Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE

Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that's a huge difference between the two sides right now. I think the steel man is very easy to make here. Department of government efficiency. That sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail. Adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units. I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it's trying to achieve. This is a world in which a department of government efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we're going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place.

The following is a conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for The New York Times, author of Why We're Polarized and host of the Ezra Klein Show. Derek is a writer at the Atlantic, author of Hit Makers and On Work, and host of the Plain English Podcast. Together, they've written a new book simply titled Abundance, that lays out a kind of manifesto for the left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democratic Party could stand for in the coming election. If I may, let me comment on the fact that sometimes on this podcast, I delve into the dark realm of politics. Indeed, politics often devises and frankly, brings out the worst in some very smart people. Plus to me, it is frustrating how much of the political discourse is drama, and how little of it is rigorous, empathetic discussion of policy. I hate this. But I guess I understand why. If the other side is called either Hitler or Stalin online by swarms of chanting mobs, it's hard to carry out a nuanced discussion about immigration, healthcare, housing, education, foreign policy, and so on. On top of that, anytime I talk about politics, half the audience is pissed off at me. And no, there is no audience capture. I get on equally by different groups across the political spectrum, depending on the guest. Why? I don't know. But I'm slowly coming to accept that this is the way of the world. I try to maintain my cool, return hate with compassion and learn from the criticism and the general madness of it all.

You are both firmly on the left of the US political spectrum. Ezra, I have been a fan of yours for a long time. You're often referred to, at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left. Can you try to define the ideals and the vision of the American left? Oh, good. We're starting small here.

All right. So, to descend down from the platonic ideals of the left and the right, well, who's actually running the show on the right and the left? Who are the dominant forces? Maybe you could describe and you mentioned democratic socialists, the progressives, maybe liberals, maybe more sort of mainstream left, and the same on the right with Trump and Trumpism. So, on the right, it's pretty straightforward at the moment. And the right is composed differently than it was 10 years ago. But the right is run by Donald Trump and the people who have been given the nod of power by Donald Trump. So, that is right now Elon Musk, but Elon Musk's power is coming from Donald Trump. That is maybe in some degrees JD Vance, maybe in some degrees, Russ Vought, maybe sometimes Homan's over at DHS. The right beneath that, the Republicans in Congress are extraordinarily disempowered compared to in other administrations. They are sort of being told what to do and they are doing what they are told. Republicans in Congress, Senate Republicans, they didn't want Pete Hegseth. They didn't want Kash Patel. They didn't want Tulsi Gabbard. They didn't want RFK Jr. Nobody got elected to be a Republican in the Senate hoping that they would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a member of the Kennedys, a Democrat who is pro-choice and running as a Democrat two years ago for HHS. But Donald Trump told him to do it and they did.

Is there a degree to which the left uniquely attacks its own more intensely than maybe other parts of the political spectrum? It's possible. You go back to the model that I gave you of 2015 where there used to be these four large parties, MAGA, center right, center left, and left. Right now, the Republican Party is all MAGA, so there is no coalitional fight to be had. It's all Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump wants to name a former left-wing environmentalist to be the HHS secretary, everyone says, "Okay, that sounds like a fantastic idea. That's exactly who we were going to nominate too. Thank you, Donald. That's wonderful. It's at the tip of my tongue."

Just to put a nice pretty bow tie in the whole thing, let me ask for advice. What do I need to do for AOC to do a three-hour interview with me? Ezra, from your throne of wisdom. I don't think I know how you get AOC herself to do it. I would not pretend to know her offices or her particular views on this. I do think though that you can see different Democrats taking on different kinds of risks. Right now, we're sort of in the age of Gavin Newsom. I mean, Gavin Newsom is the Governor of California and he's spending some percentage of his time doing a podcast with Charlie Cook and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon. Gavin Newsom realizes that one lane for a Democrat is to be high risk and talking to virtually everybody. I think Pete Buttigieg in a different way, somebody who wants to take media risks. Now I think he's going to, my gut on him is he's going to hold his powder a little bit, so he'll probably want to do the Lex Fridman podcast assuming he runs in 2028, in 2027.

There's also a reality, and I mean the book is trying to enter into this reality. I think one thing you're saying is that people have coded you. And so, Donald Trump is really excited to do it and maybe left with politicians are not. One thing that we think is that we're in a period of realignment. The last chapter of the book, we talk about an idea that is picked up from a historian named Gary Gerstle, which is an idea of political orders. And political orders are periods that have a sort of structure of consensus and a structure of a zone of conflict, but it's more or less agreed on by the two sides, even if only tacitly. So, you have a new deal order, new deal order is founded by FDR. It is entrenched when Dwight Eisenhower accepts the New Deal as part of the US proving that it can treat workers better than the Soviet Union. So those are sort of right there. The three ingredients typically have an order. You have a party that starts it, opposition party that accepts key premises. Dwight Eisenhower doesn't come in and say, "We're going to roll back the whole New Deal," and it's often held in place by an external antagonist. In that case, the Soviet Union. You then you have in the 70s stagflation, the Vietnam War, series of problems that the New Deal order no longer seems able to handle. So, you have the rise of what he calls the neoliberal order. And the neoliberal order is if you're going to choose a founder, it's going to be Reagan on that one. It's much more about markets. It's very concerned with things like inflation, and it really is entrenched by Bill Clinton, the era of the government is over. And partially, it's entrenched also by the fall of the Soviet Union.

