by Trump, and I think the Obama legacy looks different to people because it seems to have ended not in this arc bending towards justice. He's succeeded by Hillary Clinton, and she gets things done. You keep sort of building a new era in American politics incrementally.

Instead, it's followed by very rapid regression. I think one of the ways I view politics is that the communication mediums upon which it happens are very, very determinative in what then becomes powerful and popular and energetic, and I think that the move to social media and algorithmic media, it was really a move towards a style of political communication that is somewhat hostile to the liberal project, the deliberative, open-minded, thoughtful on the one hand, on the other hand, motive discourse that Obama is good at.

He's bad at Twitter. Have you ever read Obama on Twitter? It's bad. [crosstalk] It's not his thing. Trump is good at Twitter, and so I think that it all gets taken for granted. It actually is a sort of remarkable experiment what we're doing here, and the idea that a country this big and this diverse-

David Remnick: Nationally, constitutionally.

Ezra Klein: -nationally, no, I mean here on this podcast.

David Remnick: I see.

[laughter]

Ezra Klein: The idea that a country as big and diverse, with as much political argumentation and division as we have, that we actually would live together, that we can make this work, that would keep getting better, that a Black man with a middle name Hussein could get elected, doing the work of democracy, doing the work of politics, that's actually amazing, and I think he wasn't able to keep that story going, and nobody kept it going after him.

I do think there is a lot of power in actually reconnecting people at this moment when I think they feel, I certainly feel it like, "Oh, this could break. We could just break this. Somebody like Trump could just break this." There's a lot I disagree with Trump on, but one thing I really find offensive about him, and I would say this about J. D. Vance now, too, is, I don't think they believe in this project anymore.

I'm not sure if they did. Actually, J. D. Vance at one point did. I think for Vance, there's something a more kind of scarily ideological structure around that. I think he's very influenced by people who believe America was lost at some point in the past 50 years. They differ on exactly when it was, and you need some kind of counter-revolution to restore it to the heritage Americans who are really supposed to have ownership over this.

I think there's a profound contempt and anger that radiates from both of them, and I think that they both intend, Trump in his intuitive way, Vance in his more systematic way, to instantiate that into policy and power, and things can get really bad when you attempt to do that.

David Remnick: How do you defeat that? In other words, we began our conversation with an endorsement of the ability to sit down with people who you disagree with ferociously, not over tax policy, but ferociously on fundamental things, but how is this rupture to be prevented?

Ezra Klein: This is the work of politics, and one thing I believe is, we've begun to demean the work of politics. One thing that I am worried about is I actually think a little bit on both sides, but it's particularly true for me in the Democratic Party is that work, that work of building political coalitions around disagreement, of sitting in that kind of disagreement has become seen as often something quite akin to betrayal.

I am interested to see who Democrats run in 2026, and I would like to see in places where it has become very hard for Democrats to win, very unusual candidates. I would like to see them trying more things. Graham Platner in Maine tried to do that from an economic populist perspective, but Maine is not a red state. That's not what's going to win you in Texas. You see James Talarico in Texas. He's kind of an interesting candidate.

Who are they going to run in Kansas? Who are they going to run in Missouri? Sherrod Brown in Ohio is a very strong candidate. I do think over a 4, 8, 12-year period, we need to repolarize this country in a safer way than we have, right? Not this sort of system, anti-system polarization, and that means mixing up the parties a little bit again. This sense that you will need to build bridges right now to survive, that maybe are not the ones you most prefer building, I think that's very real.

I think that requires us to see the work of politics as honorable work, even when it includes a lot of compromise and a lot of working with people who, yes, we have very, very deep disagreements with, but you're trying to build power, and you're trying to do good things with that power.

[MUSIC]

David Remnick: Foreign, I'm speaking with Ezra Klein, columnist and podcaster of The New York Times. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

[MUSIC]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. Now, Klein might be just 41 years old, but he seems like he's been part of our political culture and conversation for a pretty long time. He was a blogger, then a Washington Post columnist, a co-founder of Vox, and now he's, of course, a writer and podcaster for The New York Times.

He's also the co-author of a recent best-selling book called Abundance. Most recently, Klein has drawn the ire of some progressives for a column that he wrote about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which he praised the late conservative activist for practicing politics, in his phrase, the right way, but in addition to the news of the day, I also wanted to spend a little time getting to know what shaped Klein's thinking, what shaped his liberalism, and his way of talking with both allies and opponents. I think a lot of listeners, and myself included, want to know a little bit more about you.

Ezra Klein: Do they, David?

