We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another

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.

Last week Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at Utah Valley University. His murder has shaken me pretty deeply: In the days after his assassination, when I’d close my eyes, I kept imagining a bullet going through a neck.

But it disturbed me in a different way when I would open my eyes and look online to see some of Kirk’s allies declaring war, insisting that normal politics had failed, that the time to cleanse this country of the radical left — whatever that means — had come. When I’d see some of Kirk’s critics mocking or reveling in his death, sharing clips of his worst moments, suggesting in one way or another that he deserved this, that we were better off.

This was not everybody. It was not most of us — it never is. But the nature of online algorithms meant it made for a lot of what the most politically engaged were seeing of one another. You could feel the temperature rising.

I don’t think we have ever felt as close, in my lifetime, to some kind of violent national rupture. Because it’s not just Kirk: A man tried to burn Josh Shapiro and his family alive in their home. A man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home to kidnap her and, when he didn’t find her, he fractured her husband’s skull with a hammer. The former speaker of the Minnesota House and her husband were assassinated. The chief executive officer of UnitedHealthCare was gunned down in Midtown Manhattan, and many lionized his killer.

Violence is viral. It infects, it spreads. Violence is combustible. It blazes into civil wars, world wars, totalitarian turns. Who knows which spark will light the wildfire?

In the hours after Kirk’s murder, while trying to process my own shock, I wrote a piece about him. In that piece I said: You can disagree with virtually everything Kirk believed about politics, you can detest some of what he said and did — yet still believe that he was, there on that stage, practicing politics the right way: showing up to college campuses and inviting people who disagreed with him to talk with him.

I said that I had often wished my own side exhibited more of that spirit — that we went more often to the places where we knew people would disagree with us and talked to them, that we treated disagreement as a beginning rather than an ending.

I’ve published a lot of pieces over the years. I’m not sure I’ve published any as polarizing as that one.

Many appreciated the piece, particularly on the right. It saw their friend and ally more as he saw himself. There were many, closer to my own politics, who were infuriated by it.

Privately and publicly, they offered the worst things Kirk had said and done: starting a watchlist of leftist professors, busing people to the protest that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection, telling his political foes that they should be deported, saying the Democratic Party hates this country, saying the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. Friends said to me: Look, we can oppose political violence without whitewashing this guy.

I spent some time thinking about that over the weekend. I also just spent time thinking and trying to work through how I have been feeling.

My reaction to this, honestly, is that it is too little to just say we oppose political violence. In ways that surprise me, given what I thought of Kirk’s project, I was and am grieving for Kirk himself. Not because I knew him — I didn’t. Not because he was a saint — he wasn’t. Not because I agreed with him — no, most of what he poured himself into trying to achieve, I pour myself into trying to prevent.

But I find myself grieving for him because I recognize some commonality with him. He was murdered for participating in our politics. Somewhere beyond how much divided us, there was something that bonded us, too. Some effort to change this country in ways that we think are good.

I believe this so strongly: We have to be able to see that the bullet that tore into him was an act of violence against us all.

I don’t know how to express this thought exactly. The nature of our politics right now is that it is ferocious. Our visions of what is good and even decent have diverged. The stakes of our politics right now are frightening; the consequences are real. We see one another as threats — and to some degree, we are right.

And it is also true that this country will be immeasurably worse if that is all we are to one another — if we cannot still see what binds us, if we cannot still feel ourselves as one body politic.

I was thinking about this before Kirk’s murder. We are going to have to live here with one another. There will be no fever that breaks, no permanent victory that routs or quiets those who disagree with us. I have watched many on both sides entertain the illusion that there would be, either through the power of social shame and cultural pressure or the force the state could bring to bear on those it seeks to silence. It won’t work. It can’t work. It would not be better if it did. That would not be a free country.

Much of what I would describe as Kirk’s worst moments were standard-fare MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of that movement is the president of the United States. He is now in the White House, having won about half the country’s votes in the last election. We are going to have to live here with one another, believing what we believe, disagreeing in the ways we disagree.

To recognize that does not mean we don’t disagree. It does not mean we are not appalled or afraid of what others say or want. But I think it means that we do more than that, too. I think we also have to be looking for what we can recognize in one another. Sometimes that might mean overlooking what we can’t recognize in one another.

I worry about how hard social media makes that. It is not only that it flattens us down to single moments but that it parcels out different flattened moments to different audiences. We are shattered inside the algorithm, the shards of us sent flying into the world. Instead of being complex to one another, we become incomprehensible, almost unimaginable, to one another.

But it is our choice to see one another through algorithms darkly. We can choose otherwise. I have thought Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, has been a remarkable leader over the last week. What he said here has resonated for me:

Archived clip of Governor Spencer Cox: We can return violence with violence. We can return hate with hate. And that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an offramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse. But see, these are choices that we can make. History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country. But every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us. We get to make decisions. We have our agency.

That does not just go for those of us on the left. I’ve seen many on the right struggling with the idea that Kirk’s assassination somehow reveals the impossibility, the futility, of normal politics: He tried to do it by dialogue, and look what happened to him.

What marks those who choose political violence is not their politics — it’s their decision to choose violence. That they make that decision, for whatever reason, does not justify your making that decision, for any reason.

We cannot give the lost or the mad a veto over the agreements and conduct that safeguard our society. That gives lone gunmen all the power — and it leaves us with nothing.

I don’t know what happened inside the mind of Kirk’s shooter. I have tried to imagine being his parents, being so excited for his path just a few years ago. I don’t think the question is: What politically radicalized the man who shot Kirk? I know many political radicals. They are some of the best people I know. I think the question is: What broke in him? This was not the act of someone thinking clearly.

But we still have to think clearly. When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was assaulted, when Minnesota had to grieve the assassination of some of its leaders, that did not render normal politics obsolete. It made normal politics all the more essential and beautiful. It was a reminder of the horror that lies on the other shore.

All I can say, for me, in the work I do, is I want to create a space that takes our disagreements seriously and takes the stakes of them seriously — but does so without deepening our divisions irreparably. We are going to have to live here with one another. We’re going to have to be friends and foes at the same time.

A few days before Kirk’s murder, I had taped an episode with Ben Shapiro. Shapiro is well to my political right, a person with whom I have had many disagreements — yet also a person with whom I’ve had good conversations over the years.

This conversation was no different. It was about his new book, “Lions and Scavengers.” And talking to him surprised me. You learn things talking to people that you don’t expect.

So I left this conversation as it was. It’s about Shapiro’s new book and the political moment before Kirk’s murder. I wanted to let it live as it was, because talking to one another about our disagreements isn’t only something we should do in grief or in horror. It’s just something we should be doing.

Ezra Klein: Ben Shapiro, welcome to the show.

Ben Shapiro: Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

So let’s go into the book. You have a theory of two groups here: Lions and Scavengers. What’s a Lion? What’s a Scavenger?

The basic idea is that there are parts of us — or you can say cultures, groups, depending on how you’re characterizing them — who are more apt to build. Who believe that there is an active duty in the world to make the world better, to build social fabric, to defend a civilization that is worthwhile, to innovate, to protect things that are good.

And then there are people who are basically rooted in envy and are seeking to tear down all of those things. And it’s not necessarily that they have a good replacement for those things, it’s that they have identified a grievance and then that grievance is directed externally at structures that need to be torn down.

It is based on groups, sort of, but I do make the argument that it’s actually quite personal. There’s an instinct within all of us that is the instinct of a Lion and the instinct of a Scavenger, as well.

And the reason that I say that it’s sort of internal is that one of the things I actually really try hard to do in the book is to not use the terms “right” and “left.” I really try to avoid that binary because I really do think that this is something that every single individual has to deal with: The idea that you get up in the morning and you decide whether the problems in your life are chiefly solvable by you or require action by you — or whether you’re going to direct your ire and anger and feelings of unfairness at the society around you and the structures of the society around you.

And this isn’t to make the claim that all structures are fair or that all institutions are worthy of upholding. But the question of whether you’re building or whether you’re tearing down is really, I think, the basic question.

So I didn’t understand the book as being about the fight inside the individual. Maybe it’s there. I didn’t read it as much.

I did take it, though, as trying to create a new cleavage. Because, as you say, you don’t really use the terms “left” and “right.” Actually, throughout the book, you’re not that clear on who it is you’re talking about.

So tell me about creating the new cleavage. This isn’t just left and right. You’re not talking about rich and poor. You’re not talking about successful or unsuccessful.

What’s the framework doing for you?

What the framework is doing for me is trying to suss out why it seems that there is a coalition of people who are so angry at the institutions of Western civilization that they are agglomerating and putting together a coalition that has a bunch of mutually exclusive goals and yet will march together with the same banners.

What really led off the book is what happens in the introduction. Right after Oct. 7, I was slated to debate at the University of Oxford, and I went into London. My security team told me it was actually too dangerous for me to be in London proper. I had to stay about an hour and a half outside of London, at a beautiful estate that is now turned into a hotel, for safety reasons.

It was that weekend that there was a gigantic protest — what I would characterize controversially as a pro-Hamas protest — in the middle of London. And the groups that were protesting were people who ranged from very far left on social issues, who would certainly not agree on social issues with people who were standing for Hamas, people who were fans of Hamas, people who were just opponents of capitalism.

And it occurred to me: Why are all these people marching together? What do they have in common?

There are writers who have termed this the “omnicause.” But I wanted to get to the root of why all of these people who, if you got them in a room and had them argue about gay marriage, would not agree. Or if you got them in a room and had them argue about markets would have a wide variety of opinions. But what is getting them all together? What is the thing they’re all opposing?

And you see that sort of conglomeration forming on college campuses, and I think there are deep roots to it. And the rage that was so clearly effervescent in the streets, I think that does have deep roots.

So you described that as very personal. One of the things I thought was interesting about the book is that it seems to me to be tracking a change in right-wing thought over the past decade.

I don’t think the argument we’re having anymore is the argument we were having when it was Barack Obama and Paul Ryan. Which is more an argument about health care and taxes. I remember how many years I spent debating the Grover Norquist anti-tax pledge. It seems very quaint.

Now we seem to be having an argument about a more base layer of civilization. So how do you think the argument — at least on the right — has changed?

Well, I do think that there is a very open debate now inside the right that didn’t exist 10, 15 years ago. Historically, conservatism was kind of rooted in the G.K. Chesterton fence principle, right?

It’s the idea that the difference between a conservative and a nonconservative is that a nonconservative walks across a field, sees a fence, doesn’t know why the fence is there, and immediately uproots the fence. The conservative sees the fence and says: I don’t know why that fence is there. I’m going to go figure out why the fence was put there in the first place before I uproot the fence.

