Ben Shapiro sits down with Ezra Klein to discuss his new book, Why We're Polarized: Our Disagreements on the Value of Identity Politics and the Role of Government, as well as the internet-breaking controversy between Steven Crowder and former Vox colleague Carlos Mazzo. Ezra also discusses why he doesn t think of himself as a conservative, and why he thinks he should have a shot at running for president in 2020. He also talks about his thoughts on identity politics and the role of government, and what it means to be a liberal in the 21st century, and how to define what he sees as a left-wing publication that is, in fact, a leftwing publication. And, of course, there's a lot more to the conversation than that! Subscribe to Dailywire, become a subscriber, and you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first month, and receive a FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint, and a free stock like VaynerMedia, too! Subscribe here. Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of The Ben Shapiro Show: bit.ly/support-the-BenShapiroShow and get 20% off the first month with discount code "I'm Cucked" when you sign up for the Dailywire discount. You'll get access to unlimited access to the show, unlimited ad-free version of the show throughout the entire month of the entire service, and special bonus episodes throughout the rest of the service, Dailywire's entire year, plus early-bird pricing, plus a 20% discount when you become a patron gets an ad-only version of his entire service is available for two months, plus heaps of VIP access throughout the next month, up to $50, plus two weeks, gets full access to VIP + VIP gets the choice of the VIP discount offer, plus I'll get $10% off my choice, and he'll get an ad discount when he signs up for VIP access to The Dailywire Provenee gets my VIP membership only gets $99 and I'm OBSERVELLION PROMO, and I get his first choice, VIP gets $5, VIP access gets $4 VIP access and I also get VIP access, and gets a discount on his first month gets $10,000 gets VIP access.
00:00:00.000I would not be here if I thought it was going to destroy my career forever.
00:00:03.000So I think sometimes the amount of bravery people suggest it takes pundits to wander around and have conversations in the current era is amplified by a kind of desire to make things all seem a little bit more dangerous and polarized and make the other side seem more unreasonable than they are.
00:00:17.000Before co-founding Vox.com, Ezra Klein started his career in political media, working for mainstream publications like the Washington Post and Bloomberg News, along with frequent appearances on primetime MSNBC.
00:00:28.000In 2014, Klein and his co-founders teamed up with Vox Media, a massive media enterprise with influence in all aspects of the culture through brands like The Verge, Polygon, Vulture, and more.
00:00:38.000Since then, Vox.com has become a widely influential presence, with tens of millions of website page views, 7.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and a collection of successful podcasts.
00:00:46.000Vox.com bills itself as explanatory journalism, though as we'll discuss, conservatives tend to think of Vox.com as opinion journalism of the political left.
00:00:54.000No matter what you think of Ezra's politics, there's no question he's one of the most important voices on today's political scene.
00:01:00.000We'll discuss his new book, Why We're Polarized, Our Disagreements on the Value of Identity Politics and the Role of Government, as well as the internet-breaking controversy between Steven Crowder and former Vox.com explanatory journalist, Carlos Mazzo.
00:01:11.000Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday's specialty.
00:01:50.000Honestly, it'll be good to get a rest.
00:01:52.000So the book, Why We're Polarized, I want to get into that.
00:01:54.000First, I want to ask a little bit about Vox.com, the foundations of Vox.com.
00:01:57.000So one of the things that's great in the book is you talk a little bit about your own political point of view.
00:02:02.000Obviously, you're of the left, you're a liberal.
00:02:05.000You know, you're drinking, ironically, from our Leftist Tears tumbler.
00:02:08.000I'm drinking excitedly from the Leftist Tears tumbler.
00:02:10.000This is my whole reason for coming here today.
00:02:12.000I've always made a distinction between sort of leftists and liberals, the difference being that liberals are people I disagree with on taxes and government interventionism, and leftists are people who are interested in going after my advertisers and deplatforming me and ensuring that I am unable to make a living on the other side of the aisle and or utter things on the other side of the aisle.
00:02:30.000In the book you call yourself a liberal, so how do you define liberal just to kind of get that out there?
00:02:35.000So I wouldn't cut leftist and liberal that way, by the way, number one.
00:02:38.000So liberal is, I think, tricky to define, in part because it's become under attack.
00:02:42.000So now there's this distinction between neoliberal and leftist.
00:02:44.000You have a moderate lane, the democratic primary, a more left lane.
00:02:47.000I think of liberalism as fundamentally about a mixture of equality with a relative high level of confidence in the ability of the government to provide those services.
00:02:56.000In different eras in American politics, we've cut that pretty differently.
00:03:00.000So you have periods in time where the liberals were somewhat open to the state, and then also periods of time where they have been more critical of the state, but they have always wanted to make society in general more equal.
00:03:10.000They have always believed, at a pretty firm level, that people's life chances are very defined by luck.
00:03:17.000And so the question of what our just desserts are is actually a pretty hard one to answer.
00:03:21.000And once you believe in that fundamental change of what do we really deserve and how hard that is to attribute, then it becomes very different what you should make sure people have to have a fair shot in life.
00:03:31.000So I want to come back to that in just one second.
00:03:33.000I want to ask a quick follow-up just about Vox or publication.
00:03:36.000So obviously Vox is sort of billed as explanatory journalism.
00:03:39.000People on the right perceive it to be left.
00:03:42.000Our publication, Daily Wire, is obviously conservative.
00:04:29.000And so I don't want Vox in a position where what it has is an identity as a liberal publication as opposed to views that may put it at this particular moment in American politics on the liberal side of things.
00:04:39.000And look, sometimes Vox ends up a little bit more leftist, and there are other places where it ends up being much more critical of sort of reigning liberal orthodoxies.
00:04:46.000Like I think, for instance, you look at a lot of our housing coverage.
00:04:48.000Increasingly, I think there's more of a connection between YMBs and liberals.
00:04:52.000But for a long time, liberals were not great on a lot of occupational licensing and housing issues at the local level.
00:04:59.000So it's important, and I talk a lot about identity in the book and how it can wrap you in and box you in.
00:05:03.000It's always been important to me that there is space for Vox to change and space for it to hold a bunch of viewpoints.
00:05:08.000Which, you know, three days out of five, we're able to do.
00:05:10.000Let me just say, the reason I'm asking the question was not meant as a gotcha.
00:05:13.000It's more as a sort of recommendation for defensive posture with regard to Vox.
00:05:18.000Because it feels like, you know, I do a thing on Twitter where if a so-called journalistic outlet like CNN, which portrays itself as objective, is being overtly of the left.
00:05:29.000And I found myself on occasion doing that with Vox, and I feel like I don't do it with MSNBC, because MSNBC is pretty clearly of the left, they kind of build themselves of the left.
00:05:37.000My only recommendation with regard to Vox is just say what you just said, right?
00:05:40.000And say it more and more publicly, which is, of course, it sort of reflects what the founder's vision for the site is, as opposed to it's just the site for explanatory journalism, which is, I think, the top line that people sort of get.
00:05:54.000I've said that exact thing many times.
00:05:56.000I will say, one of the things that I think distinguishes some of the approach we take, like, let me ask you, why am I drinking out of a leftist tears mug?
00:06:24.000There are a lot of leftists who have open minds.
00:06:26.000You define leftists earlier in a way that I think doesn't actually make a... You define leftists earlier as... But I specifically made this call, right?
00:06:31.000I mean, like, the original draft of this mug was Liberal Tears mug.
00:06:34.000You define leftists a couple minutes ago just as somebody who hates you.
00:06:37.000But a lot of leftists, basically what they believe is we should have single-payer health care.
00:06:51.000It seems to me there's a lot of work at The Daily Wire to say, like, this is our side and that's the other side.
00:06:56.000And it seems to me that when you do that, you make it harder for yourself to move.
00:06:59.000You make it harder for yourself to absorb new information.
00:07:01.000You make it harder for yourself and for your team.
00:07:03.000You can get trapped a little bit by that audience.
00:07:05.000So one of the reasons I'm a little bit careful with Vox is I don't...
00:07:08.000One, I don't want to be trapped, and two, I want people to feel it's for them.
00:07:12.000If we're not doing a good job of that, if we're not—look, I have no problem with where we come down on things, but it's always my hope that people will be able to see themselves and their arguments well-reflected, right?
00:07:20.000You talk a lot with my colleague Jane Koston, and one reason you talk a lot with Jane Koston is that Jane works really hard as part of the Vox team to understand trends on the right, movements on the right, ideas on the right.
00:07:30.000I want people on the right to be able to read Vox and at least feel we're taking them seriously, that we don't hate them.
00:07:35.000You know, I think the message of leftist here is that you don't like them.
00:08:01.000We do have a sense of humor about politics.
00:08:03.000But I mean, to your point, as far as open mindedness about people on the other side of the aisle, as far as I'm aware, You know, we're one of the few conservative sites where we'll have people like you on for an hour long conversation or people like Jane or people like Andrew Yang or people on the left side of the aisle.
00:08:16.000And that is something that I like engaging with.
00:08:19.000I'm not going to give up the humor of politics.
00:08:21.000Politics is inherently stupid in many ways.
00:08:23.000And I think that and I think that giving up the sense of humor for a for a sense of sincerity that I don't think actually reflects politics in our country is I'm not sure that that's a winning proposition.
