Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar10/18/24: Ezra Klein Reveals Biden Drop Out Backlash
Ryan and Emily sit down with NYTimes' Ezra Klein.
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I don't think the right has figured out if a lot of the problems it is most concerned about are even amenable to policy solutions in the first place. The reason jd. Vance was so good in that debate is he didn't sound like Jadavance at all. You go watch him in all these podcast interviews and speeches and not con conferences and whatever that he was doing on his rise up, and he sounds like one guy, and then when he needs to try to win over the general public, he sounds totally different. This is where you see a real, a real political problem. When the things you're actually saying and the things you then need to say in public develop that level of divergence from each other, then you have an unresolved problem. Within not just your political coalition, but your political thinking, because you're not going to be able to do it if you can't even really talk about it.
You and I were both rattling the cages for some type of an open process to nominate a replacement for Biden, if he could be persuaded to drop out. Were we right? On today's long form episode of Counterpoints, part of a series that we're doing with independent journalists and also mainstream journalists. Today we're joined by an independent slash mainstream one, Ezra Kleine from The New York Times. Ezra, some people called you the breakout star of the twenty twenty four election, But when I saw it, I was like, wasn't as there already? Kind of I think everybody kind of already knew whoever it was. I don't think he needed the.
Twenty I just got here. I'm having a great rookie year. It's been a thrill, amazing first year.
But thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
I'm glad to be here.
Emily is joining us from a reporting trip she's doing over in Rome. May not be able to stick around for the entire episode. Hopeful she can obviously for people.
Who don't know brutal I stayed for my whole episode with Emily, but.
Emily as soon as there's a hard conversation.
So Emily, why don't you why don't you kick it off since you said you might have to go, but hopefully you can stick around for the for the whole thing. Yeah.
Well, first of all, this all kind of came about because as I was super kind and hosted me on his extremely popular podcast, and we've talked a little bit about the trend of postliberalism on the right part of what I'm actually sort of here to think about in realm, but Ezra, one of the things Ryan and I thought might be interesting. A good place to start would be some of our younger viewers and maybe even your younger listeners might not know your origin story in journalism and how tethered it is to the story of technology and journalism in and of itself, and we kind of wanted to ask you about what feels like a horseshoem of almost a horse shoe moment from the blogging of the Oughts to substack of today, and how independent thinkers, even people who have found very mainstream platforms are adapting to that environment with new technology and new delivery systems, and how all of that is just shaking up basically the industry for everyone. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on whether the substack era, the substack moment that we're in now the kind of journalism. Maybe are we returning to what happened when the Internet first started to change journalism in some sense?
Oh man, I'm so much more interested in who you're meeting in Rome than I am with my I want to know about the Rome Post liberals. But okay, substack and blogging. I came, I came into journalism. I didn't intend to be a journalist, had no intention of getting into getting into media, no even thought of getting into media. I was just a blogger back when Bogin was young and was not seen as a way you would do anything right. People now like blog is a normal word, but it's a strange word, and people looked at you strangely when you said it. So I was like two thousand and three when I began my first blog back in my dorm room at UC Santa Cruz. There's a line, it's not my line, that the media only does two things. It bundles and it unbundles, and you're just always either in a cycle of bundling or a cycle of unbundling. The blogging era was a cycle of unbundling. Previously, in order really to have an audience, in order to reach many people, you had to be at a publication. You had to be at some kind of bundle, a magazine, a newspaper, television network, cable news network. And then the rise of the Internet in many different ways, blogging being only one of them, made it possible to do that independently. You could have you know, ezra cliin dot blog spot or dot typead. But soon after that you also had YouTube. You had a rise of all kinds of you know, Twitter was part of this Facebook, right, you have Instagram, pundits, all that is possible. You then went into a period of rebundling, and so a lot of the bloggers got snapped up by different kinds of first very small publications. I went to the American Prospect, and then overtime bigger publications in my own career, the Washington Post. Then there was another period where people who were making a name inside these bigger publications, people like me and Nate Silver and many others. Matt Iglesias would then, you know, kind of Ben Smith leave and build our own outlets. Right, This was a sort of a mixt of unbundling and rebundling. It wasn't that easy to do it on your own. At that point, blogging had sort of died. The blogsphere had been eaten away by Twitter, by Facebook, and again by the big players. But you had the rise of things like Vox, BuzzFeed News under Ben Smith. You know, five point thirty eight. You can name somebody's on the right, like the free bacon, free Beacon, Weather and free bacon.
There's no such thing as free bacon.
That was an old there was an old joke that somehow came to mind there. First you also had on the right, the Federalist right under Ben Dominic and folks like that, where I think you worked, Emily. And then we sort of went back into the first cycle as a lot of the money funding digital media dried up as interest rates went up. A lot of these organizations are still around. Box is still there, Federals are still there. But but it it that that sort of idea that they would become the next generation of major incumbents I think didn't quite pan out the way a lot of us hoped, and substack ros and that created I think another moment of unbundling. So you had a lot of these same people, including iglaciers, including Silver, including Ben Dominic, go to substack where they could do something you couldn't do in the blogosphere, which was monetize your audience. So the blogs here is very good at creating traffic, very good at creating interlinks between communities. You know, there's an amazing link economy. It was a very generous ecosystem of media. People would talk to each other, It was very easy to follow arguments across different places. It really was I think an ecosystem. Substack is not an ecosystem in that way, but it does allow you to make a living the thing that I think you see happening now, though I don't think substack is really panning out except for a small number of people independently. It is very hard for me to come up with many substacks begun in the last year that seemed to me to have developed, at least in the news and politics space, a particularly significant audience. You are seeing substack emerge now as a platform on which to create new bundles, with probably the Free Press under Berry Weiss and the Dispatch under Sam Stein being the best examples of that. But you know, you also see it with work. You know, there's like obviously a new Ryan Grimm site, and YouTube is of course a big player here too. So now I think you're seeing a turn to some of these you know, mid level this sort of like the media middle that got somewhat decimated by the rise of interest rates in the collapse of media venture capital trying to find a way again. As it turns out that the independent path is pretty tough on sub stacks, specifically because once people subscribe to a bunch of them, they stop wanting to subscribe to more. The subscriptions are expensive. I think it's a distribution channel that max is out at a pretty low level, unlike the original blogosphere, where it was sort of costless to keep like surfing over to new sites. So that's where I think we are at the moment. And you know, in one of the endless turns of this endless media recursion.
