Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
Speaker 2: We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade
Speaker 2: the studio ad staff give you, guys, the best independent
Speaker 2: coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about,
Speaker 2: it just means the absolute world to have your support.
Speaker 3: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 1: I don't think the right has figured out if a
Speaker 1: lot of the problems it is most concerned about are
Speaker 1: even amenable to policy solutions in the first place. The
Speaker 1: reason jd. Vance was so good in that debate is
Speaker 1: he didn't sound like Jadavance at all. You go watch
Speaker 1: him in all these podcast interviews and speeches and not
Speaker 1: con conferences and whatever that he was doing on his
Speaker 1: rise up, and he sounds like one guy, and then
Speaker 1: when he needs to try to win over the general public,
Speaker 1: he sounds totally different. This is where you see a real,
Speaker 1: a real political problem. When the things you're actually saying
Speaker 1: and the things you then need to say in public
Speaker 1: develop that level of divergence from each other, then you
Speaker 1: have an unresolved problem. Within not just your political coalition,
Speaker 1: but your political thinking, because you're not going to be
Speaker 1: able to do it if you can't even really talk
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 3: You and I were both rattling the cages for some
Speaker 3: type of an open process to nominate a replacement for Biden,
Speaker 3: if he could be persuaded to drop out. Were we right?
Speaker 3: On today's long form episode of Counterpoints, part of a
Speaker 3: series that we're doing with independent journalists and also mainstream journalists.
Speaker 3: Today we're joined by an independent slash mainstream one, Ezra
Speaker 3: Kleine from The New York Times. Ezra, some people called
Speaker 3: you the breakout star of the twenty twenty four election,
Speaker 3: But when I saw it, I was like, wasn't as
Speaker 3: there already? Kind of I think everybody kind of already
Speaker 3: knew whoever it was. I don't think he needed the.
Speaker 1: Twenty I just got here. I'm having a great rookie year.
Speaker 1: It's been a thrill, amazing first year.
Speaker 3: But thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 3: Emily is joining us from a reporting trip she's doing
Speaker 3: over in Rome. May not be able to stick around
Speaker 3: for the entire episode. Hopeful she can obviously for people.
Speaker 1: Who don't know brutal I stayed for my whole episode
Speaker 1: with Emily, but.
Speaker 4: Emily as soon as there's a hard conversation.
Speaker 3: So Emily, why don't you why don't you kick it
Speaker 3: off since you said you might have to go, but
Speaker 3: hopefully you can stick around for the for the whole thing. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, this all kind of came about
Speaker 4: because as I was super kind and hosted me on
Speaker 4: his extremely popular podcast, and we've talked a little bit
Speaker 4: about the trend of postliberalism on the right part of
Speaker 4: what I'm actually sort of here to think about in realm,
Speaker 4: but Ezra, one of the things Ryan and I thought
Speaker 4: might be interesting. A good place to start would be
Speaker 4: some of our younger viewers and maybe even your younger
Speaker 4: listeners might not know your origin story in journalism and
Speaker 4: how tethered it is to the story of technology and
Speaker 4: journalism in and of itself, and we kind of wanted
Speaker 4: to ask you about what feels like a horseshoem of
Speaker 4: almost a horse shoe moment from the blogging of the
Speaker 4: Oughts to substack of today, and how independent thinkers, even
Speaker 4: people who have found very mainstream platforms are adapting to
Speaker 4: that environment with new technology and new delivery systems, and
Speaker 4: how all of that is just shaking up basically the
Speaker 4: industry for everyone. So I don't know if you have
Speaker 4: any thoughts on whether the substack era, the substack moment
Speaker 4: that we're in now the kind of journalism. Maybe are
Speaker 4: we returning to what happened when the Internet first started
Speaker 4: to change journalism in some sense?
Speaker 1: Oh man, I'm so much more interested in who you're
Speaker 1: meeting in Rome than I am with my I want
Speaker 1: to know about the Rome Post liberals. But okay, substack
Speaker 1: and blogging. I came, I came into journalism. I didn't
Speaker 1: intend to be a journalist, had no intention of getting
Speaker 1: into getting into media, no even thought of getting into media.
Speaker 1: I was just a blogger back when Bogin was young
Speaker 1: and was not seen as a way you would do
Speaker 1: anything right. People now like blog is a normal word,
Speaker 1: but it's a strange word, and people looked at you
Speaker 1: strangely when you said it. So I was like two
Speaker 1: thousand and three when I began my first blog back
Speaker 1: in my dorm room at UC Santa Cruz. There's a line,
Speaker 1: it's not my line, that the media only does two things.
Speaker 1: It bundles and it unbundles, and you're just always either
Speaker 1: in a cycle of bundling or a cycle of unbundling.
Speaker 1: The blogging era was a cycle of unbundling. Previously, in
Speaker 1: order really to have an audience, in order to reach
Speaker 1: many people, you had to be at a publication. You
Speaker 1: had to be at some kind of bundle, a magazine,
Speaker 1: a newspaper, television network, cable news network. And then the
Speaker 1: rise of the Internet in many different ways, blogging being
Speaker 1: only one of them, made it possible to do that independently.
Speaker 1: You could have you know, ezra cliin dot blog spot
Speaker 1: or dot typead. But soon after that you also had YouTube.
Speaker 1: You had a rise of all kinds of you know,
Speaker 1: Twitter was part of this Facebook, right, you have Instagram, pundits,
Speaker 1: all that is possible. You then went into a period
Speaker 1: of rebundling, and so a lot of the bloggers got
Speaker 1: snapped up by different kinds of first very small publications.
Speaker 1: I went to the American Prospect, and then overtime bigger
Speaker 1: publications in my own career, the Washington Post. Then there
Speaker 1: was another period where people who were making a name
Speaker 1: inside these bigger publications, people like me and Nate Silver
Speaker 1: and many others. Matt Iglesias would then, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of Ben Smith leave and build our own outlets. Right,
Speaker 1: This was a sort of a mixt of unbundling and rebundling.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that easy to do it on your own.
Speaker 1: At that point, blogging had sort of died. The blogsphere
Speaker 1: had been eaten away by Twitter, by Facebook, and again
Speaker 1: by the big players. But you had the rise of
Speaker 1: things like Vox, BuzzFeed News under Ben Smith. You know,
Speaker 1: five point thirty eight. You can name somebody's on the right,
Speaker 1: like the free bacon, free Beacon, Weather and free bacon.
Speaker 4: There's no such thing as free bacon.
Speaker 1: That was an old there was an old joke that
Speaker 1: somehow came to mind there. First you also had on
Speaker 1: the right, the Federalist right under Ben Dominic and folks
Speaker 1: like that, where I think you worked, Emily. And then
Speaker 1: we sort of went back into the first cycle as
Speaker 1: a lot of the money funding digital media dried up
Speaker 1: as interest rates went up. A lot of these organizations
Speaker 1: are still around. Box is still there, Federals are still there.
Speaker 1: But but it it that that sort of idea that
Speaker 1: they would become the next generation of major incumbents I
Speaker 1: think didn't quite pan out the way a lot of
Speaker 1: us hoped, and substack ros and that created I think
Speaker 1: another moment of unbundling. So you had a lot of
Speaker 1: these same people, including iglaciers, including Silver, including Ben Dominic,
Speaker 1: go to substack where they could do something you couldn't
Speaker 1: do in the blogosphere, which was monetize your audience. So
Speaker 1: the blogs here is very good at creating traffic, very
Speaker 1: good at creating interlinks between communities. You know, there's an
Speaker 1: amazing link economy. It was a very generous ecosystem of media.
Speaker 1: People would talk to each other, It was very easy
Speaker 1: to follow arguments across different places. It really was I
Speaker 1: think an ecosystem. Substack is not an ecosystem in that way,
Speaker 1: but it does allow you to make a living the
Speaker 1: thing that I think you see happening now, though I
Speaker 1: don't think substack is really panning out except for a
Speaker 1: small number of people independently. It is very hard for
Speaker 1: me to come up with many substacks begun in the
Speaker 1: last year that seemed to me to have developed, at
Speaker 1: least in the news and politics space, a particularly significant audience.
