This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ezra Klein: Welcome to the first subscriber-only “Ask Me Anything” episode. We’re in the new postpaywall era. We want to make sure you’re getting more for your money.
I’m joined today by Claire Gordon, our great senior editor, to talk through a bunch of election-related questions you all have sent in.
Claire Gordon: Yeah, people are paying for this. So you’ve got to tell them how you really feel.
Klein: It’s got to be good.
Gordon: We got a ton of questions sent in about the elections. This is very much an election-focused AMA.
And to start off: Democrats have been losing the working class. Democrats are desperate to win back the working class.
And we got a couple questions, one from Garrett Burnett, who asked, “What does ‘working class’ even mean anymore?” And then Andrew Owen, who’s like: What are we talking about with the working class? I mean, I imagine it’s not really a monolith in today’s economy.
So what the heck is the working class?
Klein: Ah, a nice easy question about an endlessly contested definitional controversy.
Look, there’s no definition of the working class that works. People are individuals, and no megacategory is going to capture everybody. So imagine if you say the working class is anybody making less than $50,000. Well, you got a lot of English Ph.D. students who are making less than $50,000. Is an English Ph.D. student at Yale a member of the working class?
Maybe in a sense. But in another sense, probably they are working with cultural capital that the son of a barber who is making a little bit above minimum wage doing deliveries for Uber is not working with.
So on the one hand, you miss people if you’re looking just at income. If you’re looking just at education, if you want to make the cut that we normally make, which is college or noncollege: Plenty of people who don’t go to college have amazing careers. You have people who didn’t go to college, but they have an exterminator company that does really well in South Texas. You have people who are college dropouts. Depending on how you make that cut, maybe you catch him, maybe you don’t? But is Bill Gates a member of the working class? Or Mark Zuckerberg?
There’s nothing perfect here. I tend to go with the educational cut. I think it’s cleaner. I think it captures something more enduring about a person’s situation. The problem with income is income fluctuates a lot year to year. So somebody might be having a down year: They’re making $45,000. Maybe next year it’s $90,000.
Gordon: Or over your life.
Klein: Or over your life.
Gordon: All young people are working class by an income definition.
Klein: Exactly. So income: It fluctuates so much that it doesn’t tell you a lot about the trajectory people are on. And where they were even just a couple of years ago. Whereas education tends to be capturing something that is a little bit more consistent.
It is related to their cultural capital. It is related to where they come from. We know that people are much more likely to go to college if their parents went to college. So that’s what I use. That is what most people who study this use.
And I do think, by the way, as the Democratic Party’s coalition becomes more college educated, you see too much focus on the problems people like that specifically have.
So student-loan forgiveness was a big demand inside the Democratic coalition, a big demand from what you might call the Jacobin left of the Democratic Party. It turned out to be quite unpopular because it was functionally, depending on the measure you looked at, upward redistribution. Somebody does pay for that.
Now, there might be reasons you want to do that, and there might be particular groups for whom you want to do that. People got ripped off by for-profit colleges. But I do think one of the reasons it turned out to be bad politics was it was another example of Democrats’ focusing more on the people who were in their coalition and the problems they had than on the people who were not.
And people felt that. For a lot of people, going to college is a sign itself of a certain level of privilege. And for that to have been the thing that got forgiven, not credit card debt, not medical debt, not debt to payday lenders — that hurt. So I think that’s one reason it’s worth focusing on them.
The other thing I would just say is there’s not a cut you can make here that tells a different story. It is not as if Democrats are doing worse with noncollege voters but better with voters making less than $50,000 a year. Almost no matter how you look at this, the trends are going badly for Democrats among the people, again, they claim to represent and whom they say their policies are focused on.
And that’s a thing we’re seeing in a lot of advanced democracies. You see this in a lot of European countries. So it’s not a specific mistake that the American Democratic Party is making.
There are bigger global trends happening here that are happening to a greater or lesser extent in different places. But we are seeing them mirrored in country after country after country, suggesting some pretty big structural factors here — and that reversing them will require pretty big structural and political movements.