Yeah, and there was a period if.
You don't mind, well, I was just say I have a quick follow up is there and maybe Ryan, this goes well with what you were going to ask, so maybe you just tag it on to the end of this. I wonder if they're a cynical person might say this is just like Dylan going electric. This is you know, the it's not that the mainstream media has become more tolerant sort of independent voices. It's that the independent voices have found their way into the mainstream because you know, there might be like a Chomsky criticism, like they've become part of the machine. And I don't think that's quite right. And Ryan, do you I mean, do you have a okay, Yeah, what do you make of that? Azrael? Like, just in terms of the content of what's expressed when you go from one platform to another, because my perspective actually is that it probably has become the mainstream has seen in the market there's an interest in these different opinions and ideas from outside, you know, their usual gates, and brought those voices in because they know they can market them, they know there's an appetite for them. But I'm curious what you make of that.
This just doesn't strike me as as a new phenomena. The major institutions are always looking around to try to see who is gaining audience, what is resonating with their audiences, and in what way so it can become part of their product. That's capitalism at its finest. It happens in music, it happens in movies, it happens in television, it happens in media, right. I mean my own story in journalism is part of that. I think there was a moment of substack explosion when there were particular ideological fights that were blowing up media organizations, right. And I think this is a period where you see things like Andrew Sullivan go into substack from New York Magazine. That moment is not that true, right, It's not how these organizations currently feel from the inside. It doesn't feel like the ideological strictures lay down, at least in exactly that way. And so at this juncture, I don't particularly find substack offering me a hugely different ideological set of perspectives, and I can get elsewhere, and often I can get them else with better editing. As an example, right in the thing that you were on my show to talk about, Emily. I follow the post liberals, but I follow them mostly through journals and I follow them in their writing places like The New Statesman, and I do follow the substacks, but I find a lot of the substacks to be tiresome to follow and not the best expression of those ideas over time. And so you know. But but First Things can be a very useful magazine, I think, to read in a regular way, the clear amount you know, review of books is an interesting journal to read right now. So I don't find this to be a particularly new phenomena. There's always a bit of a lag between what is finding new audience in the more independent sphere and what is finding its way into mainstream institutions. But I typically view that as a as much more of a lag as places you know, come to to understand, you know, what you could really call, in a sentic way, the market signals, rather than typically a chomp sky and manufactured consent approach or or a model or a you know, some kind of model of the constantly acused censorship.
And through through through all those different gigs that you mentioned that you've gone through. At each step you somebody watching from the background, or maybe even let's say you as like a college student would say, oh wow, I've made it. This is the place where I need to be, and now I can just do my work, Like even at the very beginning of getting you know, the Washington Post, when when we were growing up in the eighties nineties, like being a Washington Post columnist was like the pinnacle of opinion writing, journalistic success that was equivalent to the New York Times. People might find that shocking now, like nobody ever really talks about the Washington Post opinion section the way they do New York Times anymore. But yet after several years of that, you moved on then started Vox, very you know, extremely successful, you know, independent online news organization, which maybe you could say, well now now we made it. Now, now this is what I'm going to do, and then you moved on again. So are you restless? Did you just? Like, what was the thing that was moving you from place to place?
I don't think I'm restless, at least I don't feel it. But I feel it is tired. What I feel is profoundly tired all the time. When I went from the Post to Vox, I believed, and in some ways this was born out. In some ways it wouldn't. It wasn't that we could use the growing tools of digital media to do new things in the news. What you know, I always say I fundamentally left the Washington Post for a different content management system, and we wanted to build this explanatory layer underneath the work. This constantly updated. I mean, when you really think of what you can do online that you can't do in print, in text, and most of the early phase of online journalism was simply moving what you did in print into a computer, the opportunities are remarkable, right. It's still to me the untapped opportunity of you can update a webpage and as such, a single story can change and grow over time. Sometimes people look at that as some way of pulling one over on the audience, but that's because we've given the audience expectations from a different era, right.
You know.