[laughter]

David Remnick: Well, they're trapped, so they're going to. [laughter] You have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years. Very often, I will read about people in the Democratic Party wanting to know what Ezra Klein thinks or the influence you have within the Democratic Party, positive or negative, about the potential shutdown in Washington that may be coming around the corner. I want to go back. Tell me a little bit about your family background and your political family background. What were the politics in your house?

Ezra Klein: I grew up in Irvine, California. The district I lived in did not elect a Democrat to Congress until Katie Porter in 2018. That was our first Democrat we sent to the House. My father's a professor at UCI, now retired.

David Remnick: Taught what?

Ezra Klein: Mathematics, which I am not good at. [laughs] I used to joke that I'm good at math for a journalist, but not for The Sun.

David Remnick: [laughs] That's not saying much.

Ezra Klein: It's not. My dad's a mathematician. My mother worked with children and was an artist, but they are both, thankfully, alive and healthy. My house was mostly Democratic, but members of my family in recent years, some of them less so, some of them a lot less so, in fact, but it wasn't a highly political house. We did not receive The New Yorker or The New Republic. We got The LA Times, watched nightly newscast, listened to talk radio. It wasn't a highly political house I grew up in. There we go.

David Remnick: You had some political enthusiasms early on. You worked for Howard Dean.

Ezra Klein: Oh, yes, when I was in college. I got into politics. My brother, my older brother, was a lawyer, environmental law, and used to take me to protests in LA, where he lived.

David Remnick: What kind of protest?

Ezra Klein: Farm workers' marches. Not the only kind, but he did a lot of great work there. I did get into politics, but I primarily got into it through blogging. I became a blogger back when nobody knew what that was. This is when I was a freshman in college, and I got into blogging in 2003 and just loved writing about politics, reading about politics, thinking about politics, debating it with people.

David Remnick: When I began to read you in little venues early on, and then you arrived, to me, the first self-branded journalist that I knew of when you were doing Wonkblog at The Washington Post.

Ezra Klein: A simpler time.

David Remnick: Well, but an innovative person and at the same time had an analytic cast of mind when it came to politics that a lot of journalists just don't have. How did that develop, and do you accept the premise?

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

David Remnick: [laughs] What are they getting at that you think is true?

Ezra Klein: I would say I don't think this is my reputation anymore in the way it was in the Wonkblog days, but the idea that I was this cool, detached calculator of a reporter or journalist, the reason I care about these things is I care. I feel incredibly emotionally compelled by the stakes of politics, whether or not people get health care, whether or not we go to war, what kinds of people are in power, that these things are shaping our lives, whether we want them to or not, is a central, almost physical reality we all have to face, and understanding them is one of the few ways to try to face it.

David Remnick: Kind of like a Marxist or a certain kind of conservative of a different sort, there is this systemic look at the way things work. When you were younger, when you were 28, still at The Washington Post, you used to give a talk that was called "Why Washington Is Horrible (in Charts)," the main point being that we focus way too much on individuals and maybe not enough on Washington as a system. Tell me what that was about. How much has it carried over to your thinking today?

Ezra Klein: That speech, which I think was either from or became my book, Why We're Polarized, which was my first book, which is sadly relevant at the moment, was about the way you needed to understand these as structures and institutions that had rules and internal logics. For instance, we have this functionally false idea of how our political system works based on the founders' intentions, which is, "Oh, we're a system of checks and balances, right? We have three coequal branches that will jealously guard their power and prerogatives from one another."

Well, that was the intention of our system. In fact, what we have is two political parties that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution because they were not predicted or anticipated, or hoped for. They compete across those branches. Right now, we have a Republican-controlled Congress cooperating with a Republican-controlled executive branch, I would say cooperating with a Republican-controlled Supreme Court.

Unless you have built into the way you are looking at politics the influence and fundamental centrality of parties, which are system does not do in any rigorous way, you will not understand either how it works or how it doesn't work in the Senate, right? It's just maybe less so now, but it was certainly a mainstay of political reporting that we just treated everything as "The President should be able to get this done, and if it's not getting done, well, what's the President doing wrong?"

The filibuster was being used constantly, and unless you understood first that that was a new fact about American politics, the filibuster was rarely used, and unless you could kind of see why that had happened and then realize, "Oh, it's actually very hard to get to 60 votes in the Senate, and in this time of polarization, it's hard to get bipartisan cooperation," I think it's important.

I think it is part of our duty, our, on some level, sacred duty to give people a true account of why things are happening, and that requires understanding the systems in which people operate because most of us, for better and for worse, reflect the systems which structure the logics of our lives.

