The New Yorker Radio Hour - An Alternative Oscars Ceremony, and Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

It’s time for the most anticipated of all awards shows: the Brodys, in which The New Yorker’s Richard Brody shares the best films of the year, according to Richard Brody. And the political commentator Ezra Klein explains why he thinks politics have gotten as polarized as they are: we care too much about party identity and not enough about policy. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Ezra Klein is a political commentator and a self-described policy wonk who's very much willing to get into the weeds of how government actually works. He hosts a political podcast aptly called The Ezra Klein Show. Klein's first book is just out and it aims to tackle a huge question. the book is called simply Why We're Polarized. And one of Klein's major themes here is that policies are now far less important to who we elect than who we identify with. In other words, that partisanship has become a kind of identity politics and it's very hard to change someone's mind about their identity.

Ezra Klein talked about his book with Isaac Chotner, who writes the Q&A column for the New Yorker. Well, I want to ask you about the democratic race in the context of this book a little bit. because you've essentially written this book and you're saying that things like health care, that's not how our political system is where it is because of the debate over health care. There are much larger issues of identity. And if you want to understand American politics, you have to understand these much larger forces that are going on. And yet, if you look at the democratic debate, there is a lot of very intricate policy debate about bills or issues that are probably not going to pass the Senate no matter what happens. You know, it's certainly a contrast to the Republican primary of four years ago where there was racism on the stage and people were yelling at each other and it was crazy in many ways. But in some ways, it feels like a more accurate reflection of where American politics is.

And I'm wondering if you think the Democratic debate, as good as it is to talk about policy and as important as it is, is actually sort of different from the main conversation about what's really going on in politics now. I don't think so. I don't think that Democrats are debating policy. That actually goes very deep in part because it's a party of very different groups. You have to sort of win people over through transactional policy. But the bigger point I would make here, and I say this is somebody whose whole career is covering policy, it's a mistake to think that policy is not a way people express identity. And in particular, Bernie Sanders is genius at this.

When Bernie Sanders talks about Medicare for All and the way he talks about Medicare for All, he's not just making a policy argument. He's making an argument about values and who he is. And I think you see this in the way the Democratic policy debates play out. They're not really having like a clear debate over who has the idea that is most likely given the composition of the U.S. Senate and the House to pass, right? Thus that you will get the most people health care. I mean, you will hear that from Amy Klobuchar. But that's not the way this thing has played out in its macro form.

Bernie Sanders has made Medicare for all a kind of litmus test. It's about are you a certain kind of person who believes a certain set of things about the world and is built on a certain set of value foundations. And so then when Elizabeth Warren, who I think is a good counter example here, she, as far as I can tell believes in Medicare for All, she came out with a very detailed financing plan for Medicare for All, which he hasn't. But then she also came out with this transitionary bill, which she felt would help solve some of these political problems. And the reaction to that among the Bernie Sanders wing of the party was not, oh, that's interesting. Like, let's kind of go back and forth. The reaction was, oh, you're.

you're not a true, pure, diehard Medicare for All supporter. You will compromise. And when you see something like that, what you're seeing is policy operating at a symbolic level. It's not just operating as who has the best theory for how to get to Medicare for All. You're seeing a sort of identity argument play out about who is truly connected to this. Who is truly, in this case, a Democratic Socialist? Is there a way in which this might set people up, Democratic voters up, or voters for whoever the Democratic nominee is for disappointment. Yes. And the same sort of, okay, let me finish in that.

For the same sort of cynicism that we see in the system now and which I think benefits outsiders to the system because of that cynicism about how Washington works, that Democratic politicians now are promising a whole range of things that even if they are elected, and even if they somehow get 50, 51 senators are very, very unlikely to pass Congress. I cannot stress yes enough. we do not invent campaign overpromising in the year 2020. There's not a campaign where presidential candidates do not promise more than they are likely to be able to pass. My biggest critique of the rising left, which I have a lot of sympathy with and in many cases agree with in goals,

is that it has substituted an ideological critique for an institutional plan. In particular, the critique that has emerged of Barack Obama is that he didn't get all these great things, because he was just a neoliberal. And if only he had had a pure and more aggressive form of politics in the way Bernie Sanders does, then he would have gotten it. An argument I'm making in my book is that we imbue too much explanatory power and stories and actions of individuals. For the most part, individuals carry out the biddings of the political system around them. We are much too focused on big promises presidential candidates make and much too light on their plans for institutional reform or their plans for getting around. institutional roadblocks in a way that sets up continuous cycles of disappointment and depression.