00:08:33.000I think also you may be more optimistic about politics than I am, oddly.
00:08:36.000Because your book is very realistic about the prospect of polarization, but sort of the way that you're articulating the way people see your site, as opposed to my honest recognition of the way I think people see our sites.
00:08:48.000That may just be a difference between, in my opinion, realism and optimism on your end, or realism and pessimism, or optimism and pessimism.
00:08:56.000I think, so I have a media chapter, and I'd love to talk with you about it, because this is something I struggle with, right?
00:09:01.000I started Vox, and along with my co-founders, and it's hard, right?
00:09:06.000I mean, you know this, you built a site, it's hard.
00:09:08.000And you're in a media ecosystem right now, in a media business model, where it is harder.
00:09:14.000I talk about this a lot in that chapter, but things have moved to this very choice-based model.
00:09:17.000There's a tremendous amount of attentional competition.
00:09:44.000You come and you show, no, this is a fight you can actually win.
00:09:47.000And one of the things that I struggle with in the media is the push towards all of that.
00:09:52.000As you say, the book in a way is grim and some of what I'm trying to do in the book, in my podcast, in both self-presentation and broader Vox presentation, is you're a little bit trying to create the politics you would like to see in the world.
00:10:05.000And the politics I would like to see in the world is little more open.
00:10:09.000Well, and this is what I found so fascinating about the book is that it's, there's so much in there that's really interesting material about polarization and why we're polarized.
00:10:18.000But I wonder if it sort of elides the main reason why, why I think we're polarized, which is that there are true and real chasm wide ideological differences that are breaking out in the American philosophy right now.
00:10:28.000And that all of these systemic things that you talk about, why people polarize and why they tribalize and all that can be true.
00:11:54.000It's actually a really interesting read.
00:11:55.000Obviously as somebody who reads a lot of books on the other side of the aisle, I found this to be a particularly informed take with regard to, especially the social science research on tribalism and how people group and how people find identity.
00:12:06.000I want to start with one of your premises.
00:12:08.000And it's a premise that I actually think, it certainly divides the two of us and our perspective on American politics and the world.
00:12:15.000You talk about identity politics, and you defend identity politics.
00:12:52.000I read this, and my first reaction was, this seems like a category error to group all these things together.
00:12:57.000The reason being, that in one case you are talking about race, an immutable characteristic of human beings that is not innately linked to politics.
00:13:04.000And in other cases, you're talking about actual ideological groups which are innately linked to politics.
00:13:08.000I mean, how you identify as a Christian is certainly going to have ramifications based on your interpretation of scripture for politics.
00:13:15.000How you identify as a gun owner obviously is going to, that is an activity.
00:13:18.000It is not you were born a gun owner, it is you chose to be a gun owner, possibly based on your feelings about guns.
00:13:24.000Like for me, my Advocacy for the Second Amendment began before I owned a gun.
00:13:28.000For a lot of people who are in favor of lower tax rates, they're not millionaires, they're not billionaires.
00:13:32.00063 million Americans voted for President Trump.
00:13:34.000The vast majority of them are not millionaires or billionaires.
00:13:37.000But a lot of them wanted higher tax rates on the rich people.
00:13:41.000I mean, that's true, but it is also true that for the senators who are being voted for and for congresspeople who are being voted for, people have voted for lower taxes in the past.
00:13:50.000I voted for lower taxes when I was not making as much money.
00:13:52.000I vote for lower taxes now that I am making a lot more money.
00:13:54.000So the question that I have when it comes to identity politics is, if you are going to kind of lump all of this together, I do have an objection, which is, I think it is fair to object to identity-based politics on the basis of immutable characteristic, because there is no necessary conjunction between skin color and politics, whereas there is a fairly necessary conjunction between your religious outlook or your political outlook and identifying with other people who have that political or values-based outlook.
00:14:22.000We tend to, in life, associate with people who share our values, but if we in life only associate with people of our same race, we tend to get very uncomfortable with that, and I think that's perfectly appropriate.
00:14:34.000I mean, in my view, I mean, identity on a broad level is obviously all the things that make you you.
00:14:40.000So presumably race would be a part of that, of course.
00:14:43.000But in terms of what is appropriate to bring into the political square, what is it appropriate to polarize politics around?
00:14:49.000I know I'm jumping past your question.
00:14:51.000So the argument you make, because I want to make sure I'm following it, is that race is immutable.
00:14:55.000And as such, it poses, and you can tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth, it poses a particular danger to politics in a way that something like religion, something like an ideological perspective, something like where I'm from, I'm a Californian, that doesn't.
00:15:07.000The sense of identities chosen or built on at least shakier ground inherited are different than identities that are somehow something you can't take off.
00:15:18.000Because if the conversations that we have about politics are designed to shape each other, if we're actually, the conversations that you want to have and that I want to have, the conversations about convincing each other, if those are to have any effect in the real world, they cannot be based on immutable characteristics because those characteristics are immutable.
00:15:33.000Hold on, they're not based on immutable characteristics.
00:15:37.000When people talk about identity politics coming from race or coming from anything, the idea is not that the politics itself is an immutable characteristic.
00:15:47.000The argument being made, at least in part, is that something about the way you're moving through the world, whether it's because you're African American or Hispanic or Jewish or Californian or you live in a rural area, Is alerting you to some experience or giving you some experience that then, at least in theory, is speaking to a broader truth.
00:16:02.000I know that sometimes when you argue this point you like to make a cut between a politics based on experience and a politics based on data.
00:16:08.000I think of experience as a way of pointing you towards what is true about the world.
00:16:11.000You then have to validate it, but nevertheless you can bring that in.
00:16:14.000The idea that you would take that out, that something that was immutable in you, that you couldn't take off, is something you can't have in politics.
00:16:22.000I mean, of course it's something you need to be able to have in your politics.
00:16:24.000If you're having a distinct experience because of your race or because of your sexuality or whatever it might be, to say you're going to wall politics off from that, not only does that seem weird to me in terms of what politics is for, but isn't how politics ever worked?
00:16:37.000No, but the point that I would make is that you are now conflating experience with an immutable characteristic.
00:16:44.000And that is an argument that I object to on the left.
00:16:47.000I think I don't understand what you're saying.
00:16:49.000So the argument that I'm making is if you and I share an experience... Yeah.
00:17:05.000But that does not suggest that we have a common interest except against the anti-Semitic hate.
00:17:11.000Okay, when you suggest that there is such a thing as a black interest, or as a... I don't want to use Jewish because Jewish actually has religious overtones, obviously.
00:17:19.000Judaism is both an ethnicity and a religion.
00:17:21.000And you and I disagree, I'm sure, very widely on the ramifications of what it means to be Jewish, even.
00:17:26.000So Jewish identity is a little fuzzy because it actually branches off into a couple different areas, but race is... But all identities are fuzzy in that way.
00:17:33.000Not in that exact way, but all identities have big groupings within them, and you're doing a crude cut, right?
00:17:38.000Whenever you're talking about demographics, you're modeling the world in a crude way that is going to get things missed and wrong at the individual level.
00:17:43.000If the problem throughout American history, and I think it largely has been, is white identitarianism, then why is that a problem, but black identitarianism or Hispanic identitarianism is not?
00:17:53.000I think that the problem is when the policy is bad.
00:17:59.000The reason I say that you don't believe that is because the same policy applied to one group becomes good, and a policy that is applied to another group becomes bad.
00:18:05.000The problem is when the policy is bad.
00:18:07.000If we have a policy that it works better when applied in one direction or another, as you, I guess, occasionally do, although we should talk about examples because I'm not really sure what you're referring to there.
00:18:17.000I think affirmative action as a way of writing a historical injustice is a pretty straightforward policy.
00:18:22.000It seems to work when you're dealing with something that has actually happened in American history, to say that you're dealing with a very straightforward effort there to pay down a debt.
00:18:30.000Well, so the argument in favor of affirmative action is now being based on the experiences of people presumably under segregation or Jim Crow, and we are now in the year 2010.
00:18:41.000First of all, the efficacy of affirmative action is very much in doubt according to the research of the Thernstroms, but putting that aside... I disagree that the efficacy is in doubt, but we don't have to go through a peer review here.
00:18:50.000Let me ask you this question just straightforwardly.
00:18:52.000Why is it that if you are the head of an African-American household and you have a full-time job, you're going to have a lower net worth on average than the head of a white household who is unemployed?
00:19:03.000Or similarly, if you're the head of an African-American household, you have a college degree, you're likely to have a lower net worth than a white household headed by somebody who dropped out of high school.
00:19:12.000That is speaking to something that has happened historically, right?
00:19:18.000At some point, if you want society to be even roughly equal, you're going to have to do something about that interrational injustice.
00:19:24.000Or, alternatively, the idea of equality would be that everyone is treated equally under law, not differentially by race or based on past discrimination.
00:19:34.000And this is why, when you say why we're polarized and the implication is that we are polarized because of tribal identity, the real reason I think that we're polarized is because there are two very different visions of the world and how the government ought to operate in that world.
00:19:45.000Meaning that you're positing a sort of Rawlsian view of justice.
00:19:49.000I fundamentally disagree with the Rawlsian view of justice.
