Offline with Jon Favreau - Ezra Klein on the Democrat’s Echo Chamber

Episode Date: February 20, 2022

This week on Offline, Jon is joined by the New York Times’s Ezra Klein. Dissecting polarization and virality, the two attempt to figure out if a healthy democracy is possible in today’s media environment and what it’ll take for the Democratic Party to step up to the task.

Hey everyone, before we get started, I have some exciting news to share. Offline is here to stay. And starting on March 6th, new episodes of the show will be released on its very own feed. Today's episode will be the last one on the Pod Save America feed. So if you like the show and you want to keep listening, do me a favor that will take like 10 seconds. Go to your favorite podcast app, search Offline with Jon Favreau, and subscribe to the new feed. You can also find the link in the show notes. Subscribing now and even rating the show will help make sure you don't miss an episode, and it will help make sure that other people find it. We'll be taking next week off to get everything settled and maybe even unplug for

a few days. But I'll see you again soon on March 6th in our brand new feed. Now onto the show. I definitely see the people around me who are really jacked into Twitter becoming worse versions of themselves. I don't see people get on Twitter and it seems to improve them and lead them into a more virtuous life. You don't meet anyone and you're like, oh, I follow you on Twitter. You're actually much worse than person. Totally. You never had that experience, right? I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. My guest this week is Ezra Klein, host of The Ezra Klein Show, columnist at The New

York Times, and author of the book, Why We're Polarized. I could have talked to Ezra about any number of topics related to this show. If you listen to his podcast, and you should, it's excellent, he's talked to a few of the same guests about some of the same issues. But I wanted to talk to him specifically about how social media shapes politics. For one thing, we haven't yet done an episode that's focused on politics, even though it's a theme that's been running through most of our conversations. And as I told Ezra when I asked him to be on the show,

I wanted to talk to someone who could be more interesting than a politician and more scholarly than a typical hack like me. He also spends time in his book on the role that social media, especially Twitter, has played in making our politics more polarized. Though, interestingly, he doesn't think the effect is as big as you might think. We get into why that is, Thanks for watching. a while about the future of the Democratic Party and whether it can survive in a country that is way too online. I hope you'll enjoy it too. As always, if you have questions, comments, or complaints about the show, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com.

Here's Ezra Klein. Ezra Klein, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me. So I started this show to explore all the ways that being very online has changed us for good and mostly, I'd argue, for bad. I want to talk to you specifically about how it's changed politics, since I actually haven't devoted an episode to that yet, since I do that in my normal life all the time. But because you have talked to...

This is more your hobby podcast? This is my hobby podcast, exactly. But because you and I have talked to some of the same guests and covered some of the same topics on your pods, I wanted to start with a more personal question, which is, how has your relationship with the internet changed over the last several years? Because I get a sense from your podcast that it has. It's not great, I would say. What would be on Facebook, it's complicated.

You know my background a bit. My whole world was built by coming along at the right moment in the internet. I got into journalism because I was an early blogger. Back when nobody knew what that was, when the word sounded like a fungus, other things with a blah sound aren't good. I was this shitty student at UC Santa Cruz, and I didn't make the school paper. But the internet had all of a sudden allowed me to sit around obsessively writing about politics for an audience of literally dozens of people.

And those dozens became hundreds and those hundreds became thousands. And I got an internship and I got into journalism and my whole life, I mean, I wouldn't have met the woman I married without the internet. I wouldn't have my work without the internet. Nothing would be the same for me without the internet. And I loved the internet. And I genuinely don't know on some level how much of how I feel now is just me becoming an old, cranky, get-off-my-lawn sort of person. Like, the internet was better when I was a kid. But it does feel like it sped up, fractured, that the companies that owned the platforms got too good at what they were doing. They became

hyper-efficient at managing our attention in ways even they didn't understand the consequences of. And the feeling of the internet certainly to me is not joyous anymore. The feeling of being hooked into smartphones is not good. The longer I've been in it, the more concerned I've become. That's kind of a long, rambly answer, but that's the truth of it. And I feel guilty about it because very few people have benefited more from the riches of having access to the digital world than me. Yeah. I mean, I've gone through the same thing. I'm interested in you saying that you're worried that it's just you getting older. I have that in my head, whether it's about the internet, whether it's about my political opinions. I'm trying to be very conscious of the fact that when I was in my 20s, I would talk to people who are in politics in their 30s and 40s and 50s and be like, well, they seem just very out of touch because they're older. So like there's like a natural life cycle to these things. I think for me, like the internet seemed social media particularly seemed pretty bad, you know, from 2016 on during the Trump years.

But I kind of attributed it to Trump and the Trump emergency that we were all in. I think once we moved from the Trump years to just being in a pandemic and being stuck at home, that's when I first realized, or I really started to realize more that all the time I was spending on my phone was just making me feel bad. And just doing what I do for a living, which is talking about politics and advocating for candidates and whatever else like that started feeling really bad. And it didn't feel as bad when we used to do live shows and meet people in person, or we were on the road, or we were seeing campaigns, or we were knocking on doors.

But just being in front of your phone or in front of your screen, just scrolling, it makes you feel pretty bad. So you know I'm an economist-y kind of person. Yeah. And I'm more comfortable with those kinds of explanations. So let me give you my actual model of it, not just how it feels, but what economists are always seeking is efficiency, right?

Markets are supposed to become more efficient. Corporations, businesses, economy is more efficient. You match the skills people have to the jobs you've got. You get the prices exactly right. And something that can happen in a lot of areas of life is that you can become too efficient, by which I mean you've overly optimized across a small number of areas in the economy. Let's call it prices or a company trying to cut wages or whatever it might be, or GDP for a country. And you're missing all these other things.

Your GDP is growing, but you're destroying the environment, right? You've become overly efficient from one perspective. And what I think changed between the iterations of digital life that we're talking about is that it got too efficient. So you think back to early blogging, the great innovation was, hey, you can put words up on a webpage and people can read them for no money. Like that was what happened. And that was an amazing innovation. And it allowed all these people to participate who hadn't before. But there was nobody really mediating between the writer and the audience, trying to jack in to the audience's attention and serve up to them at any given moment what would be most alluring and changing the writer's incentives. I mean, we knew a little bit. I think it was a site meter back then. I knew how many people visited. It was nothing like having what we have now. I know literally at what point in my article you click off. Wow.