A lot of writers on the left, a lot of people on the left feel that generally arguments about polarization or partisanship or what's gone wrong in American politics focus too much on both sides being to blame and that essentially Democrats have moved to the left in the last several decades and have gotten more polarized and partisan, but that essentially Republicans are to blame for where we are. How do you feel about that critique and how? How do you feel about that critique and How do you feel like your book does or doesn't fit into it? So I agree with that critique, number one. So polarization is a system that is affecting and afflicting all of us.

And that's not just political parties, but us in the media. It has changed how we do our work, how elections are run, how governance functions. It affects culture, what ends up on TV. The Republican Party has responded to polarization in a different way than the Democratic Party. It has moved further right and the Democratic Party has moved left. The Democratic Party operates under. conditions of diversity and democracy that the Republican Party does not operate under. And I mean this. In the Democratic primary right now, if you want to become the Democratic Party leader,

you have to win liberals in Iowa, white liberals in Iowa and more independent voters at New Hampshire and traditionalist African American voters in South Carolina. And so what it ends up creating is a preference for very coalitional candidates. The Republican Party, which is an overwhelmingly white Christian party that does not have to put together these coalitions of different groups, allows you go much deeper. Donald Trump was a candidate who very intensely appealed to a particular kind of person, which is how you got him in 2016. And also in a very polarized system, which you're writing about, someone who wins a major party nomination can get 46% of the vote and win the presidency, even if they're unpopular because they're only two options and people are very partisan and Republicans will largely vote for one person. Right. So you can run this argument both ways. And so let me do it this way. In 1950, the American Political Science Association releases a report called Towards a Responsible Two-Party System, very famous report. And what it basically says in a way that sounds very weird to modern ears is there's a huge problem in American politics and it is that the parties are not polarized. And the argument APSA makes, the political scientists make, is that the most fundamental choice that people make in a system like ours is which party to vote for. But in that period, exactly what you're saying is happening.

We don't really know what's going on inside the party. So maybe you vote for Strom Thurmond in the South, but that's also the party of Hubert Humphrey in Minnesota. And so your vote is kind of being taken and turned into a muddle. You are voting for one agenda and you're not getting it. So the reason I say all this is that I think right now, within our discourse about polarization, the way people think about it is polarization is breaking the American political system. So what we need to do is turn the clock back on polarization. We need to become depolarized.

I would actually argue it in many ways of the reverse, in part because I don't think we're going to become depolarized. But another thing you can imagine doing is changing the way American politics works so that it can function amidst conditions of polarization. So what would fixes look like to make our system more majoritarian? The tricky thing here is that as soon as I say this, people are going to be like, well, that won't pass because that's a problem. Polarization will make it so nothing can pass. But at a small level, you can imagine things like, getting rid of the filibuster, which creates an added supermajority requirement in the Senate, get rid of the electoral college. So right now, we have a U.S. President who did not win a majority

of votes. We have a Senate majority that did not win a majority of votes. And because of that, we have a Supreme Court majority that was put in place by people who did not win a majority of votes. Or even pluralities. Or even pluralities in some cases. So you could also do something, and you can imagine this in different levels, right? You could add states, you can take them away. You can court pack. You can not court pack. You can make Puerto Rico and D.C. states, which you should do for justice and equity reasons anyway, you could then imagine the parties competing at the majority level and that what you have then is more aggressive forms of governance,

that then the voters have to choose accountability. We've basically made a choice in our political system to have less voter accountability, but less ability for the other party to do things you may not like, that we prefer the muddled accountability that comes from a system tuned towards inaction. against the possibility that we'll have effective governance and the public will like things that I don't like. And I just think that's wrong. I think the way political systems work best is that people can vote in a party.

