America's Next 250 with Ezra Klein

A conversation about freedom and attention

For a live show Q&A last year, we considered our dream guests for the podcast. Here’s Sarah’s response:

Well, today, part of Sarah’s wish has been granted. Ezra Klein is here to talk with us about where America sits at this anniversary, and what he’s thinking about as he looks ahead. We hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as we enjoyed having it. -Beth

P.S. Just putting into the universe that I’d still very much like to talk to French president Emmanuel Macron. Just sayin’.

Topics Discussed

• The vision of abundance and why the future is so hard to imagine

• Attention as a collective resource — and why ours is deranged

• Freedom as choice vs. freedom as self-mastery

• Virtue, vice, and the illiberal moment

• Institutional trust, corruption, and the education debate

• Natalism, AI, and whether we're living through an aberration

• Outside of Politics: which founder would make the best podcast guest

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Episode Resources

• Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9781668023488
• Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein
https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9781476700366
• The Lost History of Liberalism by Helena Rosenblatt
https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9780691203966
• The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9781668002483
• The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson
https://bookshop.org/a/124929/9781250231321
• "Now Is a Time of Monsters" by Ezra Klein, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/opinion/ai-climate-change-low-birth-rates.html?eafs_enabled=false

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:09] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Our guest today is a New York Times opinion columnist, author of Why We’re Polarized, and co-author with Derek Thompson of Abundance, and the host of The Ezra Klein Show. Ezra Klein is here to talk with us about where America sits at this 250th anniversary, and how we might look ahead toward a more perfect future. This episode is mostly forward-looking, but Ezra does stick around for Outside of Politics to tell us which of the founders he would be most interested in hosting on his podcast. It’s

[00:00:41] Sarah: It’s so great, guys. I’m so excited for you to listen episode. Okay. Before we share this incredible conversation, we wanted to tell you our plans for the next six weeks. Long-term listeners frequently talk about us as their political therapist or emotional support podcast, and that is what we want to be, and we want everyone who listens to be able to pay attention to news and politics sustainably over a lifetime, and that requires taking breaks. So for the next six weeks, we’ll still be here with you, but we’re softening the pace a bit. You’ll see new episodes of Pantsuit Politics right here in the free feed, and on our premium feed, you’ll see two new episodes each week, something like an episode of More to Say and a Good News Brief. But we are taking some time off, and we’ve staggered the time off. Beth will be here with you the next two weeks as I start my vacation. We’ll overlap a bit in our vacations, and then I’ll be here as Beth wraps up her time away into early August. You don’t need to memorize the schedule. It doesn’t matter. We just want you to know what to expect, and that you’ll have some time, particularly on Substack, to catch up if you’d like to soften your listening pace, and we will be back with you in mid-August as school begins for many of us across the country.

[00:01:54] Beth: Up next, here’s Ezra Klein. Ezra, we’re so happy to have you on Pantsuit Politics. Thank you for being here.

[00:02:09] Ezra Klein: I’m so glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:11] Sarah: See, you’re on a first-name basis here at Pantsuit Politics.

[00:02:16] Ezra Klein: I feel like podcasts are all a first-name basis.

[00:02:18] Sarah: Yeah, for sure.

[00:02:18] Beth: Yeah. It’s the nicest part of doing it.

[00:02:20] Sarah: I’ll remember that when I go to Joe Rogan and be like, “Hey, Joe. What’s up, buddy?”

[00:02:23] Ezra Klein: Wouldn’t it be weird to go and say, “Hey, Mr. Rogan”? He wouldn’t know what to do with that.

[00:02:28] Beth: That’s true.

[00:02:29] Ezra Klein: That’s his dad.

[00:02:30] Sarah: He teaches at the local high school.

[00:02:33] Beth: When we were thinking about what to do for July 4th on this 250th anniversary of America, we wanted to talk with you because we really liked the way that Abundance opened, with this super compelling, rich, detailed vision of what the future could look like. So as you have lived with that vision out in the world, I wonder if there are parts of it that jump out at you as distinctly American, or if there are obstacles to that vision that jump out at you as distinctly American.

[00:03:04] Ezra Klein: Ooh, what an interesting question. Okay. So for people who haven’t read the book, but it’s available wherever your books, e-books, and audiobooks are sold.

[00:03:11] Sarah:  No one in our audience? What are you talking about.

[00:03:14] Ezra Klein: It begins with a little vignette that is imagining 2050 and imagining an abundance of things that some of them we could have right now and don’t. Clean energy for a lot of people, clean drinking water. Some of them that we don’t yet have but could. Certain kinds of medications or advanced forms of energy four-day work week. And it’s saying, look, there is so much we could solve now if we arranged both the material and the genius and the will of our society to do it and to build it. So many of our scarcities, housing, energy public infrastructure, are chosen that we could live somewhere really different. It’s interesting that when I think about it now, actually, those first few pages of the book are the ones that feel the furthest from me of everything we do in the book.

[00:04:00] Sarah: Wow.

[00:04:00] Ezra Klein: And the reason is that, that’s not a full vision of the future, of course. It’s not a vision of how we’ll relate to each other, our families, what our spirits will be like. It’s a vision of plenty, right? Of material plenty. And material plenty that is helped along by advances in technology. And I think that AI specifically has made the relationship between technology and the left, however you want to define the left, much more complicated than it was even then. We were writing that book at a time when green energy was the big technology most of us were talking about. AI was beginning to build. And so I think easier for people to see the way technological advances could create a better world, right? Electric vehicles are better. You don’t breathe in combustion in the way that you do for combustion engine vehicles. But now with AI and the sort of mistrust of the people running it and the concentrations of wealth and power, even though AI could do great good for the world I think people sense that it might harm them, has made it really hard to say that technology can be a force for progress, a force for justice, a force for distributional equity. And so that part of the book was trying to get people to imagine a future that they liked a lot better than the present, but that was quite different than the present. That’s the part of it that I think is actually going worst. Other parts of the book about how to build more housing, like that’s all... we’re doing that stuff. But the reknitting a relationship between the left and technology as a force for social progress has been harder.