00:19:51.000I do not think that society or government is in a place to achieve equality of outcome, nor do I think that the attempt to, in Thomas Sowell's phrase, to achieve cosmic justice is something that is either possible or desirable from the government.
00:20:03.000When you say we can't achieve, I can totally buy the argument that you don't want it to, or that you think it would be unfair, but I think there's a very big difference that's important to keep in mind between cannot and should not.
00:20:23.000You can achieve low levels of reparations for past injustice through things like affirmative action.
00:20:27.000I mean, we can disagree about whether or not affirmative action works, but positing that it could, Just doing a little bit to try to do things about what has happened in the past is not going all the way towards totalitarianism.
00:20:37.000Let me actually back this up for a minute because I think we should talk about identity and polarization because I think something in my definition of polarization is getting missed here.
00:21:01.000There's part of the country that is against that, part of the country that is for it.
00:21:04.000That's clearly a very big difference in belief about how the country should be governed, what we should do, and what is right for the government to do, right?
00:21:11.000I mean, to take that as more than just a racist argument, there's also a set of arguments about, you know, what is the proper role of the federal government, what are states' rights, etc.
00:21:20.000What is remarkable about that moment in American politics is it does not split by party.
00:21:24.000in the House and the Senate, you have a higher proportion of congressional Republicans vote for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.
00:21:29.000And then a Democratic president, of course, pushed and signed it.
00:21:32.000So you have a truly bipartisan effort on civil rights and also a truly bipartisan opposition to it.
00:21:38.000So it isn't that we have, in my view, deeper ideological differences today than we did then.
00:21:43.000I think the ideological difference over is segregation by law an okay or even commendable thing to have is a much more dramatic ideological difference than most of what we're dealing with today.
00:21:53.000The difference is that a lot more of our distinctions drop across party lines.
00:21:57.000Not just ideological, but identity as well, and it is the merging of those ideological, identity, experiential, demographic, and then the cutting of them by our politics that is really different here.
00:22:07.000So, polarization, we've always been disagreeing, and we've had much more dangerous moments of societal fracture than this one.
00:22:12.000What is distinct about this moment is the degree to which they layer onto party, and then how that interacts catalytically with our American political institutions.
00:22:20.000So I don't in any way wipe away the idea that there's a great ideological debate to have here.
00:22:24.000Just that we're not in a new era of great ideological debates.
00:22:26.000What we're in a new era of is party polarization.
00:22:28.000So, I mean, I agree with an enormous amount of that, and that I think is the most solid part of the book.
00:22:32.000I think that what I disagree with is that the prescription is that identity politics generally should be treated the same based on the group that is claiming identity.
00:22:41.000So I want to get into that in just one second.
00:22:43.000First, let's talk about your employees.
00:22:45.000Let's say that you have an employee who is so useless you eventually give him his own show, and then you send him to CPAC where he proceeds to be exposed to coronavirus, then he comes home, doesn't self-quarantine, and just comes on into the office.
00:22:55.000Let's say that you wanted to replace this terrible employee.
00:22:59.000If you are hiring, you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com slash benguest.
00:23:04.000ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100.
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00:23:17.000You can filter candidates and focus on the best ones.
00:23:20.000ZipRecruiter is so effective that four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the very first day.
00:23:25.000So if you are looking to replace an employee who shall remain nameless, An employee like Michael Knowles.
00:23:58.000Because I really have serious doubts, and I don't mean to cast aspersions at intent here, but to your credit, I have serious doubts that if a white majoritarian party came up in a white identitarian party and said the interests of white people are the most important here.
00:24:13.000Also, this policy that is expressly designed to benefit white people happens to benefit everybody else.
00:24:17.000I doubt you'd be like, oh, well, you know, that's okay.
00:24:19.000Because, you know, sure, they're white identitarians, but that's also helping black people, so that's okay.
00:24:23.000I think that depending on how—there are a lot of different ways to think about whether or not a policy is good or bad, and we can go through them— But I think that I want to go through identity for a minute here, because one place where I think we disagree a little bit, and one thing that I try to define in the book, is I want people to see identity as, one, obviously something we all have, and you've agreed to that earlier, but also it's something that's challenged and activated in politics.
00:24:44.000And primarily the thing I'm trying to do with identity politics here—I've got to admit, I'm a little bit confused by some of the distinctions you draw, because What we're seeing in politics all the time is that identities converge, they diverge, they activate, they spin down.
00:24:57.000And we need to see it as a psychological process that spins up.
00:25:00.000And once it spins up, it changes how we relate to each other, changes how we absorb both contrary and positive information, changes how we feel about the other party.
00:25:09.000And the idea that everybody has identity and that it all works off a pretty similar psychological basis in the mind, I think that's pretty much unchallenged in the social science literature.
00:25:19.000And so this idea that you're going to allow some identities into politics and not others, I don't even know how you could do that, even if you wanted to, or even what exactly.
00:25:26.000What I'm making is that it's more dangerous to graft politics onto certain identities than to others.
00:25:31.000And I think that's a proposition with which, again, I don't understand.
00:25:33.000Are racial politics and religious politics all that?
00:25:35.000Because you've cut those apart from each other.
00:25:37.000Is religion something more chosen, people can move in and out of?
00:25:40.000But, I mean, you know, look worldwide.
00:25:42.000There's plenty of religious wars, plenty of religious violence.
00:25:45.000People cleave to a lot of different identities.
00:25:48.000Some of them are racial, but also racial identities are more complicated than even I think this conversation is making them sound.
00:26:08.000Even use religion as an example, one of the things that the founders, I think, very wisely did is they stumped in favor of separation of church and state, specifically to minimize the impact of a state being made the weapon of a particular religious sect.
00:26:19.000So the founders recognized the problems of religious identitarianism.
00:26:22.000Right, I think you're making, I think you're arguing for my position.
00:26:26.000No, I'm arguing that affiliation specifically by, there are gradations in the dangers to be posed by affiliation with particular identity groups and how those manifest in politics.
00:26:36.000And I'll agree with you that religion is in some ways, because it is largely inherited from parents, and because it is not directly politically related in some ways, that in some ways it stands between sort of the poles of race and, say, tax rates.
00:26:50.000But there are gradations there, and I think that to pretend that these are all the same, which is sort of what you claim in the book, that all identity groups to which you choose affiliation should be treated equally in politics, and that when politicians appeal to those identity groups, that that is equally... Oh, I don't think I agree with that at all.
00:27:04.000Well, so then clarify for me, because I'm a bit confused.
00:27:08.000So clarify for me, which do you think that there are increasing or divergent dangers based on attempts to appeal to particular senses of identity in American politics?
00:27:18.000Let me think for a second what I think about this.
00:27:24.000I don't think it is different now than it has ever been.
00:27:26.000If anything, one of the arguments I make in the book is that identity politics is paradoxically weaker now as we see it more clearly.
00:27:33.000So one of the big-picture arguments I make in the book is that we are in an era of very rapid demographic change.
00:27:37.000So we are en route to being a majority-minority nation racially by about 2043.
00:27:43.000We've seen the percentage of Americans that are foreign-born go from about 4% in 1973 or 1974, I think it was, to about 14.5% now.
00:27:50.000That's a couple points off from a record, but we're expected to hit a record.
00:27:53.000And then to bring religion into this, we are again en route to seeing the religiously unaffiliated become the single largest religious group again that's expected by demographers in about the 2040s.
00:28:02.000So about 7 out of 10 seniors are white and Christian.
00:28:07.000Only 3 out of 10 people under 30 are white and Christian.
00:28:09.000It's a very, very rapid change in religious mores in the country.
00:28:13.000And all that is creating a lot of pressure on the system, but one of the things it's creating is an ability for groups that traditionally have not been strong enough to put their needs and their claims onto the political agenda to do exactly that.
00:28:24.000And that's why one of the arguments I make is that identity politics is often most powerful when we don't see it clearly at all.
00:28:30.000I mean, you've said already in this conversation that white identitarianism has been one of the foundational sins in American political life for a very long time.
00:28:37.000Oftentimes it is acted-- - Unspoken white identitarianism.
00:28:39.000Oftentimes it is acted almost completely invisibly.
00:28:41.000Like one of the points I make in the book is that presidential cabinets for the vast majority of American history were just all white men.
00:28:48.000And when that was going on, nobody said, ah, identity politics, like only white men are being chosen for this.
00:28:52.000But then if somebody comes out and says, I think we need a cabinet that looks like America or a cabinet that is 50% female or whatever it might be, that all of a sudden is identity politics.
00:29:01.000So to your question about whether or not... And I agree with that critique.
00:29:07.000So I agree with the point that it is more identity politics to suggest today that we ought to, in today's politics, forget about Sixty years ago, I agreed that it was unspoken white identitarianism to have only white males at the cabinet table.
00:29:21.000Today, if somebody says... Two policies.
00:29:43.000I want to hold for a minute on first the first question, then I'll go to your second question, which is, my point is simply that identity politics has always been part of America.
00:29:53.000And I don't think you're going to get it out of the whole thing because people interact through not just the political system but the world through their identity.
00:29:59.000But it's one of the worst things that has happened in American history is the unspoken white identitarianism.
