Ezra Klein on Why We're Polarized

Welcome to Another Way, the Podcast of Equal Citizens. I'm Jason Haro, Equal Citizens Director and Chief Counsel. Today we've got a really special episode of the podcast for you. It's a live conversation between Equal Citizens founder Larry Lessig and Vox Media founder Ezra Klein about Ezra's new book, why We're Polarized. Spoiler alert. Part of the reason we're so polarized is that our democratic system could use a reform or two. Hear more details in their conversation before we start it, just a few links. You can support this podcast on patreon@patreon.com/ecitizens and you can find our whole archive online@equalcitizens us anotherway. The event, meanwhile, was held in Back Bay in Boston and hosted by the Harvard Bookstore. The audio you're about to hear is courtesy of the wonderful folks at the Forum Network of WGBH Boston. They'll also have a video up on their website. So if you want to see what happened, in addition to hearing it, search for WGBH Forum Network in your favorite search engine or check out the link that'll be in the show notes. And now enjoy Ezra Klein in Conversation with Larry Lessig.

Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. My name is Lauren Artilles. On behalf of Harvard Book Store, I'm so pleased to welcome you to this evening's event with Ezra Klein and presenting his new book, why We're Polarized in Conversation with Lawrence Lessig. For any of you not familiar, Harvard Bookstore is Harvard Square's landmark independent bookstore just across the river a few T stops away. Come visit. This evening's program is one of the highlights of a season absolutely packed with Harvard Bookstore events. Visit us online@harvard.com events and sign up for our weekly email newsletter to learn more. The conversation this evening will conclude with some times for the question you've submitted. All copies of our featured title have been personally pre signed by the author. If you haven't yet picked up your signed copy, you can do so after the talk in the lobby on your way out this evening. And I just want to take a moment to say thank you for buying books at Harvard Bookstore. Your purchases support this Author series and ensure the future of a local independent bookstore. So thank you. And finally, a quick reminder to silence your cell phones for the talk. And now I'm so pleased to introduce tonight's speakers. Ezra Klein is the Editor at large and co founder of Vox, the award winning explanatory news organization. He is also the host of the podcast the Ezra Klein show, co host of the Weeds podcast and an executive producer on Vox's Netflix show, explained previously he was a columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at msnbc, and a contributor to Bloomberg. Tonight, Ezra is joined on stage by Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Fuhrman professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, host of the podcast Another Way, and co founder of the Creative Commons. They'll be discussing Ezra Klein's new book, why We're Polarized, which argues that America's political system isn't broken, but that the truth is scarier. It's working exactly as designed. Chris Hayes calls it absolutely crucial for understanding this perilous moment. And Rebecca Traister writes, why We're Polarized makes the compelling case that the centuries long battle to perfect our union means we were built to be split. Klein's provocative question is whether America's democratic systems and institutions can bear up under the weight of our divides. We are so pleased to host this event here in Boston tonight. Please join me in welcoming Ezra Klein and Lawrence Lessig.

There are a lot of you, thank you all for coming out.

So this is an extraordinary event, not just because the whole of Boston is here, but you know, I'm not very good with jokes, so I'm just going to skip to the punchline right away so we can just set up the sense of what this conversation has to be about. You might have seen Fareed Zakaria refer to this as perhaps the politics book of the year. That's, I think, understating it. This is an extraordinary piece of work and it will define, it will anchor the debate not just for the year, but for as far as we can see. And it's not just because the substance tackles and addresses these questions in a way that's incredibly illuminating and teaches us an enormous amount that at least I hadn't seen. But also because you're liberated from being an academic, you don't have to do it in just one discipline. What's so beautiful about this book is the way you weave together the work and insights of so many different people and disciplines and to bring us to a place which I think genuinely many people in some sense had a sense of, but we were not yet there and this gets us there. And I think we should start by just saying, Ezra, thank you for that contribution. Yes, that's the way we thank

the 20 I slipped Larry backstage is, as you can see, money very well spent.

Okay, 20 would just not cut it, Ezra,

but thank you. Thank you for your. Thank you for the very kind words.

So what I hope to do in this conversation is, through the questions that I want to play here, give you a deeper sense of what's in this extraordinary book. Ezra, very generously and with some humility, said, look, we don't really have to talk so much about the book. We can talk about whatever you find is interesting. But the thing I find interesting right now is the book. So I want to start and move there and then. And then move into what I think we need to complement this with or what more there is to think once we accept this as a foundation, but to give people a clear sense of this. I think the one quote right from the very beginning of your book where you describe what this is about. You say a core argument of this book is that everyone engaged in American politics is engaged in identity politics. And this is something that is new and in some sense pathological in your understanding of how politics has evolved. But give us a sense of the sense of identity politics that you mean because it's richer than our ordinary sense in which we talk about it.

Yeah. So thank you for all very much for all the kind words. It's strange to have a book move from abstraction in your head that you're living with, and by the end, you're. You're genuinely wondering in your fourth copy edit, do these words make sense in any order? And then it comes out and people find some value in it. So I'm grateful for that. Identity is at the center of this book. Identity as a dimension of politics, because it is a dimension of human behavior and human cognition that needs to be seen as almost coexistent with policy, with party, with ideology, with these things that we normally understand political behavior and political conflict as revolving around. I'm a policy guy from way back. I mean, you and I know each other from. From that work. And the thing that was always so striking to me about covering policy was policy was always positive sum. I would be at the beginning of a healthcare fight or a climate fight or a financial reform fight, and people would be able to imagine a way, whatever it was, that you could come up with a compromise where everybody would prefer to the status quo. And then by the end, there was no compromise to be had. Everything was red blue. Identity politics is a term that I think we badly need and we've managed to have and define in a way that has blinded us to what it should mean, which is to say identity politics is a way we discredit and marginalize the political claims of weaker groups by suggesting that Their political claims come from a sense of identity, a particularistic experience that they have had. So African Americans rallying as part of Black Lives Matter against police brutality. That's called identity politics. Donald Trump running for office to build a wall across the southern border, well, that's just politics. Rural gun owners, billionaire CEOs who want a tax cut, just politics. Identity politics is perversely, somewhat most visible when the identities get weaker, not strongest. We have less identity politics in a way now than we did before, because there's not singular majoritarian identities that are so strong and so dominant that they can dominate all of politics and dominate the agenda and become in that way invisible. But recognizing that we all have identities, that the identities we have interact with our politics and then being able to see the way they've changed over time. And that, I think, is what you're getting at, which is that was all a little bit of psychological setup to say what has changed in politics over the past 50 or 60 years is that identities that used to cross cut each other have begun to stack on top of each other. So it used to be that we had Democrats and Republicans, as we have now, but we had liberal Republicans, we had deeply conservative Democrats. When Strom Thurmond was one of the most conservative members of the US Senate, he was a Democrat. He became a Republican later in his career. We had a lot less sorting on race, on religion, on geography. It didn't used to tell you much if somebody lived in a city or not. It didn't used to tell you much if they were Hispanic or not, if they were Catholic or not. And now it does. As they've all stacked on top of each other, our political identities have become what Liliana Mason calls mega identities. And when that happens, when the other side is simultaneously different from us ideologically, but also across all these other demographic factors, they become very threatening. Their vision for governance very different. And the amount of hostility and the difficulty of bridging the gap in politics much, much more significant.