I know. I mean, the things I can know about how you're reading me are extraordinary. I can test 10 headlines. So I can jack that headline up to 11. And this is true, I think, across a lot of things. So to your point about getting off my lawn, I think a lot about my views on TikTok, where you have a lot of teenagers who spend an hour and a half on TikTok a day. And I think that's bad. But obviously, they think I'm a boomer, even if I'm not quite. But in the same way that I feel this way about Twitter, I just don't know that optimizing our attention that tightly is ultimately good for our ability to pay attention to anything fundamental, that it is just more diverting because I'm like a being who evolved to scan my immediate environment for threat, interest, and food,

that things changing quickly is more interesting to me. And the more power corporations develop to make things in my immediate environment change very quickly to me, such that they get my attention, they keep doing it. So blogs seem shorter than newspapers, and then Facebook seemed even quicker than that, and then Twitter, oh my God. And then TikTok. And it just keeps going. And at some point, it works. But I think that we are playing with forces in the human mind we don't really understand. And I think the thing that's driving it is not any kind of view about what the good life is or what a good politics is, but is meta's share price, is ByteDance's desire for market share, or possibly, depending on how you look at it,

the Chinese Communist Party's desire for global influence, and they're destroying our attentional environment. Right. And it's certainly bad for us individually. I think a lot about what happens when an entire society is unable to focus or pay attention or make collective decisions or take collective action and how the internet is contributing to that. I mean, most political elites, people who work in politics, cover politics, spend a huge amount of time on social media, particularly Twitter. What effects do you think that's having on our politics, particularly, because that's obviously a big question, but what are some of the most pernicious effects on our politics? This is so hard for me, this one. So I just did a show on my own podcast with Johan Hari about his new book, Stolen Focus About Attention. And it's one of his big arguments that we are seeing crises of democracy, ecological

crises, because our attentional ecosystem has become so degraded, our societal attention has become so degraded that we can't focus on anything. And I struggle with that argument because obviously some part of me, given everything I've said to you, wants to believe it is true. But a tremendous amount of destroying the environment happened in the pre-social media era. Politics, when I look back on it over the course of American, or for that matter, global history, looks pretty bad. And so this all feels pretty bad.

And on the other hand, I'm not sure I can say with as much certainty as this argument needs that I think the overall trends are bad. Because, for instance, basically what Twitter does to politics is it radically increases the power of highly intense niche ideological or interest groups. And some of them are groups I really like. The Sunrise Movement, which I have some tactical differences with. But overall, I think getting people to care about climate change is the right thing to do. They've used Twitter very effectively. Black Lives Matter used Twitter extraordinarily effectively. Trumpists used Twitter quite effectively.

And so, you know, there's good and bad from it, but basically it is a profound expansion of the power of views that at other times were suppressed in American politics by stronger parties. And so the question, I think, in the long run of whether it'll be good or bad for politics is whether you think our politics should travel further out to the – I don't even exactly want to say the extremes, but should travel further out to more intense, narrowly held views from the kind of consensus-making efforts that stronger institutions and stronger parties default to. And I know that even the language I use on that sounds like I'm stacking the deck because when we talk about consensus-making efforts in American politics, that's coded as good. But a huge part of why we're polarized in my book is about how that was often bad. A consensus-making effort was bottling up civil rights legislation for the first half of the 20th century.

So I just don't know on some level. I definitely see the people around me who are really jacked into Twitter becoming worse versions of themselves. I don't see people get on Twitter and it seems to improve them and lead them into a more virtuous life. And at the same time... No, you don't meet anyone and you're like, oh, I follow you on Twitter. You're actually much worse than person. Totally. You never have that experience, right?

That never happens. And it's, I don't know if you feel this way, but as a podcaster who relies on interviews with people who are often on Twitter, I actually, it is a continuous discipline for me to remind myself that I can't let my feelings about people on Twitter drive how I feel about them or their ideas in any broader way. I do this all the time. I think about it when I'm about to interview someone who might be controversial online. And then almost always after the conversation, I come away thinking, I really like that person

or I still disagree with a whole bunch of stuff that they say, but I understand them more and I don't have that same feeling I have when I see one of their tweets or some fight that they're getting in on Twitter, which then makes me reflect on myself, which is why I'm like, don't get in Twitter fights anymore or just don't tweet as much anymore, you know, because I do think it brings out the worst in us. Although, and here you can tell I'm just going to be relentlessly both sides-y today. It's, I can't help it. I'm sorry. It's the New York Times in you.

It's the New York Times in me. So I've had this thought that maybe it goes the other way too, that I have really often had the experience of bringing on people who either I really disagree with, who I know from other mediums. We'll use Twitter as an example here, but they could be a blogger, they could be whatever. Or people who have been incredibly shitty to me personally on Twitter. And I'm like, all right, we're going to have this debate. We're going to have it out. And human beings are very social animals. And you get around a table or on a Zoom call with somebody and the tendency to be a more reasonable version of yourself is quite powerful. And one problem with that that I've noticed in my interviews is that sometimes I cannot get people to say what they're really saying because they know it would cause a lot of

friction in the moment. And so they begin to sanitize. They sanitize their disagreement with me or they sanitize what their political opinions really are. And I think this is actually a pretty profound cognitive bias that drives people in Congress completely insane in their view of what's about to happen. Because Joe Manchin's every experience sitting down and having dinner with his Republican colleagues is so much more reasonable, I assure you, than how they end up voting in the end, right? His experience when he talks to them in the back rooms, I mean, you hear this all the time,

right? That, you know, Democratic presidents say it all the time, that all these Republicans, who they told me privately they'd support me, but they just can't. And so one thing I sometimes think about is that it is 100% true that in person, we're all much more agreeable, or at least most of us. I think we have the view that maybe that's our truer, better political self. But I wonder, sort of watching what happens actually in politics, if sometimes that causes you to miss how unreasonable people are ultimately going to be or how they're going to be when it becomes the binary, which side am I on, vote on legislation or whatever. Because, I don't know, when I look at how things actually play out oftentimes,

they don't play out like the most reasonable versions of these actors that I can summon. They play out like the less reasonable versions of them that I see. And so I sometimes wonder if I'm actually fooling people by getting folks around a table and then creating my highly reasonable chill vibe that elicits a fun conversation. You have to, this is the now cliche Obama line, but you have to be able to disagree without being disagreeable, but that requires actual disagreement like look i'm i'm very non-confrontational to a fault um i don't i don't love confrontation it's a problem in my own personal life too so i have to push myself towards the other direction if i'm talking to someone to

actually get into the disagreement but i think like back to the twitter thing look i think there's two two problems for me with the platform and and all of people in politics and media being on it. One is what you were just talking about, which is like, in order to have a functioning democracy, we all need a space where we can debate and disagree in ostensibly a productive way that ends with then, you know, all of us voting or members of Congress voting, and then we move on to the next thing. Obviously, we don't have that right now. And Twitter does not make that possible. So just the ability to have a public political debate is important. And I don't know that we have a lot of spaces to do that right now.