Speaker 1: You are seeing substack emerge now as a platform on
Speaker 1: which to create new bundles, with probably the Free Press
Speaker 1: under Berry Weiss and the Dispatch under Sam Stein being
Speaker 1: the best examples of that. But you know, you also
Speaker 1: see it with work. You know, there's like obviously a
Speaker 1: new Ryan Grimm site, and YouTube is of course a
Speaker 1: big player here too. So now I think you're seeing
Speaker 1: a turn to some of these you know, mid level
Speaker 1: this sort of like the media middle that got somewhat
Speaker 1: decimated by the rise of interest rates in the collapse
Speaker 1: of media venture capital trying to find a way again.
Speaker 1: As it turns out that the independent path is pretty
Speaker 1: tough on sub stacks, specifically because once people subscribe to
Speaker 1: a bunch of them, they stop wanting to subscribe to more.
Speaker 1: The subscriptions are expensive. I think it's a distribution channel
Speaker 1: that max is out at a pretty low level, unlike
Speaker 1: the original blogosphere, where it was sort of costless to
Speaker 1: keep like surfing over to new sites. So that's where
Speaker 1: I think we are at the moment. And you know,
Speaker 1: in one of the endless turns of this endless media recursion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there was a period if.
Speaker 4: You don't mind, well, I was just say I have
Speaker 4: a quick follow up is there and maybe Ryan, this
Speaker 4: goes well with what you were going to ask, so
Speaker 4: maybe you just tag it on to the end of this.
Speaker 4: I wonder if they're a cynical person might say this
Speaker 4: is just like Dylan going electric. This is you know,
Speaker 4: the it's not that the mainstream media has become more
Speaker 4: tolerant sort of independent voices. It's that the independent voices
Speaker 4: have found their way into the mainstream because you know,
Speaker 4: there might be like a Chomsky criticism, like they've become
Speaker 4: part of the machine. And I don't think that's quite right.
Speaker 4: And Ryan, do you I mean, do you have a okay, Yeah,
Speaker 4: what do you make of that? Azrael? Like, just in
Speaker 4: terms of the content of what's expressed when you go
Speaker 4: from one platform to another, because my perspective actually is
Speaker 4: that it probably has become the mainstream has seen in
Speaker 4: the market there's an interest in these different opinions and
Speaker 4: ideas from outside, you know, their usual gates, and brought
Speaker 4: those voices in because they know they can market them,
Speaker 4: they know there's an appetite for them. But I'm curious
Speaker 4: what you make of that.
Speaker 1: This just doesn't strike me as as a new phenomena.
Speaker 1: The major institutions are always looking around to try to
Speaker 1: see who is gaining audience, what is resonating with their audiences,
Speaker 1: and in what way so it can become part of
Speaker 1: their product. That's capitalism at its finest. It happens in music,
Speaker 1: it happens in movies, it happens in television, it happens
Speaker 1: in media, right. I mean my own story in journalism
Speaker 1: is part of that. I think there was a moment
Speaker 1: of substack explosion when there were particular ideological fights that
Speaker 1: were blowing up media organizations, right. And I think this
Speaker 1: is a period where you see things like Andrew Sullivan
Speaker 1: go into substack from New York Magazine. That moment is
Speaker 1: not that true, right, It's not how these organizations currently
Speaker 1: feel from the inside. It doesn't feel like the ideological
Speaker 1: strictures lay down, at least in exactly that way. And
Speaker 1: so at this juncture, I don't particularly find substack offering
Speaker 1: me a hugely different ideological set of perspectives, and I
Speaker 1: can get elsewhere, and often I can get them else
Speaker 1: with better editing. As an example, right in the thing
Speaker 1: that you were on my show to talk about, Emily.
Speaker 1: I follow the post liberals, but I follow them mostly
Speaker 1: through journals and I follow them in their writing places
Speaker 1: like The New Statesman, and I do follow the substacks,
Speaker 1: but I find a lot of the substacks to be
Speaker 1: tiresome to follow and not the best expression of those
Speaker 1: ideas over time. And so you know. But but First
Speaker 1: Things can be a very useful magazine, I think, to
Speaker 1: read in a regular way, the clear amount you know,
Speaker 1: review of books is an interesting journal to read right now.
Speaker 1: So I don't find this to be a particularly new phenomena.
Speaker 1: There's always a bit of a lag between what is
Speaker 1: finding new audience in the more independent sphere and what
Speaker 1: is finding its way into mainstream institutions. But I typically
Speaker 1: view that as a as much more of a lag
Speaker 1: as places you know, come to to understand, you know,
Speaker 1: what you could really call, in a sentic way, the
Speaker 1: market signals, rather than typically a chomp sky and manufactured
Speaker 1: consent approach or or a model or a you know,
Speaker 1: some kind of model of the constantly acused censorship.
Speaker 3: And through through through all those different gigs that you
Speaker 3: mentioned that you've gone through. At each step you somebody
Speaker 3: watching from the background, or maybe even let's say you
Speaker 3: as like a college student would say, oh wow, I've
Speaker 3: made it. This is the place where I need to be,
Speaker 3: and now I can just do my work, Like even
Speaker 3: at the very beginning of getting you know, the Washington Post,
Speaker 3: when when we were growing up in the eighties nineties,
Speaker 3: like being a Washington Post columnist was like the pinnacle
Speaker 3: of opinion writing, journalistic success that was equivalent to the
Speaker 3: New York Times. People might find that shocking now, like
Speaker 3: nobody ever really talks about the Washington Post opinion section
Speaker 3: the way they do New York Times anymore. But yet
Speaker 3: after several years of that, you moved on then started Vox,
Speaker 3: very you know, extremely successful, you know, independent online news organization,
Speaker 3: which maybe you could say, well now now we made it. Now,
Speaker 3: now this is what I'm going to do, and then
Speaker 3: you moved on again. So are you restless? Did you just? Like,
Speaker 3: what was the thing that was moving you from place
Speaker 3: to place?
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm restless, at least I don't feel it.
Speaker 1: But I feel it is tired. What I feel is
Speaker 1: profoundly tired all the time. When I went from the
Speaker 1: Post to Vox, I believed, and in some ways this
Speaker 1: was born out. In some ways it wouldn't. It wasn't
Speaker 1: that we could use the growing tools of digital media
Speaker 1: to do new things in the news. What you know,
Speaker 1: I always say I fundamentally left the Washington Post for
Speaker 1: a different content management system, and we wanted to build
Speaker 1: this explanatory layer underneath the work. This constantly updated. I mean,
Speaker 1: when you really think of what you can do online
Speaker 1: that you can't do in print, in text, and most
Speaker 1: of the early phase of online journalism was simply moving
Speaker 1: what you did in print into a computer, the opportunities
Speaker 1: are remarkable, right. It's still to me the untapped opportunity
Speaker 1: of you can update a webpage and as such, a
Speaker 1: single story can change and grow over time. Sometimes people
Speaker 1: look at that as some way of pulling one over
Speaker 1: on the audience, but that's because we've given the audience
Speaker 1: expectations from a different era, right.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: One of our big views at Box was what if
Speaker 1: we could have this story that is a fundamental part
Speaker 1: of a story, right, not the new piece of news,
Speaker 1: but the context for all those new pieces of news.
Speaker 1: What if we had that growing and changing we call
Speaker 1: those card stacks. What really made that hard? And I
Speaker 1: mean there were certain workflow issues that we're just really
Speaker 1: really difficult about keeping up that many of them when
Speaker 1: you were a small organization. I think you needed to
Speaker 1: be something the size of The New York Times to
Speaker 1: really make that work. But the other was that there was,
Speaker 1: at least for a period, a real split into the platforms,
Speaker 1: and there was this phase driven by traffic on Facebook
Speaker 1: and traffic elsewhere where we weren't just publishing. And this
Speaker 1: is true for Box, but also true for The New
Speaker 1: York Times, for the Washington Post, for everybody. You weren't
Speaker 1: just publishing to your site. You were publishing to Facebook
Speaker 1: incident articles, you were publishing to Google Amp, you were
Speaker 1: publishing into Apple News, you're publishing onto Snapchat in a
Speaker 1: very different way. And in publishing it to all these
Speaker 1: different places, you no longer control over the underlying system.