Yeah. So you build on the work of Sam Rosenfeld's wonderful book the Polarizers, which tells this history. And I remember when I first read it, I really literally could not imagine how it was true. And the history is a period of American history all the way up until the, you know, basically Goldwater begins to unravel it. When people affirmatively argue that we need political parties that are not ideological, that they say that if we had ideological political parties, a left party and a right party, it just couldn't work with Americans. Separated powers, system of checks and balances. It would break American democracy. And so they would affirmatively say, we need these muddied parties if we're gonna have the capacity for governance. Now that's an idea which today I think is almost unrecoverable. We can't kind of even understand what that would mean. But it pushes the question which I think so much of your book is pushing, which is, can we really run governments if we have the kind of polarization that you're talking right now? And I don't mean government in general. I mean government given the Constitution that we have inherited right now.

So this is a big theme of the book, and I want to say it forthrightly. I have a couple thoughts in the book that are going to be common to people and a couple that are going to be a little bit more of a challenge. And here's one of the more challenging ones. Polarization is fine. It is natural. It is normal. We see it in other countries. We've seen it in this country before. There is nothing crazy or wrong with different political parties or political coalitions just being different from each other. And so, as Larry is saying, in 1950, you have the American Political Science association releases report called Towards a Responsible Two Party System. And their argument, a little bit the reverse of this other part of Sam's book. Their argument is, America's got this terrible problem. And the terrible problem is our parties aren't polarized. And now today you say that, and it sounds like you're making an argument for toe fungus and kicking puppies. But they were. It made a kind of logical sense because here was the argument. You were a Democrat voting for Strom Thurmond in South Carolina. At the same time someone else was a Democrat voting for Hubert Humphrey in Minnesota. The most important vote we cast in a party system is for which party will be in control. This whole thing of voting for individuals, it's nice. It sort of is true. But much more than we vote for individuals, conceptually at least, we vote for parties. The problem was the parties were not honoring the agendas that they were promising the voters in those regional areas they would honor. Hubert Humphrey and Strom Thurmond wanted almost exactly opposite visions of what should happen in American politics, particularly around race. And so what the political scientists and many others said at the time was, this is crazy. It's crazy that we don't have a clear choice that you can make in an area and see that honored at the national level. This is what Barry Goldberg's, Barry Goldworth's Barry Goldwater's a choice, not an echo speech is all about this idea that you want to have a Republican running for president who is notably clearly different than the Democrat they're running against. It should be a choice. And at some basic level, they're right. The problem is, and this was noted at the time by dissenters like Austin Ranney, a great political scientist, and others, that America's political system is weird. In particular, when you get. When you win an election, it doesn't mean you get the power to govern, because we divide power between so many branches. We have things like the filibuster, what Francis Fuigama calls a vetocracy. There are so many ways to stop something from happening that in order to get things done, you need very high levels of bipartisan support. So that works out fine when you have these weird mixed parties with conservatives in them and liberals in them and all kinds of demographic groups and so on. But then when you get these parties that become different and they see the other one as a threat and they really disagree and they don't want to cooperate with each other, all of a sudden, governance grinds to a halt, and then everything is just endlessly stuck in the stage of conflict. Everybody's constantly fighting for power and then never being quite able to wield it. The public never is actually able to decide, well, did they like how? Did we like how we were governed, or did we not? Because it's an endless fight over why things didn't really happen or why they got a quarter loaf as opposed to the whole thing they promised. And so the key thing this is a book, like the title, is why we're polarized. But. And I fought very hard to not have a subtitle and will pat myself on the back for that victory forever. But the answer, like, in a weird way, the title is misleading because it's not just a book. It is a book about the interaction between polarization and America's political institutions, including, by the way, the media. Not just straightforwardly political institutions, because it's in that interaction that the problem is you can be polarized and have a functional political system. Other countries do it all the time. It's our particular political system that is creating a lot of problems right now.

So this is the one question. I mean, there's actually 17 questions I have, but this is the one that I want to push strongest on. At the end of the book, you do surprise by saying, you know, for example, I don't consider polarization to be a problem. You recount the extraordinary Struggle that Obama had to get his Supreme Court nominee even to have a hearing. And at the end of that, you say, it may sound ridiculous, but both McConnell and Obama represented legitimate electoral majorities and there was no obvious way to resolve their differences. So I want to say it is ridiculous to say that. Right? Because if we live in a political system that has a constitution, that can't survive with that kind of polarization, then we should be able to say, look, given the system we have, you can't behave like this. If you behave like this, we can't have governance. And so we could choose to change the system. We could become a parliamentary system where you can have, like, a militant minority and it doesn't really matter. But if we have a system of checks and balances, then to allow this level of partisan reality to manifest itself without strong critique is basically to give up the capacity to govern.

I guess what I would say is that having spent a number of years strongly critiquing Mitch McConnell, I've come to believe it's an ineffective road to social change.

Okay, what about defeating him at the election?

No, that's fair. The reason I make this argument in the book, and I think liberals will read this part with some heartburn, that it is hard to figure, it is hard to put your finger on what exactly from Mitch McConnell's perspective did Mitch McConnell do wrong on the Merrick Garland affair? It is not hard from my perspective to say what he did wrong. I think he did something terrible, but he didn't invent a new constitutional power. He had the votes. And by the way, it wasn't just him. If his Republican colleagues had not wanted him to do it, it wouldn't have worked. It was only because he had their lockstep support that that could actually happen. And so one of the things, it is certainly the case, as you suggest, that I have come to the view that the forces that are pushing us towards polarization are so myriad, and there's so much part of ecosystems and institutions and technology changes and a hundred other things that it feels to me like we're on this polarization flywheel. And so, yes, my view is that if you want to come up with a path forward, it's changing the system to work amidst polarization, not telling people to not be polarized because they're just going to be polarized on some level. We all have, like, deep in our hearts, an extremely good answer to how polarization should end, which is more people should agree with me. And, and this is important. This is way and the People who agree with me should wield more power. And if you look at my book, and I think this is a critique I've gotten from people on the right and on some level they're correct. I argue for democratization. I think it is, as my people say, Ashonda, that we have the White House is occupied by the guy who won fewer votes. The Senate is run by the party that won fewer votes. The Supreme Court, because of those two things, is occupied by the party or dominated by the party that won fewer votes in the relevant elections. Only the House actually represents a popular vote majority. That is a bad incentive structure for a system. But the problem is it is an incentive structure that at least one of the parties really prefers. And so I think it, I think the way forward might be democratization, but it is the very. If that were a way, what's the right way to say this? The polarization problem I am trying to solve through that is the blockage to getting that done, at least until the demographics or something else changes very fundamentally in the system. And so more than I really have a way forward, what I just have is a description of why people are doing what they're doing. And in McConnell's case, the only thing I will say, I don't even want to say in his defense, but the only thing I will say about what was happening there that I think is worth reflecting on more is Supreme Court nominations had for a long time operated under a strange set of norms, not rules. And that was, although this was a very ideologically important vote, you would not treat it the way you would treat a normal vote on a bill. You thought about qualifications, you didn't think about ideology. The question was, was this person a capable juror, a great juror, a brilliant legal mind? Antonin Scalia was confirmed unanimously by the US Senate. So that's many, many Democrats voting for him. But part of the reason that had happened was that in this depolarized mid 20th century period, Supreme Court nominees actually voted very unpredictably. Some very liberal nominees were nominated by Republicans. Think of a David Souter or an Earl Warren. Very conservative nominees were in fact at times nominated by Democrats like a Byron White. And so what had happened was that the parties looked at this and said, this was a terrible mistake. We have made a terrible mistake. And they got much better at vetting. And their people stopped surprising them once on the court and once they became clearly ideological warriors on the court, all of a sudden the idea that you could treat this as a non ideological vote fell away because it was an ideological vote. It's probably the most important ideological vote most members of the Senate will ever cast, certainly than they were going to cast in 2014 or 2015 or 2016. And so once you've done that, then it becomes very hard to say to people, set that aside for now. The problem is, as you point out, if they don't set it aside, well, at some point the system is just going to break down because we're going to stop being able to appoint Supreme Court justices, which is oftentimes the conclusion of my book on things is this seems very bad and it seems bad,