[00:05:26] Sarah: I think peering into the future is always so fraught. I have great admiration for futurists. I think it’s a very difficult job. And because so many of the problems, I can tell myself intellectually even with AI and the reaction to it, the future problem I’m obsessed with is the birth rate. Me and Elon out here just stressing the birth rate constantly. Left

[00:05:44] Ezra Klein: Left natalist.

[00:05:45] Sarah: I know.

[00:05:46] Ezra Klein: Close to my heart. We should talk about that. I never meet left natalists.

[00:05:49] Sarah: Listen, I am concerned. I am very concerned, but then I talk myself down. My new favorite phrase is the sleepwalker bias. We’re not going to sleepwalk into some AI dystopia. We’re not going to sleepwalk into this population problem. So you have to peer into the future, and you want to peer into the future with the problems we’ve already identified and the solutions that might work. But I have to tell myself that’s not how it’s going to go, that things will adapt and change and we will shift culturally. What I worry about with both of those problems, the AI, the birth rate, and it’s a problem you have been talking about with polarization, we have been talking about since we started 10 years ago, is this sense that sometimes if you scratch at all of these, you get to this conflict between the individual and society and institutions, societal institutions. You have distrust in societal institutions because people feel locked out of the institutions, but people don’t participate in the institutions because they no longer trust them, and then we’re in this circle of individualism bumping up against this need for sort of societal purpose, especially if we’re trying to adapt and change to these problems as they show up. How are you thinking about that? Abundance isn’t your first book. You’ve been thinking about this conflict between individualism and societal distrust as we attempt to peer into the future with AI and birth rates and all of that.

[00:07:15] Ezra Klein: Ooh, there’s so many rich directions to go on that question. I like that one. Here has been the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about how to write about and how to make into a kind of deeper inquiry. I think beneath everything you just talked about, the relationship between individuals and institutions, between individuals and each other, between the individual and society, is attention. And as much as we talk about this now, we still do not talk about it enough or have it theorized correctly. So your life is simply the total of things you pay attention to. What you are not attending to is not part of the conscious experience of your life. Now, attention here is meant widely, right? When you read a news story, you’re paying attention to that story, so it becomes part of your life. The same is true for a society. Society is shaped by what it pays attention to and the way it pays attention to it and what it doesn’t pay attention to. And attention is somehow too small of a word, but it’s the only one I have, so forgive me. And I think our attention is deranged. I think our attention as individuals and as a collective-- I believe in attention as a collective social resource, such that it is subject to tragedies of the common problems and can be fracked and overused, and everybody wants our attention, so they’re all competing with each other for it, so they get louder and louder. Going back to my first book, Why We’re Polarized, which has a lot on how the media was changing and what was happening on Twitter and algorithmic media. From there, we went away from social media to algorithmic media. That had started by then, but was not as fully flowered as it is now. I always find it amazing when you look at these court documents from META lawsuits that it’s like a couple percentage points. I think it’s seven to fifteen percent, something there, of the time people spend on Instagram is looking at things from friends and family. It’s not social media anymore. It is algorithmic media. The algorithm is not on your side. It does not want what is best for you. And Elon Musk owns X and has warped it in favor of his agenda. And I think we are being collectively deranged. And so what we attend to is really weirdly warped. And in a world where it’s warped, then our sense of society, of ourselves, of each other is going to be warped. People sometimes will do this thing where they say, “Twitter, it’s not real life.” It’s not real life. It’s not. If I thought Twitter was real life, I would do my show very differently. I do not think you can do a good show looking at Twitter and Blue Sky and Threads as barometers.

[00:09:44] Sarah: I try not to panic when you show back up there. I’m like, “Oh, no, something has really hit the fan if Ezra’s back on X.”

[00:09:51] Ezra Klein: But it has to, right? If you believe what I believe, which is that these are places that are politically deranging us, you can’t expect to do work you believe in and never make them mad.

[00:10:01] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:10:01] Ezra Klein: That’s not going to be good work. So it’s not that I try to make people mad; I try to be conciliatory and open-hearted, but I can’t be afraid of making them mad. Anyway, to the broader point, it’s all to say that I think beneath what you’re inquiring about there is this question of how do we know about the world outside of us? Everything in that world is mediated. Like from our senses at the individual level. Like sound is vibrations and airwaves that then gets converted into electrical impulses in my brain, all the way to what is in New York Times, it’s a mediation project, right? What is Twitter? Mediation. What is TV? Mediation. And if the world is mediated for you poorly and in a way that is supposed to make you angry at each other, that always brings your attention to the worst things and the worst people and the loudest people, then what is going to happen to your society over time? It’s going to derange in that same way, and that, I think, is what is happening. And it’s not the only thing happening, and it doesn’t mean it will only go one way. But that’s what that question makes me think about.

[00:11:04] Beth: I wonder if on some level that is the crux of the resistance to technology in helping us achieve a more materially abundant future. So my attention hero, the person I would most like to be like in terms of how I train my attention, is my dad. And that’s true about my dad, I think in large part, because he has spent most of his life as a farmer. He’s done other things. He’s been a county judge executive, he’s been a loan officer, but what he likes is to be out on the land alone with God, his sense of the universe, what he thinks is meaningful doing work with his hands that he can see. And it has made him just fundamentally kind and oriented to what is important. He doesn’t lose his way in terms of his priorities.