Speaker 1: So a lot of that burst of enthusiasm for what
Speaker 1: you could build and how you can make it different
Speaker 1: by taking advantage of your ability to code the underlying
Speaker 1: content management and code and recode the website and change
Speaker 1: what was possible that just didn't pan out. A lot
Speaker 1: of other things did pan out, And I'm super proud
Speaker 1: of a lot of things that we did when I
Speaker 1: was at Vox, and a lot of things that the
Speaker 1: Box is doing now. I mean it was built to
Speaker 1: be a organization focused on contextual journalism or explanatory journalism,
Speaker 1: and I think that ended up not just both being
Speaker 1: good for it, but good for the broader media, where
Speaker 1: a lot of things that we pioneered have been absorbed
Speaker 1: at a pretty deep level and are now commonplace. But
Speaker 1: the reason I personally left was in and it was
Speaker 1: sort of the opposite of restlessness but exhaustion. Managing a
Speaker 1: startup for seven or eight years is really hard, and
Speaker 1: I was editor in chief for about half of that
Speaker 1: and then editor at large. But when you're one of
Speaker 1: the founders of something, you're sort of always a key
Speaker 1: manager of it when you're there, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: be able to focus back on my own work just
Speaker 1: as a person and not really be a manager of
Speaker 1: an organization that at that point was one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty people, And in order to both do that for
Speaker 1: myself and also to create space for the people who
Speaker 1: would be managing vox to really have full freedom right
Speaker 1: not have people constantly coming to me and saying, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure this is really you know, how we
Speaker 1: started out, or should we really be doing this, or
Speaker 1: we'd love to have you in this meeting or what
Speaker 1: do you think about this? At some point it's really
Speaker 1: hard to manage around a founder, you know, when the
Speaker 1: founder is sitting there and still doing a bunch of
Speaker 1: the an immediate organization, the journalism, so both. So I
Speaker 1: could no longer be a manager and the managers could
Speaker 1: truly be the managers. It was time for me to
Speaker 1: move on.
Speaker 3: Interesting piece of Internet history. In the earlier part of
Speaker 3: what you said that I think people who are newer
Speaker 3: to this, you know, need to understand part of it.
Speaker 3: You talked about the early link economy, with the with
Speaker 3: the Bloggi sphere, and the difference with substact being that
Speaker 3: you can actually make make a living. There was a
Speaker 3: period of time maybe you weren't making a lot of money,
Speaker 3: but where you could act. There were actually bloggers who
Speaker 3: were making money from ads, uh and kind of overnight
Speaker 3: and you might even remember this the Google ad Sense
Speaker 3: apocalypse or whatever the bloggers at the time called it.
Speaker 3: Google basically just said, no, what, we're actually not doing
Speaker 3: that anymore. We've decided we're going to We're going to
Speaker 3: keep the money now. And because everything was at that
Speaker 3: point monopolized by Google, they could they could simply just
Speaker 3: do that, and then we witnessed, you know it kind
Speaker 3: of a parasitic takeover of of digital media organization revenue
Speaker 3: years later, in the exact way that you've talked about,
Speaker 3: where the platforms successfully persuaded individually all of these different
Speaker 3: news organizations, some of them to quote unquote pivot to video,
Speaker 3: which was its own criminal debacle, I believe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, who wants to watch video?
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, Well, so the pivot to video, if people
Speaker 3: don't remember this was this was driven by Facebook, which
Speaker 3: spent enormous amounts of money giving it directly to news organizations,
Speaker 3: basically funding their journalism to pivot to creating these online
Speaker 3: these online videos that they would put on Facebook, and
Speaker 3: then Facebook, we now know because a lot of the
Speaker 3: records are now public, was completely lying about the views
Speaker 3: that they were getting. I remember one of the first
Speaker 3: ones I did over at Hugh Post. They said it
Speaker 3: got like one hundred and fifty thousand live viewers.
Speaker 4: Is this top Post Live?
Speaker 3: No, this is this is pre huff Post It Actually,
Speaker 3: I think it helped kill huff Post Live and that
Speaker 3: what it did is that killed a lot of organic
Speaker 3: ideas that journalists had, like yourself over at fox hof
Speaker 3: Post Live, for instance, trying to build an actual, like
Speaker 3: native live video audience and pushed it into this Facebook
Speaker 3: video operation. And then Facebook got tired of that a
Speaker 3: couple of years later. But by that point they had
Speaker 3: gobbled up all of the revenue and the audience and
Speaker 3: there was nothing left for digital news organizations. They raised,
Speaker 3: they raised interest rates, the money drives up, and they
Speaker 3: all and they all disappear, like it's that's more or
Speaker 3: less like the collapse, the rise and the collapse, and
Speaker 3: then the kind of platforms walk away with with uh
Speaker 3: with with most of the audience. H what remains though?
Speaker 3: The New York Times, like somehow out of that fire,
Speaker 3: you know, emerges this phoenix that looked like it might
Speaker 3: not make it at some point. And you know, look
Speaker 3: at the Los Angeles Times, look at the Chicago Trimmune.
Speaker 3: Yet the New York Times has been become almost a
Speaker 3: platform onto itself. Do you think that's becoming increasingly interesting
Speaker 3: way to think about the Times rather than as a
Speaker 3: news organization that's interesting.
Speaker 1: Is it a platform? I don't think it's a platform,
Speaker 1: because I think a platform implies within it the ability
Speaker 1: for others to build on it, I will say I
Speaker 1: largely agree with your history there of the twenty tens.
Speaker 1: The only thing I would say to it is that
Speaker 1: I don't even think Facebook, at least in my experience,
Speaker 1: Facebook put some money into help into encouraging people to
Speaker 1: bring things to video, but for most media organizations, they
Speaker 1: didn't give them that much money. They weren't that interested
Speaker 1: in us. What they were doing is both inflating views
Speaker 1: and just in Facebook and really everywhere, the promise of
Speaker 1: that era was that you were building these huge audiences
Speaker 1: on these platforms and that eventually they build the revenue
Speaker 1: mechanisms so you can monetize that. Right, if you think
Speaker 1: about what BuzzFeed was, what Vice was, what everything was,
Speaker 1: well huff Post, right, everything was sort of designed now
Speaker 1: on this theory that having used you know, have Facebook
Speaker 1: and Twitter and whatever to reach more readers, viewers, whatever
Speaker 1: it might have been, than we ever had before, we
Speaker 1: would turn that into money. And at a certain point
Speaker 1: in each one of these cases, a platform said came
Speaker 1: in and said, I know what we've been telling you,
Speaker 1: but actually we're going to turn that into money. And
Speaker 1: that was the end of it. Right that ultimately those
Speaker 1: business models couldn't work. And that speaks to what you
Speaker 1: just said about The New York Times, because the Times
Speaker 1: fairly early in this process, building off of its own
Speaker 1: centrality in the media world, its own size, and the
Speaker 1: quality of the offering, they made a decision that at
Speaker 1: the time they made it was highly controversial in journalism,
Speaker 1: which was they were going to try to get people
Speaker 1: to pay for The New York Times, and they were
Speaker 1: going to put articles behind a paywall, and they were
Speaker 1: going to go virtually all in on the idea that
Speaker 1: you could build a subscription busines business to media digitally,
Speaker 1: even though all your competitors were free, right, even though
Speaker 1: somebody could easily just substitute in the Washington Post, the
Speaker 1: La Times, the Atlantic Right, choose your you know, choose
Speaker 1: your media organization. The Times wasn't the only one. The
Speaker 1: Journal and the Financial Times had been doing subscriptions, but
Speaker 1: there was a view that these publications that were a
Speaker 1: little bit more like trade publications for the financial press
Speaker 1: could make subscriptions work, whereas something that was as easily
Speaker 1: substitutable as news could not. And the absolute core of
Speaker 1: the New York Times success was making the paywall work
Speaker 1: and making subscriptions work, and then that informs a lot
Speaker 1: of subsequent strategy, which is obviously, you know, not mostly
Speaker 1: stuff that happened before I came here, and I have
Speaker 1: no role in any of it even now. But when
Speaker 1: you think of things like games and cooking, the Times
Speaker 1: has this model which is in a way almost more
Speaker 1: like the Netflix model.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: If they can make the package worth paying for, then
Speaker 1: the whole thing work. And so anything that makes a
Speaker 1: package more incrementally valuable is very, very valuable to The
Speaker 1: Times and to me it's one of the And now
Speaker 1: they're putting podcast like mine behind a paywall. I mean,
Speaker 1: the new episodes are free, but the older ones are
Speaker 1: going into this paywalled archive because of you. Is the
Speaker 1: only thing that is really reliable in funding journalism is
Speaker 1: persuading the audience to pay for it at some level.