One of our big views at Box was what if we could have this story that is a fundamental part of a story, right, not the new piece of news, but the context for all those new pieces of news. What if we had that growing and changing we call those card stacks. What really made that hard? And I mean there were certain workflow issues that we're just really really difficult about keeping up that many of them when you were a small organization. I think you needed to be something the size of The New York Times to really make that work. But the other was that there was, at least for a period, a real split into the platforms, and there was this phase driven by traffic on Facebook and traffic elsewhere where we weren't just publishing. And this is true for Box, but also true for The New York Times, for the Washington Post, for everybody. You weren't just publishing to your site. You were publishing to Facebook incident articles, you were publishing to Google Amp, you were publishing into Apple News, you're publishing onto Snapchat in a very different way. And in publishing it to all these different places, you no longer control over the underlying system. So a lot of that burst of enthusiasm for what you could build and how you can make it different by taking advantage of your ability to code the underlying content management and code and recode the website and change what was possible that just didn't pan out. A lot of other things did pan out, And I'm super proud of a lot of things that we did when I was at Vox, and a lot of things that the Box is doing now. I mean it was built to be a organization focused on contextual journalism or explanatory journalism, and I think that ended up not just both being good for it, but good for the broader media, where a lot of things that we pioneered have been absorbed at a pretty deep level and are now commonplace. But the reason I personally left was in and it was sort of the opposite of restlessness but exhaustion. Managing a startup for seven or eight years is really hard, and I was editor in chief for about half of that and then editor at large. But when you're one of the founders of something, you're sort of always a key manager of it when you're there, and I wanted to be able to focus back on my own work just as a person and not really be a manager of an organization that at that point was one hundred and fifty people, And in order to both do that for myself and also to create space for the people who would be managing vox to really have full freedom right not have people constantly coming to me and saying, hey, I'm not sure this is really you know, how we started out, or should we really be doing this, or we'd love to have you in this meeting or what do you think about this? At some point it's really hard to manage around a founder, you know, when the founder is sitting there and still doing a bunch of the an immediate organization, the journalism, so both. So I could no longer be a manager and the managers could truly be the managers. It was time for me to move on.
Interesting piece of Internet history. In the earlier part of what you said that I think people who are newer to this, you know, need to understand part of it. You talked about the early link economy, with the with the Bloggi sphere, and the difference with substact being that you can actually make make a living. There was a period of time maybe you weren't making a lot of money, but where you could act. There were actually bloggers who were making money from ads, uh and kind of overnight and you might even remember this the Google ad Sense apocalypse or whatever the bloggers at the time called it. Google basically just said, no, what, we're actually not doing that anymore. We've decided we're going to We're going to keep the money now. And because everything was at that point monopolized by Google, they could they could simply just do that, and then we witnessed, you know it kind of a parasitic takeover of of digital media organization revenue years later, in the exact way that you've talked about, where the platforms successfully persuaded individually all of these different news organizations, some of them to quote unquote pivot to video, which was its own criminal debacle, I believe.
Yeah, who wants to watch video?
Yeah, exactly, Well, so the pivot to video, if people don't remember this was this was driven by Facebook, which spent enormous amounts of money giving it directly to news organizations, basically funding their journalism to pivot to creating these online these online videos that they would put on Facebook, and then Facebook, we now know because a lot of the records are now public, was completely lying about the views that they were getting. I remember one of the first ones I did over at Hugh Post. They said it got like one hundred and fifty thousand live viewers.
Is this top Post Live?
No, this is this is pre huff Post It Actually, I think it helped kill huff Post Live and that what it did is that killed a lot of organic ideas that journalists had, like yourself over at fox hof Post Live, for instance, trying to build an actual, like native live video audience and pushed it into this Facebook video operation. And then Facebook got tired of that a couple of years later. But by that point they had gobbled up all of the revenue and the audience and there was nothing left for digital news organizations. They raised, they raised interest rates, the money drives up, and they all and they all disappear, like it's that's more or less like the collapse, the rise and the collapse, and then the kind of platforms walk away with with uh with with most of the audience. H what remains though? The New York Times, like somehow out of that fire, you know, emerges this phoenix that looked like it might not make it at some point. And you know, look at the Los Angeles Times, look at the Chicago Trimmune. Yet the New York Times has been become almost a platform onto itself. Do you think that's becoming increasingly interesting way to think about the Times rather than as a news organization that's interesting.
Is it a platform? I don't think it's a platform, because I think a platform implies within it the ability for others to build on it, I will say I largely agree with your history there of the twenty tens. The only thing I would say to it is that I don't even think Facebook, at least in my experience, Facebook put some money into help into encouraging people to bring things to video, but for most media organizations, they didn't give them that much money. They weren't that interested in us. What they were doing is both inflating views and just in Facebook and really everywhere, the promise of that era was that you were building these huge audiences on these platforms and that eventually they build the revenue mechanisms so you can monetize that. Right, if you think about what BuzzFeed was, what Vice was, what everything was, well huff Post, right, everything was sort of designed now on this theory that having used you know, have Facebook and Twitter and whatever to reach more readers, viewers, whatever it might have been, than we ever had before, we would turn that into money. And at a certain point in each one of these cases, a platform said came in and said, I know what we've been telling you, but actually we're going to turn that into money. And that was the end of it. Right that ultimately those business models couldn't work. And that speaks to what you just said about The New York Times, because the Times fairly early in this process, building off of its own centrality in the media world, its own size, and the quality of the offering, they made a decision that at the time they made it was highly controversial in journalism, which was they were going to try to get people to pay for The New York Times, and they were going to put articles behind a paywall, and they were going to go virtually all in on the idea that you could build a subscription busines business to media digitally, even though all your competitors were free, right, even though somebody could easily just substitute in the Washington Post, the La Times, the Atlantic Right, choose your you know, choose your media organization. The Times wasn't the only one. The Journal and the Financial Times had been doing subscriptions, but there was a view that these publications that were a little bit more like trade publications for the financial press could make subscriptions work, whereas something that was as easily substitutable as news could not. And the absolute core of the New York Times success was making the paywall work and making subscriptions work, and then that informs a lot of subsequent strategy, which is obviously, you know, not mostly stuff that happened before I came here, and I have no role in any of it even now. But when you think of things like games and cooking, the Times has this model which is in a way almost more like the Netflix model.
