Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE | Lex Fridman Podcast #462

Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that's a huge difference between the two sides right now.

I think the steel man is very easy to make here. Department of Government Efficiency. That sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can.

Be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high speed rail when it wants to build high speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to afford, add affordable housing units. You know, I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about.

You know, deregulating the market, we need.

To think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it's trying to achieve. This is a world in which a Department of Government efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we're going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place.

In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now it won't stay that way. You cannot change American politics. You can't change the Democratic Party if you're not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by willing able to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow this guy ran like right after Mitt Romney and John McCain while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Right.

If you are not like the Democratic Party does need to change. It needs to attain a different form because the Obama coalition is exhausted. It's done. It's not going to be able to do that if it doesn't have standard bearers who are willing to say we were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently.

When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon's at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him, and maybe most importantly, for the purposes of this part of the conversation, you know the people who work for him, I'll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon, edX, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, I know exactly what Elon wants. This is his goal for the super heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter and the growth of our subscription business and how we're going to integrate new features. There's probably a really clear mind meld right now. I have no sense that there's a mind meld. And in fact I have the exact opposite sense that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an act of destruction.

Destruction.

We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It's much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint, to describe DOGE as an ideological purge of progressivism, performing an act of or performing the job of efficiency rather than a department of actual efficiency itself.

The following is a conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for the New York Times, author of why We're Polarized, and host of the Ezra Klein Show. Derek is a writer at the Atlantic, author of Hitmakers and On Work, and host of the Plain English podcast. Together they've written a new book, simply titled Abundance, that lays out a kind of manifesto for the left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democratic Party could stand for the coming election. If I may, let me comment on the fact that sometimes on this podcast I delve into the dark realm of politics. Indeed, politics often divides us and frankly, brings out the worst in some very smart people. Plus, to me, it is frustrating how much of the political discourse is drama and how little of it is rigorous, empathetic discussion of policy. I hate this, but I guess I understand why. If the other side is called either Hitler or Stalin online by swarms of chanting mobs, it's hard to carry out a nuanced discussion about immigration, healthcare, housing, education, foreign policy, and so on. On top of that, anytime I talk about politics, half the audience is pissed off at me. And no, there is no audience capture. I get shit on equally by different groups across the political spectrum depending on the gu. Why, I don't know, but I'm slowly coming to accept that this is the way of the world. I try to maintain my cool, return hate with compassion, and learn from the criticism and the general madness of it all. Still, I think it's valuable to sometimes talk about politics. It's an important part of the big picture of human civilization, but indeed it is only still a small part. My happy place is talking to scientists, engineers, programmers, video game designers, historians, philosophers, musicians Athletes, filmmakers, and so on. So I apologize for the occasional detour into politics, especially over the past few months, I did a few conversations with world leaders and I have a few more coming up. So there will be a few more political podcasts coming out, in part so I can be better prepared to deeply understand the mind, the life, and the perspective of each world leader. I hope you come along with me on this journey into the darkness of politics as I try to shine a light on the complex human mess of it all, hoping to understand us humans better. Always backed, of course, by deep, rigorous research and by empathy. Long term, I hope for political discussions to be only a small percentage of this podcast. If it's not your thing, please just skip these episodes or maybe come along anyway, since both you and I are reluctant travelers on this road trip. But who knows what we'll learn together about the world and about ourselves. This is the Lex Rubin podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

You are both firmly on the left.

Of the US political spectrum. Ezra, I've been a fan of yours.

For a long time. You're often referred to, at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left.

Can you try to define. Can you define the ideals and the vision of the American left?

Oh, good, we're starting small here.

And maybe contrast them with the American right, sure.

So the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations. Right. The luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. We are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out, well, we don't deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard and we also had talent, and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level, that we are sitting here is unfair. And that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited, is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity. Right. So people can have lives of flourishing. So I'd say that's one thing the left is fundamentally more skeptical of. Capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government. So I think in a way you have both. Like markets are things that are enforced by government. Whether they are how you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich building coal fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar panels. And the market doesn't know the difference between the two. And so there's a set of goals about regulating the unchecked potential of capitalism that also relates to sort of exploitation of workers. There's very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to the left. When you think about what the minimum wage is, I am a successful podcast host. When I go into a negotiation with the New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me. When you are a minimum wage worker. The reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They are not working with firms. And by the way, without certain kinds of regulation, those firms would cartelize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So trying to rectify power imbalances is, I think, another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the maybe, let's call it the intuitions. I want to say that's a podcast answer, not a book. I'm sure I left a million things out here, but I'll start there.