So that seems to be a problem. Number two, and I'd love you to talk about this, because you write about this in Why We're Polarized, which how the most fundamental divide in political media isn't necessarily left versus right, but interested versus uninterested. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think this is so crucial. So we are very, as you say, we are very used to talking about, you know, what we call like media polarization media bias, and it's left-right. Do we have a liberal media? Fox News is so conservative.

That is all real and difficult and a problem. But the much more fundamental divide is whether or not you're interested in political media in the first place. And so to back this up, there's an interesting puzzle in political media studies going back about 30 or 40 years, which is it used to be understood that the constraint on small d democratic knowledge was that people didn't have enough information. It was just hard to know anything, right? I mean, think back 60 years. You get a paper once a day. There's a couple of news channels that have an hour of news a night. There's basically nothing. And the world is big, and it's changing, and there are so many different opinions on it all.

And so slowly over time, we go from a condition of fundamental information scarcity, political information scarcity, where the hardest thing is to know what's going on. How would you develop a view on, is China a currency manipulator in 1961? I mean, they wouldn't have been because they were super poor, but you take my point. And then you go with the rise of cable news, then the rise of the internet. Really rapidly, I mean, within a couple of decades, from this condition that dominated the entirety of human history, information scarcity, to information abundance. And now you could not possibly, could not possibly

consume 1% of the information thrust at you every hour. You could not possibly. I mean, all of a sudden, every newspaper in the world to a first approximation is available online and all of the blogs, right? And then all of the digital news sites. And there's not just one 24-hour cable news service, but a bunch of them simultaneously. And it just keeps going. Now there's podcasting. And so you might expect that when you lift that fundamental constraint on information, that what would happen is the public would become much more informed because all of a sudden they have so much more information. And that doesn't happen.

And so people begin to study it. And there are these very fascinating studies that get done right around the beginning of cable news and the internet, because you can actually study homes that had it during this period and homes that didn't. And what they find happens is that the explosion of choice in media bifurcates the audience in a different way. So it used to be that everybody got some political news, but it was hard for the junkies to get as much as they wanted. But if you bought your TV because you wanted to watch I Love Lucy, you were also there when the evening news came on, and so you got a bit of news. Or you get the newspaper because you want to see sports, but you got to get through the front page, and sometimes something catches your eye. And that stops because at the same time you have an explosion of political news, you also have ESPN. You also have constant sports websites, The Athletic, SB Nation. I don't really understand sports. I don't

know. But everything, right? You have rock climbing, you have HGTV, you have Comedy Central, you have then, of course, the rise of streaming. And so it is true that all of a sudden your ability to absorb political news becomes auras of magnitude greater than it ever was at any time in human history. But at the same time, your ability to not get any political news and instead really dive deep into something else also explodes in the same way. And so what they find is that the people who want to be informed have way, way, way more information, but the people who don't care have way less. And so the average information we have changes, but it becomes a much stranger distribution. And that's not great for democracy on some kind of obvious level.

But I think this is a thing people really, really miss, that they're so often thinking about media bias, and they forget that the people they need to reach are not either ideologues like them in politics or the ideologues unlike them who they also relatively well understand. Like a hardcore liberal kind of understands a hardcore conservative. What neither of them understand is somebody who thinks they are both unbelievably dull and would sooner get a root canal than watch an hour of cable news. I've literally been saying that on almost every episode of this podcast because it bothers me from, you know, I'm a Democratic activist. And I think Democrats in general have this view where, OK, how do we win elections?

Well, there's two paths. There's either reaching out to the middle, the swing voter, and there's all kinds of stereotypes about who that swing voter is that we can get into that may or may not be true. Or we can go fire up our base and we can bring in more people who don't necessarily vote, who are progressive just like us and look like the Democratic coalition. We can do that. And i always want to say both strategies include reaching out to people who just don't fucking pay attention to the news and especially don't pay attention to political news and are not on twitter and probably don't have the views that we have even if they share the broad values that we have and that's not like a small slice of the electorate that's most of the electorate including like not just of the electorate, including like not just

most Americans, most people who will go vote in a midterm in a presidential election, but just aren't on Twitter all day long paying attention to the news that we do. Now, I do wonder if it's changed a little bit during the Trump era, you know, when you saw polls before the 2020 election that like more people were paying attention to the election than had ever paid attention to an election before, right? So I do wonder if interest in political news has gone up a little bit over the last several years. But I still think by and large, we're talking all about these political strategies as parties, and we're all debating on Twitter, and we're all yelling at each other and all this kind of stuff. And then there's a whole country out there who's just going about their business,

and we have very little idea what they all think about politics or what action they're going to take when it comes to voting. And so this is the interesting countervailing trend I was talking about, because I do think it relates there to, say, Trump. The thing that is the hardest to appreciate fact of American politics in the recent past to me is that the parties just weren't what they are now. They had the same names. Like we know a bunch of the people who ran them.

But Republicans had a bunch of genuine liberals in there. Democrats had a bunch of hardcore racist conservatives in there. When the Civil Rights Act comes into Congress, a higher proportion of Republican members of Congress vote for it than Democratic members of Congress. When Nixon is president, he considers bills that are more liberal than anything you got from, say, Bill Clinton and at least on par with what you got at the times from Barack Obama. But what happens in this process of ideological and party polarization is a party stopping that different. They become much more dissimilar. So I mean, Joe Biden goes from being a pro-life senator who opposes Roe v.