Speaker 1: Anything else, be it advertising where the advertisers have a
Speaker 1: lot of views understandably so on what they want to
Speaker 1: advertise next to it's like, you don't want the brand
Speaker 1: association between Lexis to be the devastation of Gaza, right.
Speaker 1: So it's very hard to get really strong advertising for
Speaker 1: a lot of hard and important news stories, and the
Speaker 1: platforms are completely unreliable partners. So if you don't want
Speaker 1: to be completely subject to the whims of one of
Speaker 1: those two businesses or partnerships, you have to be able
Speaker 1: to make convincing people to pay for the thing you're
Speaker 1: making for them work.
Speaker 4: So what's really interesting I think about all of that,
Speaker 4: and I'm curious about your take on this. I think
Speaker 4: what made your writing so compelling in the blog days
Speaker 4: and still now was a sense that the neoliberal consensus,
Speaker 4: if we can call it that, sort of taken on
Speaker 4: more of a profound or popular meaning now, but at
Speaker 4: the time in the Bush era, there was a sense
Speaker 4: that it wasn't really working. People in the Bloggis Fair
Speaker 4: were writing about privacy and data and aftermath of nine
Speaker 4: to eleven and adventurism abroad and all of that, And
Speaker 4: I kind of wonder you've written about family policy, or
Speaker 4: you've talked about family policy, right, and I wanted to
Speaker 4: ask you about that too. There's a sense on the
Speaker 4: right that came after the Bush era, in fact, really
Speaker 4: after the Obama era, that suddenly this neoliberal consensus that
Speaker 4: they had defended so doggedly, whether it was the FBI
Speaker 4: or the Patriot Act, really wasn't working, or anti welfare
Speaker 4: policies really wasn't working. And there's some thinking in that
Speaker 4: space now about how conservatives can use policy is to
Speaker 4: shape a world that they see as more conservative on
Speaker 4: family level, on community level. So I guess I wonder
Speaker 4: if you think you were sort of the right is
Speaker 4: kind of a Johnny come lately to what in some sense,
Speaker 4: not exactly obviously in your policy prescriptions are wildly different
Speaker 4: in some cases, but we're you sensing Do you think
Speaker 4: you were ahead as someone who is center left, Were
Speaker 4: you ahead of sensing something that the right is now
Speaker 4: kind of catching up to.
Speaker 1: I'd have to think about that. It's funny because I
Speaker 1: my initial instinct is to say no. As much as
Speaker 1: I'd like to sell you on on my own prescience, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I would totally buy that that version
Speaker 1: of what made my writing useful over these over these years.
Speaker 1: But let me not make this about me. I do
Speaker 1: think that the right is dealing with its own set
Speaker 1: of failures, and one of the things that I think
Speaker 1: is interesting about where it has ended up is it
Speaker 1: has a lot of trouble then distinguishing what it actually
Speaker 1: wants to do about them. From banal prescriptions on the left.
Speaker 1: And I think if you want to see this very
Speaker 1: clearly among the ideological post liberals, you go listen to
Speaker 1: the podcast episode I did with Patrick Deneen, you know,
Speaker 1: eighteen months ago, a year ago, And in that episode, Daneen,
Speaker 1: who is very close to Jade Vance and has become
Speaker 1: one of these people who you know, talks about, you know,
Speaker 1: the liberals who have been in charge, as if to
Speaker 1: say they've betrayed the country and the people would be
Speaker 1: too too gentle for how he frames it in my view.
Speaker 1: But then you talk to him and it was very
Speaker 1: hard to figure out where he really differed from Joe Biden,
Speaker 1: And if you then read his subsequent book, it was
Speaker 1: still very hard to figure it out. It's like you're
Speaker 1: going to expand the House of Representatives to a thousand people,
Speaker 1: You're going to do national service, like this is your
Speaker 1: big set of ideas. These are again like they've been everywhere.
Speaker 1: But I don't think it's because the center left or
Speaker 1: the left since to these problems earlier. Necessarily, I don't
Speaker 1: think the right has figured out if a lot of
Speaker 1: the problems it is most concerned about are even amenable
Speaker 1: to policy solutions in the first place, Right, if you're
Speaker 1: worried about family breakdown, which people have been worried about
Speaker 1: in different contexts for a very long time, right, I
Speaker 1: think you can really understand JD. Vance's Hillbilly elegy as
Speaker 1: an extension of what had been written about black communities
Speaker 1: for a very long time and is bringing a lot
Speaker 1: of that same research. Somebody described it to me the
Speaker 1: other day as like the Mooin to Hand report for
Speaker 1: white people. And this family breakdown is a very very
Speaker 1: hard problem to solve. People have tried lots of different
Speaker 1: things on the right and the left, and it's not
Speaker 1: really worked. Fertility rates, which are a big question on
Speaker 1: the right right now, there are a lot of countries
Speaker 1: have been going through much more profound fertility collapse and
Speaker 1: anything we're seeing in the United States. They have a
Speaker 1: much more intense set of incentives to do something about it,
Speaker 1: and nothing they have tried. If you're looking at places
Speaker 1: like South Korea and Japan and Italy and others, none
Speaker 1: of it has worked. And by the way, that's true
Speaker 1: on the you know, more liberal solutions too. A lot
Speaker 1: of times liberals will say, well, if you want to
Speaker 1: do something about fertility rates, you need universal childcare and
Speaker 1: this and that, but they're not higher in the Nordic
Speaker 1: countries where you do see those kinds of wrap around
Speaker 1: social policies. So I think there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: things people on the right are worried about. Some of
Speaker 1: them you could solve in more liberal ways, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: you could get wages up using a number of the
Speaker 1: just normal policies like the ear in income tax credit.
Speaker 1: You know, in the child tax credit. You can get
Speaker 1: effectively the amount of money people have to spend up
Speaker 1: by using tax transfers. We know how to do that.
Speaker 1: But in terms of some of the broader community dimensions,
Speaker 1: family dimensions that I think truly sit at the core
Speaker 1: of things people on the right are worried about, I
Speaker 1: don't think they have. They've only, I think, begun to
Speaker 1: recognize the scale of the problem. They definitely have not
Speaker 1: thought up, or worked through or trialed out solutions that
Speaker 1: fit the problem. And to a bunch of things we
Speaker 1: talked about. When you're on my show, then you get
Speaker 1: into the cultural dimensions of the rot the right or
Speaker 1: the postable right, or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1: The new right is seeing and on the other hand,
Speaker 1: they've tied themselves to Donald Trump and barstool sports and
Speaker 1: a bunch of aggressive accelerators of that cultural rot and
Speaker 1: so the contradictions become even more profound within that movement.
Speaker 1: So I think the ideological difficulty of what of what
Speaker 1: the sort of new right is trying to grapple with
Speaker 1: is at this point like frankly underappreciated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe that's a good question for Emily then is
Speaker 3: I thought, tell me if you agree as with that.