In other words, before you tear down an institution, before you rip away something that has a historic basis, try to figure out why it’s there. Because it might be there for a pretty good reason. And I think that such a rage that has risen, at least on part of the right, that the tendency is to just rip things out by their roots rather than trying to correct — or even determining whether the thing can be corrected —

The right isn’t conservative anymore. It’s counterrevolutionary.

It’s anti-left. I think the left is anti-right and the right is anti-left. And I think that is, broadly speaking, a problem. I grew up as a sort of traditional —

That seems wrong about the left to me —

That they’re anti-right?

I don’t think that what motivates Bernie Sanders is that he is anti-right. You don’t like Bernie Sanders. We’ll talk about that at some point here, the way you talk about him in the book —

I despise Bernie Sanders, yes.

Fair enough.

[Laughs.]

Your politics are your politics. But Bernie Sanders is profoundly motivated by a desire to pass Medicare for All —

I mean, I think that’s right —

He is not motivated in the way that, say Tucker Carlson or some figures I see on the right are motivated by a sort of reaction. He has had the same politics for decades and decades and decades.

But you’re speaking of one particular figure. I could name figures on the right who I think are motivated much more ideologically —

Well, I just think if you’re asking who represents the left in America, that would probably be the person you’d come up with —

Well, I think there’s a case that Zohran Mamdani represents the left in America, increasingly.

I would also say Zohran Mamdani is motivated by a desire to create free buses and rent freezes —

I don’t think that’s right.

OK. But let’s stay on the right for a second — the counterrevolutionary side of it. What is the difference between being a conservative and a counterrevolutionary?

Well, I think that being a conservative is rooted in basic principles: private property, rule of law, traditional virtue, localism, subsidiarity, balance of power among the branches of the government. These were all the things that I grew up with as a conservative.

I think that, obviously, President Trump is post-ideological. That is for sure. What that means is that the right has become sort of a repository for anti-left feeling and is now a big tent.

And what I would say is: The problem with the big tent is you let in a lot of clowns.

Obviously, there are tendencies on the right. I don’t think it’s the overwhelming majority of the right, but I think it is a growing tendency on the right to react to the world with a mentality of grievance that can then translate into a desire to rip things out by the roots.

Compared with a decade ago, are you more or less comfortable on the right?

In what way?

You choose.

Ideologically, I don’t think I’ve moved very much probably over the course of my career. I started writing a syndicated column when I was 17. So the dumbest things I said were probably — others may argue, but — between the ages of 17 and probably 25.

But my root ideology has not changed very much in terms of being very free-market oriented, being very hawkish on foreign policy and being in favor of traditional social policy.

I’m very comfortable with my own viewpoint. As far as do I see more opposition from people who identify as part of the right? Obviously, there’s a lot more opposition. It’s a less unified movement ideologically, for sure.

Let me try to characterize what I see the argument becoming here. You can tell me the ways in which you think this is wrong.

What I took from the book is that the claim of the right — you have one version of it, different right-wing figures have other versions of it — is that the left has turned against the foundations of Western civilization. They have come to hate — and now universities teach their young to hate — everything that made us great and the virtues that made us great: strength, ambition, risk-taking, Judeo-Christian beliefs and this fundamental civilizational inheritance.

So what has changed is: It used to be a fight about policy, but now it’s a fight about whether all this is good or not. And that’s a much more fundamental kind of conflict.

I think that’s a relatively fair characterization. Sure.

And when do you think the topic changed? How would you describe the move from, let’s call it the Reaganite right — or for that matter, the left of that era or the Democratic Party of that era — to whatever you think we’re in now?

Sure. I sort of have a grand unifying field theory of modern American politics, which is that the election that people don’t care about is actually the most important election — and that’s 2012.

So in 2008, Barack Obama ran as a unifying candidate, like him or hate him. I didn’t vote for him. I was not a fan. But Barack Obama ran as somebody who was, in his very personage, unifying America. There was no red America, there was no blue America, there was just the United States. There was no Black or white America.

There were just Americans. And the idea was that he was sort of the apotheosis of the coming together. He was going to be the culmination of a lot of these strands of American history coming together to put to bed so many of the problems that had plagued America over the course of our tumultuous history.

And then he pushed a fairly rote left-wing agenda with regard to, for example, Obamacare —

Which he ran on. That was not a hidden part of his campaign.

For sure. But that’s not why people voted for him predominantly. His overwhelming victory, I do not think, was due to his support for a much more government-involved health care system.

Democrats have been running on that my entire life. You can go all the way back to “Hillarycare,” and they were trying to run on that back in ’90s. So something changed. And it wasn’t Obamacare per se.

So he runs, he wins. Obamacare happens. There’s a big blowback in the form of the Tea Party. And he reacts to that by essentially polarizing the electorate. He decides that instead of broadcasting to the general electorate an optimistic message about America, he is going to narrowcast his election in 2012. He’s going to base it on a much more identity-groups-rooted politics. He’s going to appeal to Black Americans as Black Americans and gay Americans as gay Americans and Latino Americans as Latino Americans.

And there are a lot of articles coming out at this time about how, essentially, demographics is destiny, and there’s going to be a new minority-majority coalition in the United States. And Mitt Romney, who is the most milquetoast and probably, I’d say, personally clean candidate in my lifetime — he is characterized as a person who forcibly cuts the hair of gay kids and straps dogs to the top of his car — and he might “put y’all back in chains,” as Joe Biden said during the campaign. And Mitt Romney loses.

And I think that the parties take away from that precisely the wrong messages. They take away the same message, but then they manifest it differently.

The message taken away by the Democratic Party is: We have an unbeatable coalition. This new coalition that Barack Obama has forged in 2012 — in which he lost votes from 2008, but he still maintained a very solid majority — this is the way forward. We’ll never lose again because we’ll be able to cobble together a majority-minority coalition, some college-educated white people, particularly female.

And Republicans took away exactly the same message, which was: No matter how milquetoast we run, no matter how clean the candidate, we’re going to get ripped up and down, and we’re going to lose. We’re just demographically losing the argument.

So what Republicans came away with was: We’re just going to throw whatever against the wall. The big problem here is that Mitt Romney was simply too nice a guy. We need to run the biggest pulsating middle finger that we can. That pulsating middle finger is Donald Trump — so we’re going to run him in 2016.

And Democrats took away from this that it basically didn’t matter who’s at the top of the ticket. You could put in Hillary Clinton, and she could just inherit the Barack Obama coalition because that was the new Democratic coalition.

Without going too deep into it, this feels to me like a more narrow argument about political strategy.

I don’t even totally disagree with it. I do think that the Democrats’ embrace of a demographic triumphalism was pretty disastrous. And I would obviously, predictably, put more weight on what the right is doing. But I think I’m pushing you a little bit into something more fundamental here —

No, but I think that they’re connected —

Which is: This is where it becomes the fight over Western civilization? Because I would say during this period when you’re talking about Barack Obama, with his microtargeted polling or whatever it is, you have the birther smear emergent on the right in a very potent way.

Obama creates reaction, as well, just by nature of who he is and what he represents —

Well, I don’t think it’s as easy as that. For people who don’t live on the right and imbibe from the media of the right during this time, the understanding on the right was that Barack Obama was a much more divisive figure than the left and the traditional media like to say that he was. And they saw him as a fundamental, transformative change agent who did not see the American experiment in a positive light.

And they felt the right — and I sort of agree with this — that he was dissembling. When he was talking about the positive, sunny, optimistic vision of America, what he actually meant was the Cairo speech, where America was sort of a sinner in the Middle East. And his view of American history was much more along the lines of what he said about Henry Louis Gates Jr. or Trayvon Martin than it was along the lines of: There’s no white America and Black America, there are just Americans.

The reaction of the right was: This is an interest group-based politics that does not particularly like the founding, and we are going to react to that with Trumpism.

So if you understand Obama and Biden more from the left, what are the moments in those presidencies that are radicalizing to people on the right? That differ from how differently you see them, or from maybe how I do?

For President Obama, I think the left perceives the Obamacare moment as the moment that the right sort of radicalized. And I don’t think that’s actually correct. I think the “bitter clingers” comments were a big one.

Archived clip of President Obama: Each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

That was in the 2008 election.

I think the Henry Louis Gates statements in which he suggested that the officer had acted stupidly and then linked that with racial discrimination in the past.

Archived news clip: Recently, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you, and what does it say about race relations in America?

Obama: I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry. No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And, No. 3, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.

The Trayvon Martin situation was quite polarizing, for sure.

Archived clip of Obama: My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.

And also the Ferguson riots.

Archived clip of Obama: The situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is, in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.

Those I think would be the biggest examples of Barack Obama setting off the right, so to speak.

It’s interesting you chose those. Those are mostly rhetorical examples.

Take the “bitter clingers” comment. I actually think about this one a lot. He gets caught on this — he’s on tape.

To me, if you compare that to things that get said, even say to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment — he basically says: Look, you have people in towns, these towns have lost everything. They’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost the plants that employed everybody, their fundamental dignity and livelihoods have been taken away from them. In that condition, people get bitter.

And then he does say: They cling to guns and religion, which I think he wishes he didn’t —

And xenophobia, right?

And xenophobia. But it’s fundamentally an effort to say to a group of liberals: We have failed these people. It’s actually very different than —

You’re such an empath, Ezra.

I am.

The way that the right reads that is his sneering at those people. Meaning if they only weren’t xenophobic and religious and hollowed out by life, then they would totally buy into what I’m selling them.

And I think that this also meshes very well with what the right tends to think of —

Well, he’s saying that we have failed them, right? That they wouldn’t just buy into what he’s selling them. He’s saying that the left has abandoned these people.

Right. But I will not fail these people. And if I were given the power, then I would fix all of their problems. And really, if they only understood how much I could fix their problems, and what’s keeping them from doing that, the reason they won’t embrace me — it’s what I would say is the mirror image of how the left viewed what Mitt Romney was saying about the 47 percent of people who would never vote for him.

So people on the right read that like: OK, there’s a bunch of people who aren’t paying taxes. They’re unlikely to vote for a person who’s going to lower taxes. And people on the left read that as: He’s sneering at people who are not paying taxes.

So I think that there is that element here.

The other couple of examples you give are interesting for just being about race, right?

The racial issue here, yes. Racial relations in this country got markedly worse in 2013, 2014, 2015.

But is that because Barack Obama should have been more positive on what happened to Trayvon Martin or what happened to Henry Louis Gates Jr.? Or because it was hard for people to hear: Yes, if you’re a Black man, and you see these, your interpretation is: Yes, we get hassled by the cops, often for no reason, in a way that white people don’t really understand. Or: My son could have been Trayvon — I understand that also as an expression of pain, an effort to try to build a bridge.

It’s very hard to imagine Donald Trump doing the Henry Louis Gates — the beer summit, as it got called, where you had the cop and Gates at the White House at the same time.