[00:11:55] Sarah: The opposite of deranged.

[00:11:57] Beth: Yeah. He is the opposite of deranged.

[00:11:59] Ezra Klein: Ranged.

[00:11:59] Sarah: Yeah, ranged.

[00:12:00] Beth: And I’ve thought so much about this because I’m really interested in precision farming. That’s part of the vision that you all mention at the beginning of Abundance. And I have learned a lot about Food Valley and the way the Netherlands is just creating so much abundance of food in clean ways, in predictable ways that could reduce the suffering of a lot of people. That is a completely different job than the job that my dad has done his entire life, and the attention at the root of it becomes a little more deranged, I think, right? It is about control and monitoring instead of creation and hope and trust and faith, and many of the things that are why he loves to farm. So I wonder if on some level, even if we could solve the social media side of it or the algorithmic media side of it, if people do have on this gut level a sense that I am just going to matter less even if they’re telling me-- whoever they are-- in this future I could be more comfortable.

[00:13:07] Ezra Klein: I guess it’s worth saying that an even modestly sane human organization on the scale of a country like the United States of America is a historically rare and unlikely thing. And we have not managed it at high levels of sanity and ethical practice for very long, or for very long periods, even inside of that maybe post-Civil Rights Act era. And which is only to say that something about what you’re saying about your father, one thing it makes me think about. There’s an old view that it is more virtuous to do certain kinds of work than others, right? Jefferson had this view. You could find it in the Greeks, right? That the small farmer is going to be a more ethical person than, say, the factory worker. They’re going to be imbued with the qualities of self-governance that a citizen needs. You can find a lot of this in Michael Sandel’s book, which is a really worthwhile book, Democracy and Its Discontents. But it wasn’t really true. We moved from farming as the dominant occupation to factories and other forms of more mechanized, mediated, alienating labor, and still had an amazing twentieth century as a country. Not obviously without its horrors, but with a tremendous amount of progress inside of it. And that progress came out of unionized factories and other places. Which is only to say that even if you have work that I think can be very sane-making, the way your world is mediated to you and who you end up believing can shift that really profoundly. Your father sounds amazing. At the same time, I’ve met many farmers whose sort of politics or sense of the world struck me as less admirable. And I’ve met many people of every profession. I’ve not found the profession that keeps you safe because in the end we have this weird question of what attracts what we’re thinking, what attracts our attention, and then who do we trust? And I do think the core question in any kind of very complex society is: who do you trust? And one of the things it sounds like to me when you talk about your father is not just that he’s a farmer, but he’s probably the person other people trusted. When you talk about some of those civic functions that he stepped into, he was probably the person other people thought he’s probably done the work. I’ll listen to him. And that’s what our representatives are supposed to be. That’s the bedrock of our system of government, and yet nobody has been spun off into more derangement than the people who work at the white hot core of politics.

[00:15:50] Sarah: Right.

[00:15:51] Ezra Klein: Being a Republican member of Congress on Elon Musk’s X is not a sane-making enterprise.

[00:15:56] Sarah: No.

[00:15:57] Ezra Klein: And so, I still think there’s something in that where you can work with your hands, you cannot work with your hands, but who do you choose to trust? Who, what? Like the newspaper, I don’t know what nobody said, and I’m not somebody who primarily reads the news on paper, I wish I were, but it was a saner technology than algorithmic media is. And one reason is it that I think it holds your attention and then it lets you release it to think. Like I was thinking about this. I read books on paper now again. I moved back off of Kindle a while ago and I really try to not read on screens. I print things out because on the screen it doesn’t release my attention to think about the thing I just read. I go check messages or whatever when I have a second of attentional drift, as opposed to like looking up and like finding myself internal. And I’m not saying there’s any one way to do it. Plenty of people read a lot of books and are crazy, and it’s not like the Nazis were illiterate or something. I don’t have the formula, but I don’t even think it’s a profession. There’s got to be something about what institutions we are tied to and what responsibility those institutions feel to be decent actors, to say something more than when they’re speaking to Mr. Rogan after Donald Trump’s second election. All that moderation we did was bullshit. We’re back in a free speech era where anything goes. To have some higher social sense of yourself than to just flip with political winds like that.

[00:17:24] Sarah: I don’t want to alarm you guys, but I think I maybe fixed it over the course of both of your answers and questions. When you were talking about attention-- and we have been thinking about this. Before we started recording, we talked about podcast secret bingo card. And I think on both of our secret bingo cards, if you’re a listener to both of our podcasts, is a word you just said, which is virtuous. We have also been talking about vice and virtue. I think it was a guest on your show that started talking about vices again with gambling and porn and marijuana, and I was like we have a name for this. I forgot. And it was so helpful to orient myself that way. And when you were talking about attention and then Beth was talking about her dad, I thought, where is the line between attention into purpose. Where on that spectrum do we go from mindless attention into focused purpose? And often it is because we have someone we trust or somewhere we trust which is telling us what to pay attention to and what to very much redirect our attention from. And I don’t think there’s always been an easy answer. Like we have been in this civic vice and virtue conversation all year, and I’m in the middle of Rick Atkinson, who was on our podcast earlier this week’s, The British Are Coming. And there’s this moment where one of the revolutionary colonels is like, “These militiamen don’t have any virtue. They don’t live virtuous lives. We are losing it. We’re all downfall.” And I was like, “Okay, I feel a little better. That makes me feel a little better. We’re not new to this game.” But I do think we are missing... we have everyone screaming for our attention, but not a lot of places where people go and the question is answered: What should I pay attention to? What is my purpose? What makes a good life?

