The Ezra Klein Show - The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

What happens when ambition no longer checks ambition?Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein show. A few years back, the online right became enamored of a new epithet for liberals. NPC, short for non-player character. The term is lifted from video games, where an NPC refers to the computer-controlled characters that populate the game, while you, the live player, you make the actual decisions. NPCs don't have minds of their own. They don't have agency. They're automatons.

They do, as they're told. NPC quickly became a favorite dismissal for all those liberals with their BLM and MeToo hashtags, their Ukrainian flag icons, their they-them pronouns, and anti-racism reading groups. Liberals in this story, they thought what they were allowed to think. They said what they were allowed to say. You might have seen these memes if for your sins you're sufficiently online.

Featureless gray faces, sometimes surrounded by liberal icons. Elon Musk loved posting them. Like any good insult, the NPC meme served a dual purpose. It contains a kernel of truth about its target. We liberals can be conformist. We can be too afraid to offend. We can be overly deferential to institutions. We can be cowed by the in-group policing

that we inflict on ourselves, and a little quick to take up whatever the cause of the moment is. But the real purpose of the NPC insult was self-congratulation. The right was full of live players. You could see it in their willingness to offend, their mistrust of institutions, their eagerness to debate what liberals would not even say out loud. This became part of the Trumpist right's self-definition. They were the nonconformists, a coalition that wasn't made of automatons.

And that's what America needed, live players. And here we are in 2025. And at this point, I'm willing to concede at least half the argument. American politics does have an NPC problem, possibly a lethal one, but it's not on the left. I can make a generous case for a lot of what the Trump administration is on some level trying to do, or at least saying they're trying to do. There is something to the argument that the administrative state is too hard for the president to guide or even control. Government is too gummed up by process and protocol. It is too hard to hire and to guide or even control. Government is too gummed up by process

and protocol. It is too hard to hire and fire in the civil service. Even if I agree with the goals of many DEI programs, and I do, many of them don't achieve those goals. Some of them make the problems they seek to fix worse. There hasn't been rigor at looking at which is which and getting rid of the bad ones. There is actually a good argument for auditing USAID. We probably should convert more of what that agency spends to cash grants and direct public health support. And yes, how the government manages software procurement and bills and maintains digital services

is hopelessly cumbersome. I was saying all this before the election too. All of it is well- known, including among liberals. Many liberals have spent a lot of time trying to think about how to fix these problems. And so it is a genuine failure of Democrats that they did not put more energy into making the government faster and better and more responsive when they were in charge. How the hell did the Biden administration pass $42 billion for broadband in 2021, and have basically nothing to show for it by November of 2024?

How did they get $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charges, but only billed a few hundred of them by the end of their term? Why is it all so slow? Democrats became champions of a government that often didn't work. And that's part of the reason Trump won. Not the only reason, not the biggest reason, it's not as important as a price of eggs. But when people feel the government isn't working, the party promising change beats a party rallying in defense. When Elon Musk says that the election gave Republicans a mandate for reform,

he's not totally wrong. You couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted, you know, we have a majority of the public voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. But look at how Musk justifies that mandate. The proof is that Republicans control the House and the Senate.

So why not write some bills? Sure, Republican majorities are narrow, but bipartisanship here, it wasn't out of the question. Democrats were defeated and ready to deal. Their own voters wanted them to deal. A January poll by CBS and YouGov found that 54% of Democrats wanted their congressional representatives to work with the Trump administration. It was only 46% of Democrats who wanted relentless opposition. One month later, February, only 35% of Democrats want cooperation and now 65% want all-out opposition.

That is a lot of political capital the Trump administration burnt in just one month. And for what? I've covered Washington for decades now. There's gray in the spirit. If this was about policy, Trump and his team would have gone through Congress. They didn't want to go line by line through USAID and figure out what worked and what didn't. They didn't want to release a package of proposed spending cuts and debate them.