It’s hard for me when I look back on that, on the “beer summit” in particular, to hear: That’s what radicalized you all?

Yes. And the reason is: The implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America — which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying. That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream.

And when, instead, things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was: Well, you know, it turns out that Black people in America, they’re inherently victimized by a white supremacist system that puts Black people underfoot. And: My son could have been Trayvon.

And people on the right saw that as, like: Well, but that’s not true. You are an upper-class Black man who is living in the White House, and unless your son was mistaken for a prowler going around at night in a neighborhood, then, no, that actually wouldn’t happen to your son. In fact, you have two Black daughters, and that stuff has never happened to them.

So the sort of pre-Michael Brown in Ferguson — the idea that when the president went out and he said that people wouldn’t just make this up. And it turns out, actually, that a lot of it was made up.

It kind of sounds like the interpretation of Obama, at least to you, was that if he’s elected, we’ll agree we’ve gotten past all this — that it’s supposed to make us feel better, and then when it didn’t, that was understood as the betrayal of a promise.

That is how I think most Americans saw it, including Black Americans. That was a widespread sentiment. Not just among white Americans, among Black Americans. That something had gone radically wrong in 2013, 2014.

So something happened. And this was an argument that was made by legacy media a lot, which was that the real reason people were so exercised about Obamacare wasn’t because they really cared about Obamacare.

It was really because there were a lot of “bitter clingers” out there who, you know, were clinging to their God and their guns and their xenophobia, and they didn’t really like the Black president. And if a white president pushed Obamacare, they probably would have had some problems with it, but they wouldn’t have gone crazy like this. I mean, these people —

I can tell you, there’s actually a lot of polling on this, on how attitudes on race correlated with attitudes about Obamacare.

That may be the case, but the point is that the perception by people who are not actually picking on Barack Obama because of his race, or were picking on him because of his politics, was that suddenly everything was being refracted through a racial lens.

And how do you understand the birther thing?

In terms of the public resonance of the birther thing on the right?

I mean, that you have a Black president, and there is a wildfire-like theory that he’s actually born in Kenya. Dinesh D’Souza does a whole documentary about this —

Well, to be fair to Dinesh, he doesn’t actually claim that Obama was born in Kenya in that documentary.

Donald Trump is a prime pusher of this —

Yes.

Right? That felt —

So that’s a combination of two things, I think. Really, if you’re going to try to intellectualize it, and again, you’re intellectualizing —

Well, I’m not trying to intellectualize it. What I am saying is that people were not saying that Bill Clinton was not born here; they need to show his birth certificate; they need to prove his Americanness.

Well, so I will say that I think that part of it was the same instinct that led people to say that Donald Trump was a Russian agent.

Meaning I don’t understand where this person is coming from. I don’t understand what their philosophy is. I don’t understand why he’s thinking the way he’s thinking. It must be that he’s not from here.

So I think that there was some of that in the same way that the left said: I don’t understand who this Trump guy is. I don’t understand why he’s saying what he’s saying. It must be that he’s a paid Russian agent. Which similarly spread like wildfire — and was not race-based, right?

And then I do think that there was an element of — he has a very eclectic background. He grew up in Hawaii, he spent time in Pakistan. And he writes in “Dreams From My Father” about his feelings of kinship in Kenya. And then his first big sort of address as president of the United States, he goes to Cairo for the so-called apology tour where he is talking about the evils of American policy in the Middle East.

Archived clip of Obama: The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.

And people go: Well, this doesn’t seem super-homegrown.

Now I’m saying this as somebody who never bought into the birther [expletive] and thought that it was [expletive] from the beginning. But if you’re asking me where the sentiment comes from, I think it came much more from the ideology as opposed to the race.

Now again, is there a combo between backgrounds there? Sure. Can you make the argument that there was a racial component? Yes, absolutely. Do I think that was the predominant thing that drove it? I actually don’t.

I think that there was a desperate hope, frankly, by a lot of Republicans that if you could find out that he didn’t have a birth certificate, then you wouldn’t have to run against him in 2012. And that would be really convenient, wouldn’t it? If it turns out he is not an American citizen, then you don’t have to worry about it.

And there was even some of this about John McCain in 2008: He was born on a foreign military base. That means that he’s not an American citizen.

There’s a discussion about this about Marco Rubio. And I don’t mean to downplay it. I’m not going to —

It didn’t take off with them in the way it took off with Obama.

Well, Obama was also the most singular political figure of any of our lifetimes by this point.

A lot of the book is a defense of Western civilization from its enemies. You talk a lot about Western civilization. How do you describe it? How do you define it?

The way that I describe it in this book, and I give a sort of more fulsome definition in an earlier book that I did called “The Right Side of History,” is the tension between Jerusalem and Athens. Not my original construct. That’s a division that goes back to Tertullian.

The idea of a biblical heritage combined with Greek reason and the tension between them. They don’t easily fit together. And so what you see over the course of Western history is this tension. Sometimes it moves in the direction of biblical theocracy, which you can see in European history. Sometimes it moves more in the direction of reason.

But if either comes on more than the other, you end up with a pretty bad thing. If you end up with, like, a full biblical theocracy? Bad. If you end up with a fully amoral, rationality-based system? Also bad. Which is the history of the mid-19th to mid-20th century.

And so the history of Western civilization is the symbiosis between those two factors. But the basic principles of Western civilization that I think are the most important, at the very least that I discussed in the book, are things like equal rights before the law, private property, freedom of mind, freedom of thought, freedom of religion.

A bunch of the book is a defense of this. When I tried to think through: Who’s the enemy in this book? — a lot of it to me was the academic left, let’s call it — you talk about Edward Said, you talk about Fanon and a sort of intellectual culture that understands Western civilization more in terms of its sins than its successes, that is focused on the Nazis, focused on slavery in America, Jim Crow.

This goes back to what I was saying earlier, that I think a lot of the debate — Trump is very much part of this, this is one in which he’s not post-ideological — is about: Are we fundamentally good or are we fundamentally bad?

That’s right. Good but flawed — or evil but sometimes you do the right thing. I think that’s right.

These are big things: the Nazis, a lot of 19th-century and 20th-century wars in Europe, slavery in America, Jim Crow. In your schema of Western civilization, where do they fit?

First of all, there are sort of two contexts. There’s the global context of all of these events happening. There’s the global context of fascism in the 1930s, if you’re going to talk about Nazi Germany. In which case, you would also have to include Eastern fascism because Japan was a fascist state that killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million people between —

Oh, lots of fascism in the 1930s.

Yes, exactly. And not unique to Western civilization. And slavery — also not unique to Western civilization.

But in that way, reason is not unique to Western civilization. I mean, once you start saying that —

I didn’t say that reason is unique. I said that the tension between sort of biblical values and reason is unique to Western civilization and manifests in different historical ways. And you can argue that those are not contingent, that they could have arisen anywhere, but I think that’s kind of a difficult argument.

And you can make the argument Magna Carta could have happened anywhere, but it didn’t happen just anywhere. It happened in a particular time at a particular place for a particular reason, or set of reasons, and then it evolved in a particular direction.

So like it or not, that’s how history happened. And so acknowledging that’s how history happened, and so maybe that has something to do with all the wonderful things that we see in our civilization today, I think, would be a good move.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t acknowledge sins of the past by any stretch of the imagination. We absolutely should. And then we should work to fight the obliteration of attempts not to remember that sort of stuff. Not to get into contemporary politics, but it’s why you see a bizarre amount of arguing past one another on some of these issues.

President Trump, when he’s talking about how slavery ought to be taught at the Smithsonian, for example.

Archived clip of President Trump: We want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner — not in a woke manner or racist manner — which is what many of them, not all of them, are doing. Our museums have an obligation to represent what happened in our country over the years, good and bad, but what happened over the years in an accurate way.

I think that the way the left interpreted him talking about that was saying slavery shouldn’t be taught at all at the Smithsonian. The way the right interpreted that was: We should talk, for sure, about slavery at the Smithsonian, and then we should talk about how slavery ended. We should talk about the Civil War, and we should talk about what the rest of the globe was doing about slavery at that time.

A little bit of comparison would be good because to be grateful for the things you have, you also have to look at how things were going for everybody else at the time.

You touched on this at the beginning, but what is a Scavenger to you? Who are the Scavengers?

The Scavengers are groups, ideologies, people who are fundamentally driven by envy and therefore externalize all the problems in their life toward a system that they blame as oppressive, and then seek to tear down that system wholesale without even necessarily a plan for replacing it.

The thing that really matters is that the system be torn down. And in the book, I talk about what personality types are most common, relying on the work of people like Eric Hoffer. I talk about why it seems to arise from upper-middle-class people, particularly in the West.

The sort of groups that I break it down into are what I call Barbarians, using the traditional “barbarians at the gate” euphemism: The idea that there are people from outside the civilization who believe that the United States or Western civilization or Europe is predominantly responsible for all the things wrong with their civilization. Therefore, the only way to regain your innate manhood, your innate nature, is to destroy and to tear everything down.

You mentioned Fanon. I cite Fanon pretty richly here, but I also cite Sartre, too — who I think is significantly worse than Fanon. At least Fanon is justified in his opposition to colonialism in Algeria. Sartre is a true nihilist and says that, essentially, the West should import its own destruction as a way of doing recompense for all of its sins.

Then you have what I would call the Looters: people who believe that the systems of free markets, capitalism, private property — that these things are innately impoverishing and thus need to be abolished. And whatever it takes to abolish it, you should do it.

One of the characteristics of Scavengers is the willingness to wink, nod or participate in violence. The idea is that the systems are so oppressive that violence itself is justified. This is truly a scary thing that’s happening in American politics: the widespread justification for actual acts of violence that had been happening. In the book, I used the case of Luigi Mangione as a sort of example par excellence of this.

And then you have what I call the Lechers. People who believe not that people ought to be able to order their lives in a wide variety of ways in terms of their sexual behavior but believe that traditional institutions like family and church are somehow a threat to their doing this. That there’s a sort of indoctrinating element to traditional family, to church and that those need to be abolished or fought or their influence minimized in order to recenter the marginalized. And so the center basically has to be exploded.

And so that explains the sort of bizarre example that we’ve seen of Queers for Palestine. Which: Why Queers for Palestine? The answer is not because lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender identifying people are going to be treated particularly well in a future Hamas-ridden Gaza Strip. I think the idea is that the same civilization that is marginalizing you is marginalizing these people, and therefore you have to get together in a coalitional fashion in order to take down that civilization.

You’ve been talking about the omnicause on the left, but there are parts of your Scavenger chapters where the people you’re naming are on the right — Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate. And there are streams of the right that are grievance oriented, streams of the right that I think offer a vision — at least of masculinity, specifically — that differs quite a bit from yours.

That is destructive and tears things down. Yes.

Talk me through that.