That party can do the things it said it was going to do and people can decide if they like the outcome of that. I think it's a little bit crazy that we've gotten so attuned to a system that is about making sure people can't get the thing they voted for because we fear that, I don't know. The voters are too stupid to decide if they liked it or not. Ezra Klein, talking with staff writer Isaac Chautner. Klein's new book is called Why We're Polarized. This is the season for one of our great annual traditions at the New Yorker Radio Hour when we bestow the most prestigious honor in filmmaking. The Brody Awards.

The Brodies, unlike the Oscars, aren't decided by a huge pool of unaccountable people floating around Hollywood, but by one guy, Richard Brody. Richard writes about film for New Yorker.com, and he sees more movies in a week than most people see in five years. Joining me to do the honors here today is staff writer Alexandra Schwartz, who writes about theater and books, but who's basically here for the M&Ms and the popcorn. It's that time of year again.

It's the most magical time of the year. It's the most magical time in the year. So here we are surrounded by M&M's, cheese doodles that aren't quite cheese doodles, and some popcorn. And we are ready to go on the Brodies. Welcome, Alex. Welcome Richard. Glad to be here.

And what we're going to do is we're going to just do four awards, the biggies. Best actress, best actor and both in leading roles, best director, and best picture. And of course, these are all Richard's nominees, not the academies. Alas. I don't think so. In a better world.

So let's get right down to it. Let's start with the acting awards. First up is best actress in a leading role, Alex, the Brody nominees please. Cynthia Arrivo for Harriet. Adele Henel, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Lupita Nyango, us, Elizabeth Moss, her smell, and Melissa McCarthy, The Kitchen. And the winner is?

Lupita Nyango for us. Once upon was a girl. Richard, the last I looked, she was not even nominated by the occasion. Academy. What happened? What was the source of the snub, or is it just the same old, same old? Well, I think, first of all, the enthusiasm for us is simply less than the enthusiasm for Get Out was, and I think for very invidious reasons. I think that Jordan Peel here made a film that is no less a political film than Get Out, but its politics are not centered on the politics of race. And I think that weirdly and unpleasantly, the Academy, like many critics, expect something

very particular from an African-American filmmaker. Very particular and very predictable. And very predictable from an African-American filmmaker that they did not get in this movie. On the other hand, Us is a much more comprehensive political movie. Tell me a little bit about her performance. What distinguished it so much for you? On the one hand, she creates characters

who are entirely comprehensible, plausible, and precise in their milieu. And on the other hand, she captures something exemplary of the, let's say, the metaphysical experience, the haunting experience, that makes it one of the most powerful, political metaphors of the time. Now, who do you think is actually going to win?

Who's the Academy going to pick? I think it's going to be very tough. The Academy likes biopics. I think that Renee Zellweger has a very good chance for Judy. I think her main competitor is going to be Scarlett Johansson for Marriage Story. No way. I think that she delivers the kind of performance, which is simultaneously vulnerable and triumphant,

that will appeal to voters. What did you expect was going to happen? I don't know. I guess I didn't think it through, but I thought we agreed we weren't going to use lawyers. I want, I don't know, I'm trying to say this as undramatically as possible. I want an entirely different kind of life. Alex, you got a winner for the Academy and your own choice? For Best Actress?

Yeah. I mean, I think I'd have to pick Sorcia Ronan for Little Women. I mean, I am a fan of Little Women in the movie. I am irritated that Greta Gour will. Wig was not nominated as I feel she should have been. For Best Director. For Best Director. And I thought that Sorsha Ronan was a great Spunky Joe.

All right. Let's go on to Best Actor in a leading role, Alex. Robert De Niro for the Irishman. Adam Driver, The Dead Don't Die. Winston Duke for us. Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems. And Paul Walter Houser for Richard Jewell. And Richard.

the winner is. Adam Sandler, uncut gems. Adam Sandler, who didn't get nominated, Andrew Sandler, who seemed to, maybe I think the polite word,

is, got screwed. Yeah, absolutely got screwed. Why did he get screwed? He got screwed because he's in a movie that is a... Makes you a nervous wreck

from beginning to end. It's a frenzied, daring movie. It also features an actor whom the Academy doesn't take seriously. He got screwed because he's Adam Sandler,

I think, and I did see an interview that he did where he said that if he did not get nominated, he was going to drop a stink bomb of a movie on all of us as revenge. And so I think we can look forward to that. I can't wait. Yeah, that's what the Academy thinks of Adam Sandler, but I'm totally with Richard on this one. Uncut Gems is the story of a man who is digging his own grave.