I mean, there's a lot of fascinating things there. On the unfairness of life that could be the interpersonal unfairness. So one person getting more money than another person, more skills or more natural abilities than another person. And then there's just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden you cross a street and the car runs a red light and runs you over and you're in the hospital. So that unfairness of life, general, I guess the left sees there's some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there's also a general notion of the size of government. I think the Left is more comfortable with a larger government as long as it's effective and efficient, at least in this idea.

That's certainly true. In the last 100 years. It was New Deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting the 1950s, 1970s, 1980s, it's typically been conservatives who've tried to constrict governments. Sometimes they failed, while liberals have typically tried to expand, certainly taxing and spending. But one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking, and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra's answer was really lovely, but, like, at a really high level, I thought maybe disagree with this. I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors.

What each side fears, what each side.

Values, and what each side tolerates. I think liberals fear injustice, and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society. And as a result, they value different things. Liberals, I think, tend to value change.

And at the level of government, that can mean change in terms of creating.

New programs that don't previously exist.

It's typically been liberals, for example, who've.

Been trying to expand health coverage, while conservatives have tried to cut it back just in the last few years. It was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the Chips and Science act, the ira. And then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it. And then I also think they tolerate different things.

I think liberals are more likely to.

Tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn't been.

While I think conservatives more likely to.

Tolerate injustice, they're more likely to say.

There'S a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world and we're not going to try to overcorrect for.

It with our policies.

And so I think that even at.

A layer above what Ezra was articulating with the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there's almost like an archetypal difference between what they fear and value and tolerate.

Liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes.

A bit of what people might think of as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition, and often tolerate injustice.

The only thing I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right likes small government, oversimplifies. The left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the imbalances of Power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance and national security state. I always think about the sort of George W. Bush era, although right now with ICE agents hassling all kinds of green card holders. You can think about this moment, too. But the right's view that on the one hand, the government is incompetent, and on the other hand, we could send our army across oceans, invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and then rebuild these societies we don't understand into fully functioning liberal democracies that will be our allies. We was an extraordinary level of trust in a very big government. I mean, that was expensive, that took manpower. That was compared to we're going to set up, you know, the Affordable Care act in America. That took a lot more faith in the US Government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left has more confidence in the government of the Czech, and the right has more confidence in the government of the gun.

You're right. There's some degree to which what the right, when the right speaks about the size of government, it's a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy, because they seem to always grow the size of government anyway. They just kind of say small government, but they don't. It's, you know, in the surveillance state, in the foreign policy, in terms of military involvement abroad. And really in every. Every program, they're not very good at cutting either.

They just kind of like to say it.

Cutting is really hard.

Government spends trillions of dollars, and if you cut billions of dollars, someone is.

Going to feel that pain and they're going to scream. And so you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall spending under Reagan.

Reagan might be one of the most.

Archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government.

Government grew under Reagan.

Defense grew, all sorts of programs grew.

So I think that one thing we're.

Sort of scrambling around in our answers.

Is that at a really high level.

There are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history.

But often at the level of implementation.

It can be a little bit messy. Even Bush's foreign policy that Ezra was describing, sort of from a big sense of American history, is very like Wilsonian, right? This sense of, like, it's America's duty to go out and change the world.

Or to use a current example, Mckinleyan or.

Or Mckinleyan. Right?

And a lot of people compare Donald.

Trump's foreign policy to Andrew Jackson.

This Sense of we need to pull back from the world, America first. We need to care about what's inside of our borders and care much less about what's outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don't fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative because those definitions can be mushy.

All right, so to descend down from the platonic ideals of the left and the right, who's actually running the show on the right and the left, who are the dominant forces, maybe you could describe, you mentioned Democratic socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream left and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism.