Wade to a very pro-choice senator who will absolutely appoint Roe-protecting justices if that remains relevant over the coming years. And the thing here that I think has kind of countervailed this dynamic is that it's become really easy to tell the parties apart. I have a bunch of polling in the book about how few even strong partisans could really tell you the difference between the two parties, because there often wasn't that much. There was a lot of difference between individual senators, but they were all mixed up. There's this period where Strom Thurmond is the second most conservative senator in the Senate, at least in terms of how often he votes for the Republican president, but he's a Democrat during that period. And so now the parties become really different. And you don't need to know very

much about politics to know which one you like better. And so it's actually easier in certain ways to activate people because they don't have to do this complicated choosing process. You don't need to like politics or know much about it to know that the Democrats are the party that's worried about climate change and wants a more multiracial America and wants to give more money to poor people and they like Obamacare and the Republicans are pro-life and they're more Christian and they're more white and they want to cut taxes on rich people and they don't really care about climate change and they don't want to have any lockdowns and Democrats maybe do want to have lockdowns.

So the choosing, like the ecosystem in which people make their political choices becomes a lot clearer because of particularly elite polarization. But at the same time, a lot of people, as you say, are tuned out. And I think one thing that we underestimate of how bad that situation is, is that the number of voters who will plausibly swing in any given election has really gone down. It's gone down a lot. Ticket splitting has gone way down. Swing voters have gone way down. And those voters played a really important role in American politics, which is they maintained a certain level of accountability. Because they weren't that interested in politics,

and they also didn't understand the parties that well, so they would vote for either one. When one party really fucked up, they moved against it en masse. And so you could really punish parties for fucking up. And the problem now is it's actually become much harder to punish parties severely, and particularly the Republican Party because of its structural advantage in the Senate and the Electoral College for fucking up. And so I think in another era, if you have something to perform as badly during a global pandemic as Donald Trump did, they would have gotten like 35% of the vote in the next election. But because the parties are so different, people are so locked into their party,

actually Donald Trump's approval rating a year after COVID is about the same as it was right before COVID. It doesn't really do anything to change the shape of American politics. And I think that's genuinely scary. And so the uninterested were able to play a disciplining role because the interested were very rarely going to leave their party for the other party. They were very rarely going to defect because to defect, you kind of hate what the other party stands for. So even if you don't like your have a lot fewer of them. And so doing a really bad job, you don't get punished the way at least it was plausible you once did in American politics by losing in landslides. You can lose a lot in midterms because people don't pay attention and it's driven by turnout differences. But I think this is a much bigger problem than people give it credit for. I think we've lost a pretty fundamental kind of accountability. Well, I think the uninterested, there's two issues with them. One is either they feel cross-pressured. You've named all the different issue positions in each party. And some people say, okay, well, I agree with the Democrats on this, but I agree with the Republicans on this.

So these are your sort of traditional cross-pressured voters. And then there's another group of them who are uninterested because they are cynical about politics in general, and they're not sure about either party. And maybe they call themselves independent, but they're not true independent in the sense that they're like right down the middle. They're just really pissed at the establishment and could kind of go either way. And it feels like that group of voters could really swing an election and that group of voters could really sort of hold a party accountable for not fixing everything which is also something you're seeing recently like this has been a very unstable time in terms of party rule because as soon as one party takes power you almost can can tell that in the next election, that party's going to get punished.

And then we just keep switching back and forth. That feels like a dynamic that's somehow related to people's general cynicism with the political system and how it's been failing to deliver, which I also think it circles us back to digital media, more media in general, in an interesting way, which is the rise of a lot of media and commentary and transparency is just extremely bad for large institutions and organizations of all kinds. There's a lot more ability to see people fucking up, a lot more ability to blast scandal everywhere, a lot more ability and coverage, at least at the national level, of the extremes of either party. And so you were talking a second ago about the less interested but also anti-establishment group, right? And there's a lot of arguments. There's a book by Martin Gurry that makes this argument revolt of the public and makes it globally, that basically in the modern information ecosystem, it's almost impossible to maintain trust as an establishment

because everything you do wrong and even some things you don't do wrong are going to be what everybody knows about you. And the things you do right don't get a lot of attention. Right. You know, the media is – I'm a part of the media. The media is obsessed with things going wrong. We are not that interested in things going right. And this is true around a lot of things. I mean, God, go read Robert Caro.

Lyndon Johnson was so corrupt. He was so unbelievably, unfathomably corrupt. He made Donald Trump look like a piker, but just people didn't really know. And a lot of things are like this. And so it's not really possible for establishments to act. I just did this piece a couple of weeks ago on coronavirus and trust. And the point of the piece, working off some research that looked at country by country outcomes across 170 some countries, was that a lot of things that you might expect would predict infection rates didn't do a really good job. GDP doesn't do that much for you. America has terrible infection rates despite being really

rich and having a pretty potent healthcare system. But trust, interpersonal and towards the government, actually explained, not a majority, but more than almost anything else with the exception of age, because age makes you much more vulnerable to dying of coronavirus, of course. And one of the points I was making, like talking to some trust researchers, was that one version of this is you get into like an antitrust feedback loop. The government performs badly. That gives people more reason not to trust it. And when they don't trust it, it's harder for it to perform well, which makes more people not trust it. But also, there's just not that much evidence right now that doing well really changes people's

trust in government in each other. It seems like doing well might not go in the direction of helping you gain trust. And just look at vaccines for an example of that, right? Vaccines have done incredibly well. And the whole week I spent on that column, everybody was debating Joe Rogan and vaccine misinformation, right? That's where we were as a country at that exact moment. So that is one thing I think digital media has done in a very specific way, which is it is undermining institutions, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. But I suspect that overall institutional quality is going down, not up, and nobody really knows how to reverse that. And I do think as our politics becomes polarized between increasingly a party that is the defender of institutions, the Democratic Party, including like most fundamental democratic institutions, small democratic institutions, and a party that is fighting against those institutions, the Republican Party, then that dynamic, which both parties can contribute to,