Right.
If they can make the package worth paying for, then the whole thing work. And so anything that makes a package more incrementally valuable is very, very valuable to The Times and to me it's one of the And now they're putting podcast like mine behind a paywall. I mean, the new episodes are free, but the older ones are going into this paywalled archive because of you. Is the only thing that is really reliable in funding journalism is persuading the audience to pay for it at some level. Anything else, be it advertising where the advertisers have a lot of views understandably so on what they want to advertise next to it's like, you don't want the brand association between Lexis to be the devastation of Gaza, right. So it's very hard to get really strong advertising for a lot of hard and important news stories, and the platforms are completely unreliable partners. So if you don't want to be completely subject to the whims of one of those two businesses or partnerships, you have to be able to make convincing people to pay for the thing you're making for them work.
So what's really interesting I think about all of that, and I'm curious about your take on this. I think what made your writing so compelling in the blog days and still now was a sense that the neoliberal consensus, if we can call it that, sort of taken on more of a profound or popular meaning now, but at the time in the Bush era, there was a sense that it wasn't really working. People in the Bloggis Fair were writing about privacy and data and aftermath of nine to eleven and adventurism abroad and all of that, And I kind of wonder you've written about family policy, or you've talked about family policy, right, and I wanted to ask you about that too. There's a sense on the right that came after the Bush era, in fact, really after the Obama era, that suddenly this neoliberal consensus that they had defended so doggedly, whether it was the FBI or the Patriot Act, really wasn't working, or anti welfare policies really wasn't working. And there's some thinking in that space now about how conservatives can use policy is to shape a world that they see as more conservative on family level, on community level. So I guess I wonder if you think you were sort of the right is kind of a Johnny come lately to what in some sense, not exactly obviously in your policy prescriptions are wildly different in some cases, but we're you sensing Do you think you were ahead as someone who is center left, Were you ahead of sensing something that the right is now kind of catching up to.
I'd have to think about that. It's funny because I my initial instinct is to say no. As much as I'd like to sell you on on my own prescience, well, I'm not sure I would totally buy that that version of what made my writing useful over these over these years. But let me not make this about me. I do think that the right is dealing with its own set of failures, and one of the things that I think is interesting about where it has ended up is it has a lot of trouble then distinguishing what it actually wants to do about them. From banal prescriptions on the left. And I think if you want to see this very clearly among the ideological post liberals, you go listen to the podcast episode I did with Patrick Deneen, you know, eighteen months ago, a year ago, And in that episode, Daneen, who is very close to Jade Vance and has become one of these people who you know, talks about, you know, the liberals who have been in charge, as if to say they've betrayed the country and the people would be too too gentle for how he frames it in my view. But then you talk to him and it was very hard to figure out where he really differed from Joe Biden, And if you then read his subsequent book, it was still very hard to figure it out. It's like you're going to expand the House of Representatives to a thousand people, You're going to do national service, like this is your big set of ideas. These are again like they've been everywhere. But I don't think it's because the center left or the left since to these problems earlier. Necessarily, I don't think the right has figured out if a lot of the problems it is most concerned about are even amenable to policy solutions in the first place, Right, if you're worried about family breakdown, which people have been worried about in different contexts for a very long time, right, I think you can really understand JD. Vance's Hillbilly elegy as an extension of what had been written about black communities for a very long time and is bringing a lot of that same research. Somebody described it to me the other day as like the Mooin to Hand report for white people. And this family breakdown is a very very hard problem to solve. People have tried lots of different things on the right and the left, and it's not really worked. Fertility rates, which are a big question on the right right now, there are a lot of countries have been going through much more profound fertility collapse and anything we're seeing in the United States. They have a much more intense set of incentives to do something about it, and nothing they have tried. If you're looking at places like South Korea and Japan and Italy and others, none of it has worked. And by the way, that's true on the you know, more liberal solutions too. A lot of times liberals will say, well, if you want to do something about fertility rates, you need universal childcare and this and that, but they're not higher in the Nordic countries where you do see those kinds of wrap around social policies. So I think there are a bunch of things people on the right are worried about. Some of them you could solve in more liberal ways, right, I mean, you could get wages up using a number of the just normal policies like the ear in income tax credit. You know, in the child tax credit. You can get effectively the amount of money people have to spend up by using tax transfers. We know how to do that. But in terms of some of the broader community dimensions, family dimensions that I think truly sit at the core of things people on the right are worried about, I don't think they have. They've only, I think, begun to recognize the scale of the problem. They definitely have not thought up, or worked through or trialed out solutions that fit the problem. And to a bunch of things we talked about. When you're on my show, then you get into the cultural dimensions of the rot the right or the postable right, or whatever you want to call it. The new right is seeing and on the other hand, they've tied themselves to Donald Trump and barstool sports and a bunch of aggressive accelerators of that cultural rot and so the contradictions become even more profound within that movement. So I think the ideological difficulty of what of what the sort of new right is trying to grapple with is at this point like frankly underappreciated.