00:30:03.000I agree that it has terrible dimensions and I agree that it has, oh, maybe I don't agree, but I believe it can have good dimensions.
00:30:09.000Like everything in politics, it's complicated and it can go in multiple directions depending on who's doing it and whether or not the causes are going forward.
00:30:17.000I think in the general question of how to build cabinets that you're bringing up there, oftentimes the way people see it is not actually that what they're doing is betraying the meritocracy by trying to make a more diverse cabinet, but actually forcing themselves to be meritocratic in building something and also creating a world where you can be meritocratic in the future.
00:30:34.000If you've created a system where it's endlessly white privilege regenerating itself through, then it becomes very hard to have a system 20 years from now Where there are enough people who have come up through the pipeline and have had their needs recognized and have had their talents seen to be able to have the kind of system that we want to have.
00:30:49.000I think one of the places that I probably disagree with you pretty profoundly in politics has to do with what do you do about historical injustice now?
00:30:58.000I think sometimes there's an effort to say, I call it sort of zero day equality, right?
00:31:04.000And so as of today, everything goes in the same direction.
00:31:06.000As of today, everybody gets treated equally.
00:31:08.000And then all the accumulated power, the accumulated wealth, the accumulated position in society, you just sort of wipe it away and you hope people are going to swim through that entire thing.
00:31:18.000It's why I brought up earlier this question of an African-American family with a head earner and a full-time job having significantly less wealth than a white family with an unemployed head earner, an African-American family with a college-educated head earner.
00:31:29.000having a lot less wealth in a white family with a college dropout head earner.
00:31:33.000Like that is something where you see that there's something going on in the background there, that if you simply begin running the race right now, it is not going to be a fair race.
00:31:40.000Now you have to handle these things carefully.
00:31:41.000I don't think anything is easy, right?
00:31:43.000My background, as you know, is as a policy reporter, it is hard to fix difficult problems.
00:31:48.000It doesn't mean you shouldn't try or it doesn't mean you shouldn't see them as problems.
00:31:50.000Well, you can see historical injustice as a problem and still recognize the limitations of government, which goes back to one of your original statements about kind of the nature of liberalism, about the ability of government to get this stuff done.
00:32:01.000I mean, Lyndon Johnson specifically talked about kind of moving toward a Rawlsian equality of opportunity as opposed to the sort of equality of rights that is guaranteed under the Constitution or should be, right?
00:32:10.000The idea that equal rights before law and equal application of the law was the basis of Americanism, and he sort of replaced that Speaking clearly with this idea that it was not a fair race if somebody was starting off ten yards behind, which is a nice metaphor.
00:32:36.000Well, when I say it's true to the extent that it's true, what I mean is that there are a couple of problems with it.
00:32:41.000One, everybody in society, to a more or less extent, is born different from everybody else in society with certain advantages and certain disadvantages, and that's accurate.
00:32:49.000Also, everybody is born either with a certain advantage or disadvantage in terms of historical circumstance.
00:32:55.000What makes You believe that either it is right and just for the government to then come in and act as a sort of godlike figure in figuring out who deserves to have something taken away from them and handed to somebody else, even if they don't necessarily bear personal responsibility for it.
00:33:41.000Fair majorityism doesn't mean, I think, for me what it means for you.
00:33:44.000I think we are fundamentally so far from being an actual democracy in this country, given that the White House is occupied by the candidate who won fewer votes, the Senate is occupied by the party that won fewer votes.
00:33:53.000Because of that, the Supreme Court is occupied by the party that won fewer votes in the relevant elections to offer Supreme Court nominations.
00:33:59.000We are so far from democracy, I would like to see a pretty big move towards being a democracy.
00:34:03.000Pure majoritarianism in the sense of, like, running a California proposition process or not having individual rights, of course not.
00:34:08.000But majoritarianism, way closer to where we are now, not having a filibuster, that kind of thing?
00:34:20.000So then what are the limiting principles?
00:34:23.000Meaning, what are the things that ought to be protected?
00:34:28.000Well, the reason I ask this is because... We've done a lot of work on this throughout American history.
00:34:36.000So the founding argument, for better or for worse, the founding argument, I think very much for better, is that there are certain individual rights that pre-exist governments, and the government was instituted to protect those individual rights, and that a government that surpasses those individual rights ceases to act as a function of its original Mandate and therefore is illegitimate.
00:34:56.000I mean, this is the basics of the Declaration of Independence, right?
00:34:59.000And then the Constitution is designed specifically with all of these checks and balances.
00:35:02.000As you discuss in the book, it was designed for gridlock.
00:35:05.000I mean, when people yell about the gridlock of American government, I always am confused by that because literally the thing was designed for gridlock.
00:35:11.000I mean, the founders are not unclear about this in the Federalist paper.
00:35:13.000I think it's a pretty tremendous zone of range within where we are now and what we've agreed is legitimate to do within our constitutional structure that you could do.
00:35:32.000So, normatively... You believe, as you understand our constitutional structure, that you should be able to do something like single-payer health care?
00:36:18.000And this is where I think that we have our great divide on your book, which is that you believe that the divides in America are chiefly due to reorientation of identity.
00:36:31.000Again, I want to be super clear about this.
00:36:33.000I think these divides have been much bigger at other times, and they were very similar divides.
00:36:37.000It's not like people didn't have the argument you and I are having right now in 1950.
00:36:40.000I mean, you had an argument in 1950 that was much more between communists and going all the way to, say, like a Barry Goldwater.
00:36:46.000The range of political opinion in 1950 was vast.
00:36:49.000My point is simply that back then, It didn't split by party, and that has very particular, distinctive implications for a political system like ours.
00:36:58.000I want to be clear, because I think this is something that people really get wrong.
00:37:01.000The way in which our political system, we equate polarization with disagreement, we equate it with bitterness or argumentativeness or incivility.
00:37:18.000So I think it is important for those of us in this moment who are political pundits and who are trying to assess this to not play into the idea that we are living through some level of fracture and friction that America has never experienced.
00:37:30.000I think that there is, particularly by the way on the left, a tendency to overstate how bad the current moment is and how deep the divides are.
00:37:51.000And that is the change the book is tracing.
00:37:53.000I'd be interested if you think it's true.
00:37:55.000I don't think that even our divides on economic policy, to say nothing of our divides on race and social policy, are deeper now than they were 50 years ago.
00:38:03.000But even if you do, I don't think that is the main thing that has changed.
00:38:06.000And I think those arguments are quite similar.
00:38:09.000I mean, we can go back to early issues of the National Review and see these debates playing out.
00:38:12.000The difference is who they're talking to and how those things establish themselves by party and then how they're mechanized by party.
00:38:19.000Because when parties are internally united, they are able to act with a level of discipline and a level of competition between them that is.
00:38:26.000creates one kind of political system versus when they're internally divided and they try to handle disagreements either through internal compromise or, as was often the case in American history in the 20th century, through suppression of those disagreements.
00:38:36.000So when it comes to sort of the acceleration of divides, I think you're right on some issues and I feel like you're a little bit off base on other issues.
00:39:07.000And then you see the Republican Party reorienting largely, you make it sort of a racial story, but I think that that ignores the fact that a lot of other things went on in the 60s aside from the civil rights movement.
00:39:17.000I mean, there was a sexual revolution and there was an economic revolution under LBJ that really grew government at extraordinary rates.
00:39:22.000I mean, people tend to pay a lot of attention to the New Deal and not enough attention to the Great Society, which was an exponential growth of American government.
00:39:29.000And that really did result in sort of the Reagan backlash to that.
00:39:32.000And that's where the modern party system really begins, is really in the 60s.
00:39:36.000You talk a lot about the Civil Rights Act, as I said, and the Voting Rights Act, and all of that is appropriate, although I would challenge some of the assertions of the Southern shift, which I think, again, has been statistically exaggerated and a little bit— it ignores some of the underlying economic trends.
00:39:50.000It ignores— It ignores the fact that Republicans really only took over the South in terms of Congress in the early 1990s.
00:39:58.000No, but I talked about that pretty explicitly.
00:40:11.000Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating thing, right?
00:40:13.000Identity is so powerful, including partisan identity, that to change it you often need generational... the polite way of saying it is generational cohort replacement.
00:40:20.000It is very hard to change people's political identities, and it often doesn't happen until one generation dies out and those loyalties begin to fade because the next generation doesn't have them.
00:40:29.000I mean, this is an old piece of insight that a lot of social change is actually generational.
00:40:33.000For sure, but the reason that I'm tracing the history a little bit in terms of the 1960s is that there is a feeling in the Republican Party, and really inside the kind of conservative base, that you're right, and that you were right that there was agreement about the growth of government, but then there was this explosion in government that happens in the 1960s, and that extends into the Republican Party via Nixon.
00:40:54.000And then there's a backlash to that in the Republican Party that consolidates around, okay, we have now gone too far.
00:41:00.000And that the continuation of the going too far has not abated.
00:41:02.000So there's one point you make in the book where you say, you know, Democrats have constantly sort of striven for change and Republicans increasingly are the party of stop, no, don't do that.
00:41:12.000One is that, as you sort of suggest in the book, that the people who are anti-change and who are genetically and psychologically predisposed toward non-change have now centralized in one party.