[00:19:07] Ezra Klein: I think that’s right. And yeah, as you say, I’ve been in this inquiry as well. And maybe it’s a good another-- I worry about talking about this because I’ve done a little bit of beginning to try to talk about my thoughts here, and I can feel that they’re not at the place I can make them sufficiently non-theoretical.

[00:19:23] Sarah: This  is a safe space, Ezra. Everyone here loves you.  Don’t worry.

[00:19:28] Ezra Klein: This is a safe space for trying. Our modern definition of freedom is not the definition of freedom we used to have. Our modern definition of freedom is about choice. And our older definition of freedom was about self-mastery. And when you go back to what the founders and the framers were talking about, who had plenty of obviously sins and flaws of their own, freedom for them, the kind of freedom they were talking about did include choice, but it included the recognition that for choices to be wisely applied to be free, you had to fundamentally have shaped yourself in a way that you would not get carried off inside of that sort of more open space. And we all can. I think a lot about being somebody who is free to take heroin and then ends up in addiction is not free.

[00:20:16] Sarah: Right.

[00:20:16] Ezra Klein: The fact that they made that first choice. I watch my kids when they’re on a screen, and we’re not like a fully screen-free household, and if I’m gave them the freedom to choose what they did all the time, I don’t think that would end with them being more free in the way I would understand it. And so when you’re talking about purpose there, which I think is a really important and worthwhile word to bring into this or the citizen or something like that, there is some connection between the way we began to think and the way we were told to think, right? This was a project too. Freedom is being able to buy whatever you want with nobody telling you not to. Freedom is the freedom of the consumer.

[00:20:55] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:20:55] Ezra Klein: Not freedom is something that is a mixture of guaranteed political freedoms and the kind of virtuous self-development to find it. I like this book by Helena Rosenblatt called The Lost History of Liberalism, and one of the things she talks about is that older liberal writers, and I don’t mean hundreds of years ago, they didn’t talk about individualism, they talked about individuality. And that what you were trying to achieve under liberalism, which is a system of sort of individual freedoms and individual rights, was the space and the self-cultivation to find who you were, to self-develop as a full person, to flourish, to fully use your particular God-given gifts and potentialities. And that eventually corroded or was narrowed into not individuality, but this other thing, like individualism, just whatever, you do you.

[00:21:48] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:21:48] Ezra Klein: And just those are very distinctive visions, right? I know people who are individuals. They have cultivated themselves into someone who, even amidst the uniqueness of us all, you can really tell they found who they were and are. And I know people lost in individual choice. And those are very different ways of living.

[00:22:09] Sarah: Yeah. 100%.

[00:22:11] Beth: It seems important to me to arrive at a place where you can talk more about this because I’m thinking about the illiberalism that is flourishing right now as people, I think, recognize that we have a level of choice that is making us less free and certainly less happy. But because illiberalism so often takes the form of constraint that is unimaginable as desirable to people on the left, and that I think is undesirable in the world, it’s hard to have a positive vision of constraint. This is really on my mind today because I do my best creative work when I build a very tight constraint around it. I made an episode this week of what I called Founding Father Karaoke. I imagined the founders at karaoke together, and what songs would they choose, and what does that tell us about them? To make it happen, I needed a frame around it, so I only let myself choose songs from the Lilith Fair playlist. But that’s the thing. I look at Instagram or TikTok where there’s all kinds of choice. There’s no constraint, and what people choose to do is just replicate each other. It’s use the trending audio, use the format that has worked for 1,000. We’re just making the same thing over and over again in this world without constraint. So creatively, I understand constraint as the key to freedom. I don’t know how to share that as a vehicle for policy and culture that makes people more free.

[00:23:43] Ezra Klein: Yeah. Let’s bring this back into raw politics or more real politics. Within what we’re describing as freedoms, you have these two directions freedoms often go, freedoms to and freedoms from. And one of the things that the illiberals are doing that I think has not been popular and has not been good politics for them, has not been good for people, is they’ve been systematically breaking our protections from certain forms of government coercion, due process for the immigrant, that kind of thing, and also allowing in a tremendous amount of just raw corruption. And people see that and they don’t like it. And at the same time, they are not doing much in the way of positive freedoms. You’re not more likely to have healthcare under Donald Trump, right? It is classically a view of American liberals that you’re not going to be very free. Or maybe put it this way; the freedom to sleep under a bridge because you cannot afford a home is not a worthwhile form of freedom. That’s where we see it’s one of the things that got me to write Abundance. We were giving people a lot of freedom to sleep in a tent. What we weren’t giving them the freedom to do was afford a home.

[00:24:48] Sarah: Right.

[00:24:49] Ezra Klein: So the thing about the illiberals, who I’ve spent a lot of time talking to and reading, is they ask some good questions and they come to some shit answers. And in I think taking both sides of that seriously opens a lot of political opportunity. And one weakness, I think, of many liberals is they don’t want to admit that some of the questions are good.

[00:25:13] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:25:14] Ezra Klein: They don’t want to admit that there are things that they weren’t hearing. But the weakness of the illiberals are their answers are terrible. For instance, they like to talk about virtue, but they don’t practice it. They’re led by the least virtuous people imaginable, and they celebrate their lack of virtue. You just cannot be a political movement that is going to try to take the high ground of virtue and decency and be led by Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Doug Wilson. The mistake would be, for instance, if the broad left didn’t recognize that failure as an opportunity and just said, “You guys have embraced the absence of virtue, so we’re going to do the same thing,” as opposed to seeing that as ground they have not captured. But you got to do more than just be decent. Like just being a decent semi-virtuous person does not... it gets you somewhere in politics. I think it’s something people liked about Barack Obama, but it doesn’t get you that far. Corruption is like a good place to start. One thing you are just not going to have is any form of virtuous public sphere when the people in it spend six hours of their day dialing for dollars.