I think that the idea — again — is that this crosses party lines. I would say that the ideology of resentment-driven politics, particularly in the economic sphere, tends to be more left leaning than right leaning.

When you’re talking about the right, I do not mean this to be a pure right-left division. And when I criticize the sort of great conspiracy theory, as Karl Popper talked about: Yes, there are people on the right who obviously are doing that. I mean, Tucker is name-checked in the book for this reason.

Archived clip of Tucker Carlson: This policy is called the great replacement: the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries. They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it’s happening, they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.

I think that Tucker engages in an extraordinary amount of conspiracy theorizing these days because he has a belief that the United States has been fundamentally corrupted in some way, and that the only way to explain that fundamental corruption is because there are shadowy forces outside of his control who are not only manipulating you, but they are engaging in a sort of tacit brainwashing, a sort of mental manipulation.

I mean, the book is largely written against grievance politics: this idea that you see a system, you don’t like the system, it must be that the system is to fault. I think that is a rather cowardly way of addressing issues.

Name some Scavengers with power for me.

I would say that Joe Biden’s willingness to open the border is an element of Scavengerism. The idea that America somehow bears some sort of bizarre blood guilt that requires us to keep our Southern border open, to just allow in millions and millions of people. I think that’s driven by a particular —

You think, for Joe Biden, it was driven by blood guilt?

I think that for a lot of the left that was — I don’t know who was president during the Biden presidency. A lot of the left —

Name your person.

Yes, exactly.

No, I don’t mean it like that. I mean, I know the Biden administration pretty well and whether —

I’ll ask you: What do you think was the ideological drive for leaving the border open for that long?

I think that they believed that we have an asylum process, and people were fleeing genuine poverty and persecution. I think that they were in coalition and were appalled by the first-term Trump administration on immigration. And I think that they did not act fast enough when it became a crisis.

But I don’t think, having talked to many of them about it, that they understood this as a kind of reparations.

So I do think that there is a part of the left that articulates this as a kind of reparations. I think it’s fair to say that wasn’t Joe Biden, specifically. But I think there is a part of the left that sees it as a kind of reparations in terms of economics.

Bernie Sanders definitely falls in this category. He believes that America is guilty globally. He believes that the great suffering of the Earth can be laid at the feet of American-style capitalism, that America is somehow a terrible and horrifying site of untold human suffering because of capitalism. He has never created a damn thing in his entire life that is worthwhile.

He created a pretty big political movement.

Yes. I said that is worthwhile.

I guess this is a place — the Lions part of the book feels to me like a pretty straightforward case for a traditional and positive masculinity: Be bold, be risk-taking, take care of your family, innovate, see purpose in life.

There’s a lot there that, if I imagine this as a male self-help book, a lot would fit. And I’d want my kids to read it. I would not argue with it.

When you get to the Scavengers, the way you write about them: “The Scavenger is a looter: greedy, jealous and violent.” You say:

The Scavenger is a Lecher: rebellious, perverse, and leering.

The Scavenger is a Barbarian: jealous, enraged, and violent.

The Scavengers do not wish for a better world, or at least a better world for everyone; they would rather everyone be equal in misery than that everyone be unequal in prosperity.

Let’s talk about Bernie for a second. You call him a “putrescent Marxist pimple on the posterior of the body politic.”

[Shapiro laughs.]

This is a person who, as I see him, has really devoted his life to trying to make the situation of people in the working class or in poverty better. He believes that the billionaires and the millionaires have too much —

Well, now only the billionaires, right? Once he became a millionaire, that disappeared.

Well, sure. And that people should have health care. That should be a right. That kids shouldn’t be in poverty. That we can redistribute more.

I can understand why you disagree with him. You’re a more free-market guy than Bernie is. But the cut you’re making here is very deep: Just people who are extractive and want to destroy, want us all to live in hell. And it’s like, this longtime Democratic senator and former mayor?

Defend that for me.

Sure. So I mean, Bernie Sanders has met very few dictators who are Socialists in bent that he has not offered a defense of. Bernie Sanders has never produced anything outside of a grievance-based political movement that suggests that —

Stay where I am on what Bernie wants. Because what you’re describing in terms of he’s never produced anything outside of politics — well, OK. Politicians produce politics. That’s their job. Many politicians on the right have not started large businesses, so that doesn’t cut enough people out.

He has not produced job growth. He has not produced a more productive base of citizenry. He has not produced public policy that has resulted in anything of measure.

He has not been a co-sponsor on a major bill his entire career. He has sat outside the political system and [expletive] about it for literally —

I’ve watched him add huge amounts of things to various bills. I covered the Affordable Care Act very closely —

Are we now going to pretend that Bernie Sanders is a wildly powerful legislator? Because —

He was always, for someone on the left —

He has not co-sponsored a major bill his entire career —

He was always somebody who was very good at working to get his amendments into bills. I don’t want to try to convince you to like Bernie Sanders. What I’m trying to do is match up the guy who got a bunch of funding for community health centers to this division you are creating in the people who just want to suck dry —

The guy —

Hold on a sec.

Sure.

You don’t see anything of value in the way he understands people whom I think you would see sympathetically as suffering, as deserving a higher minimum wage, as deserving health care when they can’t afford it?

To you, he is just an enemy of Western civilization?

Yes. And the reason I say that is because, again, I think that the easy part of all politics and all of human life is to find the places where you think that life has been unfair to people. Because life is sometimes unfair to people. The question is how you direct that.

Has he directed that toward actually building better systems — or has he spent his entire career yelling at people who have become wealthy? Has he maligned them as morally inferior for having developed wealth? Has he decided that there is a class of people who are the great exploiters in his moral narrative and who must be torn to the ground? Billionaires shouldn’t exist.

I have a question: When you cross that $999,999,999 mark, is that when you become evil? When exactly is that barrier crossed?

I think you could not become evil. You could just have a high marginal tax rate —

Well, but that’s not the case he makes. He makes the case that you are a moral inferior if you’re a billionaire.

Let me read you something JD Vance said to my colleague Ross Douthat in 2024: “The people on the left, I would say, whose politics I’m open to” — “I’m” here is JD Vance — “it’s the Bernie bros. But generally center left liberals who are doing very well, and center right conservatives who are doing very well” — I think that’s actually you and me — “have an incredible blind spot about how much their success is built on a system that is not serving people whom they should be serving.”

Is JD Vance, at least this part of JD Vance, a Scavenger?

That ideology is a Scavenger ideology.

Yes. That is a grievance-based politics that is not rooted in reality, and it is directly at odds with the Lion version of JD Vance who wrote “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Well, he’s not been that guy for a long time.

I’m aware of that.

So JD Vance is a Scavenger to you? That’s valuable for me to understand.

I think that his economic philosophy as articulated there — and again, he’s given a lot of different messages to a lot of different people about economics, right? Sometimes he’s a Peter Thiel innovator and a crypto-bro innovator. And sometimes JD Vance is a: We need to ensure that Elizabeth Warren’s economic plans are implemented — but from the right.

So I’m not going to be inconsistent about this if I’m condemning Bernie Sanders economics: If it comes out of the mouth of JD Vance, then it’s the same economics.

So can an economic system be unfair structurally?

Of course. But I don’t know why that would be the case with a private property system in which people own the fruits of their labors.

Oh, there are all kinds of ways a private system can be unfair.

Well, I mean, sure —

And also markets are shaped — I mean, come on: We’re not in Crude Econ 101 here. We create patent systems that create government-enforced monopolies. We have a structured economy.

Of course, but there is a difference between more and less fair. And it seems to me the least fair system is a centralized governmental system in which you pick winners and losers — and/or nationalize the labor of others in order to achieve your specific goals.

Sure. You can be more or less unfair.

So your view is basically any politician, left or right, who says to people: Listen, you’re suffering. You don’t make enough. You’re working two or three jobs to get by or not finding jobs. And the reason is that you got screwed. We shipped your job to China. The trade deals were unfair. The billionaires took too much, and now you’ve got just-in-time scheduling in a community that doesn’t have a paper mill anymore.

Whenever you sort of activate that sense that it’s not your fault, it’s their fault: That’s Scavenger mentality to you?

Generally speaking, that is true unless you can provide very, very good evidence that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the thing that you are blaming and the thing that is happening to the person.

I think most of the time, it’s misdirection. So when people suggest, for example, that manufacturing is going to come back to the Midwest if you just tariff China hard enough, and that’s not going to victimize consumers on the other end who are going to be paying more, then yes, that is a grievance-based politics. That is an envy-based politics.

And listen, envy can go really far in politics. Envy is a great way of doing politics. It really is. The hardest thing in politics is to say the thing that no one will say, which is: My job is to basically get the obstacles out of your way so that you can succeed or fail on your own merits. And if you fail, that ain’t always everybody else’s problem.

How do you understand the pitch Donald Trump, over the course of his political career made to his voters? Because I would say a real way that he differed from Mitt Romney was that he came and said: You got screwed.

Yes. I think he’s wrong, but yes.

And so Trump pulled the right into a Scavenger mentality?

I think with regard to a sort of a populist economics, yes. Sure.

You seem pretty positive on him a lot to feel that way. You voted for him in 2020, in 2024. You campaigned for him in 2024.

Yes. Right. I’m happy to explain my evolution. I didn’t vote for either candidate in 2016. I voted for him in 2020. I campaigned for him in ’24, yes. That doesn’t mean I agree with him on everything.

I actually want to be superclear. I understand your evolution is interesting. I don’t want to do a retrospective interview with you. I’m actually tracking it because I think it is important to understand you to understand the right.

The reason I’m actually surprised to hear you say some of this isn’t that I couldn’t map it onto the theory of the book. But the way you write about Scavengers in the book, it’s so vicious, it’s so subhuman, that to realize that actually politicians you somewhat like fit into that for you is genuinely surprising to me.

Again, I think that to suggest that adopting certain aspects of a Scavenger mentality that doesn’t necessarily turn you totally into — this is why I started with the point that every day you wake up and decide whether you wish to be a Scavenger or a Lion.

There are people who have aspects of Scavengerdom; there are people who have aspects of Liondom.

I think that President Trump’s economic agenda has aspects that are more Lion-like. I think it has aspects that are more Scavenger-like.

But when I read this book, I read something that maps very uneasily onto Trump. You do have a whole section about Trump as a Lion and his taking the — I forget if it’s the oath of office or which speech exactly it was. But when he won, it’s like: The Lions are reawakening.

Well, but what I do say in that section is: I don’t know whether that moment is going to be justified by subsequent action. I do say that.

I wrote that the day of the inauguration, and it felt like there was a sense in America that we’d move beyond some of the grievance politics that were so characterized in the D.E.I. basis of the Biden administration or the “wealth is bad” side of the Democratic Party.