00:41:23.000The other possibility is that we've pushed pretty damn far in the last three decades on a wide variety of issues.
00:41:29.000And I think those are catalytic with each other.
00:41:31.000Well, yes, but I think that the psychological explanation seems to lay at the feet of psychology of political change, whereas the explanation that I'm laying forth is that the Democratic Party, the media, that particularly there's been a real social move toward the left, and that the reaction to that, centralizing the Republican Party, is not chiefly a psychological one as much as it is a psychological reaction to a perfectly justifiable I don't think.
00:41:56.000I mean, I think an argument I make pretty explicitly in the book, particularly in the demographic change chapter, is that all of this is being activated and amplified by genuine real change.
00:42:04.000It's simply not that people are inventing that the country is changing dramatically.
00:42:08.000It is not that people are inventing that things are different around them.
00:42:11.000I think some of the economic changes, particularly over the last 30 or 40 years, are probably a little less substantial than this, and I think that's born out of the data, but it's also there.
00:42:18.000I mean, I don't disagree that the Great Society and before that the New Deal changed politics.
00:42:23.000Part of the story about the Civil Rights Act is not that what happens, and I think that's actually an important and often missed point about American politics.
00:42:29.000What happens is, not the Civil Rights Act passes, and then all of a sudden Barry Goldwater wins the South, and tomorrow everybody's a Republican in the South.
00:42:37.000You keep a tremendous amount of Southern Democratic senators, Southern Democratic members of Congress.
00:42:42.000You keep a lot of those long-time elites.
00:42:43.000South becomes more competitive in presidential elections.
00:42:46.000This is a big era of ticket splitting.
00:42:47.000It's why you get a lot of cross-party coalitions during this period.
00:42:50.000It's why Joe Biden is out there saying, hey, remember when I used to make deals with segregationist senators?
00:42:54.000That is the moment of politics that he grew up in.
00:42:56.000I think it's always interesting how different it was in living memory.
00:42:59.000But what happens there is that what the Dixiecrat blockage did, and that's sort of how I describe it, functionally, and this is a longtime view in political science, functionally American politics was a four-party system in the 20th century.
00:43:09.000You had Democrats, as we think about them now, Dixiecrats, which were a conservative, pretty racist party.
00:43:14.000That entered into a national power sharing agreement with the Democratic Party as long as they were allowed to keep going to segregation in the South, liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans, and that it was the Civil Rights Act and a lot of changes began happening after that, and happened slowly, that allowed for realignment.
00:43:29.000The way I think about it is that, particularly that racial dimension of politics, and if you look at measures of party polarization, you can't explain it unless you add this racial dimension in mid-20th century America.
00:43:39.000It doesn't split the parties in two, internally, the way it once did.
00:43:43.000And that is what creates the possibility to have so many people who feel, as you were talking about, about economics, move over to the Republican Party.
00:43:51.000It's that move where you didn't have this foundational split inside the parties that then creates a kind of flywheel process of polarization and everything else.
00:43:59.000I mean, the process of identity sorting I talk about, where you first have this move towards ideology, where Democrats become the party of liberals and Republicans a party of conservatives.
00:44:08.000And then you have, layering on top of that, a move by race.
00:44:10.000I mean, you used to have a lot more as a percentage African-American Republicans than you do today.
00:44:14.000Jackie Robinson is very famously a Republican.
00:44:17.000If I'm not wrong, the earlier black senators were Republicans.
00:44:20.000And so that change in the Democratic Party becomes very much a party of a non-white America, right?
00:44:58.000And so I talk about it as something that is sorting.
00:45:02.000To be honest, it is something that I think is truer than we are able to get at, but I don't trust the research enough yet to layer much on it.
00:45:10.000But nevertheless, from what we know, there is a sorting around that, right?
00:45:13.000I actually think you've talked about this book, Prius vs. Pickup, by Weiler and Hetherington, and they really do show that over time there's been a very sharp sorting by this sort of fluid, which is this like high openness to experience dimension, and fixed, which is this more conscientiousness dimension.
00:45:27.000Different people cut it different ways, but that's clearly happened.
00:45:29.000And so the way I see it is more that once the process of polarization and sorting begun, it happened to a lot of things on top of each other and created what political scientists call conflict escalation.
00:45:38.000Instead of disagreeing on one thing, now things go together much more cleanly.
00:45:42.000The Republican Party in 1976 had a national convention platform that said, there's a disagreement in our party on abortion.
00:45:50.000Some people in our party think you should be able to get an abortion whenever you want it.
00:45:53.000Others think it should always be illegal.
00:45:56.000It wasn't until later the parties polarized on abortion.
00:45:59.000I also note in the book, you look at Bill Clinton's 96 convention platform, he sounds like Donald Trump on immigration.
00:46:04.000The parties are substantially more different now, not because those opinions, and I think this is something we're circling a bit, not because those opinions that they're fighting over now didn't exist in American politics, but to the extent they did, they existed as cleavages inside the parties too.
00:46:17.000And when a cleavage is inside the party, the party tries to compromise it or suppress it.
00:46:21.000When it is between them, they try to escalate it.
00:46:24.000And so what I'm trying to describe is a difference in political conflict dynamic, not not a difference in political opinions.
00:46:30.000The thing political scientists argue about in my book is that they feel the mass public is not polarized on policy very much at all.
00:46:35.000And in fact, if you look at most people, they're very unpolarized on policy.
00:46:39.000I mean, Republicans very heavily support higher taxes on the rich.
00:46:42.000Democrats have all kinds of views that would get canceled on liberal Twitter.
00:46:45.000Like it just doesn't fall the way political elites fall.
00:46:47.000We are unusually, all of us, super ideological.
00:46:51.000And And going way back to Converse's studies in the 50s and 60s, only about 15 to 20% of the population has a very clear, coherent ideology, a sense, as they say, of what goes with what.
00:47:00.000What's changing is just how sordid those parties are at the top level, and that changes how the mass public reacts to them at the bottom level, because people are sitting there.
00:47:08.000It's much easier to make a distinction between two parties that have very clearly different views on abortion then two parties are mixed on them.
00:47:14.000Easier to make a distinction between, on immigration, if you care about that a lot, between the party of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than the party of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
00:47:22.000And so as parties change, as these disagreements locate in parties as opposed to, or between them as opposed to inside of them, it very much changes the dynamics of American politics more broadly.
00:47:31.000So I want to get into that in just one second.
00:48:31.000Better to get your life insurance, right?
00:48:33.000Go check them out at policygenius.com.
00:48:36.000To get back to the sort of identity politics question, because that's really the area where we disagree.
00:48:39.000I agree with so much of your analysis on the polarization of the parties.
00:48:42.000And it's obviously true that all of the ideological diversity within the parties is basically gone at this point.
00:48:47.000I mean, the blue dog Democrat is basically gone.
00:48:49.000The very liberal Republican is effectively being moved out.
00:48:53.000I mean, you can see people who are not even liberal Republicans, if they if they cross the party, are now being sort of sent into the wilderness and wished into the cornfield.
00:49:01.000So, you know, that that out on the ice ice flow.
00:49:04.000So that sort of stuff is obviously happening.
00:49:06.000I guess the question is when it comes to how to have political conversations and how to cure the polarization, a lot of that, to me, is going to rely on having conversations like the one we're having, where neither of us feel that our quote-unquote identity is threatened, as opposed to most of the conversations that are being activated.
00:50:00.000That's why I'm not leaving this place without a mug.
00:50:02.000And I also think it's the least dangerous conflict.
00:50:03.000But I do think that when these things all begin to layer on top of each other, And that's the story I'm telling in the book.
00:50:10.000One of the points I'm making is that we have to understand political identities as identities.
00:50:13.000And that's why I go through a lot of this other—separate from, because I want to be clear for the audience, we were talking a couple of minutes ago about political psychology research, about psychological substrates of people's politics later in life.
00:50:23.000Here I'm talking about research about how people form identities, which I think is much, much stronger, and we can go through the Henry Toshville stuff if you'd like.
00:50:30.000I think that what is happening now is we have to understand that a lot of the polarization in the country is actually coming from political identity, which is fed into by racial, by religious, by geographic, is another, I think, quite big one, kinds of identity.
00:50:46.000Michael Tesler, the political scientist at UC Irvine, he shows that in polling, if you looked at racialized controversies, which we had plenty of in the 90s, they were very divisive in the country, but they didn't split by party.
00:50:57.000Simpson verdict or the Bernard Goetz trial in New York, People had different views, but those different views were not different by Republicans and Democrats.
00:51:03.000If you poll racialized controversies now, George Zimmerman or a couple years ago, whether or not—this is my favorite—whether or not 12 years a slave should win an Oscar, which is not something the parties took position on.
00:51:13.000But if I'm remembering the numbers here correctly, 69% of Democrats said yes, 12 years a slave should win an Oscar.
00:51:20.000So what you have is a layering of these identities on top of each other, and then they come out in these political identities, which in many ways are much more comfortable arguing about.
00:51:30.000Just to finish one more study here, I show in the book a study that I think is pretty disturbing, which is by Shanto Yengar and Sean Westwood, where they show that if you give people a form and you ask them to rate somebody applying for a scholarship, you now see very, very high rates of discrimination simply based on whether or not the hypothetical scholarship applicant was a Republican or Democrat in high school.