Gordon: So I found this question pretty interesting, very curious what you think, from Noah Case:
It’s not uncommon to see people claim that the United States is moving toward a postmaterial politics. I can’t decide whether these election results weaken that claim or strengthen it.
On the one hand, for all the talk of wokeness and cultural issues, it seems like voters swung to Trump because of inflation — a material issue. On the other hand, voters picked a candidate whose policies will raise prices and diminish Americans’ standard of living.
What do you make of that contradiction? Is it even a contradiction?
So was this a postmaterial election or was it the economy, Stupid?
Klein: So all elections are now postmaterial elections. But it’s important to say what that means.
The theory of postmaterialism, which comes from Ronald Inglehart, and to a large degree Pippa Norris, who’s been on the show in the past, is noting that in the ’70s, you begin to see — in America but also in other countries — a sharply rising set of concerns that are not directly about the pocketbook or about war.
So environmental concerns, concerns about equality, concerns about different forms of political participation. And this continues to rise as countries become more educated and more affluent. And so the basket of issues is just broader.
And to some degree that was always true. I do think you can overstate how much the pre-’70s politics was all material. It’s not as if race was not an issue in American politics in 1940, to say nothing of 1840.
Gordon: Or women in the 1910s.
Klein: Or women. But there is very, very good evidence that this hits a kind of tipping point. You have much more of societies going to college. That seems to change the way politics works. And that’s just continued to be true.
So inflation was very, very important this year. In that way I wouldn’t say it was a postmaterial election at all. On the other hand, when we say inflation was very, very important this year — what are we saying? Well, in 2020, we didn’t have an inflation problem. And what we seem to have had is a 5- to 6-point swing in the vote from 2020, something like that.
Overwhelmingly, the way people voted in 2024 was how they voted in 2020. So what shifted this election on the margin, I think, was largely what we would call material concerns. On the other hand, most people are not voting in a way that is exquisitely sensitive to the promises the two parties are making about material concerns.
The fundamental fact of the elections now is that they’re stable and that partisanship is very deeply entrenched, and people are not changing their minds in relationship to this or that policy. They’re not changing their minds even in relationship to this or that economy. To see how much some of this is psychological, it is worth going and looking at these charts.
You can go see them at Gallup or other places that measure consumer confidence and expectations about the economy and people saying the economy is good or bad. Just look at the shift that happens if you break that down by partisanship, when Donald Trump wins. Partisans feel better about the economy when their team is in charge, and that has a much bigger effect on economic expectations than any individual policy you can isolate.
Gordon: And that’s an indication of postmaterial times.
Klein: I think so. It’s an indication that people are putting a lot before the actual condition of their bank account.
Gordon: Well, that kind of tees up nicely. My next question, which we also got from a couple different listeners, is: In the middle of this postmortem season on the election, what lessons do you worry would be the wrong ones for the party to learn going forward — or lessons you worry that Democrats might overlearn?
Klein: Oh, that’s a good question.
Let me start here. I think the battle on what you might call extreme wokeness has already been won. I think it was won before the election. I think you saw that in Kamala Harris’s campaign.
So one concern I have is I think there is more likelihood on that of an overcorrection, where particularly trans people get thrown under the bus. And if you look at what Representative Nancy Mace is doing, targeting Senator Sarah McBride in Congress: There is such hatred of trans people in the Republican Party right now. And trans people are such a vulnerable group that I think it’s worth being very careful there.
And Democrats made really severe political mistakes here. I would say the trans activist community was part of those political mistakes, and they allowed themselves to get caught on the edge cases Republicans had chosen. It was as if the main political issue around trans rights was National Collegiate Athletic Association swimming competitions, or for that matter, combat sports. And it’s just not.
You do not want to let the other side choose the issue. And in a very strange way, a lot of the groups that were trying to represent and were working in a very sincere way on behalf of trans people were also trying to make Democrats get caught on these edge cases. Because they were using them to force Democrats to send a costly signal of their commitment to trans rights.
If you were willing to say, for instance, that yes, you would do gender-reassignment surgeries for prisoners: That’s a real signal you’re willing to take some political pain in order to show your allegiance or your allyship to that community. I think that just ended up being a fairly disastrous political maneuver. But I think that’s done.