David Remnick: I want to go back to the question that I raised before about your influence in the Democratic Party. How do you feel it and not feel it?

Ezra Klein: When this began being the way people saw me, it was really around Biden leaving the ticket. What I will say about that whole process, where in early 2024, around the time of the Super Bowl and the Robert Hur press conference, I did a series of pieces basically saying this is going to be catastrophic for this then 81-year-old to run again. He's not up to it, but also there is still things.

The big problem, to me, at the party in that point was fatalism. "Well, we have no choice to run because there's nobody but Biden, because otherwise it'll be Kamala Harris, and she'll lose," right? That was the quiet whisper response to anybody who thought Biden shouldn't run.

David Remnick: From Biden's people.

Ezra Klein: From that world of people, yes. I, one, thought Harris would be a better bet, and I think would have been a much better bet if he had left the ticket much earlier, but two, I believed we should have had an open convention and that if he had left early in the year or with some months ago--

David Remnick: Even with only 107 days left on the clock.

Ezra Klein: He could have left before that. [laughs]

David Remnick: No, no. Without question, and should have, but considering that he--

Ezra Klein: By the time he left, there was not time for it.

David Remnick: It was too late.

Ezra Klein: It was too late. He had waited too long. When I did that series of pieces, I would say they were not influential at all. Biden gave a good State of the Union, and everybody thought I was an idiot, and that's just where the situation sat. What changed the situation was reality. It was Joe Biden getting up in that debate and falling apart.

Joe Biden: Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with-- Look, if we finally beat Medicare--

Ezra Klein: I don't see this as some remarkable campaign of influence I ran. I think I was seeing reality a little bit. I think I was seeing it clearly, but by the way, voters had seen this long before I said anything about it, right? The supermajorities of the public had said for a long time, Biden was too old to run again.

David Remnick: And they were right.

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

David Remnick: Would you ever go into politics?

Ezra Klein: No, absolutely not.

David Remnick: You're making a Sherman statement now.

Ezra Klein: I'm making a Sherman statement. I think you have to know what you're good at doing. I think I'm good at doing this.

David Remnick: Tell me a little bit about "this." What is your sense of your mission as a podcaster, as a writer, as somebody who makes public appearances? What is your sense of mission?

Ezra Klein: My sense of mission is simple. I have values and beliefs about how the world should work and what would make the world better, and I try to persuade people of them, but I also try to explore them in an honest way. I do this because I care about where things are going. I'm not dispassionately observing from the sidelines. I am emotionally, intellectually, spiritually involved, but what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it has changed a lot over the years in ways that I can follow more through intuition than through some framework.

The version of me that was writing Wonkblog and telling everybody about healthcare aging in one chart is not what I'm doing on my podcast now. My podcast is a forum in which I'm not primarily trying to be persuasive. Over time, I think it has persuasive elements, but it's mostly other people talking. I have a lot of people on who I disagree with. I think it acts as a space in which certain kinds of conversations can be had and then can be put into conversation with each other, and that matters.

In my column, I'm more prescriptive, right? What goes into, eventually, the book Abundance comes more from the column, and that's me trying to understand the world and trying to find ways to confront things in it that I find puzzling or unnerving. I try to take seriously questions that I don't love. I don't try to insist the world works the way I want it to work; I try to be honest with myself about the way it is working.

David Remnick: You are an important figure at what I think is still today the most important news gathering organization on Earth, The New York Times, but it's also one that everybody has opinions about. Recently, Thomas Chatterton Williams just wrote a book about the summer of 2020, which was dramatic in a lot of quarters, including The New York Times. Bari Weiss left and created The Free Press. How do you look back on that one?

Ezra Klein: I wasn't there. I just really don't know what happened, internal, to The Times at that time.

David Remnick: What's your opinion about Bari Weiss's increasing influence in what seems to be, she's about to be a very important figure at CBS.

Ezra Klein: Yes, it seems like she's about to take over CBS.

David Remnick: What do you think?

Ezra Klein: My thing about Bari and I've been on her show, and I have a lot of admiration for how good she is at what she does. My disagreements with Bari, I think she's asymmetric in sympathy and generosity.

David Remnick: Tell me what that means.

Ezra Klein: I've thought their work on, say, starvation in Gaza has been really bad. I think the whole thing where--

David Remnick: Spell it out.

Ezra Klein: Yes. They've done this whole thing like, "Well, a lot of the kids who have died and have been reported on, well, they had secondary conditions, and yes, when you starve a population, the people who die first will be the most vulnerable." That's not exculpatory. That did not feel to me like there was overwhelming evidence of how bad things were in Gaza, and I felt that they were trying to whitewash it.