00:51:51.000These political identities are standing in for a lot.
00:51:53.000They are very powerful in how we treat each other.
00:51:55.000And they're at the core of a lot of political polarization.
00:51:58.000And I think much more so at the core of it than some of these other identities you're talking about.
00:52:02.000It feels to me like the politics have been layered onto the political identities by politically motivated actors.
00:52:07.000What I mean by that is, right, and so what I'm suggesting is that the layering is the problem.
00:52:13.000Not the identity group identification, which as you identify has been part of American politics forever, but people identifying by party, people identifying by value group, even to a certain point, apolitically by religious group is not a problem.
00:52:25.000Politically by religious group it starts to become more of a problem, right?
00:52:28.000If you identify- But we agree they've always done that, right?
00:52:30.000Yes, but doing it by racial group has always been the biggest problem in American history and doing it by racial group today and layering politics on top of racial group makes it almost impossible to have a conversation in the sense that if you believe that you're- an immutable characteristic about yourself is threatened by somebody else's political position, then there's no possible way to have a rational conversation.
00:52:51.000And this is how you end up with the idea that you appearing on my show, you're gonna get unbelievable blowback because I am a threat to people who are transgender, or I'm a threat to people who are black, or I'm a threat to people who are Hispanic.
00:53:03.000Now, I have never said a word about black identity as being bad, because black identity is not bad.
00:53:10.000Meaning like, if you are a black person, that is not bad.
00:53:13.000And not only that, I have forcibly Gone after and taken more abuse for it.
00:53:18.000Anybody going after the alt-right and racism coming from that particular purview.
00:53:24.000You're going to get hit for being on the show, specifically because the idea is that because I believe that Trayvon Martin was acquitted, that George Zimmerman was acquitted, and that the DOJ could not come up with evidence that George Zimmerman was racially motivated in the killing of Trayvon Martin, that therefore you are speaking with an overt racist because I took a position on that trial that obviously threatens identity.
00:53:45.000So, one, I think sometimes people overrate the bravery it takes to appear on a show.
00:53:50.000Like, I will live through my cancellation.
00:53:52.000Like, I would not be here if I thought it was going to, like, destroy my career forever.
00:53:56.000So I think sometimes the amount of bravery people suggest it takes pundits to wander around and have conversations in the current era is amplified by a kind of desire to make things all seem a little bit more dangerous and polarized and make the other side seem more unreasonable than they are.
00:54:09.000I have plenty of conversations on my show With people I disagree with, like Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan and so on, and my show doesn't get cancelled.
00:54:20.000I think some of it is deserved, frankly.
00:54:21.000But I was looking at a speech you gave a couple of years ago, and I don't know what it was actually titled, but of course on YouTube it's titled, Ben Shapiro destroys the concept of white privilege.
00:54:31.000I think that when you do these speeches, the way that speech was constructed is full of a lot of jabs.
00:54:36.000You talk about the people you disagree with sounding like you're 22-month-old spitting up.
00:54:41.000You don't try to lower the amount of threat people feel from you, but I actually don't really want to talk about you in this.
00:54:46.000What I want to make is a bigger point about race and politics, which is, it is true that being, say, African-American in this country, politics has often been a threat to you, like a deep, real threat to your ability to live a decent life.
00:55:01.000And that is true for people of different sexualities and it's true for a lot of us in different ways.
00:55:04.000And so one of the things that I do think I profoundly disagree on with you is that the idea that bringing that into politics, the reason is often combustible, is that that is a place where there's been some of our deepest injustice.
00:55:15.000And in particular, I think it's combustible because people have a sense deep inside that if we were to really account for historically what we've done, the amount of societal disruption that would take, reparations and other things, it would be so much that people don't even want to face it.
00:55:31.000It's much easier to suppress it, which again, by the way, is what we did for much of 20th century politics.
00:55:37.000I'm not coming here with an agenda to solve politics, much less an agenda to solve racial divisions in politics.
00:55:42.000But the idea that racial divisions are part of politics, you're going to somehow, like, lock them out, it just seems wild to me.
00:55:47.000I mean, of course one of the many things we have to deal with in politics is racial division.
00:55:51.000Politics is a place where we're able to take our divisions and hopefully deal with them non-violently so they don't explode in other parts of our country and other parts of our society.
00:55:59.000Now, I have very deep concerns that we've become unable to deal with anything in politics, be those racial divisions, be it healthcare, be it anything.
00:56:06.000But that's a set of arguments I'll make about the way our political system now functions, not so much about whether or not it is viable to bring these disagreements into the political sphere.
00:56:13.000But I think that at root, there is also a fundamental disagreement here on how many of these political disagreements go to identity.
00:56:21.000And that may be the biggest disagreement of all, which is that I agree there are obviously certain points where there are policies that are threatening to black people and were designed to be threatening to black people.
00:56:29.000I mean, most of American history was replete with exactly such policies.
00:56:33.000The invocation of policies that are not only facially neutral but not designed to be discriminatory toward black people, the activation of the racial trigger when it comes to the invocation of group identity in response to that, I think is incredibly dangerous and it ought to be used with great care.
00:56:49.000And I feel like you downplay the amount of care that ought to be used for that because you're pretty sanguine about the idea that policy is generally racialized.
00:56:57.000I don't think I do downplay the amount of care you need.
00:57:01.000And I think actually one of my criticisms of you is I think you don't.
00:57:04.000I think that you say a lot of very inflammatory things that offend people and then when they're offended you weaponize that offense back at them.
00:57:09.000And I think it's a careless way to treat people in this and I think the whole idea that you shouldn't bring race into politics is a careless way to treat Yes, it needs to be careful.
00:57:19.000Yes, you need to try to hear the best of all sides.
00:57:22.000And something I do in the book, which among other things has given me a little bit of blowback, is I try to have a reasonably sympathetic account, though it is not my account and it is not my position, of the feelings of white fear in the country right now.
00:57:33.000I try to have a pretty sympathetic account of what it feels like to live in a country Where you thought you understood what the power order was, and it is changing.
00:57:40.000And I talk about that loss of social status as being something that you have to take seriously in American politics, sort of no matter what you actually believe about American politics, because if you don't, it's a very dangerous thing.
00:57:50.000So it's actually not my view that you should deal with it without much care.
00:57:54.000It's my view that you just do still have to deal with it.
00:57:56.000We don't get to dodge our hard issues because they could be combustible.
00:57:59.000It just requires us to deal with them in more decent faith.
00:58:02.000So, I mean, obviously, I think we ought to deal with hard issues, and I want to get to that in just one second.
00:58:06.000But first, let's talk about saving time and money.
00:58:09.000You know, it's not really a great use of your time or your money to take a bunch of packages, schlep them to the post office in the back of your car, and then wait in line at the post office.
00:58:16.000Post office is great, but why not just do everything online?
00:59:18.000The example that you just gave, and it is an example that I came across in the book, obviously where you're talking about sort of the fear by white people of the burgeoning demographic minority, but burgeoning demographic majority.
00:59:30.000You posed it just now as sort of an attempt to understand the mind of people who feel that fear.
00:59:37.000And as a conservative, I've always felt, and when I read the book I got this feeling too, that you're sort of speaking conservatism as a second language.
00:59:44.000When you're trying to provide an explanation of how people are feeling, that what you're actually doing is racializing a fear that most people don't feel racially, they feel culturally.
00:59:58.000Well, I mean, I talk a lot about Ashley Jardina's research here, which is that there is a tendency, particularly in periods of demographic change and threat, to see, and I think this is a distinction that is not often made well on the left, but I do say it quite explicitly in the book, that you can have, one of the things that is happening right now is we're seeing, and you can see this very clearly in survey data, an increase in white identity.
01:00:17.000When you ask white people, just like, how do you feel about being white?
01:00:22.000And you see a change in the direction of feeling more connected to whiteness and feeling that to be an identity that people possibly need to defend.
01:00:30.000That can happen with or without an increase in outgroup hostility.
01:00:34.000And so I talk a fair amount, actually, about the fact that for most people who are seeing an increase in white identity, you actually don't see it alongside an increase in outgroup hostility.
01:00:43.000Now, for some, you see it with a very sharp rise in out-group hostility.
01:00:46.000But one of the things that I actually think is an interesting question in our politics is Donald Trump, and I know we haven't been talking about him that much here, but Donald Trump mixes these things in ways I think are probably quite politically suboptimal for him.
01:00:58.000The kind of politician who worries me more is somebody who would be very good at catering to white identity without offering as much out-group hostility.
01:01:04.000Because that kind of out-group hostility is actually quite unpopular.
01:01:06.000But the question of defending privilege, I mean, I actually talk in the book about a study that shows that if you go and you remind white college students and talk to them about white privilege, they're going to score, like if you test them after, higher in various racial resentment factors.
01:01:18.000You have to be very careful in the way you talk about this, particularly in a country with a lot of change.
01:01:23.000I don't think I'm racializing things that aren't racialized, but I am trying to deal with the fact that we have a series of interlocking demographic changes that are happening all at once, on top of, by the way, a lot of technological changes and political and social changes that are creating a sense of just change.