So on the right it's pretty straightforward at the moment. And the right is composed differently than it was 10 years ago. But the riot is run by Donald Trump and the people who have been given the nod of power by Donald Trump. So that is right now Elon Musk, but Elon Musk's power is coming from Donald Trump. That is, you know, maybe in some degrees, J.D. vance, maybe in some degrees Russ Vought, maybe sometimes, you know, Homans over at dhs, the right beneath that, the Republicans in Congress are extraordinarily disempowered compared to in other administrations. They are sort of being told what to do and they are doing what they are told. Republicans in Congress, Senate Republicans, they didn't want Pete Hegseth, they didn't want Cash Patel, they didn't want Tulsi Gabbard, they didn't want RFK Jr. Nobody got elected to be a Republican in the Senate hoping that they would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A member of the Kennedys, a Democrat who is pro choice and running as a Democrat two years ago for hhs. But Donald Trump told him to do it and they did. So the right has developed a very, very top down structure. And one of Trump's talents, one of the things that makes him a disruptive force in politics is his ability to upend the sort of coalitional struct the interest group structure that used to prevail. The Koch brothers were the big enemy of the left 10, 15 years ago. The view was that in many ways they set the agenda of the right. The Koch brother network is much less powerful under Donald Trump because he just disagrees with them and has disempowered them. Not to say none of their people or none of their groups are meaningful at all. They are, but you wouldn't put them at the forefront in the way that you might have had another time. Right this second we're using the left. But Democrats are in fundamental disarray. There is no leader Democrats. Senate Democrats decided to vote for the continuing resolution, avoiding a shutdown or a critical mass of them did. Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats, and Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, are in bitter disagreement over whether or not they should have done that. Democratic leadership isn't even united on the single biggest point of leverage they might have had. They disagree over whether or not it was even a point of leverage. Outside of them, the party is no leader, which is fairly normal after a pretty crushing defeat. But there isn't the next in line. So, you know, you go back, right, and it was pretty clear that, you know, after Barack Obama, it was going to be Hillary Clinton. After Hillary Clinton, it was either going to be Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had come in second in the primary. Joe Biden had been the vice president. You often have a presumptive next nominee who the party can look to for a kind of leadership. Even after 2000, Al Gore was still giving big speeches. There was a question about Al Gore running again. There is no presumptive in the Democratic Party right now. You can't turn around and say, oh, it's going to be Pete Buttigieg, it's going to be Josh Shapiro, it's going to be Gretchen Whitmer. Absent parties are given force. Modern parties, which are quite weak by historical standards, modern parties tend to be given force by a centralizing personality. Donald Trump being a very strong example of that on the right. But Barack Obama was the, the person who held the Democratic Party for a long time. In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won't stay that way. There's a rhythm to these things. There'll be a midterm. They're probably going to pick up a bunch of seats in the midterm. If that means Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker after the midterm, he's going to have a much louder voice because he's going to have power. It's going to be a harder road for Schumer to get back to the majority because of the Senate. Ma. And then we'll start having a primary on the left and you'll begin to see voices emerge out of that. But right now, the, you know, the Democratic Party, it doesn't have points of power. There's simply outside of, you know, at the national level, there is no Democrat who wields control over a branch of government. Right. They don't have the Supreme Court, they don't have the House, they don't have the Senate, they don't have the presidency, and they don't have a next in line. So you're looking at an organization without any of the people in a position to structure it. And the head of the dnc, the new head, Ken Martin, doesn't have power in that way. So they're pretty fractured.

You got a lot of criticism for this, but you were one of the people that early on said that Biden should step down. Why is the Democratic Party at this stage in its history, so bad at generating the truly inspiring person, to me personally, AOC is an example of a person that might be that person.

You should have her on the show.

I would watch that, definitely. I really try to. And we'll talk about this. I try to do like two, three hours. And there's a hesitancy on the left especially to do these kinds of long programs. I think it's a trust issue. I'm not exactly sure what it is. 80% of the people on this show are left wings. I'm pretty good faith and I try to bring out the best in people.

Have you invited her?

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah.

Yeah, we'll see what happens when. When people get closer to 2028, sure. Maybe we'll begin taking. Taking that. I hope so.

You know, Bernie's up there in age, so he can't, you know, he can't do it anymore. Why is the Democratic Party so bad at generating.