[00:26:22] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:26:22] Ezra Klein: And recognizing that might be a generational campaign to win back the Supreme Court in order to change the laws or the rulings that have made speech so hard to regulate in politics is real. So I think one place to start, going back to something you talked about at the beginning, is just institutional credibility cannot exist in such a corrupt system. Would solving money in politics or really limiting money in politics solve everything? It would not. It really wouldn’t. But it would have, I think, an outsized effect on people’s ability to have some faith in the system. Look, education has been a fairly dropped topic by Democrats. They had a lot of fights over it in the Obama era and then functionally haven’t spoken about it since then. But what we teach our children is something people care a lot about, and is not something the right has very good ideas on right now, and AI has made it something we’re going to need really good ideas on. I would very much urge people to go back to what liberal arts was supposed to be, which was educating people to be a citizen, educating people to be free. That’s the liberal in liberal arts. It’s not that you just read books. It’s you’re supposed to be developing the capacities to be a free person. And being able to guarantee that and spend the money on that and so on, I think there’s a certain amount of security that you need to put into a vision like this I also just think there’s power in recognizing that the sphere is toxic. Something I don’t know that Democrats or liberals have known how to even talk about since Obama, and this Obama in ‘08, is Obama in ‘08 was powered by articulating a sense that many Americans had, not just Democrats, that politics just shouldn’t feel like this. The country shouldn’t feel like this. And the problem was that and it wasn’t for him just Republicans. He talked about the media. Back then it feels so small now. The 24-hour cable news cycle was his big target. The political consultants, the pollsters. But then because he wasn’t able to make politics feel different enough, it feels naive to talk about that.

[00:28:18] Sarah: I’m haunted by your conversation with Chris when you were like, “If you do it, you look like you’re doing an Obama impression.” Haunted by that. Can’t stop thinking about it.

[00:28:26] Ezra Klein: So somebody’s going to have to figure out a way to channel the upset and anger and sense of disgust even some people on the right feel about how politics feels right now without sounding like you’re running a naive rerun of Obama.

[00:28:42] Sarah: Or a bad West Wing episode. Oof.

[00:28:44] Ezra Klein: Or a bad West Wing episode. And so I don’t think that’s just going to be, like, sounding notes of unity. I think it’s closer to maybe Jon Ossoff’s attacks on corruption. Newsom has his issues, but he’s at least talking to people on the other side. But I think you should be running against algorithmic media, against AI for children, against certain forms of modernity that you may not know how to fix, but you may know they’re bad. And knowing something bad is actually the first step in having a conversation about it.

[00:29:24] Sarah: I want to talk about education. We’re deeper in this project than you. I have a senior; that’s my oldest child. Beth has a sophomore. And what I see in public education is some of the unarticulated values of our current form of liberalism, both inside the Democratic Party, but I think adopted more broadly. Which is basically fairness and harm reduction. Individual fairness and individual harm reduction. To the point where the public education system I think this is why people don’t talk about it because it’s so hard. We had Rahm Emanuel on our show. He’s great on education, but you can tell he doesn’t have a kid in the system, because we started talking about ed tech and all these things we live with and he was like, “Oh, yeah.” You could kind of see he didn’t exactly know what we were talking about. Because we’re asking the public school system to do so much all the time. And I struggle with fairness, and I hear it articulated so often around AI, around so many of the issues, public education that we talk about all the time. Now, my youngest son is a Type 1 diabetic. I know you also live with Type 1 diabetes in your life. And it’ll teach you real fast fair has fuck all to do with it. When you can kind of let that go and be like what are we trying to do? What are we trying to do? And I think we’ve lost that in so many institutions, including public education. There was a great piece in The Times several months ago where she was like, “We’re not trying to educate. We’re trying to do everything else but educate to have an informed citizenry.” And so I think that we have some values articulated and unarticulated, but they’re all, like you said, that individualistic understanding instead of not just a self-mastery is freedom, but an institutional mastery. How do we create citizens that can master these institutions, that can fight corruption and be a form of servant leadership, and all these different virtuous visions inside these institutions? Because we’ve been so consumed with what’s fair especially in the housing. Like, how do we build housing when the land has to go somewhere. There is going to be a cost of AI and more housing and all these things. There will be a cost, always. But when you are consumed with individual fairness and harm reduction, you can’t get there. You can’t talk about it.

[00:31:35] Ezra Klein: Yeah, this stuff is tough. I think that one of the things that liberals, leftists, however you want to describe it, it’s a big fight here in New York City, actually where I live now, is about what is your vision of excellence in education? What does it mean to succeed? What is our relationship to kids who maybe it’s not fair. They’re more likely to come from high socioeconomic background, families and all the rest of it. But what is your vision not of just fairness, but achievement?

[00:32:07] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:32:08] Ezra Klein: And how do you think about that? How do you think about when it’s less present than you want it to be? How do you balance those two things against each other? One thing that politics always is, society always is, people always want there to be an answer, and it’s all just balancing. It’s like you’re not going to throw fairness overboard. Fairness is really important. But if you stop balancing, fairness and excellence, the meritocracy is flawed, and it’s better when done well than many of the alternatives.

[00:32:36] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:32:36] Ezra Klein: But right now the education conversation feels ripe to me because I don’t know anybody happy with what we have.

[00:32:43] Sarah: Definitely.