It's the story of a gambler. His life is on the line at every step of the way. He works in the Diamond District. He has a shop where he provides bling for basketball players. Kevin Garnett plays himself in this movie. And he's kind of good. And he's really good. Yeah.

How many carrots is this? What, four, five thousand carrots? $3,000 a carrot. I'm not. Why's it got so many colors in it, man? What is this? That's the thing. They say you can see the whole universe in Opel.

That's how fucking old they are. Holy stuff. I'm telling you. That's why I want you to see you. You know, that's crazy. Yeah. From stone to stone. Garnett to Stone, you know that.

That's a million dollar opal. straight from the Ethiopian Jewish tribe. I mean, this is old school. Middle Earth. Got a little dinosaur, Jim. That's a dinosaur. Well, I think the secret to Uncachems is that he worked with directors

who had an idea about what Adam Sandler could and should be. It's by working with the most talented directors that actors expand their range. I also thought he was very good in the Meyerwood stories by Noah Baumack.

Yeah, I agree. So, mischief is being played all throughout your list here. One of the pieces of mischief is that you nominated Adam Driver, not surprisingly, for Best Actor in a Leading Role, but you didn't nominate him for a marriage story. You nominated him for a zombie movie, directed by Jim Jarmish called The Dead Don't Die.

Why? The Dead Don't Die is one of the great political movies at the time, and that seems to be a theme that's coming up this year. This has been a year of remarkable political films. The Dead Don't Die is a climate change. horror story. Is it some sort of epidemic or what? It's zombies.

What are you saying? Well, it's the undead. They've been reanimated. Caused by the Earth having been pulled off its axis. Caused by the polar fracking. But the authorities and energy people keep saying that's not true. Really? She's alive?

No, she's not. She's just undead. Shardonnay. Holy shit. Did she just say shardinet? Jordan, eh? Yeah, she did. Now let's move on to Best Director.

Alex, who are the nominees? I'll just finish eating my cheese doodle. The nominees. Jordan Peel, for us. Mariel Heller, a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Jim Jarmush, for the Dead Don't Die. Josh and Benny Softie, Uncut Gems. Martin Scorsese, the Irishman.

And the winner is... This was very tough, by the way. The winner is Jordan Peel. For us. Why so tough? because everybody's great this year. This is, 2019 was an extraordinary year for really inventive direction. What got me about us is that it's a colossal movie.

It's a movie that starts from a very particular experience and really takes on, like, the world. Now, Richard, the big news about, not that it's unique news from year to year, but the big news in best directors, there are no women, notably, as you've mentioned before, Alex. No, no, no, Gerwig. No Greta Gerwig. What is up? I mean, this category is particularly

horrible when it comes to this issue. And this year was a great year for women to making movies. I think if you look at the list of directors nominated by the Academy, the results are dinosauric. The results are... Who exemplifies a dinosauric choice? Well, Sam Mendez, Todd Phillips. Of 1917. Yeah. Even Quentin Tarantino, whose quality of direction has declined drastically over the years as he has become more attentive to his writing. Richard, one movie that is all over the academy's list, to many people's delight, including mine,

but is nowhere to be seen on your list, is Parasite. Why did it not make the cut for you? Parasite is a classic case of a pretty good movie. It's made by a director who has an authentic need to make this movie. You feel that he has something he wants to say. It's motivated by passion. And what he has to say has to do with rich and poor, advantage, disadvantage. I think that fundamentally, he simply wanted to show spaces.

He wanted to show that there are places that look one way where rich people live and that look another way where sewage spews out when there are storms where poor people live. Alex? I have to say, I found the film to be a lot more inventive and working on a lot more levels than my colleague here. You know when you call your colleague, it's like in the Senate. The gentlewoman from South Carolina. My beloved and esteemed colleague here. To me, Parasite was the movie that I wanted us to be. It had a more coherent vision.