And I think that’s true on a lot of things. I’m more worried now about people forgetting that systemic racism is a real thing that we need to think about in policymaking than about it being overly big in policymaking.
There are places where this isn’t true. I think that university D.E.I. organizations are still a very strange space. There’s a great piece by Nicholas Confessore in The New York Times about the architecture of the University of Michigan’s huge D.E.I. efforts and how ineffective it has been: how much money has gone into it, how it’s made everybody less happy there — and there’s been no advance on anything people care about.
So to me, there is a tendency here that is mirrored in many other areas of liberal lawmaking to focus on process and not outcomes. I’m pretty for D.E.I. efforts that achieve the outcomes they set out to pursue. I am not for the ones that don’t. And there’s been very little seriousness about it. There’s been a lot of signaling.
So that’s one area, though, where I am more worried about the overcorrection than I think the needed correction.
Gordon: I’m just curious, politically, how do you walk that line in practice? Say, if you’re a Democrat running for office? Because I imagine Republicans are going to keep wanting to make this a salient issue.
They see it as a winning one for them. Journalists will ask candidates about it. It sounds like you’re saying that you hope the Democratic Party doesn’t make trans issues their Sister Souljah moment.
Klein: That is one of the things I’m saying. Because also I don’t think that’s why Kamala Harris lost. I don’t think it’s the most important feature of this period of American policymaking.
I will say that I thought Representative Seth Moulton, who is from Massachusetts, who there was flack around because he said after the election that he didn’t want his girls playing in sports with people who were biologically born as men — and then the parts of the Democratic Party or the parts of the liberal coalition, whatever you want to call it, that have been enforcing a lockstep on this came after him.
And you watch Moulton hold his ground, and nothing bad happened to him. And then he said something in a more recent — I saw it quoted in a Times article: But that doesn’t mean that I want to allow anybody to be discriminated against in this country for being trans.
And every single issue is like this.
You have to know what it is you are for and what it is where the politics do not support you going further — or you don’t even think it’s a good idea to go further. And you just have to draw the lines correctly.
When people say the Democratic Party was listening too much to the groups, it’s not that they listened to every group on everything. Ask the people demanding a Gaza cease-fire how quick the Biden administration was to take up their cause.
I think one thing that did happen here was that Joe Biden was very, very, very engaged on foreign policy. And he really kept hold of that. And I do think as a man in his 80s, there were limits to how much he was that level of engaged on.
And I think domestic policy was outsourced much more to larger internal coalitions in the Democratic Party than the foreign policy was. And so there were a lot of lines drawn on foreign policy, and there was a lot less of that internal balancing happening on domestic policy. They were just saying yes to too much.
Everybody has to figure out where their politics are, and then they have to work, if they don’t think the politics is where they want it to be, to change the politics. But what was happening too often in the Democratic Party was a shortcut. You weren’t trying to change the politics — you were just getting the politicians to sign on to what you wanted. And the politicians were treating signing on to things as if those were acts of politics. As if those groups spoke for very large parts of the country, and by bringing them on, you were actually bringing on the constituencies they claimed to represent.
And the political theory in both directions was wrong. But that is not unique to social issues, not unique to gender identity issues, not unique to racial issues.
This is how economic issues work. Tax cuts are popular until you go too far and you gut the government. This is how health care policy works. Climate policy has all these dynamics.
What good politicians do is they balance.
Gordon: So to make this issue a little bit more personal, we’ve got a question from Don Frost, who said: “As a young gender-queer Pennsylvanian, the ads this cycle have been difficult, to say the least. Trans and queer folk, especially around the Philly area, are already targets for violence. My fear is that this violence will grow over the next four years. Hearing the mainstream
media — ”
Gordon: The narratives that you were just talking about that Democrats have gone too woke on trans issues —
“ — has me deeply worried. I understand wanting to focus our messaging on the working class, but why should I fight for a party that views me as expendable?”
Klein: I can’t speak for the Democratic Party. My position, as I said a second ago, is that this election was not lost on trans issues — and that it is neither the right nor the moral response to it to flip all the way in the other direction.