Speaker 3: Jade Vance's performance in the vice presidential debate, in a
Speaker 3: lot of moments, was actually the most eloquent articulation of
Speaker 3: Biden's economic policy and Biden's economic agenda that anybody had
Speaker 3: put forward, except it would then be done with a
Speaker 3: line also that Biden is destroying the country. It's like, okay, fine,
Speaker 3: but everything you just said is something that they have
Speaker 3: embraced and done and would like to and would like
Speaker 3: to do, and to the point that it might not
Speaker 3: be enough to do the cultural things that he's arguing
Speaker 3: for Emily, is it like that goes back to the
Speaker 3: question of how real is it? And is some of
Speaker 3: this just cover for actually wanting to smuggle in the
Speaker 3: cultural stuff under the guise of the kind of economic populism,
Speaker 3: but understanding that you need both to make them more palatable,
Speaker 3: like what like, how do you move forward as the
Speaker 3: new right?
Speaker 4: There I think, I think there's a cynical interpretation where
Speaker 4: there are some people who are genuinely engaged in the
Speaker 4: project of smuggling. I think there are other people I
Speaker 4: would include myself, I would include JD and this who
Speaker 4: see them as inextricably intertwined the sort of project of
Speaker 4: economic populism and a more conservative culture. But what's really
Speaker 4: interesting about that comparison. I'm very curious as we thinking
Speaker 4: about this too, is it shows what's untenable I think
Speaker 4: about ultimately the realignment between right and left, because you
Speaker 4: could see the JD vance defense of the Biden policy
Speaker 4: I think being true if Biden was explicitly doing it
Speaker 4: to reduce single parent households, to improve marriage rates, to
Speaker 4: make people more interested in getting married and less interested
Speaker 4: in getting divorced, to you know, ultimately boost the cause
Speaker 4: of let's say like community, civic society and all that.
Speaker 4: And I guess Biden might say it was about civil
Speaker 4: society as well, but marriage and children in particular. We
Speaker 4: see the Harris campaign, you know, understandably latching onto JD's
Speaker 4: childless cat lady quote. And I think that's the fundamental
Speaker 4: difference between JD's his defense of economic populism and Biden's
Speaker 4: defense of economic populism. And I actually think that that's
Speaker 4: what makes it sort of untenable the realignment in the
Speaker 4: long term. And I think it's a huge problem for
Speaker 4: those of us on a new Right who want to
Speaker 4: sell these policies to the public. It's just the public's
Speaker 4: really not with us on some of those were those
Speaker 4: questions of cultural conservatism.
Speaker 1: Here's I think an interesting way of thinking about this.
Speaker 1: I think it's worth thinking of Pete Boodhajedge and JD
Speaker 1: Vance as having certain echoes of each other, which I
Speaker 1: think both people, both of them would really hate. But
Speaker 1: it's one reason they hate each other so much. But
Speaker 1: if you look at and go listen to the podcast
Speaker 1: episodes that Pete Bootajedge did while Pete boota judge was
Speaker 1: rising up in politics over the past you know, five
Speaker 1: or six years, you go listen to the things he
Speaker 1: did with people like me and on you know liberal
Speaker 1: shows that where the audience is a liberal and he
Speaker 1: was not quite as well known as he is today.
Speaker 1: And he sounds the way he does when he just
Speaker 1: did my show a month ago. Right, he sounds the
Speaker 1: way he does when he goes on Fox News more
Speaker 1: or less. Right, he sounds the same. The thing that liberals,
Speaker 1: even to somebody the left, are saying internally is the
Speaker 1: same as what they are saying externally. They believe that
Speaker 1: what they are saying to each other is actually a
Speaker 1: thing they can say to the public. You look at
Speaker 1: the problem Jady Vance has had and then what he
Speaker 1: did in that debate, And the reason Jady Vance was
Speaker 1: so good in that debate is he didn't sound like
Speaker 1: Jady Vance at all. He did an amazing job not
Speaker 1: sounding like Jadvance and also not sounding like Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: So what he did was you go watch him in
Speaker 1: all these podcast interviews and speeches and nat Con conferences
Speaker 1: and whatever that he was doing on his rise up,
Speaker 1: and he sounds like one guy, and then when he
Speaker 1: needs to try to win over the general public, he
Speaker 1: sounds totally different. Now, there's always obviously a certain amount
Speaker 1: of running to the center that happens in political campaigns.
Speaker 1: You can certainly see it with Kamala Harris but there
Speaker 1: is something deeper here happening that is of particular difficulty,
Speaker 1: I think for the right, where part of what the
Speaker 1: right I think has persuaded itself of is it modern
Speaker 1: American culture is decadent and perverse. And part of maybe
Speaker 1: what you need to do about that has to do
Speaker 1: with calling it decadent and perverse. And so in their
Speaker 1: own fora we'll call it decadent and perverse and talk
Speaker 1: about the miserable, childless cat ladies and all the terrible
Speaker 1: choices are making in their own lives. And then they
Speaker 1: have to win over an actual voter. They shut the
Speaker 1: hell up about that and run from it as fast
Speaker 1: as they possibly can. And the problem Vance has had
Speaker 1: is that it's not that easy for him to run
Speaker 1: for it. But this is where you see a real,
Speaker 1: a real political problem. When the things you are actually
Speaker 1: saying and the things you then need to say in
Speaker 1: public develop that level of divergence from each other, then
Speaker 1: you have an unresolved problem within not just your political
Speaker 1: coalition but your political thinking, because you're not going to
Speaker 1: be able to do it if you can't even really
Speaker 1: talk about it.
Speaker 3: Is that something that people are grappling with on the right.
Speaker 3: And I'm curious how much of the the different presentations,
Speaker 3: let's say, is on a right wing podcast versus and
Speaker 3: the vice presidential debate, how much of those different presentations
Speaker 3: reflect fundamentally different politics, and how much of it reflects
Speaker 3: what he would argue is the same politics and the
Speaker 3: same policies but kind of dressed up differently messaging purposes
Speaker 3: for different audiences.
Speaker 4: Well, I think for JD it's definitely different messaging purposes
Speaker 4: for different audiences, and it's like exactly correct about him.
Speaker 4: I think for some people, I mean, I actually get this.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it's like you you it's it's in good faith
Speaker 4: because you know that there's such a massive gulf between
Speaker 4: where you are in terms of like your faith and
Speaker 4: where you are where you're whoever you're talking to, whatever
Speaker 4: audience you're talking to, is you know, if you're talking
Speaker 4: to an audience, for example, that has people who who
Speaker 4: could have you know, trans family members, which is basically
Speaker 4: any audience right now, like you you can't talk to
Speaker 4: them like you would be talking to them. The right
Speaker 4: wing podcasts would be like just be rude more than
Speaker 4: you know, being unappealing, It would just be rude and uncharitable.
Speaker 4: So I think there's there's some of that that happens
Speaker 4: when media is siloed in the technological ways that we
Speaker 4: were talking about, and some of these these social gaps
Speaker 4: are so significant. But I think, you know, for politicians
Speaker 4: like JD. Vance, watching him is fascinating because there's some
Speaker 4: of the stuff that conservatives really thought in the aftermath
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty when there was some you know what
Speaker 4: people have called quote unquote woe flash, when there were
Speaker 4: some of that, conservatives thought, this is it, this is
Speaker 4: our ticket. We have found the way to sell and
Speaker 4: Jdvans very much ran on this platform. We have found
Speaker 4: a way to sell this new right agenda of economic
Speaker 4: populism and cultural conservatism. The public is ready for it,
Speaker 4: and that quickly they became it quickly became clear that
Speaker 4: that was not true. And so some of it right
Speaker 4: now I think absolutely isn't bad faith. It is you know,
Speaker 4: just talking to different audiences with messages that are in
Speaker 4: some ways deceptive, right deceptive, And it's a I think
Speaker 4: it's a really interesting point.