What I see her doing is trying to do something that used to be somewhat more common, which is try to self-consciously be what she would define as the center, and I see them tacking back and forth around that, right? They're much more sort of pro-Trump, I would say, when he's running and Democrats are in power, but then now that he's in, it's like, "Oh, no, they're the vandals," and it's a little bit more to me like the old New Republic things they used to do.

When I came into Washington, I felt there were more-- actually. It's funny, when I was a blogger, this was something we all used to complain about all the time, all of these organizations that we felt were using this concept, this amorphous concept of the center as a positioning device, that instead of sometimes being guided--

David Remnick: That it was a dodge.

Ezra Klein: No, that it wasn't a dodge; it was navigational. They weren't dodging. There are a lot of politicians like this and a lot of players like this who had felt like their politics were hewing to some idea of the center, as opposed to a very, very consistent set of views and principles, and as media polarized, many fewer places were doing that, and I think Bari saw a market opportunity in that. Is her center what I think is a center? No, but I recognize a lot of editorial skill there [unintelligible 00:39:06]

David Remnick: You are now in a position, I would imagine, Ezra, that if you decided, "You know what, I'm going to go out on my own. I'm going to do a podcast called The Ezra Klein Show, and I'm going to get a staff of X, Y, and Z," and probably you could make a great deal more money than you do now. Why is it important for you to be at The Times as opposed to out on your own?

Ezra Klein: I believe in journalistic institutions. When I went out and did Vox, I was trying to build an institution, not just go out on my own and capture the most of my revenue that I could. I think that the mix of the news is exciting, and I'm committed to the news as an industry. I think if you carve out all the national politics, et cetera, then it's much harder to also have the foreign reporting, the local reporting, the cultural reporting, all the things that make up the bundle, and those are the things I often care about.

I think I'm just in this way, it goes to the way I look at the world, but also does me, I think I'm an institutionalist. I like being at institutions, and I admire them when they are doing good, and I want them to succeed because I think we need them.

[MUSIC]

David Remnick: I'm speaking with the political commentator and journalist Ezra Klein. We'll be back with the conclusion of our conversation in just a moment.

[MUSIC]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and today I've been speaking with Ezra Klein. On his podcast and in his columns for The New York Times, and in his book Abundance, he's been making a case for how the Democrats can re-emerge from the political wilderness, but some of his ideas have invited their fair share of detractors as well.

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

[MUSIC]

David Remnick: Let me ask you about an institution that we were talking about earlier, the Democratic Party. You talk a lot to people within the Democratic Party, leaders of the Democratic Party. It looks like a mess at this point. You have some promising people in the Democratic Party.

Ezra Klein: What makes you say that, David?

[laughter]

David Remnick: I just conjured it out of thin air. In New York City, it looks like Zohran Mamdani is going to be the next mayor of New York City. If I read you right, you have ambivalence about Mamdani, or have you come around in some way [crosstalk]?

Ezra Klein: No, I don't think I've ever had a particularly different-- I wrote a piece during the mayoral primary where I said I thought Brad Lander was the best choice, but I think Mamdani is an amazing political talent. I agree with him on many issues. My concerns about Mamdani really just have to do with, "Can he first get the revenue he needs for a very, very pricey agenda?"

He's talked a bunch about Abundance and done interviews with my co-author, Derek. Can he actually rebuild the government such that he can achieve the kinds of things he wants to achieve, and what is going to happen when the Trump administration moves into a confrontational mode with him? Because I think they will, right? They're going to want to break him, escalate ICE raids, send in the National Guard here, occupy New York City.

He's inexperienced as an executive. New York City is a very hard thing to run at the best of times. He has not run much, but I don't think of those as terrible demerits to somebody. You could have said some of the same things about Barack Obama on one level, and we're just going to have to see how it plays out. I think it is genuinely strange the way the leadership of the Democratic Party has treated him.

David Remnick: It's extraordinary.

Ezra Klein: I have never--

David Remnick: His state chairman, I think, is still on the sidelines.

Ezra Klein: At this point, I have just not heard an account that makes sense. If they're trying to keep at arm's length, it will not work. He is going to be the mayor of New York as a Democrat. Saying that they're friendly to him, but not endorsing him, is not going to save them from being painted by what he does. On the other hand, to all the people who are inspired by him and like him, they look feckless. I've said this on other shows. I would, on some level, respect it more if they don't want to endorse him, if they think he'd be a bad choice, then they should say that, but this weird ambivalence dance they're doing is, I just think, much more bizarre.