I have many of the same fears as that listener. I watch what Nancy Mace is doing. I watch what the Trump administration or the incoming Trump administration is saying what that coalition in the Republican Party wants — and I think it is reasonable to be afraid. And one of the lessons I take from that is that if you are trying to protect vulnerable people, or if you are a vulnerable person who is working in politics, you have to take the politics really seriously.
People often make the analogy between this set of issues and gay rights and gay marriage. And there’s a lot of reasons that analogy may not hold, depending on what part of this you’re talking about. The questions of expanding marriage and the questions of, say, gender-reassignment surgery for minors are just very different questions.
And they’re probably going to have a different politics ultimately associated with them. So assuming that things will naturally all take the shape of gay marriage, even over time, is probably not right.
Even so, in 2004, which is a year I keep going back to as an analog for this year, there was, after that election, a belief among Democrats that a series of ballot initiatives around gay marriage had been part of what lost John Kerry the election by juicing evangelical turnout. And there was, by the way, in that period an effort to change the constitution to make gay marriage unconstitutional, to define marriage as between a man and a woman.
So there was a real political effort to discriminate here — in a way that looking back from our current vantage point feels crazy. It was very, very little time after that, that the right to gay marriage was enshrined in the constitution. But what happened in the middle of that period was Barack Obama got elected. And he didn’t get elected by saying that he supported gay marriage.
He said he didn’t support gay marriage. But everybody kind of knew he did. And what he was doing explicitly, implicitly, in different ways, was balancing the politics so that he and the people who agreed with him — or, frankly, went further than him, like Joe Biden, ultimately — would have power, and they would then be able to protect the people in their coalition they cared about. You cannot take the politics out of politics. And this is what I mean when I talk about the costly signaling — the investment in having politicians offer costly signals of support you. Not just say the thing that is popular but saying the thing that is unpopular.
And that’s been taken as evidence of their commitment. You can really trust a politician who’s willing to take an unpopular stand on your behalf.
Well, now we’re seeing, at least partly, why that may not be a good strategy. Because what matters first is not everything the politician says — but the power they have.
And if the politician who agrees with you 95 percent of the way or 90 percent of the way but only says 70 percent of the things you want them to say —because they’re trying to win votes in suburban Ohio or exurban Ohio: If that politician knows how to win, that’s actually a pretty good bet.
So I’m not going to tell anybody that they’re wrong to be afraid. But if the listener asks if they should work on behalf of a party that views them as expendable: I don’t know if they should work for Democrats. I’m not here to recruit anybody for the Democratic Party.
But the questions they should be asking, I think, need to be more fully political — that the question is gaining power for the coalition that will listen to and work with you. Not finding a coalition that says everything that you want them to say. Because of the nature, the purpose, of the political coalition is to win political power, not to signal agreement.
And I think that has been forgotten in a lot of activist circles.
Gordon: Well, another question from a despairing corner of the Democratic —
Klein: Is this all going to be [Gordon laughs] anything but this? [Klein laughs.]
Gordon: What?
Klein: Do you think anybody is still listening? [Gordon laughs.] This is what we’re giving our subscribers? Thank you for subscribing to The New York Times?
Gordon: It’s an emotional arc. And then we’re going to end on just the rosy side of this whole election. So, Gaza, from Josh Wartel. He wrote in: “Many Democrats (fairly) wanted silence about Gaza during the campaign — to keep a united front against Trump. Now that Trump has won, was that a mistake?”
And basically, what do you do now if you desperately care about the situation in Gaza?
Klein: I’m going to hold off on the question of the politics of it.
This was impossible politics for the Democratic coalition.
It’s really worth noting that Donald Trump made huge gains among both Arab American voters and among Orthodox and conservative Jewish voters.
So the politics of this were so bad, the Democrats lost support on both sides of it simultaneously. And I think it is very clear in the appointments Trump is making which side of this he was actually on when he is putting people like Mike Huckabee in as the ambassador to Israel, and Huckabee has an evangelical messianic set of views on Israel.
I don’t think in the end the Biden administration did a good job here. I’m not particularly supportive of where they’ve been over the past six or eight months.