I don't think it's so bad at generating them. I think that it was. It turned out to be bad at generating them this year. Look, like I. Yeah, as you mentioned, you know, back in February 2023, somebody who came out and said, like, like Biden can't run again. This isn't going to work. And my view, and that was really what that set of pieces was about, was about the argument that even though Biden was clearly going to win the primary, there was still time for Democrats to do something the parties had done in the past and have an open convention. And you could structure the lead up to an open convention in a number of different ways. Right. You could have something like a mini primary, but basically you'd have Democrats out in the media out giving speeches, and their ultimate audience would be the delegates, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention. And my hope was through that that you would find the person for this moment. The thing for Kamala Harris that was really difficult was she was for another moment, she was picked by Joe Biden in 2020amidst just a very different political equilibrium. A sense that you had a transitionary moment between two versions of the Democratic Party. Maybe Joe Biden reaching a little bit back to the past, to these sort of lunch pail, you know, blue collar Democrats. Joe from Scranton was a big, a big part of the Joe Biden appeal. But also Biden never has a chance if he's not not Barack Obama's vice president. And so you have this sort of weird set of historical factors like operating at the same time. There's a desire for stability and experience. Amidst the chaos of Donald Trump and the pandemic, there is Biden as Obama's vice president, who nevertheless did not run in the election after Obama. I think a lot of people look back at 2016 and think, you know what if Biden had been the candidate, he would have beaten Trump and we would live in a different reality. And then Biden chose Harris as an effort to shore up his own, at least assumed weaknesses. Right. He's a white man in the Democratic Party at a time when the Democratic Party is diversifying and when the view of how you win elections is you put, is you put back together the Obama coalition. And the Obama coalition is young people, it's, you know, voters of color and it's enough working class white voters and then college educated white voters. Right. That's the Obama coalition. And so Biden picks Harris, you know, for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought I should have picked Tammy Duckworth. But there are different people out there. And then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. First, she has a particular background from California where she's tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime Prosecutor. But she runs in the Democratic Party at a time when it's turned on that kind of politics. People want a lot from her personally, but they don't want a sort of prosecutorial character. So she sort of abandons that and never, I think, really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running, you know, in, in 2024, that works. But she's a talented debater, she's a very talented performer on the stump, but she doesn't really have a theory of politics and policy that she's identified with. But she's a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being, you know, in 2020, a 78 year old white guy he understands the future is not here him, or at least not just him. And he's sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that speaks to his own, you know, potential weaknesses. I think by 2024 you have two problems, right? Once he only steps down, what is it June like? They are weeks from the dnc. They don't have time anymore for an open convention. You now have. The Biden administration is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. So now you have Kamala Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated. It's a Biden Harris administration. She doesn't really have a lane on cost of living. It's not something she's known for working on in the Senate. It's not something she has a bunch of great ideas about, not something she's good at talking about. It's probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost of living election. And she's had no time to build that out.

Right.

Maybe if she had been running in a primary for, you know, a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg and whomever else, she either would have figured out how to do it it right. Primaries are periods of education and learning for the candidates too, or they would have found somebody else who could do it. But she doesn't get any of that right. She's thrown into the game with three months to go. So they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden's inspiring or not, he was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term. And he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn't. And then the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn't go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which she was run running. We'll see what they do in 2028. But the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe.

There's two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked, one, why did Trump win? And two, why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming onto an unstructured three hour conversation with you? Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump's victory in 2024 was over determined. There are a lot of factors here.

Number one, if you look internationally, incumbents.

Lost all over the world. They lost in the US they lost in Europe they lost in pretty much every developed country at rates that we really haven't seen in 50 years. And that's largely because the inflation crisis that came after Covid created an absolute disaster for incumbent establishment power. People couldn't bring prices down, voters were furious, and they were destroying establishment orders.

All over the world.

Democrats happen to be in power, and as a result, they got the brunt of it. That's number one.

Number two, if you look at elections.

Over the 21st century, two things are true.

One, almost every election is unbelievably close. For reasons that I'm not sure I entirely understand. The parties have gotten really good, historically bizarrely good, at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48%.

Such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5%.

And in a world like that, that little thermostatic swings are very important. And what we've seen over the last.

Few years, and there's this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics that.

Says that what often happens in politics is one party has a very compelling message of change. They become the establishment and then they become the victims of exactly the weapon that they marshaled that then the next.

Out group party says, we have a theory of change and we're going to throw out the bums.

And the next party comes in and they overreach and then they lose in a worldview of thermostatic change. And every election is very close.

You tend to have elections swinging back and forth. So I think that also explains why Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold.

Onto Power for six year, eight year, 12 year terms, the same way they.

Did, say in the 1930s or 1960s.

But finally, you have to look at.

What kind of character Donald Trump is.

And what kind of a media figure he is. We were just talking off camera about how every age of communications technology revolution clicks into focus, a new skill that is suddenly in critical demand for the electorate. Right. The world of radio technology is a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt can.

Be powerful in a way that he can't be in the 1890s.

And then you have the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower. 1956, I believe, was the first televised national convention. Famously the 1960 presidential debates between JFK and Richard Nixon. Take an election that is leaning toward Nixon and make it an election that's leaning toward JFK because he's so damn handsome.

And also just electrically compelling on a screen.

We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television on steroids.

It's a different species entirely.

And it seems to favor. It seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live wire authenticity. They're good at performing authenticity.

As paradoxical as that sounds, Trump is.

An absolute marvel at performing authenticity, even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He's just an amazing performer for this age. And it speaks to the fact that he seems to be, to borrow Ezra's term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience. There doesn't seem to be this sort.

Of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft his message to different audiences.

He just seems to be like a.

Live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age.

And there is a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the vibe of the rule follower. And the vibe of the bureaucratic rule follower is a little bit afraid of.

Unstructured conversation, is always performing the background algorithm of how do I communicate in.

A way that balances all of the.

Coalitions on my side?

Because.