Speaker 3: And as we're actually I'm curious for your take on
Speaker 3: the on the from the inside of the New York
Speaker 3: Times and the on the woe the woe clash, as
Speaker 3: Emily called it. I hadn't actually heard that phrase before,
Speaker 3: but I but I love it with but we we
Speaker 3: we can all, we can all feel it happening. That
Speaker 3: it felt like the center left kind of overstepped when
Speaker 3: it came to identity politics and has is now very
Speaker 3: quietly stepping back, but not doing so overtly, Like there's
Speaker 3: nobody is out there necessarily kind of renouncing any of
Speaker 3: the bumper stickers or yard signs that they have, but
Speaker 3: they're just not putting up fresh ones. I'm curious if
Speaker 3: you're if you're seeing that unfold inside the inside the
Speaker 3: the ecosystems where you kind of operate.
Speaker 1: I say nothing about the inside of the New York Times,
Speaker 1: and nothing I say here will be about the inside
Speaker 1: of the New York Times. I will say I think
Speaker 1: you can look around the media politics generally, and yeah,
Speaker 1: see a huge change. I think there are a couple
Speaker 1: dimensions to this. One is that there is a difference
Speaker 1: between what people came to believe and how they came
Speaker 1: to act, or at least how they came to be
Speaker 1: pushed on those beliefs. And the core thing here in
Speaker 1: My view was actually technological. You had this two new
Speaker 1: things hit the media in a fairly compressed period of time,
Speaker 1: and also many other corporate environments or institutional environments too. Obviously, Ryan,
Speaker 1: you were at a huge and very very influential piece
Speaker 1: on progressive movement politics about this. But I would call
Speaker 1: it Slack and Twitter. And what Slack did was created
Speaker 1: internal capacity for workers to talk and to organize, right,
Speaker 1: not organized necessarily the labor union term of the sense,
Speaker 1: but organized in a more informal term, and managers can't right.
Speaker 1: The way the Slack works and institutions was, at least
Speaker 1: in that period was there was a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: emojis coming in under things people said. But but the
Speaker 1: managers are much more you know, checking what they say
Speaker 1: by HR and the lawyers and so on. So first
Speaker 1: you had this sort of communication gulf changing.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It used to be that it is fairly easy for
Speaker 1: the boss to kind of call everybody into the room
Speaker 1: and make some speech, and it's actually harder for the
Speaker 1: sense of the employees to be to be passed back up.
Speaker 1: Slack made that very easy, and then Twitter made it
Speaker 1: easy for that to spill out, particularly in high visibility
Speaker 1: industries into public and so the thing that a lot
Speaker 1: of these institutions had no immunity to was what did
Speaker 1: you do when these sort of internal slack fights became
Speaker 1: external public relations problems or perceived public relations problems on Twitter,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them just were folding kind of
Speaker 1: left and right. They you know, were firing people, They
Speaker 1: were acting in ways that were afraid. They were putting
Speaker 1: out statements they didn't necessarily believe. Now that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: they didn't believe the under a set of the underlying
Speaker 1: things about there being huge levels of systemic racism in society.
Speaker 1: You know that there were all kinds of problems and
Speaker 1: inequities that should be addressed. And I do think part
Speaker 1: of the step back has been a step back from
Speaker 1: some of the ways that institutions without any immune system
Speaker 1: to this sort of new era kind of would overreact
Speaker 1: to I think, in my view, fairly modest levels of
Speaker 1: public criticism. But that does not mean I think there's
Speaker 1: been a step back from believing a lot of the
Speaker 1: things that were not believed about society in say, twenty
Speaker 1: and thirteen, in twenty fourteen, so, for instance, I think
Speaker 1: the view that there is systemic racism in policing is
Speaker 1: widely held, but the view that you defund the police
Speaker 1: is not now widely held. But I think ten years ago,
Speaker 1: neither view was all that widely held, or at least
Speaker 1: not talked about that often in public. And I think
Speaker 1: you could find a lot of different things like this
Speaker 1: where the idiological priors have been absorbed into or the
Speaker 1: ideological arguments up to a point, have been absorbed into
Speaker 1: the system. They are now kind of common sense when
Speaker 1: they weren't at another time. I think organizations think about
Speaker 1: representation very differently than they did when I got into
Speaker 1: the media in two thousand and five, for instance. But
Speaker 1: the sense that your employees are going to, you know,
Speaker 1: in a progressive nonprofit or a media organization or even
Speaker 1: a corporation like Nike, your employees are going to put
Speaker 1: a bunch of like slack faces under something somebody said
Speaker 1: and then you know, go public on Twitter, and that's
Speaker 1: going to be treated as a problem for the organization
Speaker 1: to deal with, as a problem for the employee to
Speaker 1: now have to deal with their bosses. I think that
Speaker 1: has changed, so my views, administrators and managers have a
Speaker 1: very different approach to dealing with these things, and some
Speaker 1: of the sort of inability to say, well, hey, wait,
Speaker 1: is that actually a good idea has gone away. But
Speaker 1: it's not like we've gone all the way back to
Speaker 1: how people understood the situation to be in twenty ten.
Speaker 1: I think there's a very very different sense of what
Speaker 1: is required of and should be thought about in a
Speaker 1: lot of both key decisions and and in society at large.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Emily, I think the left had gone a
Speaker 3: little so bananas for a while that the right felt
Speaker 3: like it had a really easy target, and I feel
Speaker 3: like that target has been taken away. I'm curious from
Speaker 3: the right, like if, as you grapple with the left
Speaker 3: and go out and target this like the wocism and
Speaker 3: all that stuff, if it feels harder for the right
Speaker 3: to hit it now, Like if it feels like and
Speaker 3: almost I could imagine from the right's perspective in almost
Speaker 3: an unfair way, because it's like, wait a minute, we
Speaker 3: never talked about it on the rise up there was
Speaker 3: that everybody kept saying there is no such thing as
Speaker 3: cancel culture. Obviously there was, but that makes it harder
Speaker 3: for then people to talk about its recession at the
Speaker 3: same time because something that was never here, can't go away.
Speaker 3: It was like you're fighting these ghosts, but now they
Speaker 3: might be actual ghosts. So I'm curious from your perspective
Speaker 3: if it feels like a tougher target to hit now.
Speaker 4: I think there's something to that because one of the
Speaker 4: one of the trends that I've observed going back to
Speaker 4: the beginning of this conversation is I think some of
Speaker 4: mainstream media responding to the market pressures that when you
Speaker 4: see people doing really well on a platform like substack.
Speaker 4: If you're the New York Times and you see Barry
Speaker 4: weis doing really well on a platform like substack, I
Speaker 4: think you realize that the the people who are complaining
Speaker 4: about coverage that undercut the consensus position on like puberty blockers,
Speaker 4: for just to take one example, is acceptable, and that
Speaker 4: there you know that there are more people who are
Speaker 4: open to having a reasonable discussion than the sample of
Speaker 4: people in the publications slack or you know, the slack
Speaker 4: at the Washington Post or the LA Times or the
Speaker 4: Associated Press that the country more broadly is is comfortable
Speaker 4: with having a conversation that everyone in your newsroom might
Speaker 4: not be. So whether some of these elite opinions be
Speaker 4: they at Disney or somewhere else, is ultimately representative of
Speaker 4: a larger trend and young people. It was probably the
Speaker 4: was overestimating the public support for some of those really
Speaker 4: radical or harder left positions. And I think also just
Speaker 4: really quick final point would be that media in general
Speaker 4: makes it hard for the right to come to a
Speaker 4: policy position, like to actually have a firm position on
Speaker 4: a lot of policies, because so much of our energy
Speaker 4: is understandably tied up in picking apart media coverage and
Speaker 4: finding bias and arguing against bias, that we all sort
Speaker 4: of end up looking around and saying, okay, but what
Speaker 4: do we actually what do we actually think about this?
Speaker 4: What should we actually do about this? And oftentimes you
Speaker 4: just never get to that point because the first step
Speaker 4: is like going through the bad coverage.