They didn't want to think through new civil service regulations, balancing ethics and independence and responsiveness. What they wanted was power. What Donald Trump wanted was power. And so they're trying to remake our system of government, not our laws. And they've identified a weak point in the system. And now they're trying to drive a flaming cyber truck through it. That weak point is Congress.

And the reason the Trump administration might succeed in taking Congress's power is that they have turned congressional Republicans into NPCs. The vulnerability in the system here goes way back. In Federalist 51, James Madison set out the challenge he and his colleagues faced in writing the Constitution. He said, In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.

You must first enable the government to control the governed, and the next place oblige it to control itself." So how does a government control itself? The Founder's idea was that it controls itself through internal competition between independent branches, each of which wants to protect its own power. It was the competition between them that would keep the system balanced. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition, Madison wrote. But one branch was unquestionably designed to be stronger than the others.

Congress controls the money. Congress has the power to declare war. Congress can overturn presidential vetoes. Congress can impeach federal judges, cabinet officers, and the president. Congress comes impeach federal judges, cabinet officers, and the president. Congress comes first in the Constitution. Why was Congress made so strong? Because Congress reflects a second, and in some ways the more important and enduring, form of fracture the founders imagined. Our political system was

designed to fracture power by place. Senators are elected by states until 1913. They were elected by state legislatures. The House is sliced up into geographically bound districts. And so every member of Congress represents a place. And every place is believed to have its own interests and culture and politics. That ultimately is what members of Congress are supposed to represent.

The particular needs of a particular group of voters in a particular place. And so power would be fractured. It can never nationalize into just one force. The framers of the Constitution got a lot right. But they got a lot wrong. And one of the big things that got wrong was visible almost immediately.

The founders imagined a political system free of political parties. Within a few years, they had formed their own political parties. But for much of American history, their second assumption held. Geography kept American politics fractured. It kept power fractured because it kept America's political parties fractured. Yes, we've had Republicans and Democrats for a long time. But in the 20th century, that two-party system was really a four-party system. The Democrats were split between the liberals we know today and the Southern Dixiecrats, a sort of internal party whose primary goal was upholding segregation. The Republicans were split between conservatives as we know them today and Northern liberals.

It is astonishing from our vantage point to really wrap your mind around this. But it's true for much of the 20th century. To say you were a Republican or a Democrat didn't reveal whether you were a liberal or a conservative. In 1973, Senator Joe Biden opposed the Roe v. Wade decision. Around that same time, President Richard Nixon proposed a universal health care bill and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

George Wallace started out in politics as a Democrat. Politics was different then. The parties were different then. Because parties that contained so many different places and ideologies could not act in lockstep. And so bipartisanship was common. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, yes, it was pushed by a Democratic president,

but congressional Republicans were crucial to its passage. When Watergate began coming to light, Congress acted as a collective. Only four House Republicans voted against opening the impeachment inquiry into Nixon, and it was ultimately a delegation of congressional Republicans that persuaded Nixon to resign. And this independence wasn't just on impeachment. When Nixon was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated, a policy known as impoundment, Congress acted to protect its power. Republicans and Democrats alike.

The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 passed the House with only six no votes, only six. It passed the Senate without a single vote in opposition. Republicans and Democrats in Congress acted to protect their power. That was how the system was supposed to work. But that was then. Here in 2025, President Trump is impounding money that Congress has appropriated in clear defiance of that empowerment bill that passed nearly unanimously.

He's trying to erase agencies that Congress created. And that means asserting the power to erase agencies that Congress created. And while the courts are standing in his way, Congress is doing nothing while Trump takes away their power. Congress is not fighting to stop the destruction of USAID, even though its current structure was created by a bill passed by a Republican House and Senate in 1998. It's astonishing.

Republicans in Congress could demand that Trump cut them in. They won this election, too. This is their job. It is their job to write these bills. Agreeing with Trump's policy aims need not mean agreeing with his power grab. The most powerful branch of government, the branch with the power to check the others, is supine. It is not that it can't act to protect its power.