01:01:39.000I mean, I quoted some length by William Barr's different speeches about how the secular left is pursuing an organized destruction of religion.
01:01:46.000It's very much not my view that you're just seeing one kind of threat under operation here.
01:01:50.000And in fact, I think people actually way underestimate the power of the religious threat going on right now, which is why I've had Rod Dreher on my show, why I've had Robert Jones on my show, and I've been trying to explore that as well.
01:02:01.000I think these things are very important, but I think people underestimate the degree to which they are—and I know you won't love me using the word—intersectional.
01:02:08.000Well, no, I mean, listen, the thing that I've seen a lot of folks on the left doing, Jane Costa and I have talked about this at length, is going back to, you know, sort of the original definition of intersectionality, which of course is perfectly valid.
01:02:20.000The idea that you have intersectional identity in the sense you could be a woman and you can be discriminated against and a black person discriminated against and a black woman is discriminated against in a different way, that's perfectly valid.
01:02:29.000But the idea that you can sort of set up a hierarchy of victimization inherently at the hands of white majoritarian society is inevitably going to set up the white population in opposition to that.
01:02:40.000You have now declared that you are inherently part of this white hierarchy of power that is cramming down on everybody else.
01:02:47.000And of course, that's going to create a reactionary backwash that is going to just be the natural result of being excluded from the coalition of the supposedly dispossessed.
01:02:56.000I mean, that's one of the things that I think is happening, and I think that's less racialized than it is a reaction to the racialization.
01:03:03.000And so, these factors are... The chicken and the egg here is very difficult.
01:03:08.000Well, but the question is how to stop that, but I don't get the sense that you necessarily want to stop that.
01:03:12.000I don't think you're going to be able to stop it right now.
01:03:21.000What I will say on this is that, just to finish the thought, what I will say on this is that what I'm trying to do in the book, this is, and you've read it.
01:03:34.000It's not me explaining to you how I think the world should be.
01:03:36.000I have a little bit of solutions stuff in the back chapter, and I'm sure you disagree with some of it.
01:03:40.000But in general, you can pretty much realize I wrote that chapter as a hostage letter.
01:03:44.000I don't want to write a solutions chapter.
01:03:46.000And the solutions are all, get rid of the filibuster.
01:03:50.000I am trying to describe how a system is working.
01:03:52.000Like this is a book of, to go back to Vox, exponatory journalism.
01:03:56.000It is not a book of like, here is what Ezra Klein thinks is right about the world.
01:03:59.000Whether I treat, I speak conservatism as a second language or not, like I am less interested in sort of who's right in this at the moment.
01:04:06.000than I am in trying to give people stronger and better micro foundations for understanding how politics works.
01:04:11.000What I want people to do is understand why political actors ranging from you and me to Mitch McConnell to Donald Trump to, you know, staffers, etc. make the decisions they do.
01:04:21.000I think I have for somebody who's clearly on the liberal side of that debate, a pretty sympathetic account of what Mitch McConnell did during the Merrick Garland affair.
01:04:28.000Trying to explain like how that was a very straightforward application of his own incentives and the rules of American politics.
01:04:33.000And asking him to take one of the most ideological consequential votes he would probably ever have as a Senate majority leader and not see it as an ideological vote in a time of high ideological polarization, which is at some point that theory is going to fail.
01:04:46.000And so I'm trying to change the way people see politics is working because I think we're baselined to a way it worked in the 20th century that is no longer how it works given the party structure we have.
01:04:55.000Look there we can talk about depolarization.
01:04:57.000My I would like to have had and I will tell you that I worked at this.
01:05:09.000I spend a lot of time looking at literature on depolarization.
01:05:12.000I don't think anything works at scale.
01:05:13.000I think that there's definitely evidence that you can do things like intergroup contact, and if you moderate and structure things so people are working towards a common goal and so forth, it will depolarize.
01:05:23.000It just is very hard to figure out how you do that at scale given all the forces that are moving towards polarization.
01:05:28.000Given all the media outlets move towards polarization, given how different the parties are from each other.
01:05:32.000I mean, if we have, and I don't know who's going to win the Democratic primary at this point, but if we have a Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump election in 2020, just the size of that difference is really dramatic.
01:05:44.000And that's the kind of size of difference, whether or not we have it this year or not, that we're moving towards.
01:05:48.000I will note that it did feel, since Bernie Sanders is going to win the primaries, the line that you have very late in the book where you suggest that the best evidence that the Republican Party has sort of moved off its institutional moorings is the 2016 race in which Trump won the nomination, but Hillary won the nomination in 2016, and now we're looking at I mean, I don't think there's any doubt that the Democratic Party is polarizing and moving left.
01:06:09.000I mean, there are some differences in the Democratic Party and what it can do and how it can move left, and I talk about that in the book because of the way their coalition is structured and they have to win center-right voters because of the geography of the Electoral College.
01:06:19.000I mean, there is a discussion on the left about how to win sort of downscale, more conservative whites in Wisconsin, that there's not a matching discussion on the right about how to win, you know, like African-American voters in Los Angeles.
01:06:29.000But nevertheless, like, I don't think there's any doubt the Democratic Party is moving in a polarized direction.
01:06:34.000And I think one of the big unanswered questions of the book for me is, are the differences between the Democratic and the Republican parties, is the Democratic Party following the Republican Party on a lag?
01:06:43.000I don't think Bernie Sanders and Trump are equivalent politicians on a lot of different levels, including, by the way, that whatever they say about him, Bernie Sanders is a very longtime American politician.
01:07:13.000So every president has gotten higher in this, and those are presidents of different parties with dramatically different personal, rhetorical, political styles.
01:07:20.000So what is happening here is structural.
01:07:22.000I really am trying to move a lot of the analysis off of individual.
01:07:25.000In political journalism, we personalize things that are actually systems.
01:07:29.000This is trying to analyze American politics as a system and see how it's changed over the past, let's call it, 50, 80 years.
01:07:37.000The chief critique that I had of the book, and as again, I recommend everybody read it.
01:07:40.000There's so much good information in it and it really is fascinating.
01:07:42.000Why we're polarized, go get it at your bookstore.
01:07:44.000But the chief critique that I had of the book is I feel like because of the way that you define the problem and then because of the way that you defend identity politics broadly as we are all engaged in identity politics, You have now foreclosed a solution, and everything in the last chapter, as you rightly, I mean, you basically say it straight out, it's a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, right?
01:08:02.000Getting rid of the filibuster ain't gonna cure these problems on a systemic level.
01:08:06.000What I mean by that is you set out a system whereby our increasing identity, our increasing sense of identity invested in politics is separating us.
01:08:14.000But you've laid out at the very beginning a defense of identity politics, broadly speaking, Not identity.
01:08:21.000I do want to push this because whether I defend it or not defend it, I just view it as a force.
01:08:26.000I'm not defending the existence of US politics.
01:08:30.000I'm saying that it's here and we need to understand it.
01:08:33.000Something we haven't talked too much about is the foundations of identity.
01:08:36.000One of the foundations of identity, and particularly in the way it becomes combustible in politics, which is I think primarily where you're focused here, is when you just get into ingroup-outgroup dynamics.
01:08:44.000One of the things I show in the book using Henry Tocqueville's research and others is it is incredibly easy to get there.
01:08:49.000I mean, you can do it based on almost anything.
01:08:51.000And sports is a great example of something where the stakes are not objectively that high.
01:09:02.000And that's a little bit why, when I come here, I think it's interesting to me that you're so down on identity politics, but you're doing strong in-group, out-group stuff.
01:09:10.000I mean, like, facts don't care about your feelings is like a whole—I'd actually love to talk about that if we have time—is a whole different situation around, like, what you're saying is that people on the other side of you, like, they're not factual.
01:09:21.000You don't really have to listen to them.
01:09:57.000I don't think the malleability thing is such an important distinction as you do.
01:10:00.000And what the hell are we doing in politics, dude?
01:10:02.000I mean, if there's no malleability in our ability to change people's opinions, not only is the book pointless, but all of politics is pointless.
01:10:08.000No, because I don't think identity is determinative in the way you do.
01:10:11.000I think that people from the same identity will have different politics.
01:10:15.000And identity is something that shapes people's politics.
01:10:17.000I actually have a line in there, because I think one thing you will sometimes read, and people have said this at Vox, is that all politics is identity politics.
01:10:23.000And I'm pretty careful not to say that.
01:10:25.000And the reason I don't say it is that I don't want people to think that identity is like classical physics driving politics.
01:10:31.000If you can simply match people's identities on a list, you know exactly what they're going to think or do.
01:10:43.000One way to understand a lot of elections is our fights over what identity we should be inhabiting, what identity should be activated, when.
01:10:49.000But one reason I think this is important, I do have a whole chapter about the way we absorb information, and particularly things like identity protective cognition.
01:10:56.000And one of the ways in which I think identity is particularly dangerous in politics is once we've locked into an identity that we feel is threatened, it becomes very hard for us to listen.
01:11:28.000They're somewhat related, but they're not purely related.
01:11:31.000There are different ways to set up a conversation.
01:11:33.000And if people feel in the conversation that depending on who wins, that really affects them, or they feel that everybody's in the circle together, those are really different.