But Donald Trump, from the signals being sent by these appointments, is really frightening. And it is, I fear, a real blank check for the Netanyahu government.
And what can be done about it? I don’t know.
I don’t think that anti-Gaza protesters are going to have a lot of influence on a Trump administration. I don’t think, frankly, America has as much influence over Israel as it wishes it does. This is, to be fair to the Biden administration, part of the balancing act they’ve been in.
If I had one of their senior staffers here, what they would say is that they often had the choice between functionally severing the relationship with Netanyahu and the Israeli government — and that government possibly becoming more brutal, pulling closer to China and Russia — and being in this delicate act of trying to, at least in their mind, hold them back somewhat and maintain influence.
Again, my view is that a harder pivot needed to have been made much earlier, and that if in the end that did mean we lost some of the relationship with Israel, I think that would have been at least a risk worth running. I don’t think what they did worked out. That’s just my view.
I think the better outcome you can hope for here is that all these wars are near their natural end.
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, is dead. Hamas is functionally annihilated as a significant military force — that’s been true for some time now. And Iran clearly doesn’t want the fight, and Trump doesn’t want disorder. He wants to be seen as the strongman who came back in and restored order. And what I think that he will want to do, and what I think the Israeli government might want to give him, is order.
Now, that order is going to come in the context of a zero political horizon for the Palestinians. It is going to come in the context of just functionally unending Israeli occupation over Gaza.
I don’t think the Trump administration is looking or particularly interested in the question of whether or not Palestinians have self-determination or even self-governance in Gaza. And the ability of West Bank settlers and the Israeli right wing to continue annexation in the West Bank is going to accelerate.
And I don’t know what the levers people can pull from here on that are. They were not strong in the Biden administration. They’re going to be weaker in the Trump administration. So I think you might get an end to the really acute phase of violence, at least for now. But the slower violence, the more politicized violence, the movement toward annexation — I think that’s going to accelerate.
And I think that they will be emboldened with Trump to say this is our chance to maybe destroy the Iranian nuclear efforts — if they think they can do that. It’s not clear if they can do that. Or in punishment for something, to set fire to the Iranian oil fields — that kind of thing.
The Trump administration is full of very intense Iran hawks. So that is a space that I worry about as a place where you could see a lot of war. That will be somewhat restrained by the fact that I think the Trump administration has, does not want to be seen as having, a lot of war on its watch. I think they don’t want to be presiding over chaos.
So maybe you get some stability. I think you would have gotten that one way or the other because of where the conflict is. But if you wanted a movement at any point here toward a more just outcome, I don’t at least at this moment see the pathway for it.
And you were saying, this is a despairing question. But it’s a despairing answer.
Gordon: How about a nice question for you?
Klein: Yeah, how about one?
Gordon: From Matthew Dreiling:
One of the striking things about the presidential election was how places like California and New York swung toward Trump. As the Democrats rebuild from this defeat, I think a lot of local elections, like the upcoming mayoral election in New York, could be a testing ground for a new type of politics: one that focuses on making it easier for working-class people to live and raise a family in big cities. What do you think would be the best policies Democrats could embrace to make their cities better?
Gordon: You just finished a book on this?
Klein: I just finished a book, coming out in March, “Abundance,” which you’ll be hearing more about.
I think in terms of what is difficult here: It worries me that there isn’t yet an example of a big American city that entered into what I’d call the equilibrium of tightly regulated growth constraint — very, very hard to build homes, a lot of process really to build anything — and was able to really turn that around.
Austin, Texas, and Houston are very good examples here that have had much looser restrictions on building, have been able to be much more flexible. And Austin has built homes at a pace like nothing you see in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Boston or New York — and rents have fallen. That is a real policy win there.
I will say this was beginning a couple years ago. Eric Adams won the New York mayoral race very much on this sort of appeal. He is a Black ex-cop who was running against disorder, made good arguments about upzoning and building more homes. And the problem is, he’s ineffective and possibly corrupt. And so it didn’t really work.
Gordon: Turkey. Why Turkey?
Klein: Why Turkey?
I think there is less proven than there is suspected. Let me put it that way. It’s probably not just a weakness for the country of Turkey, is my point.