and mistakes made by politicians in both parties can contribute to, I think disadvantages the Democratic Party more. It's just a harder thing for us to go out there and say, we're the party that's going to defend institutions. But by the way, when institutions let you down, which they do because people are human and they make mistakes, yeah, that's going to be on us. And Republicans, their argument is just like, fuck, let's burn it all down anyway. Who cares? Yeah, it's a really, really hard dynamic. It also has made the Republican Party much more dangerous. So take democracy, right? We have always had, and a lot of studies on this, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I'll try not to get too me about it. We've always had a very large anti-small d democratic element in this country. There's never been a moment when

democracy was a settled issue in America. Never, never, ever, ever. But, and I think this is really important, the parties were not polarized around the issue of democracy. So if you look at, or voting or some of these other things, as I mentioned earlier, I mean, the Democrats had all these Dixiecrats, really, really anti-democratic faction. If you look at studies of how easy it was to vote in different states, like five years ago, 10 years ago, what you'll notice is that there's not really a big blue state, red state divide there. In fact, a lot of things that later become highly polarized, like mail-in voting, like that was a red state innovation first and foremost. I mean, it's a big

thing in Florida, et cetera. New York, terrible voting laws. Like New York is just a total disaster because of machine politics still is to some degree. But what's happened more recently is that the Republican Party, and there's good research from, I think it's Leanna Mason, and I'm forgetting her co-authors here. Trump attracted a lot of the voters who had been actually also in the Democratic Party with high levels of what they call out-group animus. If you ask people how much they dislike the out-groups, these folks really liked Trump. And so Trump concentrated and then amplified the Republican Party as the vehicle and venue of anti-democratic sentiment. And so concentrating that sentiment in one party makes it much more dangerous because

as opposed to being diffused, and so then you can suppress it reasonably well, like if you have leadership that wants to suppress it, which in the last 20 or 30 years, I think you could say America has mostly had. Now, if the Republican Party wins, it probably has a concentrated mass of people who just don't believe in democracy. Polarizing around that kind of crazy, it's bad. Well, the other real danger here is that now the one party that is actually fighting to preserve democratic institutions, the one that we have left,

is not doing so well just in normal times, which is with their approval right now. So I do want to talk about democratic party politics. Like you wrote a much discussed piece a few months ago about former Obama data analyst David Shore, whose political theory you described this way, quote, the Democratic Party is trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members and quote, it's lost touch with the working class voters of all races that it needs to win elections. Needless to say, this did not make a lot of Democrats on Twitter all that happy. Can you talk about why you wanted to wade into this particular shitstorm? So I think it's a really important fight. So the way I structured the piece is as a debate between

Schor, who has become now less quietly, but at that point, I think quite quietly influential, and also Shore's critics. And so Shore has this theory that now gets shorthanded, popularism. And as you say, his basic idea is the Democratic Party has become so trapped in an echo chamber of its own making, and particularly an echo chamber of highly educated political obsessives, but highly educated being important there. He thinks education polarization is like a core thing fucking with the Democratic Party because it's all these, you know, college grads or post grads talking to each other. And they're really different than the country. And by the way, we used to when we lost white non-college voters, we would say, okay, well, a lot of it's racial resentment. That's why we lost these white working class voters and whatever, we're not going to win them back anyway. Now we're starting to also lose non-college educated Latino voters and you're starting to see some attrition, at least among black men with non-college educated Black men as well. Yeah. So those are important pieces of all this. So as you say, Shor's view is that the Democratic

Party, because of these internal institutional personnel dynamics, basically, they're like high on their own supply is a key thing. And so they're running around saying a bunch of things that are fundamentally not popular among the voters they need to win. And the counterargument you'll hear, which Michael Potters, or the longtime AFL-CIO political director, calls viralism, is basically that this is bullshit, that it is simply not the case that saying things that poll as popular wins you elections in that direct kind of way. You need things that people actually talk about. You need things that people actually talk about. You need things that actually, to the point of operating in the digital media sphere,

to get attention, you need to actually go viral, right? And so you need messages that the party faithful will pass around and around and around like a baton. And of course, you want those messages to be popular, but you also need to control the agenda. And I have basically the view that they're both right. And my synthesis of this, which I've said on Twitter for my sins, is sort of that the interesting argument is around unpopularism. I think everybody agrees that if you have a popular view that will also go viral in the electorate, you should talk about it. And this is sort of what Bernie Sanders is actually quite good at.

He will run around and say, everybody should have health care. And a lot of people believe that. It's a good line. But the really important thing, I think what Shore and others lack is a theory of attention in media, which is to say, how do you get a message to actually get heard? Because it's true that Medicare prescription drug pricing polls really well, and Democrats run on it a lot. But it also actually doesn't get you that much attention.

You can't break through the Trump stuff all that well talking about drug pricing. And that's true with a lot of these very highly popular economic policies that sometimes bring together the Bernie Sanders of the party and the Joe Biden normie Democrats of the party, right? These like economic populist prescriptions that are very, very popular that I've seen pull well ever since I've been in politics in 2004. But today I've noticed it's even harder to get coverage around those. Like when you tweet about something economic, you don't get as much attention. When we talk about it on the pod, we don't get as much of attention. Like the cultural and racial issues tend to just get

much more attention out, even though some of the positions that some in the party have taken on those issues are some of the least popular. But so let me push on this a little bit, because I think this is where my unpopularism comes in. What drives attention on the internet and in the media is conflict. So it is actually the case that the reason a lot of the exact issues you're talking about don't get attention is because there's nobody to disagree over them. And this is where I think the model of Bernie Sanders, for better or worse, issues you're talking about don't get attention is because there's nobody to disagree over them. And this is where I think the model of Bernie Sanders, for better or worse, is badly misunderstood.

What is different about Bernie Sanders in a lot of ways is that he is willing to say things that are unpopular to drive attention to his popular ideas. So I'll give Medicare for All as an example. The left loves to talk about how Medicare for All polls well, and it does. And then you do a couple more poll questions, and it doesn't, because people don't like a lot of pieces of it. They particularly don't like something that Bernie Sanders never screwed around with. He never denied that it will, one, abolish their private insurance, which on average people like, and two, it will probably raise taxes on the middle class. Both of these are lethal. But if you remember the Democratic primary, every single debate, week after week, feeling

like I was living in a recurrent hell of my own making, just began with a debate over abolishing private health insurance and Medicare for all because it was something you could actually get conflict on among the Democrats on the stage. They were all willing to fight with each other about it. And so this is, I think, the key thing in this. And Donald Trump was a genius on this. He understood that you dominated the attentional agenda by saying things people were going to disagree with. You actually had to create a fight. And so the place where I weirdly think both the popularists and the viralists, I guess, what a terrible name, by the way, in the modern, right? I know, the viralists.