It's that it will not act to protect its power. This is a non-player Congress. Behind it is a collapse of the structure of government the founders envisioned and the nationalization of the two parties. I'm not going to rehearsal story of how the parties nationalize here. I spent a lot of time on the story. If you'd like to read about it, I wrote a whole book called,

I Were Bolarized, but it has been true for decades now. And the possibility that it would lead to something exactly like this happening has been feared for decades. Go back to 2006, Darrell Levinson and Richard Pildes published an article in the Harvard Law Review called, Separation of Parties, Not Powers, in which they warned that the practical distinction between party-divided and party-unified government

rivals insignificance and often dominates the constitutional distinction between the branches. And they said it calls into question many of the foundational assumptions of separation of powers, law and theory. Yeah, it sure does. If Democrats controlled Congress right now, Congress would be a check on Donald Trump. Since Republicans control it, it is not a check on Donald Trump. And what you're seeing there is that to speak of Congress as an institution with ambition and will is to mislead yourself. Congress is a power center. What matters is which party controls it and how that party acts. It is parties that now compete with each other, not branches. In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated his White

House counsel, Harriet Myers, to the Supreme Court. And she had to withdraw because the Republican-controlled Senate found her unqualified and ideologically unreliable. The fact that Bush wanted her on the court, that wasn't enough. Congress Republicans had their own views. In 2009, President Barack Obama had nominated Tom Daschle to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, only to see Daschle withdraw. Daschle, the former Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, was to see Dashiell withdraw. Dashiell, the former majority leader of the U.S. Senate, was found to owe back taxes, and he thought his own nomination might fail to make it through a Senate filled with his former colleagues. But this Republican party is no check on Trump. That's been the message of Trump's nominations.

R.F.K. Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth. These were tests. Senate Republicans know these nominees are unqualified. You could see it in the hearings. Again, let's make it very clear for everyone here today. As Secretary of Defense, will you support women continuing to have the opportunity to serve in combat roles? Senator, first of all, thank you for your service, as we discussed extensively as well. It's my privilege. As the leader of the intelligence community, how would you think you would be received

based on some of these past actions to support or even to pardon Edward Snowden. Rank and file intelligence analysts and intelligence professionals. How do you think it will be received? I'm a doc trying to understand. Convince me that you will become the public health advocate but not just churn old information so that

there's never a conclusion, as Senator Hassan suggested, but that will become the influencer for people to believe, no, there's 1.25 million kids studied and there's no autism associated with measles. How do you tell me? You see what my question is in there. I'm going to be an advocate for strong science. Senate Republicans don't want to vote for these nominees. Not one of them got into politics to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ran for president

in 2023, two years ago, as a pro-choice Democrat Democrat as Secretary of Health and Human Services. But Trump knows what he's doing. You force people into submission early and soon it becomes a habit. Congressional Republicans have their reasons for bowing to him. Washington is aflame with talk of the primary challenges that Elon Musk will fund against any Republican who makes trouble for Trump. All of them fear the trouble personally weigh in against them in a primary. What an unbelievably strange life to rise as far as they have in politics,

to wield as much power as they could, and to be as afraid as they are. The NPC critique got something right. There are real dangers to conformity. Political parties, even presidential administrations are stronger when they can hear contrary voices. Musk using his billions to scare congressional Republicans into supporting everything Trump does. Yeah, it makes Trump look stronger now. It might make him and the country a whole lot weaker later if those same

nominees fail and he is blamed for the disaster. Or if the treasury payment system breaks and he is blamed for the chaos. In the short term, having unanimity makes you look strong. In the long term, success is what makes you strong. It would be good right now. Good for their party, good for the country. If Republicans displayed the values they once claimed to prize, a willingness to offend their own side, a mistrust of institutional authority, an eagerness to debate the questions that those in power

do not wish to see debated. But we are seeing none of that. This is the NPC problem we actually face. A non-player Congress driven by Republicans who serve Trump's ambitions first. Congress Republicans who have gone quiet. We are left relying on the courts. And yeah, that may work. But this is not the system working.

It's the system failing.