And then you look at other cities. You know, London Breed, who was the mayor of San Francisco and just lost for re-election — she knew all this.
She was considered by many to not be that effective, though the mayorship in S.F. is a limited office, as it is everywhere to different degrees. She at least talked a big game on NIMBYism. And I’ve watched so many of these big city mayors promise more housing but not be able to deliver it — not because they didn’t want it but because they couldn’t master the bureaucracy, the process. They couldn’t get it through the board of supervisors; they couldn’t deal with the planning commissions; the power is very fractured. The idea that it’s just what the mayor wants is simply not true.
But I’ve been working on a piece about why, if the YIMBYs have been so intellectually effective, they made it into both Kamala Harris’s and Barack Obama’s Democratic National Committee speeches.
Why in San Francisco, which is the center of YIMBY power, where the YIMBY movement began, where in California they have passed the most legislation: Why do you not see more homes being built? Why can you not see an effect, really, of YIMBYism in San Francisco?
And so I was calling and talking to people who build homes there. And one of the things they were saying to me was: Well, yeah, Senator Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks, the California state assembly member, and other excellent, pro-housing California legislators have passed a lot of bills. But those bills, in order to take advantage of those fast-track processes, you have to accept all these other standards. You have to pay, say, prevailing wage, which is paying a much higher wage, sort of more like what union members would make. What they said is: When you do that, when you add in all the things you have to then do in the project, the set-asides for affordability, that kind of thing, to take advantage of the faster process means adding so many things that raise my costs, it’s just not worth it for me, so I don’t do it.
So California has passed all these bills to build homes faster. But it’s not building homes faster, because in the end it wasn’t willing to make the trade-offs to get there. The thing that they can point to as having done really well is made it possible to build these accessory dwelling units.
That’s because now you really just can do it. Like, if you own the land, you can build a little in-law unit. But you can’t build a house that way. And so it’s not that everybody wants to make a million compromises. Big-city politics, state politics, are difficult: There are interest groups. You need to win over the support of legislators who have come up in a different politics than you have. This stuff takes time. And it hasn’t been going on for all that long. But right now it has not been successful.
And until what is actually happening in these cities changes, I think it is important for Democrats to be pretty skeptical and to keep a lot of pressure on.
Voting is cheap. The fact that a lot of people who live in blue cities or blue states either didn’t come out for Harris or voted for Trump — that’s a cheap expression of disinterest. Or anger. What’s expensive is moving. That is what people there are doing, too.
People are leaving Illinois and New York and California — by the hundreds of thousands. Net migration is very big. It is so big, if the trends continue, the 2030 census will take so much political power away from the big blue states. Because they have lost so much population to red states that if Kamala Harris or a future presidential candidate on the Democratic side won every state Harris won, and won Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the so-called blue wall — that still would not be enough to win the presidency.
So Democrats, in the states they govern, are losing so many people, that they are also losing political power. That is a very deep expression of anger. And not just anger — sadness. A lot of these people don’t want to leave. They just can’t afford to raise a family in the place they live. That, to me, is a huge failure.
And it doesn’t end until it actually ends. Electing a mayor who says they want to change it, doesn’t change it. We’ve seen that a lot. You have to change an entire system built up over a very long period of time. And the truth is nobody has done that yet.
Gordon: We actually had a question — a listener wrote in a question about that — about how the Electoral College might change, the math might change, Florida might gain, Texas might gain, and how worried Democrats should be, and if they should start thinking about it now and planning for it.
And it sounds like the answer might be: Just make it easier to build in New York City or in San Francisco.
Klein: They should be worried, but I’m very careful about futurecasting into politics. So we’re talking here, I guess, about the 2032 election — eight years from now.
Eight years ago, we had the 2016 election, which we now understand began creating a coalitional realignment in American politics that flowered in 2020 and 2024. Things are going to change between here and then, too. And so I don’t want to do too much static forecasting of, well: The population will change this way. And if you hold the two-party coalitions constant, they’re going to do this.
Gordon: We’re here with the same president as we had back then.