Where I think they're both kind of missing the point a little bit is you have to choose what you're going to talk about that people are actually going to disagree with. And weirdly, I think when you push them all on it, they probably come to somewhat similar answers. Something Shore will say is a lot of the views of a mansion or a cinema are actually really, really unpopular. A lot of quite liberal economic policy views are popularist and you should fight on them and you should go to war on them. But the problem is you need their votes. So it actually suppresses that kind of fighting in the party. But yeah, like it is the case, I think, that Democrats, particularly through Twitter, have ended up in a much more intense and high velocity feedback echo chamber

of their own sort of elite staffing, et cetera, party than is good for them. On the other hand, the weird thing about that, the thing I think they sometimes miss of their own sort of elite staffing, et cetera, party than is good for them. On the other hand, the weird thing about that, the thing I think they sometimes miss, is that has allowed also a constant testing of what sort of policies will attain enough controversy to actually get people to pay attention to them. And so you need to be willing to choose among that set of policies. And Democrats have. I think the question that is being asked here is, have they made the right choices? I think Democrats really are willing to fight around

equity policies, racial equity policies in particular, that are not clear political winners, but I think they're morally right. They're less willing to fight over a bunch of those economic policies, or they're less willing to fight around some of maybe the foreign policies. But you have to choose like where you're going to actually elicit conflict in order to have any chance of like controlling the attentional agenda when the attentional agenda is controlled for better or for worse by conflict. Well, and I think that Shor's critics make a good point in that, like, and I saw Anat Shankar-Osorio say this in the piece who we've had on the pod a number of times, that, like, the Republicans have a say here, too. Right. Yes. Democrats aren't just like speaking into a vacuum. First of all, you've got a media filter. That's where your message is going through the media filter and reaching a lot of

those uninterested voters. And so how do you reach those voters? And then the Republicans have a message too. In 2012, like Barack Obama wins that race because Mitt Romney played on the field we wanted him to play on. We wanted to talk about economics. We wanted to talk about how he and Paul Ryan wanted to give tax cuts to the rich and cut Medicare, and we didn't. We wanted to fight for the middle class. And that's exactly the argument that the Obama campaign wanted to have since 2012, before we even knew Mitt Romney was the nominee. In 2016, Hillary Clinton could talk about economic issues until she was blue in the face but Donald Trump saying that Mexico's not sending their best and he's being anti-immigrant and racist and xenophobic and all this shit and you know to Hillary Clinton's credit like she can't it just ignore that she can't have Donald Trump being this like xenophobic bigot and she's just going to be

like well let me tell you I'm going to raise your minimum wage. That's all I have to say to that. So I do think the Democrats, even if they don't want to base their campaigns around some of these issues that don't poll as well, the Republicans get a say too. And you have to figure out what you're going to say to that. I think that's all correct and undeniable. And I also think that to a degree, nobody quite wants to admit here, even the people who say they're admitting it, that policy communication just isn't that powerful. And I say that as a dyed-in-the-wool policy nerd and somebody who fundamentally wants American politics to be fought out on that ground. By the way, that is another distortion of politics and communications being dominated by highly educated, highly ideological people who are in this fought out on that ground. By the way, that is another distortion of politics and political

communications being dominated by highly educated, highly ideological people who are in this because they want to win on a bunch of policy issues. Policy is more interesting to us than it is to others. So Schor is very – he was on the Obama campaign in 2012. And 2012 Obama really sits as a very important election to him. I think that 08 Obama is at this point, in particularly democratic politics, way underplayed as an important way of thinking about politics. Because for everything I've been saying, it's basically true that lesser political talents have to work with conflict and policy and greater political talents can work with inspiration. Because it just is true.

As much as people sometimes now want to look back and count it as cringe, which is on the list of things that I see happening where I'm like, oh, yeah, maybe Democrats will just never win another election again. The decision to say that popular things are just cringe. Like, we don't like Lin-Manuel Miranda anymore. It's cringe. Everybody loves that. It's a real dangerous thing to see liberal tastemakers, which has maybe always been how it's been, but liberal tastemakers coming up with a new word for popular things,

which is just like that they're embarrassing because all these people like them. I mean, the nature of something being cringe fundamentally is that it has to be popular first. Well, it's like, hey, everyone, remember the goal, build a majority. Yes. That can beat off the party that's trying to destroy democracy. And you build majorities through cringe. You have to win people over. You have to win people over and not tell them that their opinions

suck about everything. Patriotism and certain forms of it is very, very powerful. It's funny because I think that one thing that is missed in all the debates about 1619 is how unbelievably intensely patriotic Nicole Hannah-Jones' opening essay is. And I think that the reason Barack Obama drove the right completely nuts was partially, of course, that he's a Black man, but also partially that he took the American narrative away from them. He created an alternative patriotic narrative which said the real Americans, like the real patriotic Americans are the Americans who understand America's flaws and fight to change them. Like he created this whole, I mean, it always been there, of course, in our history.

He didn't invent it. He weaponized it. Like he actually drew a circle and said, you all are outside of it. And this was right after George W. Bush, right? This was right after George W. Bush and the real Americans and the heartland. And here comes Barack Obama saying, no, like the real American tradition, the heroes of the American tradition are those who see our flaws and who correct them. And so one of the tricky things about this is it's just hard to find generational political

talents. Nobody wants to say this exactly, but it just is. And Hillary Clinton, who I'm much more of a defender of than other people, but she's not that kind of communicator. And Joe Biden, definitely not. And so one of the things right now, I think, is that Democrats are working with weak material. I mean, one, they're working with a weak situation at the moment. I mean, inflation is high. They can't pass major bills now that they want to pass. The child tax credit is going to run out. It's very hard to spin a reality that is getting worse for a lot of people. But it's also just a case that I do think a little bit in this whole debate over popular