And we should say that the book you've mentioned, which I've gotten a chance to read, and I think it's incredible, highly recommend, it's called Abundance. I think of it as a kind of manifesto for what the left would represent in the coming years. So I think people should read it from that angle. And both of you have been writing about this topic from different angles for a while. I think in '22, Derek, you wrote an article on this topic of abundance titled A Simple Plan to Solve All of America's Problems. And Ezra, you wrote an article in '21, a supply side progressivism titled The Economic Mistake the Left is Finally Confronting. And you've just described, laid out this more progressive perspective on supply side economics that you're presenting in Abundance. I was wondering if you could give the broad, high-level explanation of this idea of supply side progressivism? Well, my piece about the abundance agenda, which I wrote in 2022, started with me standing outside, waiting for a COVID test. And this was a period where two years after the pandemic started, COVID tests were still being rationed and it was like 21 degrees outside. And I was getting very, very frustrated about the fact that still, we seem to have a scarcity of COVID tests. And as I'm sitting outside, just freezing my ass off and just getting really mad, I'm thinking, "It's not just COVID tests we've had scarcity of. We also had a scarcity of COVID vaccines early on in the rollout, which created this really discombobulated scheme for distributing the early COVID vaccines."

Is there a tension between the left, the progressive wealth redistribution kind of ideas with the idea of building that's primarily getting out of the way and letting the market get the job done? Let's say two things on that. So one, we think there's a real tension between equality, redistribution and constricting the supply of specifically housing.

Can we zoom in on the housing problem? Can you explain the housing problem and what's the importance of housing in the quality of life, in the flourishing of the nation of the United States in general, and what is broken about it? Let's take the second part of the question first. What's so important about housing? We're talking about life, and even at a higher level, we're talking about freedom, like the freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to feel like the good and achievable life is actually good and achievable. This is profoundly a question of housing. There's this great paper that was written several years ago called The Housing Theory of Everything by Bowman, Southwood, and I forget the other guy's name, but they made this really beautiful point that no matter what you care about in terms of public policy or politics, housing probably makes contact with it. If you care about innovation, innovation, as I said, it's about getting people together in a city where they can work together. That's about housing density. If you care about childcare costs, that's about bringing down the cost of buildings. That's also about housing. If you care about being able to live near your friends and family, this is also profoundly a question of housing.

I want to add a wrinkle on regulation and deregulation. So, we were talking about coding earlier, who gets coded as right wing? Who gets coded as left wing? Deregulation is a word that is highly coded as right wing. The right wing wants it to deregulate, right? They want the government to stop regulating the market. It's fine. In many cases, the government should deregulate parts of the market. In many cases, it should regulate parts of the market more. What we don't talk about enough is how much the government regulates the government and how badly it needs to deregulate the government. So, I have many more left friends and they'll come to me or they'll critique me and they'll say, "This all is fine, but what we really need in this country is public housing," or it's been rebranded social housing. It's fine, Singapore, huge amount of social housing, right? They do a great job with it. One of the things we go into, and this book is a manifesto on some level, but something we really try to do is take you into the gritty, grimy, frustrating details of how policy plays out on the ground, what actually happens after a bill passes, and why we get the outcomes we do. Because often, it's like a bunch of decisions made after everybody stopped paying attention.

So, on the Kool-Aid man, I was wondering if you could maybe steelman the case for and against Elon Musk and DOGE, because you mentioned all of these regulations, all of these complexities that get in the way of building, it seems like a bold human like Elon is required to break through the regulation, put that on one side and the other side. I read somewhere that abundance is kind of the anti-DOGE, which to me, it seems like there is conflicting ideas, but there's also alignment. So, maybe can we break all that? I think the steelman is very easy to make here. Department of Government Efficiency. That sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends, building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units.

Listen, I hope your book becomes the manifesto of the Democratic Party. It's a beautiful vision. I'm a little bit skeptical because of the momentum of bureaucratic thought, but nevertheless remain hopeful. I have to ask as I'm a fan of both of you in the interest of time, Ezra, you had an intense debate many years ago with Sam Harris. Okay, so you're, I would say, like I said, I'm a fan of both of you. You're both intellectually rigorous people. So the debate, the contentiousness of it was both sad to me. But also as just a fan of you and since I admire your intellects, it's just fun to watch, what is it Godzilla and King Kong fight. I wish there was more of it. I wish you would do this podcast again and debate it more on some other topic and argue. It's just great. Anyway, some time has passed and- Yeah, was this eight years ago now?

Sure. Despite the fact that our book is a deep diagnosis of modern liberalism with a ton of criticism of the last half decade in politics, I am at root a profound optimist about everything just at a general personality sense. To a certain extent, a question like this is attempting to elicit a little bit of what can be considered analysis of the world. But you're also eliciting what is fundamentally like personality, like what makes you optimistic? I've just always been a real optimist. I'm optimistic about science and technology, especially in the realm of biomedical science in a big way. I think if you look at what's happening right now in mRNA cancer vaccines, in CAR T-cell therapy for redesigning T-cells to attack cancers. If you look at the GLP-1 drug revolution and some of these studies that have been done on the fact that GLP-1 drugs, while they were initially synthesized from lizard venom to help people with type two diabetes turned out to have these effects that seem to reduce body-wide inflammation. That not only rewires our minds and makes it easier for people's desired sense of moderation to be actualized. So people who want to eat more fruits and vegetables seem to find it easier to eat more fruits and vegetables when they're on GLP-1 drugs. But also because there's probably a lot of neurological issues that are fundamentally issues of inflammation, including maybe dementia and Alzheimer's. We might have accidentally from the tongue of a lizard, a partial medicine for Alzheimer's disease. The ability of science to connect these dots in the cosmos just absolutely thrills and fascinates me. And I hope that we get better at making those connections.