But I do say in that section I don’t know whether that’s going to be justified by further policy. I feel like there is an upsurge in the American feeling in favor of things like personal responsibility and non-grievance-based politics. But whether politicians are going to channel that in a positive direction or whether they’re going to rechannel away from that is a whole different question.

I want to do one more beat on the Scavengers here. Then we’ll move on to Trump and the present.

Let me read a piece of the book for you:

Aside from their base envy, how can we describe the Scavengers? As we’ve discussed, Lions are creative, determined and audacious. They’re steadfast, prudent, merciful and strong. Scavengers are something else entirely. In his book “The True Believer,” Eric Hoffer explains that those who tear down the societies in which they live are typically what he terms “inferiors”: the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals and all those who have lost their footing or never had one in the ranks of respectable humanity. They see their lives and the present is spoiled beyond remedy, and they’re ready to waste and wreck both. Hence, their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.

It’s pretty sweeping.

Well, if you wanted to ask me: Who is the apotheosis?

Yes. Who’s the apotheosis?

The campus protesters over the course of the last couple of years.

Although they’re not inferior. I thought about this. I have a little note on that section. I’m like —

No, they are.

Because they are kids at Ivy League colleges. They’re doing just fine. They’re not social inferiors by any measure —

Well, no. I do talk in that exact section about why Scavengers tend to be drawn from the ranks of the upper middle class and the overtly educated who then produce less than they should.

The prototypical Scavenger — and again, one of the points I make in the book, I’ll say it over and over again, is that people are a mix of these things. And that you can sometimes be a Scavenger, sometimes be a Lion. There are ideologies that are a mix of both.

When I’m talking about the pure, thoroughgoing Scavengers, here you would be talking about Hamas, people who stand for Hamas. People who are out there protesting on behalf of the idea that the real problem in America is the police. To the extent that they actually want to defund the police, those are the people who want to tear down entire institutions.

Now politics is a game where you can channel that. You can use it as jet fuel for your political movement. And the problem is that when you do feed that sort of envious mentality, what you end up doing is throwing more jet fuel on a raging fire that already exists in the human heart. And eventually that’s going to take over your entire politics.

That’s what I’m concerned about. And the reason that I’m objecting to mapping that onto prototypical politics is because I don’t — again, I don’t use Democrat and Republican as the model of this.

There’s very little, I would say, effort to cross the empathic chasm sometimes to the people you are describing as Scavengers. How they would see the world that way. How, in fact, in seeing the world that way, there would be a boldness, there would be an effort to change things for the better, to protect their family, to protect their community.

How protesters, even the ones you don’t like, often understand themselves as standing up for someone who actually needs someone to stand up for them. A.O.C., Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani getting up in the morning and really feeling: There are people out here working their asses off, not able to make ends meet, and they need people in power to stand up for them.

I actually thought that the weirdest part of the book to me, the part that was the most striking when I got to it, was when you quote Nietzsche on Judaism. And you say this is an incorrect interpretation of Judaism, but you quote Nietzsche writing:

It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equation: Good equals noble, equals powerful, equals beautiful, equals happy, equals beloved of God. And to hang on to the inversion with their teeth, saying: The wretched alone are the good. The poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good. The suffering, deprived, sick, ugly, alone or pious, alone are blessed by God.

And you disagree with Nietzsche that’s the right interpretation of Judaism and then ultimately of Christianity.

And I also think that it’s an immoral view of the world.

Right. This is what I want to get at.

I do not think that poverty somehow creates value in humans more than riches create value in humans. What you do in the world is what makes you a good or a bad person.

I agree with that, actually. I both understand that and agree with that.

And that’s why I say that Nietzsche is wrong, by the way. Because the Bible explicitly says you’re not supposed to favor the rich or the poor.

But there’s quite a lot in the Bible also about understanding the difficulty of poverty, what you should give unto the poor, that it’s very easy for the rich and the powerful to tumble into immorality.

Yes. I think that, Ezra, I’ve obviously listened to the show a lot and have heard conversations that you’ve had with a number of figures in your discussions about Zohran Mamdani, for example.

Empathy and grievance are not mutually exclusive. In fact, empathy and grievance can go very easily hand in hand. Once you translate empathy into grievance, I think that you’ve actually, fundamentally, undermined what is good about the empathy.

Say what you mean. What is the moment when empathy becomes grievance?

I feel so bad for you that I’m going to get in your shoes, and I can see why you would believe that the systems are screwing you.

Therefore, the systems are screwing you. Therefore, we should tear down the systems. The transition from “I can see why you believe the systems are screwing you” to “The systems are screwing you” — that exact transition is where empathy becomes grievance.

There’s good social science to suggest that, actually, empathy makes for some ugly politics if, in fact, you spend all of your days on empathy. Because you end up empathizing with one group at the expense of another group.

There’s a difference between sympathy and empathy. I would hope that everybody in politics has empathy, but I think it’s perfectly empathic to say: Yes, you feel that something bad has happened to you. Your life is not what you want it to be. And now you need to realize that the only person who can get you out of the situation is you. And you need to start making really good, solid decisions with your life.

And, in fact, that message is much more likely to lead to success than the message: I alone can save. Which is something President Trump said. Or any other politician who says: I’m going to come in, I’m going to clean up the entire system for you. And now the system will be oriented toward you, personally, and magically, your job is going to come back. Or magically, you are going to be more prosperous. Or magically, somebody is going to take care of your health care in a way that they didn’t before. That is a cheap political tactic that is rarely fulfilled in real life.

It’s interesting. I understand you much more as a man without a party than I did coming into this. Because if you look across politics right now, there is not a political party or a forceful political movement, that at its core isn’t saying: The system is screwing you.

Trump is saying the system is screwing you. The left is saying the system is screwing you. The liberals are saying the system is screwing you. The right is — I mean, we’re not in the era of Mitt Romney anymore.

And you are really allergic to that view.

Yes. One of the things that I believe — this does go to religious belief to me — the biblical worldview is rooted in a fundamental distinction that the Bible makes. And as an Orthodox Jew, obviously, this is something I try to live by. The ethical basis of ethical monotheism is the idea that you have things to do in the world, and that free choice is up to you.

When I define sort of what a philosophy line would be, the basic idea that is revelatory about the Bible is this idea that your life is not a series of random coincidences and pagan gods fighting in the heavens and lightning randomly striking you.

I quote “Lear,” where Gloucester talks about: As flies to the gods are we. “They kill us for their sport.”

That’s not the mentality of the Bible. The mentality of the Bible is something that is radically different — which is, basically: Choose life. The choice is in front of you: Do the right thing, and good things will happen.

Now again, that raises all sorts of theodicy questions. Is that really true? Do bad things happen to good people? Of course, these are not new problems in religion. But the basic concept is: If you act responsibly in the world, you are significantly more likely to have a better life and to make the world around you better.

That’s the thing that I try to live by and to teach my kids. And when you teach my kids the opposite, when you teach them that no matter what they do, they’re screwed by the system and actually the systems that have brought them unnamed prosperity, the greatest prosperity in the history of the world, the most freedom of any human beings who have ever walked this Earth, that system is to blame, not them — I am allergic to that. I think that it makes people worse. I think it makes society worse. I think it makes cultures worse, and I think it empties out your civilization of meaning, purpose and prosperity.

I’ve noticed that there is a real collision of interpretation of the Bible that I feel has become more central in the past decade or two.

On the one hand, I see Tom Holland, the author of “Dominion,” on a lot of right-wing podcasts. I read “Dominion.” I think it’s a really fascinating and beautiful book that puts forward the argument that a lot of what we revere in modernity — this belief of the dignity of the individual, that they have rights, that they have a soul, that they’re not just pawns on a chess board, that they should not just be subject to the whims of power — that is an inheritance of Christianity, specifically. And that there is no liberalism without Christianity. That all these things that the left has rejected as retrograde are actually where they come from. And in rejecting them, they’ve lost something very fundamental to what made their entire worldview possible.

And then there’s this other interpretation emerging out of the Bible, which is much more this sort of — I wouldn’t call it personal responsibility in the way you’re talking about it — but something that is much more about how the world is ordered, and it depends on your actions. You have been given a guide to how to act within it, and if you want to succeed in this world, you must follow this guide.

It’s not that these two things cannot cohere —

Right. Well, I think one is kind of an outside view, and one is an inside view.

But I just think it’s interesting. This sort of what I would call, like, the Bible of the meek and the oppressed, and the Bible that is often used by, or thought through by, those in more power who believe the system has certainly been fair to them, and if others would follow in their footsteps, they would find it as fair.

To be fair, I think that, actually, the better distinction there would be between the people who are religiously observant — meaning who actually try to bring the Bible into many aspects of their life and who tend to line up, again, more along the lines of what I’m talking about — and the people who read the Bible as sort of an informative document, a book of wisdom. Or people who try to trace the outlines of Western history from the outside, which is what Tom Holland is trying to do.

I don’t think I buy that. I think that when I look at the politics of the modern Christian right, of evangelical Christianity, I do not question people’s faith. I don’t question how much they try to bring the Bible into their life. But I don’t think their politics reflect what you are describing. I think it has become a very grievance-based politics.

So actually, if you look at the more grievance-based politics on the right, it tends to be among more irreligious members of the right.

I mean, again, not to get back into my own personal evolution on President Trump, but that’s certainly a thing that happened, right?

I didn’t vote for him in 2016. A lot of evangelicals did not vote for him in 2016 because they were uncomfortable with how this sat with certain values. Then people sort of came around and said: OK, well, I guess this is the choice that I have now.

Let’s talk a bit about Trump. This is something that you’ve gestured at, but why don’t we do it as a way to set up this part of the conversation?

You were very, very opposed to Trump in 2016, wrote a piece about how you would never support him and over time shifted. You’ve talked about this publicly —

There’s a piece in The National Review where I said: Here’s what he could do to earn my support. And he did many of those things, to be fair.

So talk me through your evolution on Trump.

Sure. So when he came along, I made several critiques of Trump. Some were character based. Some were personality based. Some were critiques of people he was letting into the movement. I thought that the expansion of the Overton window for the right, while I think somewhat necessary, I think that it was overexpanded. And I think that there are, as I said at the beginning, some clowns in the tent.

But when it comes to his actual policy, I assumed that he would be as heterodox in his politics as he had been in his campaign. Which is to say he was on every side of every issue, and you kind of saw in him what you wanted to see.

Was he going to be conservative on social policy, or was he going to carry around a gay pride flag? Was he going to be a person who was staunchly pro-life, or was he going to be a sort of New York pro-choicer? Was he going to be somebody who was in favor of strong Second Amendment rights, or was he going to do some gun control? Was he an industrial-policy guy, or was he a free-markets guy?

You could legitimately take any, or all, of those sundry positions. Were the judges that he appointed going to be along the lines of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, or were they going to be his relatives?