but I do want to insist that there's a space between the conservation kind of cynical answer that elicited the laugh and the point I'm trying to make. Right. So the cynical answer is everybody in response to polarization says it's solved if you just agree with me. But I'm not saying that we should be able to come to a place where I don't have to agree with your nominee to the Supreme Court to say we ought to have a set of norms about how we think about this that elevates it above politics. I mean, one might think the same thing might happen in the context of impeachment, but that's even more ridiculous to even discuss right now. But. So let's stay with the Supreme Court. But the point is, if you realize the system can't work unless you're able to sustain those norms, then at least we should be able to say, look, we've got to fight for those norms. We can't just sort of embrace them because without, embrace the polarization. Because if we embrace the polarization, we've given up on the capacity of, of American government to function unless we're going to throw it out.

So let me push it back at you because I do think you're right and I'm being a little glib and playing to the crowd because it's a populist era and. But in some big way, you're obviously right. But let me push it back at you. So If I'm Mitch McConnell sitting here and I've emerged from my shell and I say that's correct, but the way it should have worked is it because Republicans, because my party had just won an overwhelming victory in the midterm elections, which is true, he at that moment, he really was leading what was a majority and a popular vote majority as well, and particularly because it was a swing vote that Obama shouldn't have nominated even a compromise Democratic nominee that if he wanted our votes, it should have been a nominee who upheld the status quo. Why was it on me, Mitch McConnell, and my Republican colleagues to be the ones to come over to the other side? Because, yes, Merrick Garland was a compromise nominee compared to other Democrats and liberal jurors who could have been nominated, but he was nevertheless going to be a reliable vote for Roe. He was going to be a vote to the left, and compared to Scalia, it was going to be a big shift.

So.

So that, I think is, I don't think you're in some big way wrong, but to be less glib about the people's answer to polarization as folks should agree with me, I think that the McConnell response to this, which I'd be curious to hear your answer to, is, sure, that's very fine. But I won the last election, so come over to my side and make the compromise with me.

Yeah, so he won the last senatorial election. The President took that into account. Because, I mean, from my perspective, Merrick Garland was not a small compromise. He was a huge compromise. I mean, he's a great jurist, but from the standpoint of matching liberal to conservative, given the extraordinary shift that you've seen on the court, many people said that Obama compromised too much by appointing somebody like Garland. So Obama moved to try to meet McConnell, and McConnell wouldn't acknowledge that even by giving hearings. But of course, all of this ignores the fact that last year, when McConnell was asked, what happens if somebody, you know, if a justice dies before February 2020, will you respect the same rule that you applied against Obama? He said, no, hell no, we'll get a nominee. 3. So the point is he is embracing a purely partisan principle for doing his job, not just here, but obviously throughout the context of the work that he's doing. And we ought to have a way for Republicans and Democrats both to say, look, hey, you want to have a parliamentary system where that's the way we play, we need a new Constitution. This Constitution can't survive with that.

Listen, what you are saying about McConnell in terms of his moral approach to politics is 100% right. And that moment when he was asked that, and he. So he gets asked and there's a CNN reporter in the room, and he smiles and he takes a sip of his drink and he says, oh, sure, we'd fill the seat if it came up in 2020. Oh, sure, we'd fill the seat. The thing about Mitch McConnell, one of the reasons he is useful as somebody to cover, is that there's a tremendous amount of bullshit in politics. And there's certainly some amount of bullshit with him. I mean, he pretended the reason he wasn't voting for Merrick Garland was that there was a principled objection to filling a seat in an election year. But one of the things that is helpful about him is most of the time he dispenses with that and he's pretty clear that he is simply following the power incentives of the system. And I always think about him saying my number one, our number one priority is making Barack Obama a one term president. And that was considered a great gaffe of his. But it's also how a lot of Republicans honestly thought and it's how a lot of members of Congress could rationally imagine. I mean, the differences between the parties are big enough now that it's not crazy that your priority would be getting somebody who you believe would be better for the country and to govern. I have somehow managed to like paint myself into the corner of spending this evening defending and semi praising Mitch McConnell. But the reason I do it is that I have become, and maybe this is just having covered politics in Washington for a little bit too long, I have become very pessimistic that we are going to one, restrain people through shame. One of the very, very deep trends I see, and Donald Trump is an apotheosis of it, but others are learning from him is the recognition among politicians that a sense of shame is simply a liability. And we can talk about that. But one of the lessons of the past couple of years in my view, is that more of the system relied on activating individual elected officials or candidates sense of shame than we realized. The constraints were not external, they were not real, except for to the extent people did not want to be criticized and understood as a cynical, untruthful, bigoted, et cetera, actor. So that's one. But the other is that I also don't think to my great despair that people vote on this. I mean, what I will say in the McConnell example there is McConnell took a gamble. It was for him too an election year. There was a presidential election happening and it was entirely possible that in doing something that polled quite badly, a majority of Americans believed Merrick Garland should at the very least have a hearing that McConnell could have hurt his own side. But he made a bet. And with the help of America's weird political geography, that bet paid off for him. You can actually make a quite good argument that that bet is why Donald Trump won, that it was the lure of that open seat that held conservatives who might otherwise have stayed home or not, like Trump to come out. And so I don't want to take up, I think a very reasonable criticism that has been made of me before, and I think it's largely true, is that I let people a little too off the hook in making a systemic analysis for what are truly nevertheless, individual moral decisions. So I agree with what you're saying on that level, but in my more systemic analysis, I don't think it's going to work.