policies and viral policies is the fact that most people are just not policy-oriented. But when you say that, I think then where people naturally go, and I know this is where some of the show's critics go, they go to negative polarization. They go to saying you should still be running against Donald Trump. I've had this conversation with Michael Pedorza many times, and I don't think it's going to work. But the problem is Democrats don't have a good inspirational option right now because where they are is not highly inspirational. But you do have to, at some point, give people a vision for the future that is somewhat thrilling to them and that makes people arguing for the present seem like sideshows. I mean, a big part of my work right now is,

among other things, trying to argue that you need to imagine a technologically different future and mobilize government to create things people need and don't have, because that is actually part of how you build a vision of something that is not just based on zero-sum fights over what we have now. You can buy that or not buy it, but you actually need things that make people feel like part of something, not just combatants in something. And what Obama always spoke to really, really well in American politics, which is it is the most fundamental thing in our political rhetoric, going all the way back to George Washington's farewell address,

where he warns about how parties are terrible, even as he's actually making an argument on behalf of his own emergent political party. The most potent thing in American politics is to promise people a way out of fighting about politics. And it's not a policy, it's a vibe. But this isn't on Twitter what emerges as kind of an alternative to popularism. Vibes are really important. Vibes are really important. Look, on the Obama thing, of course, I think he was talented too. Part of what I think helped him is his identity and not just his identity as a black man, but his identity as someone who, you know,

went to wealthy schools and worked in very poor neighborhoods and lived in the United States and lived abroad. And he's half black and half white and has, you know, Chinese relatives, Canadian, right? Like he's got relatives from all over the world. So he has had a foot in so many different worlds that I think what he wanted to do more than anything was constantly remember that his job was to try to persuade. And like, we should get into this too, because you and I have talked about this in the past about like the power of persuasion. I know, you know, you think that it's overrated in politics,

and I've probably come closer to your point of view over the years, especially over the last several years. But even if you don't fully persuade someone, so much of Obama's rhetoric was saying to the country, you might feel this way that's different than me. And I understand that even though I believe X. And you can argue that he did that to a fault. But the way that you come up with a story about America that is patriotic, that makes people feel like a part of this country, no matter who they are, what they look like or where they come from, is empathizing with the differences we all have and then celebrating them in a way. And not just the differences in identity, but the differences in ideology and the differences in ideas.

And I think he was constantly thinking about that on every single policy topic, on every single issue. And I do worry today that we believe the issues we believe. And if you don't believe those, then like we're not even trying to persuade you. And we don't think you think you're wrong. We think you're bad. And I'm not like sitting here like 90s DLC. Like now let's moderate our policy positions. Keep all the policy positions.

Keep them all. All the progressive policy positions. But at least talk about them in a way that gives people space to come inside the tent, because we need a really big tent right now. If again, we're trying to be people with anti-democratic tendencies, if not fascists. We've really fallen down Maslow's hierarchy of political needs. Let me say two things to that. So of course, you're right that I am not a big believer in the power of certain, at least forms of political persuasion, by which I mean, like, I don't a big believer in the power of certain, at least, forms of political persuasion,

by which I mean, I don't tend to think in politics, particularly a president can stand up and convince people of something they don't believe on a polarized issue. At the same time, I think, and particularly I think Democrats, although Republicans do for that matter, just wildly underestimate the importance of what I would call the precursors to persuasion. It's just fundamentally relationships. I think something that we get wrong in politics is that we think the fundamental question for a voter is, do they like the politician? And I think the fundamental question for a voter is, do they think the politician likes them? I think that comes first. Feeling that the

politician likes you, that they see you, and whether they agree with you or not, they're going to try to be there for you, try to understand you, try to bring you along, try to fight for you. That much more than anything else to me was Obama's genius. He was really good for all the reasons you talked about, for all of his weird straddling every possible world you could think of. He was extremely good, particularly earlier, before he got so polarizing and so on, at communicating the idea that he probably liked you. Bill Clinton, a master at communicating the idea that whatever you thought of him, he probably liked you. You can name your politicians who are not as good at that. I think we overrate the importance actually of persuasion and underrate the importance of simply,

I don't want to call it opening a dialogue because it isn't a dialogue, but holding a kind of space that people feel, you might call it a kind of space that people feel, you might call it a safe space, that people feel relatively safe in. I think this is, by the way, I say this in the book. I think it's so funny that safe spaces became this much-mocked word because, of course, the most fundamental political hope is for safety, like all kinds. And that's why everybody always wants to talk about free speech and cancel culture because even just feeling rhetorically unsafe, people hate it and they can't stop talking about it and thinking about it, even as it's like pretty far down the list of problems, I would say, that a lot of these folks are actually facing. But that goes then, I mean, to keep this a little bit

on the offline theme, that is not what a lot of our communication mediums right now are tuned to do. This hasn't come out yet, but I've got a podcast coming with a philosopher of games named Thi Nguyen, and his is just great work about Twitter. And he talks basically about how Twitter gamifies discourse. And in gamifying discourse and creating a very obvious point system, the retweets, the likes, et cetera, it replaces the many different kinds of incentives you might have and goals you might have for a conversation with Twitter's goals for your conversation. And they're not the same, even if it's easy to forget that.

And what doesn't get you high score and points in a lot of media right now is holding an uncertain space where a lot of people can be tentative and feel that even if we're not all going to agree, we're going to just kind of keep working this out together. Like what works is certainty. It's drawn lines. It's the dunk. It is like drawing the lines of your group ever tighter, you know, to show that you're part of the truth here. I mean, even all these words we're using, popularists and vibes and viralists, like nobody's even any one of these all the way anyway. Yeah. I mean, the coalition required to beat Donald Trump in 2020 included everyone from AOC to Joe Manchin and everyone and never Trump Republicans and the far

left. And figuring out how that alliance holds together, which is maybe the most important project of the next few years, requires a level of strategy and communication and collective action that even if we got everyone in a big room together to try to figure out would be messy, let alone figuring it all out together in public, online, on these platforms. That's the challenge that we're facing right now. And you don't get a lot of space to make mistakes, grow, be clumsy, all the kind of things you do when you're in an organization trying to figure out strategy. Do you think that can hold together without Donald Trump actually on the ballot?

No. Yeah, I don't either. I don't know if it can hold together with Donald Trump on the ballot, though. I certainly think we have no other choice but to try our hardest. And I think we have a fighting chance. I think if he's not on the ballot, it depends on who the candidate is and it depends on whether that candidate seems enough like Trump or seems as scary as Trump.