So my assumption was that he was going to essentially govern almost from the center left, and that many of his policies were not going to align with the things that I wanted — I wouldn’t get what I wanted policy-wise. I thought that he was going to have a dire effect on the political nature of the country. And I had objections to his character.

Say more on that.

The extent of the rhetoric that he used in 2015, 2016, I think, was quite unpleasant and wrong and bad, and I still have objections to it. And so, as I said when I endorsed him in 2020, my character critiques of President Trump didn’t change.

And many of the things that I thought were bad that he might bring about — more polarization in politics, for example — that did happen. But I got much better governance than I thought I would. Meanwhile, the left went insane. And so that was sort of why I moved in 2020. The bad things are pretty much baked into the cake.

We know what we’ve got. He gave me more than I thought he would when he gave me several justices on the Supreme Court who I actually quite liked. When he decided that he was going to push sort of a traditional Republican economic policy with regard to deregulation and tax cuts. He pushed a foreign policy that I thought was quite excellent.

I thought that was the best part of his administration in Term 1. And so I got more than I thought I was going to get. So I changed my opinion because the facts had changed.

And then, in 2024, again, it came down to a binary choice. In the primaries I supported Ron DeSantis. It came down to a binary choice when it was basically over after Iowa. And when it’s a choice between Trump and Biden or Kamala Harris, then that was a clear enough choice where it’s like: OK, I’m going to go campaign for the guy because I do not want to see a second Biden presidency or a Kamala Harris presidency.

But I think that many of my underlying objections didn’t particularly change.

Where are you now? We’re seven months in. What have you liked? What have you not liked?

I think that his attempts to move more toward meritocracy and away from D.E.I. in federal policy and procedure are good. I think that what he has been doing on foreign policy is shockingly better than I thought it was going to be.

I was one of the few people on the right who consistently took the position that we ought to continue supporting Ukraine, for example. And he came around to the position that maintaining support for Ukraine is a good thing. Obviously, I’m very pro-Israel. I like his Israel policy quite a lot.

I think that when it comes to his tariff policy, I’ve been openly and vocally anti. When it comes to things like industrial policy in which we’re taking stakes in Intel — not a fan. When it comes to his social policy, there hasn’t been a lot to say on social policy, frankly, because after Roe v. Wade was rejected, it basically got kicked down to the local level.

So you’re not seeing a lot there. I would say overall more good than bad, but it’s a mixed bag. And one of the arguments that the right is constantly having with itself is: Do you grade him versus what you would have gotten with Kamala Harris — or do you grade him versus what you want from him as the president? I always tend to do the latter.

I tend to say: Here’s what I want, here’s where I wish he would do better. As opposed to — because all day long you can say: OK, well, it would have been worse with Kamala. I agree. That’s why I voted for him, that’s why I campaigned for him.

It’s interesting. There’s an almost parallel argument on the left, which is: Do you talk about Trump as a normal Republican — the guy who is cutting Medicaid to fund tax cuts? Or do you talk about Trump as something abnormal, authoritarian — somebody taking new powers?

This is something that at other times you’ve been very alert on. You wrote about Barack Obama that he’s “a man who embodies all the personal characteristics of a fascist leader.” You said about Biden that he is “an aspiring tyrant held back only by the strength of our constitutional structure.”

I would say, on both of those counts: Who has the personal characteristics of a fascist leader but also who is pushing at the boundaries of constitutional structure, using the power of the government to harass enemies, to create incentives, to punish those who have wronged him, to force institutions to fold, Trump has been — whatever you think of him — much more creative and aggressive than any president in my life.

I’m not sure he’s been much more creative and aggressive than any president of my lifetime.

Somewhat?

It depends on the sector. I’m old enough to remember in 2009 when Barack Obama called bankers on the carpet and said: I’m standing between you and the pitchforks.

I mean, on the left, that was widely understood as his saying: Listen, you guys should support reasonable financial regulation because I am trying to keep these people from coming for you. And that was actually true.

Well, OK. The other way to read that is as a tacit threat, which is how you would read it if it came from Donald Trump’s mouth.

If Donald Trump had said to a corporation: I’m standing between you and the pitchforks, sign on the dotted line — you would read that in the way that I’m reading Barack Obama.

I’m more interested in the things he’s actually doing. There’s an old thing about Trump, and this is the thing people said about Harris —

I said this before that the guardrails will hold. And they have. The analogy that I’ve used about President Trump before and his tendency toward executive power — which has been, to be fair, a growing tendency across administrations of both parties over the course of the last 20 years minimum: The radical devolution of the authority of Congress and turning it into a vestigial organ of government, with which I greatly disagree and think is a massive, humongous problem.

When you look at what President Trump has done, the argument that I will make is that he’s been more sophisticated in the second term — this is true — about trying to avoid some of those constitutional guardrails. However, he is, in fact, abiding by court orders. When a court orders him to do something, then he actually is doing that thing. He’s not doing the Andrew Jackson: Let them enforce their order —

I agree. We sort of know that Emil Bove and others have been a little bit on the edge of that. I think, in general, they’re abiding by court orders.

We just did a show on how the Supreme Court is giving Trump a lot of the power he has sought — which, in the way the system works, he’s now got the power.

But I am a little bit surprised to hear you say that this is all equivalent to the way Obama used the executive branch.

The pen and the phone.

It’s not just the pen and the phone. You look at the way he has gone after individuals who offended him from his first term: John Bolton, Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney.

Removing the security team from Mike Pompeo —

Removing the security team from Mike Pompeo — or from Anthony Fauci. Using deportation as a tool around speech, not just as a tool around immigration.

I think these are all different policies, and lumping them all together —

They are different policies. But what I understand them all as being is a singular approach to power.

I will wildly disagree on the second part. And I will agree on the first part.

Let’s start with the first part, then we can do the second part.

Sounds good. When you’re talking about going after political opponents — yes, I agree that is a misuse of executive authority. Absolutely — 100 percent.

I’ve seen it done, unfortunately. I don’t mean to do bothsidesism because I’m condemning both sides for the thing.

Bothsidesism is typically where you say: It’s not that bad, my side is doing it because the other side also did it. I’m saying it’s bad when both sides do it.

So I try to hold steady to the idea that when the I.R.S. cracks down on conservative nonprofits under Barack Obama — I know that happened to people, and I know people to whom it happened — that is a major problem. And it is a major problem when the president of the United States unleashes law enforcement on his political opponents.

Again, I think that you can make the case from the right, and the right has very assiduously made this case: Law enforcement has been used, on both state and federal levels, in ways with President Trump that were, at best, creative. But yes, it is a problem when Donald Trump does it, as well.

When it comes to the deportation policies there, I will strenuously disagree. I wish that we had these deportation policies all along. I do not think that we have a duty to import people to the United States who do not like our civilization, support terrorist groups, do not have any real kinship with our values and have come here to lead protests at Columbia University.

You think we should deport people for speech?

I do not think that you have the same free speech as a person who is seeking to immigrate to the country that you do if you are born in this country. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t think that the president of the United States believes that he can deport Ilhan Omar, who is a citizen of the United States, and saying the exact same things as Mahmoud Khalil, who is not a citizen of the United States.

Well, he had a green card. You’re not supposed to deport people for speech.

There’s a difference even between green card holding and actual citizenship that can be fought out in the courts. The real shame is we let Mahmoud Khalil in the country in the first place.

The reason I argue with this is that we’re seeing a unified use of power.

From 2020 to 2024, there’s a big argument that emerges around free speech. I don’t think that argument is crazy. I think that there’s a lot that liberals and liberalism has to rethink that it did in that period.

The comedian Graham Linehan sent a bunch of [expletive] tweets but then was met at Heathrow by police. That’s a problem. That’s not how that should work.

I think that it is something that we on the left have to answer for, having, in some cases, been enthusiastic about things like that. But in other cases we just decided to avert our eyes, right? If a bad thing was happening to a person we thought was bad, we just didn’t talk about it.

There was a very principled defense of free speech, including speech you hated on the right. What I see happening with Trump is anything — people or institutions — that he perceives as threatening him — in many cases just speaking out against him or having investigated him or participated in his impeachment proceedings with Adam Schiff — he’s using what powers he has to go after them, alleging mortgage fraud or cracking down in a million different ways on universities. The thing with the law firms was an example of that.

The law firms are a better example than the universities.

We will probably differ on what is motivating different examples. But what I see is a unified effort.

Which goes back to counterrevolutionary tactics. This is, in some ways, a difference between being conservative or counterrevolutionary, to say: This has gotten out of hand in this whole society. And what we need to do is use the power of the state to change it.

When Trump is up there saying that ABC and CBS should maybe have their broadcast licenses revoked. He sees Chris Christie on TV criticizing him, he says he’s going to open an investigation into the bridge.

It’s different powers in different cases. They’re being very creative. But to me it’s an extremely unified approach to use the federal government to chill what people are willing to do.

As a reporter, we now have the experience — and many people in the profession have talked about this — of sources who are doing nothing wrong, they’re just experts on a thing, saying: I don’t want to get quoted anymore. I don’t want them to come after me.

The chilling effect is there. It’s happening.

It turns into bothsidesism really quickly here. It really does.

I lived through the Obama administration. There was significant concern about the possibility of getting an I.R.S. audit. The right would make the argument, I think fairly coherently, that the mechanisms of law enforcement, particularly in the state of New York — were used against Donald Trump directly.

I think in the State of New York that was actually true. I said this at the time: I didn’t think that was a good case.

I thought the case in Georgia was a good case —

The D.C. case was not a good case, brought by Jack Smith. That indictment was deeply flawed.

I could go either way on the D.C. one. But I agree with the New York one.

When we talk about the grand centralization of power in the executive branch, I think that the idea from some parts of the right is: Turnabout is fair play. I tend not to agree with that, but I also think that if there is a gun in the room, and you forswear the use of the gun, you know the other guy is going to use it, then you look like a fool.

What we really need to do is have an agreement to go weapons down. And instead, what’s happened is that it’s basically politics as a blood sport. I think that you’re now getting this on pretty much all sides. There’s sort of a pendulum movement to politics that is incredibly dangerous.

I think that, oddly enough, we could be living in an era where we see Donald Trump is holding back the thing that comes next. Meaning, I think things could get a lot worse. I think there are a lot of people on the left who are saying things can’t get worse. They say it always goes darkest just before it goes pitch black.

My grandfather had a joke. I’ve checked it in my family so I remember it right. It’s the only joke I remember. It’s a very Jewish joke: A guy goes to the doctor. He says, “Doctor, I don’t know what to do. I am sick, my wife left me, I’ve lost my job. Help.” The doctor says: “Eh! Smile. At least things can’t get worse.” So the guy smiled — and then they got worse.

Yes, exactly.