Okay. So that's what I want to make sure we cover. Because what's so striking, the book is not just about the politics. It also complements that with both an understanding of the challenge that we have psychologically, especially in the context of a media environment that has fragmented us and profits from polarizing us. And let's start with the psychological point, because this is something especially which is not well understood, which is especially striking here. And one of the things that you argue, and well supported in the literature, is that psychologically given we've framed these debates in tribal terms and we live in our own tribal existences, we all become incredibly good at silencing opposition in our own head. We can't even hear opposition anymore. And we've become very good at rationalizing everything to our own position and especially smart people. Do you have a chapter called the Press Secretary in your head? And you think of Kellyanne Conway, who's obviously a brilliant person.

How dare you.

Who's obviously a brilliant person. But she's a brilliant person. She's so, so good at taking every crazy fact and retelling it in a way that affirms her side. And your argument, your story, is that this is just a fact about us as humans, that this is what we do. And in this environment, this compliment that complicates the opportunity to address the political problem.

Yeah. I think that the most optimistic story you can tell about American politics is that it's a set of informational misunderstandings. If only you could hear what I'm telling you. You knew what I knew you would agree with me. And I will say that for me and the work I do, this research is core shaking. It is, I say in the book, it's like staring into the abyss. And to further the Nietzsche quote, and the abyss stares back.

We,

when our reasoning is in conflict with our self interest, it's not just that our self interest wins, it's that our reasoning moves into alliance with it. And the better we are at reasoning, the more quickly and powerfully that can happen. I'll tell you one of my Favorite, least favorite, et cetera. Studies in the book is by a guy named Dan Kahan and co authors. He's at Yale Law, but he's a. But he studies political psychology fundamentally. And he gave people this brain teaser. And it's a math problem. And if you read it, it's going to trick you. Unless you're really good at math, and I am not, it's going to trick you into getting the wrong answer. And in its main form, it reads as a question about whether or not a skincare cream is working. So he'd give it to people and as you would expect, if you're better at math, you get it right more often. Then he gave people another variant, same brain teaser, same problem, same trick, except now it was about gun control and whether a gun control policy worked. And all of a sudden whether you are good or bad at math stops predicting how well you do on the brain teaser. What matters is whether or not you agree with the way the gun control thing comes out. And what's craziest about this is the difference is biggest for the people who are best at math. The people are really good at math when they see it and they agree with it, they absolutely get it right. And the people who are really good at math, when they see it and they don't agree with it, they get it wrong. And this has been demonstrated over and over and over again. Just another. This is an easy study, but it's just one I love when we read things that we disagree with, it takes us longer to read them. And the reason is because we are going through formulating counter arguments. I'll give a third. They paid people on Twitter. It turns out you can actually get paid for wasting your time on Twitter. They paid people on Twitter to see. To basically insert into their feeds a certain amount of the other side. Right? So if you're a liberal, 1 out of 10 or something tweets you saw was now from a conservative and vice versa. And what it did was it made conservatives more conservative. And if you were Liberal, it wasn't 100. It wasn't statistically significant. But if it did anything, it made you more liberal. And so the lesson here is that when our group needs us to believe something, being really good at making arguments and finding information, there's also a lot of evidence that just getting more information makes you better at motivated reasoning will make you better at getting to the answer your group needs you to get to. And if you don't believe me, I invite you to watch the Senate's impeachment proceedings. A hard thing about this research and about these arguments, and I want to note it, is that, and this is why I say it's like staring into the abyss is that obviously it implicates me, too. It implicates all of you, who I'm sure think you're very smart. And we're here at the Harvard Book Store event and we're in Cambridge and, oh, well, we're in Boston. I'm told it's important information. And of course we don't believe we're doing this. And to some degree, hopefully a lot of the time we're not. The thing I will just say to not be unbelievably gloomy about this, is that I think that the place this takes you is not completely into a nihilism of we can never know if we're just messing with our own heads. I think the place it takes you is into a greater appreciation of the need for institutions and the disciplining effect of institutions that have other incentives than maybe some of our main political ones or whatever it might be. I've started to think, and we can talk more about this if you want, or this can just be a blind alley I led us into and we walk back out of. But I've started to think about human reason almost like you think of self interest under capitalism. It's a very powerful force and you can harness it for good or ill ends. And so the question with capitalism is not does it work? But have you regulated markets such that it works in the public's favor or against the public's interest? And I think that's largely true for reason, too, that you need it to be harnessed in the right ways. You need institutions that have incentives to get things right. And I think that one reason you see some imbalance in this, including in this particular impeachment proceeding, is that things like the mainstream media are disciplining Democrats in ways that Republicans have walled themselves off from. But nevertheless, if you look at the individual level and you wipe out this institutional analysis, liberals tend to do this stuff almost exactly as much as conservatives. And so this hitch in the way we think and the way we gather information and the way we process it, it seems very deeply woven into the human animal.

Yeah. So let's talk about another of these institutions. You quote this wonderful line from Will Ferrell in Anchorman 2, in which he

says, great political scientist, as you all know.

Yes. What if instead of telling people the things they need to know, we tell them what they want to know and then you continue. Which is like the creation story of cable news. So we live with a political institution, cable news and news more generally. You don't talk a lot about the Internet, but let's talk, let's add that into the mix, which almost has it built into their business interest, their business model, to make us as crazy and partisan and tribal as we can. When Fox News, when Roger Ailes went to Fox, started Fox News, and he said, we're not going to have a news station that tries to appeal to everybody. We're going to have a news station that appeals to our base and we're going to rally our base. People were astonished even at Fox News. They couldn't believe that's what they would do. But now that is the business model of every one of these cable networks. And so if we have the business model of turning us into tribes, plus the psychology of being vulnerable to being turned into tribes, I guess. Is there anything super. Do we really have to read your book to learn that in fact we are polarized and tribal?