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

Ezra Klein: I don't think it comes from there.

David Remnick: Where do you think it comes from?

Ezra Klein: I think they are afraid that he will open up gigantic surfaces that they will have to defend and will have trouble doing. I am truly horrified at Israel's conduct in Gaza at this point.

David Remnick: I agree.

Ezra Klein: I think we're well past war crimes. I think we're into something generational. Mamdani's promise to, say, direct the New York City police to arrest Netanyahu the moment Netanyahu steps foot in New York City, say, to attend a UN meeting, which I think Netanyahu would probably love this confrontation, I can understand.

David Remnick: As would Trump.

Ezra Klein: As would Trump. I can understand why the Democratic Party's leadership is just afraid of what might combust, right? Israel's a very hard issue for them. It splits their base very badly. I can see if I squint. I don't think what they're afraid of is talent; I think they're afraid of something that goes off the rails, that they're then trying to defend, but I just don't think what they're doing makes sense.

I think you have to accept one thing I've been saying about the big tent of the Democratic Party is the theory of having a big tent doesn't just mean moving to the right; it also means accepting in the left, and Mamdani is going to be one of the left's standard bearers.

David Remnick: In the last two weeks, there have been stories about AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and what the future might hold for her, either running for Senate or even president. When you think about her, do you see her as a potential president?

Ezra Klein: I don't know. We'd have to see how she performed in a primary, what her agenda was, what her campaign looked like, how she performed under that kind of scrutiny. I think you have to see her as one of the people who is a serious contender for that role. She would naturally inherit Bernie's lane in most of his support. He doesn't have full control over supporters, of course, right?

Some people might have liked him who wouldn't like her, but I think the anti-oligarchy tour they were doing was, in certain ways, a passing of the torch from him to her. Bernie has been incredibly powerful in Democratic primaries and has come very near winning in 2016 and 2020, and I think that you have to assume that she would just start with a more solid base of support than all but a couple of other people. When I've seen the early polling, and you should be extraordinarily skeptical of 2025 polling for a 2028 primary, but she is--

David Remnick: I'll be skeptical of it in 2027.

Ezra Klein: Fair enough, but she is polling behind only Buttigieg and Newsom in polls where Kamala Harris is not included, and so you're looking at somebody who starts out with one of the clearest lanes because so many other candidates are going to be competing in the non-Bernie lane, and so it'd be pretty straightforward how you would imagine her winning the primary.

David Remnick: You were describing Obama before and his talents, but also his more capacious ideology. Who's in that lane?

Ezra Klein: I don't know that we know it yet. I have not seen. Probably the closest person in the way he thinks about politics is Buttigieg, but whether or not Buttigieg can do what Obama was able to do, and part of what made Obama such an extraordinary force in the Democratic Party was his support for Black voters, which Buttigieg really struggles with.

David Remnick: And continues to. Kamala Harris just admitted in her new book that the reason she didn't select Pete Buttigieg as her vice president was that he's gay, and that would have been, I don't know-

Ezra Klein: Really? She says that in the book?

David Remnick: -too much identity in one ticket. Yes. That she would have gone for Buttigieg.

Ezra Klein: I'd not read it yet, but that is interesting.

David Remnick: How do you mean, interesting?

Ezra Klein: It's just interesting. I'm surprised she said that.

David Remnick: We are at the close of our conversation, but I have to ask you a crucial question. Do you go to Burning Man?

Ezra Klein: I've been known to go to Burning Man.

David Remnick: Would I enjoy it?

Ezra Klein: No, David, you would not.

David Remnick: [laughs] You sleep on the ground, that sort of thing?

Ezra Klein: You could do it in different ways. You could take an RV. You could go to what's called a Plug-and-Play camp. I think it's an amazing thing for anybody to see once. You might enjoy it in the sense that--

David Remnick: Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.

[laughter]

Ezra Klein: It applies probably better there than most places.

David Remnick: No doubt. I would hate it.

Ezra Klein: You might have depths and multitudes inside of you that I don't know, but when I see the musicians that you profile, they're not the ones who play there.

David Remnick: No, I hear you. I hear you. Yes. I don't think they could sleep on the ground either. In fact, most of them are under the ground. [laughter] Ezra Klein, thank you so much.

Ezra Klein: David, really appreciate it.

[MUSIC]

David Remnick: Ezra Klein is the co-author of Abundance and the host of The Ezra Klein Show.

[MUSIC]

 

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