It’s a scary thing for me to hear you say that you think Donald Trump could be holding back the thing that comes. I will probably disagree with you. I don’t think we’re going to bridge this chasm on some of the individual things.

I looked into, at that time, the question of the I.R.S. and the Tea Party nonprofits. My reading of the inspector general’s reports and other materials was that there wasn’t much there.

But I think there is something different happening here. There is something to structures that operate through a system that can be challenged.

There’s an inspector general’s report on what’s actually happening at the I.R.S. from somebody independent — versus getting rid of the inspectors general, the JAGS, getting rid of or pushing the career prosecutors who are taking down Eric Adams to resign because you want Eric Adams in your pocket as opposed to facing court challenges.

I think we’re crossing lines we’re going to really wish we hadn’t crossed — like masked men in the streets. You need ICE. ICE has a role in the system. But it shouldn’t be masked men who refuse to identify themselves or authority, etc.

I guess the question I have for you — because I’m not trying to get you to hold my position — but what’s a red line here? When would you say to me: You know what? We have entered something different?

I think we have already entered something different. The analogy that I’ve used for President Trump is that I think that the right has a very different view from the left. The left sees Donald Trump standing over the body politic prone in the street with a knife in its back. They’ll say: Donald Trump is the murderer — he killed politics. Everything was basically working fine. Donald Trump came along, and he’s the guy — you can see he’s standing right over the body. There’s the knife right in the back.

And the right says: No, no, no. He’s the coroner. He came over here, he noticed the body was dead and there was a knife in it. And he noted that the body was dead.

Now I think that he doesn’t get credit for fixing it. I don’t think the president has relegated power back to its proper channels of authority —

Nor wants to.

I don’t think that he desperately wants to go back to Congress for things.

But again, I think that we have been in a different era of politics for a while here. I think that pretending that the thing that’s happening is only happening right now, and it’s brand-new —

Yes, I get that. I mean, look, I wrote a book about polarization.

I was on your show for a book about polarization that I published in early 2020. Easy to remember because the tour got bisected by Covid.

But look, you had Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator saying:

We’re in a time and place where — I don’t know, I certainly have not — I have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real.

I’m not telling you that there was no escalation over time. There has been. Liberals saw George W. Bush this way. I understand. And I’m not trying to get everybody to tell the same story about politics.

It’s actually sort of core to my politics that they’re just going to be different stories. But you can escalate to a point where something tips. That’s what I see happening here.

I guess I’m asking you: If you don’t see it as having happened yet — instead of the book being: There are Lions and Scavengers. My hope is Donald Trump is getting the Lions out — when would be the moment where you’re like: Oh, [expletive]?

What is your “Oh, [expletive]” moment?

I think the book is largely a recognition that we’re in the “Oh, [expletive]” moment. We’ve been in the “Oh, [expletive]” moment for quite a time.

I think that the aggregation of power to a centralized authority is an outgrowth of a grievance-based politics that has been growing inside the United States and the West for decades. I do not think that these two things are disconnected.

If we’re going to do that analogy, all centralized politics of the 1930s were rooted in grievance-based politics. That’s what it was. Nazism was grievance-based politics. Mussolini’s fascism was grievance-based politics. Japanese fascism was grievance-based politics.

Politics goes awry very easily, and it typically results in people who believe that if you give enough power to one mode of the government, it will do your bidding for you. And that’s a very scary thing.

I think the only way to fix that is to do a few things: On the personal level to actually stop treating it as empathetic or virtuous to tell people their grievances are because of a system that must be completely wrecked. I think that’s a huge mistake. And then on a political level, I think that we ought to discuss how exactly the sides go weapons down.

A proposal that was made by my friend Jeremy Boreing that I think is actually quite smart: I happen to be a fan of the filibuster. I know Democrats right now are a fan of the filibuster because it’s useful to them. And presumably if they win the Senate back, they will no longer be fans of the filibuster.

I’ve long not been a fan of the filibuster.

I’m a fan of the filibuster because if you actually wish for there to be any form of slowing in the system or gridlock in the system — I’m a fan of gridlock in the system. I think gridlock is actually quite a good thing. I think that the American people should be told no an awful lot. That’s why the Constitution is very complex and designed specifically in order to create federal gridlock.

If you are a fan of the filibuster — I understand you’re not — what the Senate should do is a constitutional amendment to enshrine the filibuster.

I think that the attempt to do a convention of states in order to enshrine the principle that Congress is responsible for significantly more of our policy than the president — that would be a very good thing.

I think the thing that the founders didn’t game for — they figured ambition would check ambition. They didn’t figure that electoral ambition would check actual power ambition.

I think this is actually an interesting place to explore. I’m not a fan of the filibuster. One of the reasons is sort of not dissimilar from why you are a fan of it.

I wrote this piece in Newsweek, many owners of Newsweek ago.

[Laughs.]

The argument I made was that gridlock is actually a better metaphor for what happens in Congress than people think. In gridlock, things don’t just stop moving — everybody just starts taking side streets.

And what the filibuster does is it often takes Congress out of the game, but the pressure in the party pushes toward the executive branch. So to do this on the Democratic side? You get 59 votes, but not 60, for Dreamers. Well, maybe we’ll just have Barack Obama do it by executive order.

Or on the Republican side, there’s a genuine delight in the amount of executive authority Donald Trump has taken on. I think I have the number here. Obama issued 276 executive orders in his two terms. Trump did 220 in his first term. And his second term is already at 198.

Right.

So as Congress gets more gridlocked, what we see is an expansion of executive power. Which I actually think is really dangerous. One of the reasons I’d like it to be easier to pass things in Congress is that I think it would push things away from the executive.

So I’m not a fan of your filibuster because I don’t think the filibuster works the way people think it does.

The reason I like the filibuster is I think it ought to require large-scale consensus to make large-scale change in the country. I don’t know that 51 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the Congress and the presidency is enough of a consensus in America to do large-scale change. You will end up with policy swinging wildly side to side.

I understand. But I guess the counterargument I make on this is that when the country feels that problems are not getting solved, it creates pressure for somebody who will solve them one way or the other.

When you said the country should get told no all the time, I’m not sure the politics you get after a long period of that is actually a healthy one.

But let me give a different version of this that I think about a lot: I think the stakes on the Supreme Court have gotten way too high. I think it’s weird that you have lifetime appointments, so you don’t have a predictable pace of retirements. Then you have people staying, trying to hold on, when they’re at death’s door for years so they can get a congenial replacement from a president of their own party.

There have been proposals that you want to create a balanced court. This goes to a pretty deep idea about what it would mean to not disarm but to try to fix one of the deformities of the system. The framers didn’t expect highly nationalized political parties — they didn’t expect political parties at all.

Our system doesn’t do anything to address political parties operating cooperatively across branches — breaking the inter-branch competition that was supposed to have ambition check ambition. You could do something like, say: The Supreme Court is going to have five Democrats and five Republicans on it at all times. We have commissions like that. Then you don’t have this problem that it becomes the most valuable thing in the world, worthy of all political warfare to stack it.

Although the legal realist argument is that you’ll end up with preference-based politics anyway. So even if you have five Democrats and five Republicans, Republicans tend to be worse at nominating justices than Democrats.

One-third of the justices that they’ve appointed over the course of the last several decades have ended up voting with the liberal camp in the court. So that doesn’t solve your problem if you’re a Republican.

The biggest thing that the founders did not game for was the insane growth of the centralized government. If the founders looked at the size and scope of the federal government today, they would be absolutely shocked and appalled.

The federal government was tiny when it was created. The only question was: Was it going to be tiny or even tinier than when it was created? You could literally walk to the White House and just get an appointment with the president of the United States.

The thing they didn’t game for was that all this power would accrete to the federal government and then from there accrete to the executive branch. That obviously has been a mistake. The proposal I’ve made to my Democrat friends is that you don’t like when Donald Trump is president because you believe that he’s exerting authority in ways that you don’t like, and it’s affecting your life. I don’t like when Joe Biden is president because I believe the exact same thing about Joe Biden.

It would be awesome if I lived in Florida and you lived in New York, and we got to elect these things called governors. You could even live in a local area that better reflected your politics, and we could do fewer things at the national level. Just like the Constitution originally intended — then you could do your politics at the local level.

It would be amazing, right? This whole subsidiarity thing — genius idea. It turns out that Montesquieu totally had it right. When you try to take a country of 340 million people and create a unified, the-people-demand policy, you end up with essentially a blood-sport politics in which whoever controls the government gets to point the gun at everybody else. Then people get mad. And then the next guy comes in and does the exact same thing.

And that’s very dangerous politics.

There’s an interesting way that’s very pessimistic. I’d say two things.

The founders were pretty pessimistic. [Laughs.]

They were at times. There was a lot the founders didn’t see. And I’m always very skeptical of people who say: If you plop down the founders here now, they would absolutely have this opinion.

Who knows what Alexander Hamilton would think?

Alexander Hamilton would certainly not be in favor of the executive branch of the federal government issuing thousands of pages of regulation every single year. That would be shocking.

We would have to see Alexander Hamilton raised in this time. But moving away from ventriloquizing the founders, I think there’s a good argument for more localism and more federalism. At the same time, I don’t notice that people are much happier.

Right now the Trump administration is saying it might declare a national housing emergency in the fall. Which I think is a very funny line. It’s a huge emergency — in the fall.

I’m not a fan of emergency declarations.

It’s because people believe that the housing markets, which are heavily locally controlled, have become very broken.

So don’t have your Socialists here.

I wrote a whole book about fixing it.

I know you did.

Socialist and nationalist are different. I am actually, on one level, here where you are: We are going to have to find some pathway forward to de-escalation. I think if the lesson the left takes from these years is: We’ll see how hard they went. We have to go 30 percent harder. It’s going to be a mistake.

My view is we are seeing the way this whole thing can break. The whole experiment can break. We’re getting too close to genuine violence in the streets for my liking. But I think it’s going to be very hard without trying to figure out some way to say: We have these political parties competing, we have to create spaces where people feel represented, even when they are out of power.

I think the problem with saying: It will just be that Florida is its complete polity and California is its complete polity — is that there are a lot of Republicans in California. Man, you were one of them.

And then I left. And increasingly people are doing this.

Why would we want to live in a community with one another? Just get the hell out.

I’m not so sure that’s true. Truthfully, I’m not sure that’s true.

Not a national divorce — but rather a national separation.

Localism is what we used to call it.

The idea of localism wasn’t that you move away from everybody you disagree with.

It kind of was how the United States began. That’s literally the foundation of the United States.

That’s not what we wanted. I’ve read the founders, too. That’s not what we wanted for ourselves. We thought we were going to live in a community that had a deep set of virtues exhibited by the citizens in order to live together in something that would be diverse and complex.

But the point is that it was state and locality based identity before a national identity. That was very clear to them.