Like, you know, how close does Ron DeSantis have to get to Donald Trump to feel like the same kind of threat, right? Maybe to me, he's already there, but to a lot of other people, who knows? So yeah, I don't know about that. I think it's a very unwieldy coalition as we're seeing right now.

I think that also like gets to a real just difficulty in Democratic politics now. I don't feel like I have confidence in the counterfactuals of the other candidates winning the primary. I don't know what would have happened if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or Cory Booker and so on. I got my guts on it, but I wouldn't put down a big bet. But what I think is really interesting and sort of undeniable is that only Joe Biden, and only Joe Biden as Barack Obama's vice president, could have run Joe Biden's campaign. Like that campaign completely fails absent his name recognition and deep ties to every constituency. And so whatever comes after Joe Biden, it won't look like the Joe Biden coalition.

Because he actually, in many ways, the thing he did was run a fundamentally inoffensive campaign where he made Donald Trump the mobilizing figure, and his particular talent was creating enough coalitional structure that AOC and Sunrise could still be on his climate committee, and Joe Manchin could still feel good about him, and never Trump Republicans didn't feel threatened by him, and so on and so forth. But he also was able to run basically a non-digital campaign with no need to compete in this attentional digital conflict economy. And not one other candidate was able to do that. Nobody else had that opportunity. So he could avoid a bunch of landmines. None of the other ones were able to avoid. He was Barack Obama's vice president, and so he was always going to be at the center of the ballot. I think in many ways,

the reckoning over where digital politics has taken the Democratic Party is yet to come, because we still haven't seen the first presidential and national candidates from the Democratic Party who are from this era in politics, who rose up in this era in politics. And whether that's 2024 because Biden doesn't run, or it's 2028 or what, that's coming. And the people who knew how to do the old school thing, it doesn't select for them. And so maybe that's better, maybe that's worse, but it's coming. It's what you said earlier. It's hard to find a once-in-a-generation talent like Barack Obama,

but we kind of need to, I think, because that person is not only going to have to come up in that era, but also be somewhat apart from that cohort of people in that they know that their audience and the coalition they're trying to build is bigger than the online space that they still have to be embraced by. So which is a really, really difficult challenge. And don't you think that'll mean running against this era? I mean, one thing that I think people forget about Obama from 08 is as much as he ran against anything, he was really running against cable news. Yeah, that was Washington. It was it was a special interest in lobbyists, but it was also the up and down

politics as a game. That's who he was talking about. And the red and blue America and the dicing and the blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, this was- Because remember, it was the pundits that were dicing. The pundits that were dicing. That was the enemy in that line. I think people underestimate how much Obama was running against the vibe of political media in 2008. Not literally political media, like he wasn't actually running against the vibe of political media in 2008. Not literally political media, like he wasn't actually running against political media, but he was running against the vibe of what

political media felt like and how it understood the world in 2008. And by the way, that annoyed a bunch of people like me. I remember writing all these columns about how he didn't understand the intransigence of Republicans and blah, blah, blah, blah. But that is still very powerful politics. And I suspect that the next dominant Democratic figure like that – I'm not going to speak for the Republican coalition here – is going to, sort of like Obama did, have to fundamentally fully understand, fully be a creature of that understanding of politics and be able to position against it. Not be not a creature of it like Joe Biden is, right? Somebody who like Joe Biden doesn't know what vibes are. But somebody who came up in it and seems to radiate a taste for it that even people in it feel, right? That's the key. I think to the extent anybody was trying there, it was Buttigieg. Buttigieg was a very knockoff Obama approach to politics. But it's going to have to be an approach like that, I suspect. Because you can't run.

You will have to be of it and simultaneously against it. That was sort of Obama's underplayed genius. I mean, 12 was different, but that was 08. No, and I think, getting back to the subject of this podcast, it is going to have to include what people are increasingly feeling about the toxicity and silliness and stupidness of all of us living our lives online. Particularly coming out of a pandemic, which just added to those problems and is like, you know, we're still going to be going through the collective trauma of coming out of that as a country for quite some time. So sort of like somebody who's run like a big democratic podcast, but then begins pivoting to a podcast about how the digital world is sort of making everything worse. That's a real fucking, that's a disaster in the making. Last question I'm asking all of our

guests, what's your favorite way to unplug and how often do you do it? I've been really trying to do digital Shabbats. Really trying to. What is that? Tell me what that entails. Oh, so digital Shabbats is simply like I don't get to look at screens from roughly sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. Wow. down on Friday to sundown on Saturday. And this was hard. And I screwed around with light versions of it because I was like, well, I'll just try not to look at the parts of the screens that

jacked me into all this stuff. But I need to be able to listen to music, obviously, and listen to an audio book and get directions on my phone. And then more recently, we had a second kid that has also really hurt my digital habits because I just, you know, you sit around a lot. You sit and you look, you scroll. So I made the decision that no, I don't get to quarter low fit. Like I don't have directions on my phone because I don't have my phone. I don't get to listen to music because I need some time with that input. I'm not saying this has been going on for that long, so we'll see how it continues.

But it's really created a profound sense of spaciousness in that Friday night to Saturday period, and obviously some inconveniences. And I don't exactly know what I'd do if my wife wasn't still open to using her phone occasionally when we needed to get somewhere. But that's a practice that I've started and I'm trying to really, really do, because I think that for some period of the week, I need to feel what it's like to not be a little less in it, but just not in it. Actually not. Yeah, man, I might start trying that. I'll do a little bit at a time. I've finally got the, you know, you've hit your hour on twitter notification on my phone i've been doing since christmas and i haven't blown through it too many times which is good but i already do

feel a little bit better and when you go back to twitter after having that time limit the controversies the tweets the stupid shit it does start feeling a little bit more foreign and detached and you're like what why do i care about this so it's a good thing yeah i mean that that that stuff i never i always end up circumventing it that's why i found this is like true for a lot of things in my life willpower is rough on me like i'm not good at portion control i'm not good at portion control like i can do none but i can't do some and it's been just you know i'm 37 i've come to accept this as a weird as a weird part of myself yeah ezra klein uh thanks for doing offline this was a pleasure thank you

offline is a crooked media production it's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Andy Gardner-Bernstein and Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madison Hallman, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.

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