Yeah, maybe that's a good question for Emily then is I thought, tell me if you agree as with that. Jade Vance's performance in the vice presidential debate, in a lot of moments, was actually the most eloquent articulation of Biden's economic policy and Biden's economic agenda that anybody had put forward, except it would then be done with a line also that Biden is destroying the country. It's like, okay, fine, but everything you just said is something that they have embraced and done and would like to and would like to do, and to the point that it might not be enough to do the cultural things that he's arguing for Emily, is it like that goes back to the question of how real is it? And is some of this just cover for actually wanting to smuggle in the cultural stuff under the guise of the kind of economic populism, but understanding that you need both to make them more palatable, like what like, how do you move forward as the new right?
There I think, I think there's a cynical interpretation where there are some people who are genuinely engaged in the project of smuggling. I think there are other people I would include myself, I would include JD and this who see them as inextricably intertwined the sort of project of economic populism and a more conservative culture. But what's really interesting about that comparison. I'm very curious as we thinking about this too, is it shows what's untenable I think about ultimately the realignment between right and left, because you could see the JD vance defense of the Biden policy I think being true if Biden was explicitly doing it to reduce single parent households, to improve marriage rates, to make people more interested in getting married and less interested in getting divorced, to you know, ultimately boost the cause of let's say like community, civic society and all that. And I guess Biden might say it was about civil society as well, but marriage and children in particular. We see the Harris campaign, you know, understandably latching onto JD's childless cat lady quote. And I think that's the fundamental difference between JD's his defense of economic populism and Biden's defense of economic populism. And I actually think that that's what makes it sort of untenable the realignment in the long term. And I think it's a huge problem for those of us on a new Right who want to sell these policies to the public. It's just the public's really not with us on some of those were those questions of cultural conservatism.
Here's I think an interesting way of thinking about this. I think it's worth thinking of Pete Boodhajedge and JD Vance as having certain echoes of each other, which I think both people, both of them would really hate. But it's one reason they hate each other so much. But if you look at and go listen to the podcast episodes that Pete Bootajedge did while Pete boota judge was rising up in politics over the past you know, five or six years, you go listen to the things he did with people like me and on you know liberal shows that where the audience is a liberal and he was not quite as well known as he is today. And he sounds the way he does when he just did my show a month ago. Right, he sounds the way he does when he goes on Fox News more or less. Right, he sounds the same. The thing that liberals, even to somebody the left, are saying internally is the same as what they are saying externally. They believe that what they are saying to each other is actually a thing they can say to the public. You look at the problem Jady Vance has had and then what he did in that debate, And the reason Jady Vance was so good in that debate is he didn't sound like Jady Vance at all. He did an amazing job not sounding like Jadvance and also not sounding like Donald Trump. So what he did was you go watch him in all these podcast interviews and speeches and nat Con conferences and whatever that he was doing on his rise up, and he sounds like one guy, and then when he needs to try to win over the general public, he sounds totally different. Now, there's always obviously a certain amount of running to the center that happens in political campaigns. You can certainly see it with Kamala Harris but there is something deeper here happening that is of particular difficulty, I think for the right, where part of what the right I think has persuaded itself of is it modern American culture is decadent and perverse. And part of maybe what you need to do about that has to do with calling it decadent and perverse. And so in their own fora we'll call it decadent and perverse and talk about the miserable, childless cat ladies and all the terrible choices are making in their own lives. And then they have to win over an actual voter. They shut the hell up about that and run from it as fast as they possibly can. And the problem Vance has had is that it's not that easy for him to run for it. But this is where you see a real, a real political problem. When the things you are actually saying and the things you then need to say in public develop that level of divergence from each other, then you have an unresolved problem within not just your political coalition but your political thinking, because you're not going to be able to do it if you can't even really talk about it.
Is that something that people are grappling with on the right. And I'm curious how much of the the different presentations, let's say, is on a right wing podcast versus and the vice presidential debate, how much of those different presentations reflect fundamentally different politics, and how much of it reflects what he would argue is the same politics and the same policies but kind of dressed up differently messaging purposes for different audiences.
Well, I think for JD it's definitely different messaging purposes for different audiences, and it's like exactly correct about him. I think for some people, I mean, I actually get this. Sometimes it's like you you it's it's in good faith because you know that there's such a massive gulf between where you are in terms of like your faith and where you are where you're whoever you're talking to, whatever audience you're talking to, is you know, if you're talking to an audience, for example, that has people who who could have you know, trans family members, which is basically any audience right now, like you you can't talk to them like you would be talking to them. The right wing podcasts would be like just be rude more than you know, being unappealing, It would just be rude and uncharitable. So I think there's there's some of that that happens when media is siloed in the technological ways that we were talking about, and some of these these social gaps are so significant. But I think, you know, for politicians like JD. Vance, watching him is fascinating because there's some of the stuff that conservatives really thought in the aftermath of twenty twenty when there was some you know what people have called quote unquote woe flash, when there were some of that, conservatives thought, this is it, this is our ticket. We have found the way to sell and Jdvans very much ran on this platform. We have found a way to sell this new right agenda of economic populism and cultural conservatism. The public is ready for it, and that quickly they became it quickly became clear that that was not true. And so some of it right now I think absolutely isn't bad faith. It is you know, just talking to different audiences with messages that are in some ways deceptive, right deceptive, And it's a I think it's a really interesting point.
And as we're actually I'm curious for your take on the on the from the inside of the New York Times and the on the woe the woe clash, as Emily called it. I hadn't actually heard that phrase before, but I but I love it with but we we we can all, we can all feel it happening. That it felt like the center left kind of overstepped when it came to identity politics and has is now very quietly stepping back, but not doing so overtly, Like there's nobody is out there necessarily kind of renouncing any of the bumper stickers or yard signs that they have, but they're just not putting up fresh ones. I'm curious if you're if you're seeing that unfold inside the inside the the ecosystems where you kind of operate.