I mean. Yes, because at the end there's a surprise to it. No, I don't know. Maybe you don't. The media analysis in the book, because I'm somebody in the media. And by the way, some of that same analysis can apply to vox. The media chapter of the book is something that I think about and struggle with a lot. And it's an unfinished. Like it's an unclosed loop in my own psyche. But let me, let me give a very quick tracing of it, which is the huge change in media. And there really has been a big structural change over the past 30, 40, let's call it years, is a move from what you might call like passive consumption to active consumption, which is to say we move from a space where there are relatively few choices. And so the ability to decide what it is you are going to watch was quite limited. Maybe you got a TV because you didn't want to miss I Love Lucy, but at 6p, the networks all play the news. You had some radio, you know, you get a local newspaper, there just wasn't that much. Then there's this huge explosion of choices. You get cable news, you get the Internet, and we actually do have data on this. What's amazing about it is that with this huge explosion of information, we don't become more politically informed on average. What happens is we segregate by interest. So people who want to know about politics, they all of a sudden can know much more. People who don't want to know about politics they can know much less. The explosion of political information is more than matched by the explosion of non political cable channels. Right? There is MSNBC and Fox News, but there's also HGTV and MTV and the Hallmark channel and whatever it is you might actually like to watch. And so what we see then is the media moves into this new business model where instead of working off of monopolies of some sort or another, a local newspaper monopoly, a monopoly granted, by getting part of public airwaves, you're moving into a competitive realm where you're competing for people's attention when they have a lot of other choices. And so you're competing for an audience that is interested and is distracted. And the reason they're interested is because they've chosen a side. And the reason they're distracted is there's too much stuff. And the way you get them is you turn up the volume. And not only that, but it gets worse then when you layer in social media, because the way your work increasingly gets distributed is by people choosing to share the things they have the strongest reaction to. And I thought about this a lot. So when we launched Vox, this has calmed down now. But when we launched, Vox was right at sort of the apex of Facebook traffic. And Facebook had opened this spigot into the news. And all of a sudden Facebook had gone from being nothing a couple years ago to 40% of the traffic for major, major, major news brands. And how did you get it? You had these curiosity gap headlines and partisan headlines and so on. But what was always striking to me at Vox is that I would look at what was happening on our analytics and I would realize that whatever the mix of stories we had put out that day, no matter how carefully planned it was, no matter how, how even balanced in different ways, that it was really, it was like six stories had been the bulk of our traffic that day, and I hadn't chosen which six, and sometimes it wasn't the six that I had wanted to choose. And so people were getting a very different view of the organization than I necessarily wanted us to put forward. Or sometimes we were just putting it forward and they were getting the correct view of the organization. And this is going on all through the media. And. And it leads to, among other things, a situation where we have amped up the emotional stakes so much that people who follow political media are in a constant state of fear and agitation. I would say most days quite disproportionate to what's going on compared to, say, other periods in American history. But at the Same time, there's nothing to do with it. They're just pissed. It's just like a crazy emotional space to be in. I will just say, not to plug other people's books, but after you've bought and read every word of my book and Larry's book, there's a political scientist named Atan Hirsch who just brought out a book called Politics Is About Power or Politics Is for Power. And he has this interesting cut in the book between what he calls political hobbyism, which is consuming information to get mad about it or inspired about it, but just to kind of express about it, versus actually organizing around power and change. And a lot of people who feel like they're in politics are actually consuming politics as a form of entertainment, as a hobby. They're not doing anything necessarily to change it. They're just kind of addicted to the ups and the downs of it. And something I talk about in the book, and I say this as a political journalist, it's worth being cognizant of whether or not that is happening to you. It's worth being cognizant of whether or not you're in a cycle of basically being manipulated by people like me and if so, like, working to turn that down a little bit. I tell people to pay more attention to state and local news. And I think podcasts are actually a place where the nature of the forum, at least for now, modulates a little bit. But the media's become a polarization machine. And it's become. And the fundamental loop of it is that the audience polarized, that made us more polarized in our response to them, that made the audience more polarized, that forced us to polarize more, that made the audience more polarized. And it keeps spinning like that, as do a lot of things in politics.

Yeah. So my colleague Cass Sunstein and Thaler wrote this incredible book, Nudge, which of course, everybody embraces in some way. Even I don't think they understand it fully, but that's the nature of great books. But they would say, look, this is a problem for choice architecture. So their book is deeply driven by psychological insights, the way yours is, and the way markets and incentives work. And they say what we need to do is to step back and asked, how do we architect the environment, taking in account the problems with the psychology of humans to produce things that we actually want to produce. So you would look at the current mix of media and the psychological and the partisan, and you would say, as you just said, that in this environment, we don't do democracy very well. This architecture is pretty badly structured to do democracy. And so we should think about, like, what are the architectural changes we could make to do better democracy? I'm not talking about constitutional amendments. I'm talking about even just thinking about where we try to do politics. So you talk about podcasts. I think, you know, we could think about the slow democracy movement, which is about shifting democratic speech out of Twitter and Facebook, out of, like screaming heads on cable news into context where humans actually can digest it or process it in a more balanced and serious way. And so that would be a choice architecture for facilitating a better understanding of politics. Another part you don't mention, which I was surprised on, but this is, I think, the strongest resistance to your hopelessness. So there's the work of Jim Fishkin with Deliberative Polls. And the New York Times just recently had a review of an extraordinary deliberative poll that was Run America in one room. So the idea of deliberative Poll is you take a random representative sample of the public, you give them information about issues, you bring them together, you allow them to deliberate. You've taken a poll at the beginning about their views and a poll at the end about their views, and you see how there has been a shift. Now, if you read this book and everything you say about where we are in politics, you would predict people don't change. They are who they are at the beginning and who they are at the end. But the striking thing that comes out of these polls is that people shift in huge ways. I mean, 20, 30 points shifts, both on the right and on the left, which at least should give you hope that if you architected democratic conversation differently, we could begin to draw from that the idea that, in fact, maybe people are capable of doing democracy, even if they're going to be living in a Twitter space.

I think that's all very fair. So let me say a couple things on that space of work. Let me try not to be too hopeless about it. I think the argument of the book, particularly around things like this, is that we can be many different people depending on the context and the systems we're in. That there is no fixed us, not ideologically, not from an identity dimension. That the argument of the book is that not that we have changed exactly, but that the what is being pulled out of us from politics has changed. What choices politics gives us have changed. And the environment, particularly the environment, yes, and particularly political elites are much more polarized than the mass public. Like most people are not that sorted in their ideologies. They don't have super strong views on policy. What they're getting is very polarized choices from a system that is increasingly offering very polarized choices that makes them more polarized, but compared to us, they're not polarized at all. And that's, I think, important. I love the deliberative democracy work, and I don't really believe in it simultaneously, which is to say that I think it is very hard to make that kind of thing scale with that. But the project you're talking about, which is in the New York Times, was an incredibly intensive, very, very deeply moderated thing where they took people and they were all together for a weekend and they put them up in a nice hotel and they had really strong moderators. And by the way, one reason I'm a little bit. One of the findings of that is that everybody moderated. And there's some work like that in the Cass and Thaler book. And my read of that evidence is whether or not people moderate or not has a tremendous. It is tremendously shaped by who is brought into that group and how it is moderated. So whether or not people move to the center or move further out, people are social. And so if you give them a social dynamic where the thing that is going to reduce conflict is to move in, they're going to move in. And if you give them a social dynamic where the thing to reduce conflict is to move out, they'll move out. Which is only to say, I think you can do choice architecture in a lot of different ways. The question is, when I see a study that says we spent millions of dollars getting 500 people to hang out for a weekend, two, you know, et cetera, that's the place where it's hard for me to understand how you scale it up. But the broader thing you're saying, I think is completely true. Like, let me give you just one very easy choice architecture thing. I just think that something that you could completely imagine happening is that the social media companies get tired of the criticism and decide that we are not going to have the future of the bulk of human communication be sorted by algorithms tuned to respond to what created the strongest emotional reaction in you. What we basically have is a sorting algorithm now that says we only want things that are like a 7 or above in your response. But most of us don't want to be at a 7 or above all of the time. We want a lot of stuff that. It's a huge bias against quality quiet voices. I think of this oftentimes as the Amy Klobuchar problem. Amy Klobuchar is of every Democrat running for president, the one who over performs the most in elections. If you wanted just in terms of the record, who is the most electable candidate, it is Amy Klobuchar. Not only does she wildly over perform, but she overperforms in a state that is very much like Wisconsin. So in some way you'd say Amy Klobuchar, great issue. Is part of why Amy Klobuchar does well in Minnesota, which is a famously quite nice state. Is it? She's not a shouter, she's not a super loud voice. She seems like a very reasonable person. And maybe at another time in our politics, like when parties ran conventions and that's how they nominated people, maybe at that time Amy Klobuchar would be the nominee. But the problem right now is that she doesn't do that well on social media. She's not the main person you think of after the debate. And so she's more trouble standing out. And so I think you can do a lot of choice architecture. Deliberative democracy stuff always strikes me as harder because just how you scale it up is tough. I did a podcast with Jayne Mansfield on this and I just think it's hard. I mean, there are brilliant people thinking about it and this might just be my failure of imagination, but you could absolutely structure choices, structure social media platforms, and even structure the way political parties work to be different. I'll just say one more thing on this because I gestured towards it. I think it is under appreciated how different our elections are today than they were prior to 1972 when parties controlled who got nominated through conventions. A Donald Trump was a literal impossibility. I mean, as How Democracies Die, which is a great book, argues, we've always had people like Donald Trump, Henry Ford, Huey Long, Father Coughlin. They just couldn't get through a party convention. That's a choice architecture. Like the question of whether or not the way the choice is going to be made is party regulars who have met these people and have worked with them and are looking at them in terms of is this the kind of person that I want to work with in the future versus who is able to turn out the most people on a cold day in Iowa, you can argue which one is better, but they're just very different choice architectures. And we've moved way in one direction without, I think, any even real grappling with the cost of it. So I agree very much on a lot of our choice architectures are currently all pointing in the same direction, which is towards something that we often frame as democracy. Mark Zuckerberg defends Facebook in terms of social, of free speech or primaries get defended in terms of like democratic representation. But these are very unrepresentative forms of public participation that pull out a weird kind of person and then take the weirdest of them and make them super loud. And that's not exactly how you would imagine running a railroad.