[00:32:44] Ezra Klein: It’s not like where people are is, “This is great,” and at least in public education, I’m not saying there’s no consultants making some money and there are teachers unions and administrators and a million people with vested interest in certain dimensions of the system as it exists. But very few people will tell you it’s going and it’s working well. And whether what that implies is the need for much more experimentation or just a different kind of leadership or... I am interested in how little leadership I see on this issue. It’s not because I’m coming to you and saying “I have the answer to this. I don’t. I will say one thing that worries me that was in what you just said is that I actually worry that we have spent a lot of time teaching kids to master institutions. And you get these kids who grow up, and I run into them all the time in politics. I feel like they are the winners of the organizational races And it does make you very, in a weird way, risk-averse. It makes you achievement-oriented, but risk-averse.

[00:33:47] Sarah: Right.

[00:33:48] Ezra Klein: And it’s a big problem in terms of the kinds of candidates Democrats recruit. You can smell it on them sometimes. There’s something about I understand how we got there, but the degree to which we have forced kids to learn to the test and learn to the application and extracurricular to the... again, it’s another way of taking away people’s individuality with this weird simulacrum. We want you to be an individual, but our kind.

[00:34:12] Sarah: Yeah. They’ll tell you this is a highly individualized systems, and the ed tech and everything, it’s all for the individual kids. Bullshit. That’s what I say.

[00:34:19] Beth: I just don’t think education values pluralism right now in any meaningful respect. Part of the reason that you can have a wonderful liberal arts experience in college is because colleges are all really different from each other. And I don’t hear a lot of professors agonizing over the evidence-based method for how I teach this class. They do some weird stuff in college. You can take some weird classes. You can achieve real excellence because you can also achieve rock bottom failure, and we don’t want any of that in elementary school, middle school, high school. It’s like individualism, but within this extremely narrow, very standardized band. And I think part of the reason not many people want to lead on this is because they feel like they need to have a solution for everyone. For all things, for everyone, that maps on to that fair system that Sarah was talking about.

[00:35:13] Ezra Klein: I think that’s right, and I’m probably maybe even more pessimistic on colleges right now than you are, which I think have not done a good job on pluralism, though are maybe turning around on that. Look, we’re in a period of a lot of fracture And there’s going to be a lot that needs to be built anew if Democrats win in 2028 and take office in 2028. And, or for that matter, in 2032 and 2033. And I do think there’s a interesting set of questions about how whether a party and a movement that have in important and problematic ways be-- It’s become a movement of people who have prospered from society to a large degree as it is. It’s a movement that wins college-educated voters and so in certain ways, it has become insufficiently skeptical. It has become identified with the institutions. And it’s not that it doesn’t want to change them sometimes or isn’t disappointed in them, but often the directionality of that is it wants them to be more of that, of their current nature. This is a place where the Democratic Party didn’t used to be, like, the professional managerial class in the way it is now, and I am obviously part of that class. But it’s like Romney won college voters. We have watched this happen in our lifetimes. It has been a tremendous compositional shift in the parties, and it does change the way they think and they feel. And so you have the right, which is way too anti-institutional, and the left, which is way too pro-institution, and a lot of the demands for reform that come from the left are in the direction of more institutional complexity. More, as you were, saying before risk aversion and harm reduction. And I think it’s a really hard problem for Democrats to be able to channel in a healthier way the profound mistrust people feel in institutions, which is why I think you have to choose places where you’re going to channel it. It’s why I bring up corruption. Look, Abundance is a book about institutional failure. It is a book arguing the Democrats need to publicly take responsibility for having failed to govern in a bunch of very important ways like housing and making it possible to do things as a citizen. And then win credibility by being willing to reform things that they run so that they actually work differently. And so I am very interested in this question of how do you have an institutionally skeptical Democratic Party, an institutionally skeptical liberal movement, as opposed to Democratic Party, a liberal movement? For that matter, even though I don’t think they see themselves this way, often like a DSA side of things that has really absorbed the institution’s view of themselves. It’s just like you really have to be on alert for where that will bring you wrong. And, again, people I’m sure criticize me on this. Everybody’s going to have different views of what this means, but I don’t think you can operate well in an era of institutional mistrust if you really trust institutions. If your big answer to everybody is believe in the science--

[00:38:17] Sarah: Especially if attention is driven by authenticity.

[00:38:19] Ezra Klein: That and attention is probably fundamentally anti-institutional right now. So it’s like I believe in science, but do I think scientific institutions fail? I also think that. As you say, I live with a Type 1 diabetic and also somebody who’s had very complicated medical issues that have not always been well treated, right? And of course, institutions can fail. That doesn’t make them bad, but operating with a felt sense of that failure is sometimes a very different, I think, attitude than you often see on the left, which can sometimes take attacks on the institutions. It can only hear what’s wrong in them. It can empathize with maybe where they come from.

[00:38:57] Beth: I asked my husband to read Abundance because I told him, “I think you’ll like this.” I think it’s fundamentally a book that says, hey, everything’s about cost and benefits. There’s nothing that happens that doesn’t have a cost, so we need to choose better what we’re willing to endure a cost about because there are greater benefits available. I think about this with education. I would love to hear a Democratic candidate say, “You know what, abolishing the Department of Education, shutting that down, not a bad idea. We could do better for students with disabilities through the Department of Justice. We could do better in terms of setting new standards or aspiring for something greater in a different format. This hasn’t worked.” I’m interested in who could just take this and run with it and say, “They have the right question and the wrong answer. Here’s my vision for the answer.” I think the problem is that you stay in protective mode. Like the Department of Education is a great example. I don’t know a lot of people who think it’s achieving greatness, but I know a lot of people who are worried about what happens to students with disabilities if it’s not functioning. How do we envision a future that isn’t costing so much to groups that we are in protective mode around?