I say nothing about the inside of the New York Times, and nothing I say here will be about the inside of the New York Times. I will say I think you can look around the media politics generally, and yeah, see a huge change. I think there are a couple dimensions to this. One is that there is a difference between what people came to believe and how they came to act, or at least how they came to be pushed on those beliefs. And the core thing here in My view was actually technological. You had this two new things hit the media in a fairly compressed period of time, and also many other corporate environments or institutional environments too. Obviously, Ryan, you were at a huge and very very influential piece on progressive movement politics about this. But I would call it Slack and Twitter. And what Slack did was created internal capacity for workers to talk and to organize, right, not organized necessarily the labor union term of the sense, but organized in a more informal term, and managers can't right. The way the Slack works and institutions was, at least in that period was there was a lot of you know, emojis coming in under things people said. But but the managers are much more you know, checking what they say by HR and the lawyers and so on. So first you had this sort of communication gulf changing.
Right.
It used to be that it is fairly easy for the boss to kind of call everybody into the room and make some speech, and it's actually harder for the sense of the employees to be to be passed back up. Slack made that very easy, and then Twitter made it easy for that to spill out, particularly in high visibility industries into public and so the thing that a lot of these institutions had no immunity to was what did you do when these sort of internal slack fights became external public relations problems or perceived public relations problems on Twitter, and a lot of them just were folding kind of left and right. They you know, were firing people, They were acting in ways that were afraid. They were putting out statements they didn't necessarily believe. Now that doesn't mean they didn't believe the under a set of the underlying things about there being huge levels of systemic racism in society. You know that there were all kinds of problems and inequities that should be addressed. And I do think part of the step back has been a step back from some of the ways that institutions without any immune system to this sort of new era kind of would overreact to I think, in my view, fairly modest levels of public criticism. But that does not mean I think there's been a step back from believing a lot of the things that were not believed about society in say, twenty and thirteen, in twenty fourteen, so, for instance, I think the view that there is systemic racism in policing is widely held, but the view that you defund the police is not now widely held. But I think ten years ago, neither view was all that widely held, or at least not talked about that often in public. And I think you could find a lot of different things like this where the idiological priors have been absorbed into or the ideological arguments up to a point, have been absorbed into the system. They are now kind of common sense when they weren't at another time. I think organizations think about representation very differently than they did when I got into the media in two thousand and five, for instance. But the sense that your employees are going to, you know, in a progressive nonprofit or a media organization or even a corporation like Nike, your employees are going to put a bunch of like slack faces under something somebody said and then you know, go public on Twitter, and that's going to be treated as a problem for the organization to deal with, as a problem for the employee to now have to deal with their bosses. I think that has changed, so my views, administrators and managers have a very different approach to dealing with these things, and some of the sort of inability to say, well, hey, wait, is that actually a good idea has gone away. But it's not like we've gone all the way back to how people understood the situation to be in twenty ten. I think there's a very very different sense of what is required of and should be thought about in a lot of both key decisions and and in society at large.
Yeah, and Emily, I think the left had gone a little so bananas for a while that the right felt like it had a really easy target, and I feel like that target has been taken away. I'm curious from the right, like if, as you grapple with the left and go out and target this like the wocism and all that stuff, if it feels harder for the right to hit it now, Like if it feels like and almost I could imagine from the right's perspective in almost an unfair way, because it's like, wait a minute, we never talked about it on the rise up there was that everybody kept saying there is no such thing as cancel culture. Obviously there was, but that makes it harder for then people to talk about its recession at the same time because something that was never here, can't go away. It was like you're fighting these ghosts, but now they might be actual ghosts. So I'm curious from your perspective if it feels like a tougher target to hit now.
I think there's something to that because one of the one of the trends that I've observed going back to the beginning of this conversation is I think some of mainstream media responding to the market pressures that when you see people doing really well on a platform like substack. If you're the New York Times and you see Barry weis doing really well on a platform like substack, I think you realize that the the people who are complaining about coverage that undercut the consensus position on like puberty blockers, for just to take one example, is acceptable, and that there you know that there are more people who are open to having a reasonable discussion than the sample of people in the publications slack or you know, the slack at the Washington Post or the LA Times or the Associated Press that the country more broadly is is comfortable with having a conversation that everyone in your newsroom might not be. So whether some of these elite opinions be they at Disney or somewhere else, is ultimately representative of a larger trend and young people. It was probably the was overestimating the public support for some of those really radical or harder left positions. And I think also just really quick final point would be that media in general makes it hard for the right to come to a policy position, like to actually have a firm position on a lot of policies, because so much of our energy is understandably tied up in picking apart media coverage and finding bias and arguing against bias, that we all sort of end up looking around and saying, okay, but what do we actually what do we actually think about this? What should we actually do about this? And oftentimes you just never get to that point because the first step is like going through the bad coverage.