Yeah. And. And so we could imagine them changing the way they profit off of social media, but I think the likelihood of them leaving a billion dollars on the table to do that is tiny.

So you want to sounding worryingly like me.

Yeah. Right. Well, at least about this. So let me, let me then I want to end with one place before we turn to the questions from the audience. So here's the place. I was really hurt in the book. So you talk in your last chapter, which of course we always have to have a last chapter about how we're going to make the world a better place. You have a bunch of reform proposals you are really under unexcited about democracy reforms. I mean, you have a couple geeky ones that you and I can can geek out about, which are fun ranked choice voting and multi member districts. That's wonderful. And we can talk about the electoral college. What's striking is there's no reform described about how we could change the money in politics. In fact, you argue yourself into a stalemate on that position because you say the thing that we know about small dollar donations is that it attracts even more polarizing donors than the large donations do. And so it's either large donations corrupting the system or small donations polarizing the system. But here's what's striking about that. We are in an election where all but one of the Democratic candidates has made a commitment to make fundamental reform of our democracy. The first thing they do if they are elected president. And the reforms they're talking about are deep and fundamental, from gerrymandering reform to the Voting Rights act to public funding of congressional elections. And there's two kinds of public funding that's being described. One is the matching fund, which I think is completely susceptible to the criticism you're talking about. But the other one, which Yang first talked about, but now Bernie Sanders has endorsed it, is vouchers, which is like the Seattle program where you basically give every voter a voucher and then candidates raise their money from everybody from getting these vouchers. Now, what's underanalyzed here and what you're talking about in your kind of very quick like, let's just ignore money in politics. Move. Here is whether if everyone had vouchers and I was needing to raise money from everyone, I would really be raising polarizing money. Right? Because most people, as you said five minutes ago, are not these polarizing people. Most people are in the middle. So if we changed the way we were funding elections by giving people money that they were giving to candidates, money that wasn't polarizing, and congressmen were liberated from bending over backwards, spending 30 to 70% of their time talking to the tiniest fraction of the 1% who fund their campaigns right now, wouldn't that give you some reason to hope that there would be more? And some reason that's a tiny little bar to get over here. Some reason to hope that there would be more chance that something better could happen.

I'm going to tell a quick story here because Larry and I have been arguing about money in politics for years. I was at a conference with him once, and we were having this debate discussion. And you may know, because in general, what you should not do is see presentations given by me because I just sit on a stage talking about things. You should see ones given by him because he's these awesome presentations. But so we'd had this argument over lunch, and then he was going to give the keynote and he was like typing away his computer. Computer. And in between us talking and him giving the keynote, he inserted like six slides ethering me in the presentation in front of everybody. And it was a very compelling argument. It was very. It was devastating.

So it had a real effect, obviously.

Yeah, right. As you say, it had the effect of like. Well, I'll say it for a minute and I'm just going to hide from. I agree that I'm somewhat confused on how much I believe in public funding of elections. I would pass democracy vouchers. I'm less optimistic on them than you are. And I'll give an example. As you mentioned, Seattle has them. We did a great story. Sarah Cliff, my former colleague who left for the New York Times, and I'll never get over it, went to Seattle and looked at this for season two of the Impact, which is a podcast we have focusing on policy. And I think it was something like less than 3% of the people in Seattle had used a democracy voucher, which is only to say, again, it's pulling from an unrepresentative group in an unrepresented way, which is not necessarily bad. I would do it. I would absolutely do it.

Was it more representative and more participating than it was before vouchers, what it

mostly was, it didn't make a huge difference. Now, I actually don't want to say I think that's how it would work nationally because I think there is so much more information in a national space that I think it would be different. So let's like say that, I mean, local turnout is small in the best circumstances. Let's say that nationally it's 30%. Right. Which is great. And that's actually a lot of money. I think a real question with that. And again, I don't really want to argue against it because I would pass it in a heartbeat. I would. If I were president, I would sign the bill. I think it would be great. I think it would have the same effect of still empowering louder voices. I think it is not my view that it would be a solve for an Amy Klobuchar. But that said, I think we should do it. I think we should do. The reason towards the end of the book, I'm a little down on solutions is not because I don't believe we can make the system better. I believe we can. I believe that doing financing of campaigns in very different ways would be better, even if, by the way, even if it were a little more polarizing. One reason that I'm a little less concerned about this piece is that I'm not actually trying to solve polarization. I'm trying to solve democratization. So I care more about things like instant runoff voting and ranked choice and proportional and so on and the electoral college and all that. I just. You're running. We are running into that. Into the same problem there. That is the problem we're trying to solve in the first place, which is that you can't pass anything because the political system won't let you pass anything. And to change the political system, you need to pass something.

Yeah, but this is where I want to criticize your type. Not smart, you know, Jews, thinkers. No, I didn't say that.

Oh, sorry.