Speaker 1: I think two things about this one. I think it
Speaker 1: would be really really healthy for the right if it
Speaker 1: didn't tell itself that if the right would spend more
Speaker 1: time creating good media organizations to do good reporting at
Speaker 1: a high level of factual accuracy instead of complaining so
Speaker 1: much about the media, it'd be so much healthier. I
Speaker 1: remember when Tucker Carlson came out and said he was
Speaker 1: building the Daily Caller right and it was going to
Speaker 1: be the conservative New York Times, and good lord, but
Speaker 1: that became right. There's like a real level of empirical
Speaker 1: and epistemic standards that the right does not hold itself to,
Speaker 1: which is not a thing the left does to it,
Speaker 1: but is an actual problem on its own side. And that,
Speaker 1: in my view, is what makes it hard for the
Speaker 1: right to come to strong policy positions, because it doesn't
Speaker 1: have strong internal internal standards for its own debates. And
Speaker 1: one way of thinking about this, to connect it to
Speaker 1: what we were just talking about, is there all kinds
Speaker 1: of things that you know we're coming were ideological waves
Speaker 1: happening on the left and the Democratic Party in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: The Democratic Party and the sort of broader left, central left,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, liberal coalition has metabolized.
Speaker 1: It's kind of said, Okay, we're taking this part, even
Speaker 1: this part behind. That's not true for the right from
Speaker 1: what it was dealing within twenty twenty. Jd Vance will
Speaker 1: not currently say that Donald trumb lost a twenty twenty election.
Speaker 1: Mike Pence was not at this year's Republican National Convention,
Speaker 1: and so one actual asymmetry to me between the parties
Speaker 1: when you think back to their condition in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: was both parties were having a very very hard year
Speaker 1: for a bunch of different reasons. I also think the
Speaker 1: pandemic year is very hard on both parties. Right, There's
Speaker 1: a lot going on in American society that had had
Speaker 1: pushed kind of everybody into a very strange place. But
Speaker 1: I think the institutions on the left are just frankly
Speaker 1: healthier and more able to engage in slightly reasoned and
Speaker 1: managed criticism and periods of renewal, and at least under
Speaker 1: Donald Trump on the right, that's not been as true.
Speaker 1: And frankly the institutions on the right that have been
Speaker 1: trying to build some kind of structure for this. I
Speaker 1: think Heritage Foundation and Project twenty twenty five really saw
Speaker 1: itself as one of these groups, right, they were going
Speaker 1: to take this kind of mess of things from twenty
Speaker 1: twenty and turn it into some thing, and it's become
Speaker 1: like a huge catastrophe over there. But I do think
Speaker 1: Trump himself creates a lot of difficulty and the media
Speaker 1: dynamics themselves, right, I mean the Fox News and Dominion
Speaker 1: like settlements really tell you something. And now Tucker Carlson
Speaker 1: is over on X you know, with Elon Musk, where
Speaker 1: you know, he's still a very influential figure on the right,
Speaker 1: but has even less institutional strictures on what he can
Speaker 1: say or what level you know, those statements are going
Speaker 1: to be held to. And so I do think institutional
Speaker 1: health is a very big part of this, and just
Speaker 1: a problem the right is facing is that it has
Speaker 1: not learned a lot from twenty twenty right. I think
Speaker 1: the left actually has.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm curious for your take on that, because there
Speaker 3: was this I don't know if you know this speech
Speaker 3: that Tucker Carlson gave several years after he started the
Speaker 3: Daily Caller, as you might remember this too, where he
Speaker 3: basically said I was wrong. Like the right doesn't want this,
Speaker 3: Like the right does not want a rigorous conservative New
Speaker 3: York Times. The right ones a warrior, you know, for
Speaker 3: the right, like and that's what it And it sees
Speaker 3: right wing journalism as a weapon to be wielded on
Speaker 3: behalf of the movement rather than on the left. It's
Speaker 3: it's kind of it's like a check on the movement.
Speaker 3: It's like and the journalism is first and the and
Speaker 3: the kind of ideology is a second that does seem
Speaker 3: to be an asymmetry. Not to speak ill of your colleagues,
Speaker 3: as we're talking institutionally, not not colleagues, not none of
Speaker 3: your particular colleagues at different institutions. But I'm curious if
Speaker 3: that's been your uh if if that's been your experience
Speaker 3: on the in in the right, in the right wing
Speaker 3: media ecosystem, you know.
Speaker 4: I think part of it, so I'll say, actually, I
Speaker 4: think part of it is that Fox News is the
Speaker 4: elephant in the room because everyone is sort of like
Speaker 4: comparing themselves or the Fox just has so much power
Speaker 4: and it's waned a little bit, but has so much
Speaker 4: power over the consumer. So it's hard to you it's
Speaker 4: it's it's hard to kind of build conservative media.
Speaker 3: From especially when Tucker launch Daily Caller that Fox was
Speaker 3: like hegemonic.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, oh my gosh. Absolutely, And so that really
Speaker 4: set the tone for a lot of people in conservative media.
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously there are a ton of conservative journalists,
Speaker 4: and you know, we would maybe disagree on some of them.
Speaker 4: I know a lot of people who are committed to
Speaker 4: pursuing truth. As you know, an open biased conservative but
Speaker 4: you know, there are definitely I do. I agree that's
Speaker 4: a problem. I think the dominion settlement point is really
Speaker 4: interesting because my sort of rebuttal that would be there
Speaker 4: was also the Covington Catholic Settlement from CNN, and I
Speaker 4: just don't know. For me, I see the forces that
Speaker 4: created the dominion settlement, meaning Fox News's coverage of the
Speaker 4: twenty twenty election that led to the dominion settlement, which
Speaker 4: in some cases really followed Trump's line. I see that
Speaker 4: as being downstream of the forces that created the Covington
Speaker 4: Catholic Settlement, which came from CNN kind of jumping the
Speaker 4: gun on what happened to Nick Sandmen on the National
Speaker 4: Mall for reasons that were pretty clearly ideological. You guys
Speaker 4: might disagree, you know, journalists get things drunk sometimes. I
Speaker 4: thought that was purely ideological error. So I think conservatives
Speaker 4: are just constantly reacting. It becomes very hard for our
Speaker 4: institutions to reflect sort of first principles and then pursue
Speaker 4: a healthy debate over policies. So I kind of agree
Speaker 4: and disagree at the same time.
Speaker 3: I guess as were before you go, uh, I did
Speaker 3: you know you covered you cover economic policy that's, you know,
Speaker 3: your thing for decades really has been that area. So
Speaker 3: tell us, like what is going on with Kamala Harris's
Speaker 3: campaign and Lena Khan and Jonathan Cantor, Like, why why
Speaker 3: haven't they just come out and said, of course we're
Speaker 3: going to reappoint Lena Khan and Jonathan Cantor. They have
Speaker 3: they have been central to this this pro worker, anti
Speaker 3: trust policy that the Biden administration is pushed forward. What
Speaker 3: why won't they just do that?
Speaker 1: Like, what do you hear? I don't think they would
Speaker 1: do that about any member of the administration, like one.
Speaker 1: I think there's actually a rule you're not allowed to
Speaker 1: do that usually. Uh, but they haven't said we're going
Speaker 1: to repoint Jennet Yellen, who's going to be you know,
Speaker 1: who's been central to the economic recovery.
Speaker 3: Right, But also nobody on Wall Street is demanding that.
Speaker 1: I just I think the actual I think the actual
Speaker 1: line you're look, I think there's a version where why
Speaker 1: have they not said, listen, Lena Khan's you know, approach
Speaker 1: is great versus we're definitely going.
Speaker 3: To Rea think those are.
Speaker 1: Pretty different questions, and the answer here is a little
Speaker 1: bit I'm not sure. I don't know what I think
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris believes in her harder hearts about anti trust policy.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's necessarily that you know, read Hastings
Speaker 1: or read Hoffmann. I forget which read was Antilena Kon
Speaker 1: gets to set FDC policy, but her, you know. I
Speaker 1: think one of the realities of the Kamala Harris campaign
Speaker 1: is it emerged in matter of weeks, right, and so
Speaker 1: the work that a normal campaign would have done and
Speaker 1: that the candidate themselves would have done over the course
Speaker 1: of a primary and a year to kind of work
Speaker 1: every dimension of this out and give a series of
Speaker 1: major speeches laying out there thinking on it, they both
Speaker 1: not only didn't do, but didn't have to do. And
Speaker 1: a lot of that is done because you have to
Speaker 1: do it right. In some ways, it's strategically valuable to
Speaker 1: be ambiguous. The people who would be upset if you
Speaker 1: didn't reappoint Lenicon or someone like her, If you tell
Speaker 1: them we're not going to appoint Lenikon or someone like her,
Speaker 1: they're really mad, Whereas if you don't say anything at all,
Speaker 1: they're not happy, but they're still there in the coalition
Speaker 1: trying to influence the coalition, and so the fact that
Speaker 1: Harris did not have a primary process were pushed from
Speaker 1: the left or from the right, she had to distinguish
Speaker 1: which side of somebody. These divides she's been on has
Speaker 1: given them the opportunity to maintain a high level strategic ambiguity.