I think two things about this one. I think it would be really really healthy for the right if it didn't tell itself that if the right would spend more time creating good media organizations to do good reporting at a high level of factual accuracy instead of complaining so much about the media, it'd be so much healthier. I remember when Tucker Carlson came out and said he was building the Daily Caller right and it was going to be the conservative New York Times, and good lord, but that became right. There's like a real level of empirical and epistemic standards that the right does not hold itself to, which is not a thing the left does to it, but is an actual problem on its own side. And that, in my view, is what makes it hard for the right to come to strong policy positions, because it doesn't have strong internal internal standards for its own debates. And one way of thinking about this, to connect it to what we were just talking about, is there all kinds of things that you know we're coming were ideological waves happening on the left and the Democratic Party in twenty twenty. The Democratic Party and the sort of broader left, central left, whatever you want to call it, liberal coalition has metabolized. It's kind of said, Okay, we're taking this part, even this part behind. That's not true for the right from what it was dealing within twenty twenty. Jd Vance will not currently say that Donald trumb lost a twenty twenty election. Mike Pence was not at this year's Republican National Convention, and so one actual asymmetry to me between the parties when you think back to their condition in twenty twenty was both parties were having a very very hard year for a bunch of different reasons. I also think the pandemic year is very hard on both parties. Right, There's a lot going on in American society that had had pushed kind of everybody into a very strange place. But I think the institutions on the left are just frankly healthier and more able to engage in slightly reasoned and managed criticism and periods of renewal, and at least under Donald Trump on the right, that's not been as true. And frankly the institutions on the right that have been trying to build some kind of structure for this. I think Heritage Foundation and Project twenty twenty five really saw itself as one of these groups, right, they were going to take this kind of mess of things from twenty twenty and turn it into some thing, and it's become like a huge catastrophe over there. But I do think Trump himself creates a lot of difficulty and the media dynamics themselves, right, I mean the Fox News and Dominion like settlements really tell you something. And now Tucker Carlson is over on X you know, with Elon Musk, where you know, he's still a very influential figure on the right, but has even less institutional strictures on what he can say or what level you know, those statements are going to be held to. And so I do think institutional health is a very big part of this, and just a problem the right is facing is that it has not learned a lot from twenty twenty right. I think the left actually has.
Yeah, I'm curious for your take on that, because there was this I don't know if you know this speech that Tucker Carlson gave several years after he started the Daily Caller, as you might remember this too, where he basically said I was wrong. Like the right doesn't want this, Like the right does not want a rigorous conservative New York Times. The right ones a warrior, you know, for the right, like and that's what it And it sees right wing journalism as a weapon to be wielded on behalf of the movement rather than on the left. It's it's kind of it's like a check on the movement. It's like and the journalism is first and the and the kind of ideology is a second that does seem to be an asymmetry. Not to speak ill of your colleagues, as we're talking institutionally, not not colleagues, not none of your particular colleagues at different institutions. But I'm curious if that's been your uh if if that's been your experience on the in in the right, in the right wing media ecosystem, you know.
I think part of it, so I'll say, actually, I think part of it is that Fox News is the elephant in the room because everyone is sort of like comparing themselves or the Fox just has so much power and it's waned a little bit, but has so much power over the consumer. So it's hard to you it's it's it's hard to kind of build conservative media.
From especially when Tucker launch Daily Caller that Fox was like hegemonic.
Yes, yeah, oh my gosh. Absolutely, And so that really set the tone for a lot of people in conservative media. I mean, obviously there are a ton of conservative journalists, and you know, we would maybe disagree on some of them. I know a lot of people who are committed to pursuing truth. As you know, an open biased conservative but you know, there are definitely I do. I agree that's a problem. I think the dominion settlement point is really interesting because my sort of rebuttal that would be there was also the Covington Catholic Settlement from CNN, and I just don't know. For me, I see the forces that created the dominion settlement, meaning Fox News's coverage of the twenty twenty election that led to the dominion settlement, which in some cases really followed Trump's line. I see that as being downstream of the forces that created the Covington Catholic Settlement, which came from CNN kind of jumping the gun on what happened to Nick Sandmen on the National Mall for reasons that were pretty clearly ideological. You guys might disagree, you know, journalists get things drunk sometimes. I thought that was purely ideological error. So I think conservatives are just constantly reacting. It becomes very hard for our institutions to reflect sort of first principles and then pursue a healthy debate over policies. So I kind of agree and disagree at the same time.
I guess as were before you go, uh, I did you know you covered you cover economic policy that's, you know, your thing for decades really has been that area. So tell us, like what is going on with Kamala Harris's campaign and Lena Khan and Jonathan Cantor, Like, why why haven't they just come out and said, of course we're going to reappoint Lena Khan and Jonathan Cantor. They have they have been central to this this pro worker, anti trust policy that the Biden administration is pushed forward. What why won't they just do that?
Like, what do you hear? I don't think they would do that about any member of the administration, like one. I think there's actually a rule you're not allowed to do that usually. Uh, but they haven't said we're going to repoint Jennet Yellen, who's going to be you know, who's been central to the economic recovery.
Right, But also nobody on Wall Street is demanding that.
I just I think the actual I think the actual line you're look, I think there's a version where why have they not said, listen, Lena Khan's you know, approach is great versus we're definitely going.
To Rea think those are.