But media. Right. So. But again, because again, you know how I can't see people in the audience, so I can't even ask this question meaningfully. But how many people really knew that we have an election where all but one candidate only Joe Biden has not promised to make fundamental reform the first thing he does. Everybody else is committed to that. And yet we've not yet had one single question in a debate. I mean, candidates have tried to raise this, but nobody in the debate space has even picked up and followed through on it. So you're right. We need the Change. And to make the change happen, we're going to have to have the force to have the change. But when you have an election, literally the first in American history, where this number of candidates are committing to actually fixing our democracy and you can't even get it above the din of the media, is it the candidates or the media?

Oh, well, I will say on this I demand respect for my purity and my commitment to the cause. Which is to say, I genuinely don't believe there is anyone in the media or any outlet in the media that spends as much time on political reform as Vox. That some of the reason those candidates have made those commitments is because they made them on my show. And I don't mean that defensively. I more mean. And when I did, like our case for Elizabeth Warren, it's heavily about her political reform proposals.

Did you guys run a debate yet? I didn't.

We, we. There have been talks, but it did not come together because it was very hard to do. Turns out it's extremely expensive to run a debate is actually the key problem there. So it's millions and millions of dollars because you need security detail. So anyway, it's a whole issue. That said, we've talked to a lot of these candidates and in every single one, talk to them about filibuster reform, political corruption, all these things. I am. And we just write about, like endlessly. So I am actually, this is, I will be honest, is actually a place where I'm a little bit more optimistic. I think that we have had an effect and others in the media who've been doing similar work compared to where we were five, 10 years ago. I mean, one of my main things, like I am to filibuster form as you are to campaign finance, not in terms of smartness, but in terms of commitment. It's my central thing. It's the thing that I think is closest at hand. You really could do it. And it gets talked about now in a way it didn't before. And I think we've had an effect on that. I'm proud of that. I believe to my core that the first priority of the next president should be making the system work again. I do not really believe that all these people have promised they will do that, will do it, or that Senate Democrats will even let them if they want to. So I do have my, like, my political handicapping hat. There's a. I think it is a continuous problem in politics. So what happens is people get elected and what they feel they need to do when they are presented with A choice is do something, spend their political capital in that moment on something like a tax cut that they think is going to get them immediate payoff instead of do something that is going to make every other bill they will ever have to pass passable. And really of every candidate running, the only one I truly believe would do political reform first. And this is not an endorsement, this is just my view of them is Warren, who I think wasn't backed into saying that, but actually like that is her theory of the whole case. I think Sanders and others have a different theory of how to pass things. I think Sanders thinks about organizing more centrally and so on. This is not a necessarily criticism of the others. But if Democrats do not make this country governable, this is going to keep getting worse.

Yes.

And they are going to lose the opportunity. So one of the scariest things I've seen is a model of where the Senate is going and basically what that model says is it there is something like, again, this is just a fundamentals model. So take it not as gospel truth, but something like a 30% chance that a Democrat wins the presidency this year and wins the Senate. Pretty good chance a Democrat wins the presidency and Mitch McConnell keeps the Senate. We know that both from the senate map in 2022 and from the general turn in midterms against the governing party that if Democrats win, they are likely to lose seats in the Senate in the subsequent election. It's maybe won't happen every so often it doesn't, but probably will. So the chance of them holding up the presidency and the Senate into 2022 after having like a 30% chance in 2020, it falls to like really low. And if they lose, like, it's gone. And so they like they really. And then if you add on the potential if they don't win the presidency of, you know, other Supreme Court seats coming up from Ginsburg, like, things get really bad from a democracy perspective. So for what it's worth, in every way I can as a political analyst and the reason I front load democratization as like the only clearly, I think if you read the book, the only set of solutions I'm actually passionate about is that I think the absolute first priority right now is making America governable through popular majorities expressing themselves into power. And like, if you don't do that, what's going to happen is that the Republicans are going to use disenfranchisement as a way to keep power going forward. And we are at a very dangerous crossroads in a way that in my view, for whatever Lip services there is. Most elected Democrats do not appreciate. Appreciate it at all. And a lot of elected Republicans understand it better than I wish they did.

Yeah, okay. That's an incredibly important moment of agreement. If we don't get democracy reform, nothing else is going to happen. Perfect. So, Alison from Boston, I'm a very. I'm a liberal who. Well, that's Allison from Boston. Right. So who lives and works in a very liberal bubble. What are some ways to build engagement with. With unlike minded people and different ideas into my day? Ideally offline.

I think ideally offline is a key term there. And thank you for adding that. Look, it's easy enough to read op EDS by people you don't agree with. Do that if you feel like it. But more than I even worry about building engagement, just most people, even if you are in a liberal bubble, are not nearly as like you as you think. I don't know if you've met people, but they're extremely strange, most of them, them and strange in very diverse ways. And so getting involved in anything, in anything will be helpful. Just get involved in local housing affordability politics. Like I'm in, out in the Bay Area, but you guys have some affordability issues here. Not as bad as we do, but they're real. And one thing you will see if you do that is that a lot of the national breakdown of political divisions and cities sides collapses. And all of a sudden it's the people with 16 Bernie stickers on their car who are like, you can't ever build anything. And like. And it'll really change your view of politics. I mean, we were talking backstage about the problems of Californian governance, but I think living in California and really watching the way the governance functions there will make you more jaded on progressivism. Because there's a lot of progressivism that is extremely happy to declare that we should make big symbolic changes towards justice and equity. Until the moment you say that we are going to build more dense housing near transit, which you happen to also be near. And all of a sudden everybody's like, well parking is going to be terrible. Like it's a real problem. So just get, just don't worry about getting out of your liberal bubble. Just like actually just get involved in an issue that is important near you. That would be enough.

David from Cambridge. A lot of people see politics primarily as entertainment, not as an action that they need to take in order to change things. See Eitan Hirsch's new book. Do you think this tendency increases polarization or does it actually decrease.

Decrease it was that the Eton Hearst thing was in there.

Yeah.