Speaker 1: So they maintain to some degree, given the Donald Trump
Speaker 1: is the opponent, the loyalty of the people and the
Speaker 1: lean con wing of the Democratic Party, even if that
Speaker 1: loyalty is currently suspicious and a little bit frustrated, but
Speaker 1: also the donors that that maybe don't want that, and
Speaker 1: then if they win the election, then they're gonna have
Speaker 1: to make some choices, you know, at the moment, they
Speaker 1: don't have to make.
Speaker 3: Speaking of that open primary, you and I were both
Speaker 3: rattling the cages for some type of an open process
Speaker 3: to nominate a replacement for Biden, if he could be
Speaker 3: persuaded to drop out. Were we right at the time?
Speaker 3: You think? I mean, I.
Speaker 1: Think early we were right. I mean I think Early
Speaker 1: still right the right thing? Are we still No? I
Speaker 1: don't think they should do an open primary.
Speaker 3: Or not now, But like in hindsight, were we right?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think two things about this hard One.
Speaker 1: We don't know if Kamala Harris is going to win
Speaker 1: the election, and if it turns out that the polling
Speaker 1: is systematically, you know, getting Trump wrong by three points
Speaker 1: in the Midwest, I think there's gonna be a lot
Speaker 1: of people who say, yeah, you know, either she should
Speaker 1: have picked Jos Shapiro or or in fact running a
Speaker 1: sort of a liberal San Franciscan politician, you know, in
Speaker 1: the industrial Midwest is not what the party should have
Speaker 1: been doing this year, which is why there was actually
Speaker 1: so much resistance to having Joe Biden stepped down and
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris step up much earlier in the process. I mean,
Speaker 1: as you know, because you were doing some of this
Speaker 1: work too. The big thing in the party was not
Speaker 1: that Joe Biden at eighty one or eighty two is
Speaker 1: an effective candidate, but there was very very little faith
Speaker 1: that Harris could step into his place effectively given where
Speaker 1: Democrats needed to win. Now, Harris was clearly underrated. I
Speaker 1: made that point back in February. I made that point
Speaker 1: consistently after February. But we don't exactly know how underrated,
Speaker 1: and so if she wins, I think people are going
Speaker 1: to say that was all ridiculous. Harris is great particly
Speaker 1: she wins convincingly, and if she doesn't, people are going
Speaker 1: to say that. You know, Joe Biden should have stepped
Speaker 1: down earlier in the party, should have been able to
Speaker 1: go through a competitive process to figure out, you know,
Speaker 1: which kind of candidate could best compete in the places
Speaker 1: Democrats need to win. But by the time Joe Biden
Speaker 1: actually stepped down, given how late in the game it was,
Speaker 1: I mean you were talking weeks before the Democratic Convention
Speaker 1: at that point, and given how exhausted the party was
Speaker 1: by what it took to get him to step aside
Speaker 1: and his endorsement, like, there was no uh, there was
Speaker 1: no possibility or opening for that right. If he had
Speaker 1: stepped down in March or decided not to run for
Speaker 1: reelection at all, that would have been a different question.
Speaker 3: How much how much heat did you get for that
Speaker 3: that February piece calling for Biden to step aside by
Speaker 3: the Power Center, It's like I'm at a place now
Speaker 3: in my career. I'm a a at a place my career.
Speaker 3: Those those folks used they used to give me hell
Speaker 3: all the time, Like the like Center Left World they've
Speaker 3: kind of given up on me. Like they're like, we're
Speaker 3: not we're not we're not influencing this guy, but we're
Speaker 3: not even gonna waste waste our breath anymore. But you
Speaker 3: know that also means that when I say, like, you know,
Speaker 3: Joe bidens to old hat step aside, they're like, well,
Speaker 3: that's what he says, Like we dont understand. We guess
Speaker 3: we already know he feels that way, but when you
Speaker 3: say it, it packs more punch. What kind of counter
Speaker 3: punch did you get at the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, a lot of people were not happy with me. Look,
Speaker 1: I always want to I'm not like I sit at
Speaker 1: ESK and I write things and I say them into
Speaker 1: a microphone. It's not a job of tremendous courage. There
Speaker 1: are people are pissed at me. And there were a
Speaker 1: lot of people privately, you know, we're thinking about these
Speaker 1: questions and wanted to talk about it. But but what
Speaker 1: they really felt was that I had not sufficiently considered
Speaker 1: how bad the alternatives were. That was the real private
Speaker 1: reaction I got. Probably are people were like fuck that guy,
Speaker 1: but they said it on Twitter. Right, you can go
Speaker 1: look at people you know calling me all sorts of
Speaker 1: things on Twitter. But because I don't read, I don't
Speaker 1: really read social media reaction in that way. I actually
Speaker 1: missed a lot of It is funny that when things
Speaker 1: sort of turned on this argument, people came to me like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I'm so sorry for how everybody treated you,
Speaker 1: and I was like, they treated me that badly. I
Speaker 1: hadn't actually totally totally clocked how bad people must have been.
Speaker 1: Although you know, then people sent me when.
Speaker 4: Did you stop? Why didn't you stop tuning into Twitter?
Speaker 1: I'll read it. I don't read stuff about me on it.
Speaker 1: I don't think the human mind is well adapted for
Speaker 1: that level of feedback. And I find that I am
Speaker 1: a less independent thinker if I am tightly tuned in
Speaker 1: to the reaction people have to the things that I think,
Speaker 1: or say or do. But in private, right and I
Speaker 1: had a lot of conversations, including with Biden administration people,
Speaker 1: and you know, they were they thought I was wrong.
Speaker 1: But they thought I was wrong because one, I was
Speaker 1: underestimating Joe Biden. They thought I was wrong. Two because
Speaker 1: I was overestimating Kamala Harris, and they thought I was wrong.
Speaker 1: Three because there's no way that a party could manage
Speaker 1: an open convention that if Kamala Harris was weak, would
Speaker 1: pass around Kamala Harris and if you believed all three
Speaker 1: of those things. And I was definitely wrong, But but
Speaker 1: I didn't. You know, people knew Joe Biden's age was
Speaker 1: a problem. So in the more reflective spaces in which
Speaker 1: I tended to like actually have conversations, you know, in
Speaker 1: a way I that I cared about, you know, it
Speaker 1: was it was a little bit more interesting. I did
Speaker 1: find that people thought I was like a total fucking idiot,
Speaker 1: said so in public and people who didn't said so
Speaker 1: in private. But you know, I got to have the
Speaker 1: benefit of both sides of that.
Speaker 3: Cool Emily, anything else, I know, as there's got to
Speaker 3: run pretty soon.
Speaker 4: No, I just want to say thank you. This was
Speaker 4: fantastic and we really appreciate you coming on the show.
Speaker 1: I'm touched you stay through the whole thing, Emily, and
Speaker 1: I'm excited to hear to hear what you find from
Speaker 1: from from the Rome Post a little.
Speaker 3: Bit wall give us tell us real quick, what are
Speaker 3: you hearing, Emily, anything new from your from your Roman friends.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of this is going to change
Speaker 4: based on what happens in November.
Speaker 3: So okay, that's a lot of things right now. All right, well,
Speaker 3: Ezra Kleine, host of the Ezra Klines Show, New York
Speaker 3: Times columnist, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1: A Gill