Pretty different questions, and the answer here is a little bit I'm not sure. I don't know what I think Kamala Harris believes in her harder hearts about anti trust policy. I don't think it's necessarily that you know, read Hastings or read Hoffmann. I forget which read was Antilena Kon gets to set FDC policy, but her, you know. I think one of the realities of the Kamala Harris campaign is it emerged in matter of weeks, right, and so the work that a normal campaign would have done and that the candidate themselves would have done over the course of a primary and a year to kind of work every dimension of this out and give a series of major speeches laying out there thinking on it, they both not only didn't do, but didn't have to do. And a lot of that is done because you have to do it right. In some ways, it's strategically valuable to be ambiguous. The people who would be upset if you didn't reappoint Lenicon or someone like her, If you tell them we're not going to appoint Lenikon or someone like her, they're really mad, Whereas if you don't say anything at all, they're not happy, but they're still there in the coalition trying to influence the coalition, and so the fact that Harris did not have a primary process were pushed from the left or from the right, she had to distinguish which side of somebody. These divides she's been on has given them the opportunity to maintain a high level strategic ambiguity. So they maintain to some degree, given the Donald Trump is the opponent, the loyalty of the people and the lean con wing of the Democratic Party, even if that loyalty is currently suspicious and a little bit frustrated, but also the donors that that maybe don't want that, and then if they win the election, then they're gonna have to make some choices, you know, at the moment, they don't have to make.
Speaking of that open primary, you and I were both rattling the cages for some type of an open process to nominate a replacement for Biden, if he could be persuaded to drop out. Were we right at the time? You think? I mean, I.
Think early we were right. I mean I think Early still right the right thing? Are we still No? I don't think they should do an open primary.
Or not now, But like in hindsight, were we right?
I don't know. I think two things about this hard One. We don't know if Kamala Harris is going to win the election, and if it turns out that the polling is systematically, you know, getting Trump wrong by three points in the Midwest, I think there's gonna be a lot of people who say, yeah, you know, either she should have picked Jos Shapiro or or in fact running a sort of a liberal San Franciscan politician, you know, in the industrial Midwest is not what the party should have been doing this year, which is why there was actually so much resistance to having Joe Biden stepped down and Kamala Harris step up much earlier in the process. I mean, as you know, because you were doing some of this work too. The big thing in the party was not that Joe Biden at eighty one or eighty two is an effective candidate, but there was very very little faith that Harris could step into his place effectively given where Democrats needed to win. Now, Harris was clearly underrated. I made that point back in February. I made that point consistently after February. But we don't exactly know how underrated, and so if she wins, I think people are going to say that was all ridiculous. Harris is great particly she wins convincingly, and if she doesn't, people are going to say that. You know, Joe Biden should have stepped down earlier in the party, should have been able to go through a competitive process to figure out, you know, which kind of candidate could best compete in the places Democrats need to win. But by the time Joe Biden actually stepped down, given how late in the game it was, I mean you were talking weeks before the Democratic Convention at that point, and given how exhausted the party was by what it took to get him to step aside and his endorsement, like, there was no uh, there was no possibility or opening for that right. If he had stepped down in March or decided not to run for reelection at all, that would have been a different question.
How much how much heat did you get for that that February piece calling for Biden to step aside by the Power Center, It's like I'm at a place now in my career. I'm a a at a place my career. Those those folks used they used to give me hell all the time, Like the like Center Left World they've kind of given up on me. Like they're like, we're not we're not we're not influencing this guy, but we're not even gonna waste waste our breath anymore. But you know that also means that when I say, like, you know, Joe bidens to old hat step aside, they're like, well, that's what he says, Like we dont understand. We guess we already know he feels that way, but when you say it, it packs more punch. What kind of counter punch did you get at the time.
I mean, a lot of people were not happy with me. Look, I always want to I'm not like I sit at ESK and I write things and I say them into a microphone. It's not a job of tremendous courage. There are people are pissed at me. And there were a lot of people privately, you know, we're thinking about these questions and wanted to talk about it. But but what they really felt was that I had not sufficiently considered how bad the alternatives were. That was the real private reaction I got. Probably are people were like fuck that guy, but they said it on Twitter. Right, you can go look at people you know calling me all sorts of things on Twitter. But because I don't read, I don't really read social media reaction in that way. I actually missed a lot of It is funny that when things sort of turned on this argument, people came to me like, oh my god, I'm so sorry for how everybody treated you, and I was like, they treated me that badly. I hadn't actually totally totally clocked how bad people must have been. Although you know, then people sent me when.
Did you stop? Why didn't you stop tuning into Twitter?
I'll read it. I don't read stuff about me on it. I don't think the human mind is well adapted for that level of feedback. And I find that I am a less independent thinker if I am tightly tuned in to the reaction people have to the things that I think, or say or do. But in private, right and I had a lot of conversations, including with Biden administration people, and you know, they were they thought I was wrong. But they thought I was wrong because one, I was underestimating Joe Biden. They thought I was wrong. Two because I was overestimating Kamala Harris, and they thought I was wrong. Three because there's no way that a party could manage an open convention that if Kamala Harris was weak, would pass around Kamala Harris and if you believed all three of those things. And I was definitely wrong, But but I didn't. You know, people knew Joe Biden's age was a problem. So in the more reflective spaces in which I tended to like actually have conversations, you know, in a way I that I cared about, you know, it was it was a little bit more interesting. I did find that people thought I was like a total fucking idiot, said so in public and people who didn't said so in private. But you know, I got to have the benefit of both sides of that.
Cool Emily, anything else, I know, as there's got to run pretty soon.
No, I just want to say thank you. This was fantastic and we really appreciate you coming on the show.
I'm touched you stay through the whole thing, Emily, and I'm excited to hear to hear what you find from from from the Rome Post a little.
Bit wall give us tell us real quick, what are you hearing, Emily, anything new from your from your Roman friends.
I think a lot of this is going to change based on what happens in November.
So okay, that's a lot of things right now. All right, well, Ezra Kleine, host of the Ezra Klines Show, New York Times columnist, thank you so much for joining us.
A Gill