That's awesome. Good for Etan. That definitely increases it. Politics as entertainment is politics as polarization. It is politics collapsed down. Politics as entertainment is fundamentally the consumption of political media, whether it is created by media organizations or created by individual politicians putting up Instagram posts and so on. And the stuff that rises to the top there is the most polarizing stuff. Politics as practice, as the activation of power, as a construction of coalitions, as even just being out in your community understanding what it is people need. It's complicating in many ways. I think the opposite of polarization is complication. What polarization does is it collapses things down, often through choice architecture, to two points. And the more the points become clearly different from each other, the more polarized we are. I mean, that's all polarization is, right? It's clustering around poles. Complication is the opposite of that. It's recognizing that those two points actually weren't two. There were many points inside of them. It's recognizing that the people you thought I was actually just thinking about this after the Allison question. Nothing's going to make you get out of your liberal bubble quicker sometimes than seeing the politics of liberals at the city and local level. It will really pop some bubbles. And by the same token, if you think Texas is this horrible red state governed terribly, go check out their zoning. There's a reason people are leaving California for Texas. It's because you're able as a middle class person to buy a home in cities. And so there are all kinds of things going on that in local politics it will complicate things for you, it will make you better at politics. And also it's a nourishing activity that will make you feel better about the world. The worst thing about politics is entertainment is that it's shitty entertainment. It's entertainment that makes you feel bad. It's like the middle of every. I like romantic comedies, but I only like the beginnings before. It's like when everybody's just hanging out and making jokes before we get into the awkward middle point and everybody's in conflict. And I always just hate that third act. And politics is like you're endlessly trapped in politics as entertainment is endlessly being trapped in the third act of a. Of a drama or of a conflictual movie. Politics as actually working with people, you have an effect on things. And one of the things about politics as entertainment is that it's disempowering because you're angry, but nothing happens. You're angry, but you can't do anything about it. But when you're organizing, win, lose or draw, you meet people, you maybe try to change things, you make friends. I was at a. I was reporting on a group of yimbys. Yes. In my backyard, people in San Francisco. And they had all organized. This is a good story, actually. They had all organized because there was a Euro shop that was trying to use San Francisco housing law to stop a full lawful shop for moving in down the street. And these were people who self identify as neoliberals. And they were saying that a falafel shop on the corner is the future that neoliberals want. And so they all went to this meeting en masse to support this falafel shop, and they all brought falafels. And I will say that I don't think they were super effective at the meeting because they were sort of condescending to everybody, but they had a great time and they're building political power and, like, building identity and it's helping them. And so, yes, like, get involved. It's deep. It's not whether it's polarizing or it's depolarizing. It's also just healthy. Like, just be involved in your local community. Like, stop listening to my podcast.

Okay, so I'm getting yelled at because I was given an instruction. We were going to talk for 90 minutes, and now somebody's flashing their watch in the back, which I think that's the universal signal for. You're not supposed to talk 90 minutes. Is that what that typically means?

I don't know. I don't even know what time it is. Yeah, so I can give faster answers to questions, too.

Okay, can you change time? That's the real question. I can ignore it as long as we don't get tackled. I'd like to do at least one more here. Nobody's yelling at me.

We can do one more. It takes time to get the.

Please. Good. Okay, so this is Noah from Boston. Was the current era of polarization inevitable? Are there key events or trends you think could have gone differently to land us in a more stable position as a democracy?

I can't do quick answers to that question. Okay, next question.

No, no, no.

I think that some higher level of polarization was inevitable now. Not literally this era. I mean, just honestly imagine a couple votes, go Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and we're gonna be probably almost exactly as polarized. But I think it would feel different to a lot of people. It'd feel like less of a crisis if Donald Trump weren't raising the emotional level of alarm. But what basically happens to set off the era of polarization is a Civil Rights act which ruptures the alliance between the Dixiecrats and the Democrats and begins the period of ideological and then demographic sorting embedded in that is a really important thing. I said earlier the opposite of polarization is complication. But let me say slightly differently that at the political system level, the alternative to polarization is often suppression. The reason we were not polarized for a long time is we were suppressing racial conflict through this Democrat Dixiecrat alliance and it was unbelievably unjust. So we have a nostalgic retelling of our past that we should drop. A lot of it was quite bad. But that said, I think it was inevitable that we would go towards the polarization of the parties. I don't think it's inevitable that it worked out exactly as it did. For among other things, I think it's entirely possible the Republican Party could have become the party of civil rights. The Civil Rights act passed with a higher proportion of Republican votes in Congress than Democratic votes. And the Republican Party traditionally had been the party of civil rights, going back of course to its founder, Abraham Lincoln. And so things could be different. But the very weird mid century thing that happened where you had this conservative Dixiecrat party that wouldn't join the national party that was conservative because that party had invaded and occupied the American south, that was always an aberrant way for things to work and was going to fade. But I don't think the levels we're at now and the specific constellation of issues we're at or much less the politicians we see were inevitable.

Okay, I'm going to ask one last question based on this question here, which is have you. So this is Kevin from Brighton. What can those of us in blue areas do about this situation? Your tour is all in big blue cities, so presumably there's some ask of us.

I mean, it's by the book.

I think

I am. I understand. I will say this because it is a point of personal annoyance currently because I don't. I can't be on tour forever because I have a kid and it's hard being away. But the tour, one reason we are polarized. I'm not even gonna make that argument. The tour is in big cities because the media is there. And to reach people who are in red places, I have to do media because the way you get your message out is actually not just one bookstore event at a time. You have to try to do things at scale. So the, the question of why you're doing things in New York is. It's not because I, I actually cannot stand New York. It's one of my least favorite places in the world. I am there under protest because the national media holds you hostage in New York. Every time you write a book, it's a disaster. That said, the question of getting down on polarization in blue cities or red cities and we are doing more tor in other places is that my ask of people is not to end polarization. My ask of people is probably two things. One, as I say in the book, at the individual level, reattach yourself to your state and local politics. Do not think so much about national politics. And by the way, that's embedded in this even thinking about cities as red and blue. These places are red and blue at the national level. But, but at the state and local level they just have their own concerns and needs and distinctions. So don't think quite so much. If you're in a very blue city, you're probably voting for Democrats. I would tell you to the extent you have influence over that, prioritize democracy reform. But instead of thinking about how you can change the national scene, think about how you can change the local scene. The thing that would do more than any other imaginable political change I can come up with is if people's state and local identities once again became more dominant. Those are very powerful cross cutting identities in politics. The way politics worked for a very long time. One of the ways you kept polarization down was sure you were a Republican from Oklahoma, but you were a Republican from Oklahoma and your constituents needed a bridge and this bill wasn't everything you wanted, but they could get a bridge. And we did that. We did it through earmarks which then House Republicans got rid of in I think 2010. We did it in all kinds of different ways. Our whole system was built to balance places against each other. James Madison said in Federalist 46 that it stands to it is, I forget the exact quote, but he said the primary identities will be. The primary attachments will be to state governments, not to national ones. So one of the things that's happened is that his politics overwhelmingly nationalized. It just becomes red and blue instead of as you might imagine it would be at say the Senate level. 50 different states with different concerns. It is a remarkable thing that you can look at the Affordable Care act and the way the vote breaks down isn't that states that have high uninsured populations or that are poorer are voting for it because they're going to get subsidized, but that blue senators are voting for it and red senators are not. So that way, in which our politics is overwhelmingly built around partisan political identities. I mean, that is the story of my book. But if it's going to change, it's going to be because there are some other identities that really have a rooting pull on us. That changes it. And in political terms, the ones that have had the most power historically are state and local identities. So don't think about what you can do to change national polarization so much. Think about what you can do to. To change politics in your local community. Go do that. Spend less time online. You will feel better. And if everybody did that, politics would be better.

So hundreds of people show up, Ezra. Not just because of the podcast and not just because it's a blue city. They show up because, like most Americans, they are deeply, deeply troubled about where we are in this democracy. I think on behalf of all of us, I want to thank you for this extraordinary contribution to solving that problem. I will confess to being more optimistic than this book makes it sound that you are, but I know because you have a child, you will fight with us in that reform. Please join me in thanking Ezra.

Thank you, Sam.