I thought visually it was more arresting and precise. I also thought the cast was terrific, and the cast has been overlooked by the academy in a way that doesn't entirely surprise me. There is a lot of humor in that family dynamic. The family, which begins with a son who gets a job as a tutor at a wealthy family's house and scams the rest of his family

into the same house, the same household. That's really a kind of twisted love that I appreciated seeing on screen. Let's go on to the final, best picture, the main event. Alex, the nominees, please. The nominees are, A beautiful day in the neighborhood,

Atlantics, the dead don't die, The Irishman An Elephant Sitting Still Frankie Her Smell Little Women Uncut Gems And Us

And the winner is The winner is the Irishman Which is the gangster movie Someone gasped To end all gangster movie I'm sorry but I thought You know The way things were going

It looked like us Friend, how are you? Listen I got that kid I was talking to you about here I'm gonna put him on the phone let you talk to them, okay? Hello? Is that Frank? Yes.

Hi, Frank. This is Jimmy Hoffer. Yeah, yeah. Glad to meet you. Well, glad to meet you, too, even if it's over the phone. I heard you paint houses. Yes, yes, sir, I do. I do. And I, uh, I also do my own carpentry. Oh, I'm glad to hear that. I understand you're a brother of mine.

Yes, sir. Local 107. since 1947. Yeah, you know, our friend speaks very highly of you. Well, thank you. He's not an easy man to please. Well, I do my best. The Irishman is not to be denied.

It's the kind of big historical movie that very few directors dare make and even fewer can make well. In case anyone ever suspected that Martin Scorsese romanticized the mafia, that Shibolith is completely debunked in the Irishman. The subject of which is, organized crime has been rotting out American society for the last 70 years, at least. Politics, business, family life, community life. There is no

aspect of American life that is not completely corrupted by organized crime. But let me ask you, as a fan of the Irishman and as a huge fan of Scorsese, is there a little bit of having your cake and eating it to you? On the one hand, we were saying, well, you know, the mob, in fact, this is an anti-romantic film. It's the opposite of the Godfather. On the other hand, it's an incredibly romantic project. His pictures about the mob. Well, Scorsese's very story is temptation. This is, in some weird way, a deeply metaphysical film, the subject of which is the loss of a person's soul. But it's not just loss of a person's soul. It's the loss of collective soul. Richard, among your nominees are some big and big names.

movies, the Irishman, little women, even us. But as is customary, you have a number of films on your best picture list that probably not a hell of a lot of people have seen this year. Of all of those, what's the one that you dearly hope everybody out there gets to see at some point or another? One. You get one. And I have one to add if it's not yours, Richard. It's the one with a title that seems most obscure, namely an elephant sitting still. It's a four-hour-long Chinese movie, made by a young director named Hu Bo. There's an unfortunate story involving him. He killed himself before the film was released.

So it's his first feature and his last feature. It starts out as a very simple story of a teenage boy who is accused of stealing a cell phone, and from there it expands to a spectacle, a quiet, intimate spectacle of utter degradation in daily life. It is not a fun movie, but it's a deeply moving film. Alex? My choice would be Atlantics by Maddie Diop, a French Senegalese director. And actually, it makes a really nice pairing with one of my other favorite movies of the year, The Souveneer by Joanna Hogg. They're both movies about young women who are in love and deeply affected by loss. They both have unique viewpoint. The Maddie Dieop movie, which you can also see on Netflix, like The Irishman, is visually stunning. And what it does with the idea of migration and these dangerous travels across the American. see that many of us read about in the news is spectacular. Richard, was this a good year for movies, all and all? This was a fantastic year for movies, all and all.

This is a year of unbelievably audacious filmmaking. And the one theme that brings the best films of the year together is the underground, whether the criminal underworld in the Irishman, whether the zombies in the dead don't die, whether the doubles in us, or even parasite. the main theme of the year is there's a second world doubling this world and menacing it. Alex Schwartz and Richard Brody. Thanks so much. David, thank you. Alex, thank you.

See you next year for the Brodies 2021. Would miss it. Richard Brody. You can find Allis Picks for Best Films and Actors of 2019 at New Yorker.com. Alex Schwartz is a staff writer. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Hope you'll join us again. time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was

composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Riannon and Farrellin, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Danny Bonner, Alison McAdam, Monfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.