01:11:43.000A thing I find fascinating about you is that you operate in very different ways in very different contexts.
01:11:48.000Something you've done really well in this conversation, I see it because I do it too or try to in conversations like this, is you've drawn the circle kind of around us.
01:11:55.000You said, we're both here in it together.
01:12:03.000But there's a lot of work in the macro daily wire world to cut this divide and say to people in a way that deeply offends them, you're dumb.
01:12:17.000And so when I think about what you're going to do in politics, I think about a lot of how do you de-escalate conversations, not how do you tell people?
01:12:24.000Not to bring identities they have to have or that they're very deeply rooted to psychologically or otherwise into politics.
01:12:29.000Of course they're going to bring that into it.
01:12:30.000Like they're bringing everything else in their lives, their resources, the actual economic position they're in.
01:12:35.000Like how, once they're there, are we able to have conversations?
01:12:40.000That's part of what the book is saying, that I think the way the incentives of the media and other things are structured, it becomes much harder to do that.
01:12:46.000But I really disagree with the cut where it's like, Some identities are fine, others are not, but we can just all be at war with each other, and as long as we are not at war over things that relate to immutable characteristics in the way you see them, it'll be fine.
01:13:02.000I mean, these things all operate in politics somewhat similarly, and in other countries and other cultures, and even here at other times, they've become very dangerous in different ways.
01:13:10.000I mean, my God, look at Ireland during the Troubles.
01:13:12.000So you don't need immutable characteristics to have things get very dangerous.
01:13:16.000What you need is problems you can't actually resolve through a political system.
01:13:20.000That's true, but as you strengthen the identities, and again, I think political identities are the softest form of identity.
01:13:28.000When you strengthen other identities... But I mean, we have evidence that people discriminate, like, very dramatically on political identity now.
01:13:32.000They're not soft to people who hold them.
01:13:34.000Listen, I fully... I mean, you're saying the leftists want to destroy your life, like, take away your livelihood.
01:13:38.000I mean, literally there are groups that are dedicated to watching... No, I understand, but that's what I mean.
01:13:42.000My show is trying to attack my advertisers, so this is...
01:13:45.000No, no, I'm not telling you that people aren't out to get you.
01:13:46.000Like, I saw that video of you and your family getting, like, hounded by right-wingers.
01:13:55.000But that's what I mean, the political identity is very powerful.
01:13:57.000Right, but the point that I'm making is that, or that I was going to make, is that once you strengthen the idea of, of Identities that are more deeply rooted than politics.
01:14:06.000Because politics is a slightly later human invention than tribe or race.
01:14:11.000I mean, these are things that are a little bit more biologically fundamental.
01:14:42.000And so to combine that with the idea that a pure majoritarian, big government can solve the problem scares the living hell out of me.
01:14:50.000Because at the same time that we're polarizing, you're making the case that we should have basically a more majoritarian system, more powerfully able to cram down on an increasingly polarized Well, when you put it like that, it doesn't sound great.
01:15:06.000Let me put it my way, which is what I would say is one of the frustrating things about politics in this era for people is that disagreements are very hard to resolve in any way that they can see change and progress or even change and harm to their actual interests.
01:15:21.000We are constantly, because almost nothing passes ever, we are constantly locked in the conflict part of a disagreement.
01:15:27.000And so you don't get, like, the liberals passing single-payer healthcare and then people can say, oh, did I like that or did I hate that?
01:15:34.000And so do I want to bring them back to power or do I not?
01:15:36.000Or similarly, Republicans run on repealing Obamacare for a decade.
01:15:40.000They get the White House, they get the House, they get the Senate, and they don't repeal Obamacare.
01:15:45.000Well, they made deeply conflicting promises throughout, but yes.
01:16:02.000At this point, I think we're over time now.
01:16:03.000I might have finished all my liberal tears by then.
01:16:07.000I think it is a healthier form of politics for political parties to have to appeal to a majority of the public, not go to some like unbelievably maturitarian system, but just like in general to govern you need 51% of the vote.
01:16:19.000Like that's how most parliamentary systems work.
01:16:21.000And if you get that, which I think is an important distinction here, If you get that, you can actually govern.
01:16:25.000Like in other countries, if you win power in Canada or you win power in the UK, what it means is you have a governing coalition.
01:16:31.000That is like the actual thing that that means.
01:16:33.000If you win the presidential election here, like we might have in 2021 President Bernie Sanders and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
01:16:39.000And that's going to be a very frustrating outcome for everyone.
01:16:41.000And so one thing that I argue is that polarization is particularly difficult when it does not allow you to govern because then everybody's just caught in a constant fight for power, but not an ability to have an accountability feedback loop with the public where, okay, these folks came in, they got voted in, either I voted for them or I didn't, but they're in now.
01:16:59.000Instead, we're in endless arguments about why things didn't happen.
01:17:02.000Donald Trump says the Democrats are obstructing him and impeaching him and keeping him from doing anything.
01:17:07.000And Barack Obama says that the Republicans are obstructing him, coming after him, keeping him from doing all the things he wanted to do.
01:17:13.000And both of them, to some degree, are right, right?
01:17:14.000Wherever you come down on who's morally right to do it, it is nevertheless the case that neither Donald Trump nor Barack Obama had like 25% of their agenda through in the way that they imagined it over the course of their presidencies.
01:17:26.000I think that is something that makes it very hard to see disagreements coming into anything that could shake people out of where they are.
01:17:31.000I am, look, if I could imagine a great way to take down polarization, to take out the groupist impulse in the human psyche, I'd be open to it.
01:17:39.000I'm definitely interested in doing that.
01:17:50.000But I do think you can have political systems that work better or worse inside conditions of polarization.
01:17:55.000And I think it'd be better to have a political system where people could govern and the public could decide if they liked the way the governance had happened, as opposed to a political system where nobody can govern.
01:18:04.000And the public then has to decide like, why did nothing Why are my problems not getting resolved?
01:18:08.000Why do I feel like I keep trying to make American politics better and it only keeps getting worse?
01:18:13.000And that kind of, in addition to all the other forms of polarization we have, that just building frustration, I think, is very dangerous.
01:18:21.000Again, I would agree with you if I actually agreed with the premise of what government is designed to do, but that gets back to sort of the founding debate about what government is designed to do in the first place.
01:18:28.000I mean, you're assuming that a government is designed to achieve the needs of the majority or achieve the needs of people who, let's say supermajority, who broadly agree that they want to do a thing, whereas I believe the government is designed to protect fundamental rights and basically nothing else.
01:18:42.000So that is a stark difference between liberal and conservative.
01:18:46.000Yes, that is an old and real difference, but I would say that I think for most of the public, that is not the difference in American politics.
01:18:54.000It's a pretty small hobbyist contingent who ends up having the very deep argument between a true Rawlsian liberalism and a true libertarianism.
01:19:04.000I like it, and we should have some fun.
01:19:06.000I enjoyed having George Will on my podcast.
01:19:08.000He came on and made that argument for a while, and we go back and forth.
01:19:11.000I think the Republican and sort of right-wing turn against democracy itself, which has gotten stronger as democracy has become more of a threat to right-wing interests, I think that's dangerous.
01:19:19.000It is a good debate to have that gets to very fundamental differences in American politics.
01:19:24.000Most people, if you poll them, they want the problem solved.
01:19:27.000That is what they want government to do.
01:19:28.000So in terms of my view on this, of what is making political decisions— But in different ways, no matter how you govern the majority.
01:19:36.000The way the mass public is having a building frustration because nothing changes, that to me, when you talk about what makes politics dangerous, like that is what makes politics dangerous, when you can't resolve conflict.
01:19:48.000That is where things become violence in the streets.
01:19:51.000The Merrick Garland thing, I make the argument that Mitch McConnell did what you would expect him to do given his incentives.
01:19:55.000You can also very much imagine a future where the Supreme Court becomes unusable or the Supreme Court has three open seats for a period of 10 years.
01:20:02.000Because nobody can come to agreement in an extended period of divided government.
01:20:05.000And that kind of thing, when we lose the capacity to resolve disagreement or make the system function, I think that is what begins to shake at the foundations of systems.
01:20:12.000Because most people, they don't want to watch or listen to our podcasts or our YouTubes.
01:20:16.000What they just want is for their lives to work.
01:20:18.000And, like, if politics isn't doing that for them, they're going to get pissed.
01:20:20.000Yeah, my problem is I don't think no matter how you slice politics, it's going to make your life work.
01:20:23.000I think you're going to make your life work in the best you can hope for as the government to leave you the hell alone.
01:20:27.000But with all of that said, I want to ask you one more question because we've gone way over time because this is so enjoyable.
01:20:34.000And thank you so much for being on the program.
01:20:35.000I do have a couple more questions I want to ask you.
01:20:37.000If you want to hear Ezra's answers on free speech and about the big debate between Carlos Maza and Steven Crowder, Vox took the position that Steven should actually get kicked off of YouTube.
01:20:45.000If you want to hear Ezra's answers on that, become a Daily Wire member.
01:20:48.000Go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
01:20:52.000Well, Ezra Klein, it really has been a pleasure to have you here.
01:20:54.000I'm sorry that we don't have more time, honestly.
01:20:56.000We've gone probably 25 minutes over here.