Klein: But how good does the demographic forecasting that had made Democrats so confident in 2015 look right now? He’s not winning for the reasons he won necessarily in 2016. If he had not made huge gains with particularly Hispanic and Asian voters, and some gains maybe with Black voters, he’d be in a very different position.
So the things that people did when they drew straight lines on their population charts and assumed that people would be voting the way they are now in 10 years — I’ve just become very cautious about that form of analysis.
Gordon: As a final question, this one is from Ilan Golberstein: “I’m currently 13. If you were a 13-year-old right now, what would you be telling yourself,” he says, “about school but maybe about politics right now?”
I love thinking about being 13 right now. And this kid became, like, sentient in the first Trump administration.
I don’t know if you have an immediate thought?
Klein: I didn’t think about politics when I was 13. I have to be honest — I mean, I don’t think if you’re 13 maybe you should be thinking that much about politics.
I don’t know that I have a good answer for this. Here’s what I believe about advice in general, and it’s like a very old-school podcast question: What would you tell your younger self? Tim Ferriss used to ask a question like that. I remember always enjoying it. And I’ve thought about that question. And the truth is, I don’t think anything I could have told my younger self would help.
Gordon: Because you’re doing pretty good.
Klein: [Laughs] Well, that’s not what I mean, actually. I don’t think advice is that useful. Except in very rare circumstances. It’s really hard to implement. You know, the thing everybody wants to say, right? The thing that, you know: Enjoy it. I wish I told myself at 13 to enjoy it. These were some really wonderful, amazing years.
I did not enjoy being 13. I did not enjoy being 14, did not enjoy being 15 —
Gordon: You were not unique in that.
Klein: Yeah, and nobody coming to me and saying, “Stop and smell the flowers. This is actually great!” could have made me do it. I did terribly in school. I had like, very few friends.
And I just had to change. And it wasn’t advice that changed me. It was life. It was experience. And it was things that I couldn’t have predicted and still don’t myself really understand.
So, I mean, I have some things that I think are just good for people all the time: I think people should read as many books — on paper — as they possibly can. I think that building that form of attention in yourself, even aside from what you learn from the books, building the ability to focus and think for long periods of time, is so valuable. And it is only getting more valuable as TikTok and the internet and A.I. and a million other things train us out of that. As everybody’s brain is being adapted to a much more hyperstimulated short-form world, the ability to think in long form becomes that much more valuable.
But also, I don’t think me saying that is going to change anything for anybody. It’s hard to do all this. I’ve always loved reading books — and so easy for me to say.
Thirteen can be a tough age. The thing that I knew but wish I had known in my bones is that nothing that is true at 13 is necessarily going to be true in five or 10 years. That the degree to which life changes even year to year — I’m 40 — the degree to which my life is different today than five years ago, the degree to which in some ways it’s different than one year ago: It just shocks me every single year.
And it’s not because I can make a change or control it. But having the one real piece of wisdom I think aging has given me is some little part of me that actually believes — doesn’t just think or know or get told but actually believes — that whatever is going on now is not going to be going on in the same way in six months. Or to say nothing of six years. Like a somatic sense that just everything changes. And how you feel now may not even be just how you feel tomorrow. And there’s a lot of grace in that if you’re having a hard time.
Gordon: And four years: very long time for a 13-year-old — not that long in the grand scheme of things.
Klein: Yeah, four years: not that long in the grand scheme of politics — and not predictable. I keep saying this to people, but there’s no guarantee that the shift from 2004 to 2008 is mirrored from 2024 to 2028. But what we’ve seen in the past in big second defeats for parties that then feel like a realignment: what was called the Republican permanent majority in 2004, the belief in the emerging Democratic majority after 2012 —
Gordon: People should stop writing books with these kinds of titles.
Klein: Exactly. And then now, things change politically more in four years than can be imagined. And so being open to those changes — and being alert — is really important.
Don’t draw a straight line from how you feel now or how the country feels now. Because the line is going to wiggle, curve, loop back on itself, become a star. All kinds of things are going to happen that we have not predicted now.
Gordon: All right. Thank you, Ezra.
Klein: Claire Gordon, thank you very much. And to all of you who have subscribed, thank you very much.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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