[00:40:01] Sarah: Let me piggyback on that because that was what I was going to ask, too. Because I think we get in this situation. When you said we’ve watched this change. I think when you think about the future and you think about a vision for the future, I get stuck in where are we just living through the normal cycles? Where are we just going through the normal rhythms of history? And where are we outside that? My gut tells me AI is a normal cycle of technology. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I haven’t spent enough time in Silicon Valley. The reason, back to the pin we dropped at the beginning, the natalism freaks me all the way out. That is outside the rhythm, particularly of the United States history. We are built on a pattern of growth. But there’s a part of me like the angel on my shoulder can say, we’re entering a new phase of both American history and global history where we’ve learned the cost of growth, and we’re trying to figure a way forward that isn’t built on the back of all that growth. because that does feel outside the normal rhythms for me.

[00:41:04] Ezra Klein: To me they’re both outside the normal rhythms. It’s like I think Trump is outside the normal rhythm. I think we are living in a time of aberration. I wrote a op-ed right at the beginning of Trump’s second term called Now Is the Time of Monsters based on this somewhat mistranslation of a Gramsci quote. Something like, “The old is dying and the new struggles to be born. Now is a time of monsters.”

[00:41:24] Sarah: Oh, I remember it. Also haunted by that one.

[00:41:27] Ezra Klein: And the two things I had on that were AI fertility collapse, and the other ones were climate as I remember it, and Trump. And all of those, I think, are pushing society and will continue to push society not into spaces that have no rhyme in them. We have had other periods in which the structures of technology overturned. There’s no Nazis without the radio. We have had other periods in which demographic change upended society, some that were much more violent and mournful than this one like the Black Death. And we’ve had other periods which technology changed things really dramatically. Whether AI is normal, I think it’s not normal, but you get into this weird question of what is normal. Was the internet normal? Was social media? Is the fact that we now look at our phones and have this black box that is a thing we spend most of our day, is any of  that normal?

[00:42:19] Sarah: Think about how much electricity changed how we functioned.

[00:42:19] Ezra Klein: Yeah. And so you’re just going to be in a navigating a period of really unusual forces. And one of the things I think then you get into is what is your relationship to change? What is your political movement’s relationship to change? And how do you convince people that you understand their fears? More than that, that you share their fears, because I think you should on these things, and also that you can see a different future. I see a lot of sharing people’s fears, and I see only a little bit of envisioning a different future.

[00:43:03] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:43:05] Beth: What would change for you right now if you didn’t believe that these things are aberrations? If you didn’t look at Trump as outside the normal cycle, what would be different?

[00:43:17] Ezra Klein: I don’t think specifically anything. I don’t believe that history is teleological. So what does it mean to say Trump is outside the normal cycle? I’m not saying that he is a unique figure in human history. I’m saying that of American presidents and American political figures, he is a distinctive, disruptive figure who has dynamics that are unusual, that he is not like the eight people who came before him in that job. And, you can come up with your, “I think that there’s a lot of rhyme to the mid-20th century here,” or we can all talk about Andrew Jackson. But the way things played out at other times doesn’t, for me, give you a guarantee it’ll play out that way this time. I think sometimes people take strange amounts of confidence in different cycle of history theories, right? I’ve had people recommend me Samuel Huntington’s book on this and Peter Turchin’s book on this. And sure, maybe there are a lot of different cycles of history people proffer. But one of the lessons of long human history is they can get really fucking bad, and they can be bad for a long time. Or not. You can be amazed at how fast things can change. I spent part of my honeymoon in Vietnam. Like, when you think about what we were doing to that country just a couple of decades before that, I’ve been married a long time now, it’s shocking. So there’s this I think both confidence and fear I have that the boundaries of the possible are wider than we think in either direction. It can get much worse faster, and it can get much better faster. You think about what society was like in, 1940, and you think about where it is in 1960 at least, in America, certainly 1965, 1970, and it’s really very different. I’m not sure the cycles are doing a lot of work for me here because I can look at cycles and say a down cycle could last 100 years. Just depends which cyclical theory we’re talking about here. Are we in a the cycle is the decline of the superpower, and that’s a long irreversible cycle, or the cycle is an elite overproduction cycle or... This is why I’m skeptical, and you don’t see me have a lot of cyclical thinkers on the show because it’s like which cycle when?

[00:45:38] Sarah: What do you hope, though? So we can analyze it, but our kids are going to be older than we are now at the next big America birthday. What do you hope they see and feel and experience?

[00:45:52] Ezra Klein: I’m not sure at this moment I’ll throw the ball that long. Right now what I hope is, which is more near term, is like we’re in a political emergency and a social emergency now. And I am, as of now, not seeing the level of kind of ingenuity and strategic thinking among the people who will need to do it that I wish I was seeing. I’m not necessarily seeing the leadership emerge. And maybe I’m wrong, and maybe it’s all there and we’ll look back in a couple of years and say, “Okay, like that was navigated and somebody built something better out of that.” And history can work in ways you don’t think. But I’m really interested, and it’s why I lit when you were asking some of those initial questions because I think there’s a more fundamental rethinking that has to be done at the moment, so that at the endpoint of it, the people who are going to be the leaders of this will have what to draw on. I’ve been reading a lot of books about the history of liberalism, and I like a lot of them for the first two-thirds, and I’ll get to the last third and I’ll be like, “Oh, you just want to do the thing again.” I feel this way about many of the 2028 Democrats. If you don’t sound fundamentally different right now than you sounded in 2020, on some level I don’t want to hear it. There’s nothing about this period where you have rethought anything fundamental, then you’re somehow experiencing it very differently than I am.

[00:47:22] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:47:22] Ezra Klein: And it’s hard. It’s hard to think clearly and in a far-reaching way when you’re in this kind of constant onrush and onslaught of corruption and emergency and war and ICE deployments. Part of the strategy of authoritarians and certainly of media figures like this, is that they like overwhelm you with stuff.

[00:47:45] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:47:46] Ezra Klein: And they do that in part to make it hard to react.

[00:47:50] Sarah: Yeah. It’s not just the change; it’s the pace of change. That feels outside the normal rhythms.

[00:47:54] Beth: And the detail of it.

[00:47:55] Ezra Klein:  Yeah. And so there’s a kind of constant dynamic. My colleague Masha Gessen has written a lot about this. There’s a constant dynamic with trying to keep you off balance, and so you need people who have an internal balance. I think it’s one reason people have really found themselves drawn to Mamdani, who seems to have a kind of preternatural like calm and confidence to him. Obama was this way at another time in another way.

[00:48:27] Sarah:  I would throw Pope Leo on the pile.

[00:48:29] Ezra Klein: I would throw Pope Leo. I think people are really drawn right now to people who seem like they have a direction they are going.

[00:48:34] Sarah: Yep.

[00:48:35] Ezra Klein: And going in that direction with a kind of clarity and confidence.

[00:48:39] Sarah: I just want to say that we find a lot of balance by listening to your show.

[00:48:43] Ezra Klein: Thank you. I appreciate that.

[00:48:45] Sarah: I personally do. Thank you so much. We don’t ask about books at the end, but we do have a little outside of politics. And we have a fun revolutionary era-themed question for you. If you could have any of the founders on The Ezra Klein Show, who do you think would be the most helpful, useful, interesting?

[00:49:19] Ezra Klein: Ben Franklin.

[00:49:20] Sarah: You know he was obsessed with the birthright. Did you know that? He was obsessed with America’s birthright.

[00:49:24] Ezra Klein: I did not know that about him.

[00:49:25] Sarah: I just read that.

[00:49:27] Ezra Klein: He’s an amazing thinker. Just a fascinating thinker on a million different levels. I just think if you’re looking for a dinner companion, a lot... can we be honest? Founders, many of them are geniuses, many of them also have a much darker side to them, but a lot of them seem insufferable.

[00:49:41] Sarah:  They didn’t Like each other.

[00:49:42] Ezra Klein: They didn’t even like each other. They seem to have had good reason. But Franklin had, it seemed to me, a little bit more of a sense of irony than some of the others. So if I were picking somebody to have on the show, I think Franklin would be a good talker, as we say.

[00:49:54] Sarah: Beth, was he at your karaoke party?

[00:49:56] Beth: He was. Ben Franklin is the original gerontocracy, too. Much older than the rest of these folks but having such a good time. I’m really interested in his daughter, who managed a lot of his letters while he was off gallivanting in Europe and trying to bring the Europeans around to the revolutionaries’ cause. So I would love to hear her perspective on everyone because she was such a spoke for or a hub. A hub is what I’m thinking of for his correspondence. But yes, he was at my karaoke party doing Fiona Apple’s Criminal.

[00:50:23] Sarah: Okay. I like it.

[00:50:25] Beth: Just in response to the way that some of the others in the mix thought his behavior was distasteful.

[00:50:32] Sarah: Well, he was a little slutty, right?

[00:50:34] Beth: Yeah, and I could see him kind of winking at that.

[00:50:36] Sarah: Yeah, I like it.

[00:50:37] Ezra Klein: because you don’t want to have anybody on the show who doesn’t have appetites, right? It’s about containing, but also who’s not trying to restrain them, right? The thing about Franklin is he’s at the same time... And I’m not saying he’s all great or anything. The people who their appetites are restrained because they’re automatons, they’re not interesting. The people who their appetites are unrestrained are terrible.

[00:50:55] Sarah: He was subscribed to the self-mastery.  He’s trying.

[00:50:57] Ezra Klein: Yeah, he’s on my mind because I’ve been reading Jeffrey Rosen’s book The Pursuit of Happiness, which is all about the founders’ understanding of happiness. And so he ends up being a very central figure in that, which is part of why I’m thinking about him and mentioning him.

[00:51:08] Sarah: I just read the section where he was with General Howe trying one more time post-Declaration to reach some sort of compromise, him and John Adams. And the General Howe was basically like you need to keep British men coming here to make America strong.” And he was like, “We have a baby factory. We don’t need you. We have an exploding population.” He was, like, apparently very obsessed with the American birthright. Look at that.

[00:51:31] Ezra Klein: See? There you go.

[00:51:31] Sarah: He’d be so disappointed in us, guys. That’s for another show.

[00:51:34] Ezra Klein:  You’re a Franklinite.

[00:51:37] Sarah: Thank you so much.

[00:51:38] Beth: Thank you so much for spending time with us.

[00:51:39] Sarah: We hope you have, as we say on Pantsuit Politics, the best Fourth of July available to you.

[00:51:45] Ezra Klein: Thank you so much, and I hope the same for you.

[00:51:48] Beth: Many thanks to Ezra Klein and to everyone who’s finding ways to celebrate America 250 with us. We’ve had so much fun with all of you, and the fun will continue. We hope you’ll kick off the next chapter in our history by observing America’s Potluck with your people on July 5th.

[00:52:01] Sarah: And the film club. Don’t forget the film club through July. Norma’s Happy Birthday America Film Club. I’m going to celebrate throughout the month of July. I just want everyone to know.

[00:52:10] Beth:  I think the rest of the year it’s still game. It’s still fair game. Yes.

[00:52:15] Sarah: Yes. I feel this week is very special. I’m excited that we have this very special July 4th episode, but Imma keep celebrating throughout July, just so everybody knows.

[00:52:23] Beth: How you begin the next year is as important as how you observe the anniversary.

[00:52:28] Sarah: That’s exactly right.

[00:52:29] Beth: So I will see you back here next Tuesday. Sarah, have such a good time on your vacation. And all of you have the best weekend available to you.

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