Yes, that is true. But they didn’t mean that as ideological.

I’m not sure that’s an ideological thing. Or that it has to be an ideological thing. I think that one of the big problems is that when you critique political parties — political parties are like John Dillinger: They rob the banks because that’s where the money is. So if you’re a political party and you want to control the federal government, you need to unify your own party.

What we’ve seen over the course of the last five decades is the radical homogeneity of the political parties emerging. My proposal is: What if we throw the ring into the fire? Instead of trying to figure out better ways to control the handling of the ring? What if we just take it and we toss it into the fire, and then we actually just go back home to the shire?

How about that?

The place where I go off that is, unfortunately, I don’t believe there is a fire. My sense is that people want action, and they often want national action. So there isn’t a way to bind that as effectively as you want.

That’s incredibly dangerous. I think that’s exactly what the founders were attempting to avoid. I can stop citing the founders. That’s what I would attempt to avoid.

There you go.

I like the founders. I’m happy with citing the founders. Every time Donald Trump becomes president — which he’s done twice now — I hear from my liberal friends that they’re terrified by the prospect of unified national power in the executive branch.

Every time a Democrat becomes president, I hear that they’re very excited that the president is going to unilaterally relieve student loans and use OSHA to press a vaccination mandate — that I have to soothe the federal government to stop. If that’s the game, then it only gets worse from here.

You like what Trump is doing on immigration. And I think there are two streams of the Trump administration immigration policy.

One you can sort of imagine of almost any Republican administration right now: There was a huge amount of migration during Biden. There was quite an uncontrolled border, and you’re cracking down on that. You’re trying to reverse some of that. You’re going after criminals.

And then there’s been — I would call it an exalting in cruelty. There’s been sending people to El Salvador, in prisons, and Kristi Noem’s posing in front of a bunch of human beings in a cage. There have been the tweets and memes of a Studio Ghibli-fied immigrant woman weeping as she’s deported by, presumably, border agents. The masked ICE agents. The ruthlessness of it has been very telling.

I understand that you want tighter immigration enforcement. But how do you take the rest of this?

I think that a lot of our politics is reactionary triumphalism. I think that is exacerbated by the onlines. The way that you gain credibility with a very online base is to use memes.

On the actual immigration policy — which, again, I think is a different thing — I think that a lot of immigration policies are quite popular with the American people. If the idea is that you’re trying to detect in the policy the animus, as opposed to saying that there are particular political figures who may be trying to make political hay by posing in kayfabe fashion, I think that’s a bit of an over-read.

It’s funny: I take these things as much more connected. I understand this is part of the policy, right? If I were to try to defend the Trump administration on this — and I am not a fan of the Trump administration on this: To take Adam Serwer’s line, “The cruelty is the point.” It’s a signal being sent, and the signal is to leave, don’t come, and we can do terrible things to you.

The militarization of it and the cruelty of it — I do think there’s a tremendous amount of dehumanization in all this. I know that word gets overused.

You say it’s like playing to the base. But public leaders are responsible for what they play into or don’t play into.

I agree with that.

Even if you believe it’s fake on their part. In a way, I would think it’s much worse if it were fake.

I don’t think it would be worse if it were fake on their part. If it was a naturalistic outgrowth of policy, then I think that’s actually worse.

I will say that if you were going to try to steel-man some of this — and again, I’m not actually a fan of Studio Ghibli-ing people crying — if the goal is to send out the signal to the rest of the world: Don’t come because you’re not welcome here — then that’s succeeding. The levels of immigration generally have dropped in the country.

Now, when it comes to legal immigration, I’m actually quite a fan of certain types of legal immigration — not all legal immigration. But there are open debates on the right about immigration policy in the legal sphere. And you do see some of this kayfabe playing into that, as well, in weird and ugly ways on X.

One of the things I’m getting at here is: I actually find the cruelty as a policy in the Trump administration to be part of what the whole policy is, part of how it is reshaping the right, part of how it is changing the incentives for the people who will come after him.

It’s one of the parts of what is happening in politics that I genuinely do find frightening. I understand that people on the right see the left differently than I do. I understand that they understand Obama and Biden differently than I do. But I think that one of the ways in which Trump broke something fairly fundamental in politics was that there were some expectations of a certain decorum — not in every moment, but something all sides broadly tried to hold to.

But part of Trump’s entire appeal is transgression. And the people running the social media accounts, the people coming up behind him and the people trying to appeal to the base — they just keep escalating the transgression.

I think it’s a political mistake. I also don’t think that it’s a good thing to do.

But I don’t think it stays in this cordoned-off place of: I’m just running some politics here. I think it becomes you — in the same way that kids become edgelord, neo-Nazis online, and then one day, they actually don’t like Jews.

I think participating in this kind of politics is genuinely dangerous.

I would use the words “ugly” and “immoral” rather than “dangerous.” I try to reserve “dangerous” for things that are actually dangerous.

But if you’re saying that it could lead to something worse, in the way that you’re talking about, then sure — I’m not a fan. I do not like that. I think that it is a problem, and I think that it is infectious. Meaning that because it’s transgressive and it’s fun, it has made its way over to all sides of the aisle. I don’t think it’s unique to the right. I think that you see it on the left, as well. And failure to recognize that it’s a problem across the board means that there’s not really a way to stop it.

So yes, I would prefer that it would stop. I do not think that it is good for the soul. I do not think it’s good for the body politic.

I think a politics that asks us to do hard things should, at the very least, treat them as hard things. Yes, we’re determined to do them. Yes, it’s important that we get this done. Yes, it’s important to take criminal illegal aliens and deport them.

Does that mean it’s important to have a picture in Studio Ghibli of the person crying? Probably not. Unless you can show me that there’s a calibrated reason for doing it — I tend to agree.

You said there’s a world that you worry about, where Donald Trump is the guy holding back the next thing. Republicans weren’t fans of Bill Clinton, but now we look back at him with quite a lot of fondness.

At least the second term, right? Welfare reform — good.

What’s the world you’re imagining there? Paint the nightmare here for the liberals — where Trump is actually the one holding back the thing that has really going to come to fruition.

I can paint the picture for both liberals and conservatives. I’ll start with the conservatives first, since I have a home rooting interest.

The nightmare for conservatives is that the economy goes south, and an A.O.C.- or Mamdani-style candidate runs on the basis of oligarchy, says that the Trump administration has enriched itself —

Correct. A lot of crypto money is flowing into that administration right now.

I’ve made that case on my program, actually. The systems are totally broken. We need to elect somebody who is going to break the systems even further and then reunify them in a very centralized way. And what you end up with is an extraordinarily far-left president with all the executive power that President Trump has exhibited, but expanding it even further, with solidified control of Congress behind them.

The nightmare scenario for conservatives: President A.O.C. with a unified Democratic Party.

And what do you imagine and fear the president doing?

A radical revision of free-market economics and regulation. I could see a world on the foreign policy front where a far-left president decides to basically surrender — not only to a multipolar world, but to an America-last world, in which the United States takes not only a nonmuscular role in the world, but a sort of repentant role in the world. I think that would be wildly dangerous — not only for security, but in terms of global commerce.

I think there’s increasingly an unwillingness to listen to the Supreme Court. The one breaking point that everybody has stopped short of — including the Trump administration, as we’ve discussed — is just saying to the Supreme Court: Screw it — we’re doing what we want.

I do think that we are on the verge of somebody trying to challenge that. I think that when that happens, that’s when all hell breaks loose. If the Supreme Court orders do not hold, then you could see the kinds of crackdowns on free speech like what you see in Britain or Canada. You could see a restoration of particularistic regulations designed to benefit certain groups explicitly at the expense of other groups. All of this would be really quite terrible.

Right now, people on the left are worried that Trump doesn’t care what Chicago wants. But this is one of the reasons I’m not actually in favor of the president violating the Posse Comitatus Act. It’s one thing to back up ICE in pursuing some legitimate federal interest. It’s another thing entirely to police crime in Chicago — even if you don’t like crime in Chicago — which nobody likes.

So that’s sort of the nightmare scenario from the right. The nightmare scenario from the left depends on where you are on the left. There’s the horseshoe theory, where some of the left agrees with some of the right.

I’m kind of giving you the nightmare scenario from my perspective on both right and left.

For a mainstream Democrat, where Donald Trump turns out not to be the worst thing behind the door.

You could probably describe this better than I could, but think of Donald Trump unbound by the Supreme Court. Or think of a Donald Trump-like character — because again, I agree with much of his agenda. But imagine the agenda that you hate most being effectuated by the executive branch, completely without any sort of checks and balances. What would that look like to you?

I can tell you that as a traditional conservative who is hawkish on foreign policy, many of the worries I have about the left apply also to the right. I think that there’s a world where the next thing that arises on the right is a sort of conspiratorial, grievance-based politics.

If I were going to do it, I would say that Donald Trump, whatever his views and whatever moment he thinks America was great in — it’s the thing that has emerged behind him.

You’d know better than I would what it’s like to be young on the right, right now. But when I talk to a lot of people I’ve known for a long time on the right, they seem pretty concerned — even the populists — about what it’s like being a 23-year-old rightist in the YouTube comments. There has been a real rise of the Groypers, of Nick Fuentes.

A decade ago we might have talked about Yuval Levin as a central intellectual right figure. Now we’ve moved to a Bronze Age Pervert. And Trump doesn’t come out of an ideological hothouse.

No, he does not.

He has his own intuitions.

This is right.

The people coming behind him do.

This I actually very much agree with. I think what’s unique about Trump — and this is why, whenever people are talking about him as a crisis-level figure — Donald Trump is nonideological. He is effectively a pragmatist. Well, the way that I have described him before is that he’s heterodox but reactive to circumstance.

For example, as I said earlier, I have been a supporter of continuing to fund Ukraine — which was not a traditional Trumpist position during the election cycle. And President Trump put his hand in the Putin fire, got burned and still continued to support Ukraine. That is him trying a thing and it’s not working and him backing off the thing.

The way that the left characterizes Trump with regard to tariffs is TACO: Trump always chickens out.

Another way to describe it is he tries a thing, and if it doesn’t work out, then he stops trying the thing.

The idea that Donald Trump is this ideological monster dedicated to wrecking all of the things — that’s not right. Donald Trump tries things, and if it doesn’t work, he kind of untries things. He sticks his hand in the fire, and then he takes his hand out of the fire. You can create algorithms to trade based on this sort of stuff.

So I think that the point you and I are making is that the centralization of power in the executive branch could be dangerous — especially if placed in the hands of a true ideologue. I think that’s right.

One of the things to remember about the 1930s is that the mechanisms of power pre-existed the people who then misused the power. The forcible use of the centralized government in Germany happened under Heinrich Brüning in 1930. It was Franz von Papen who was getting rid of the powers of the various principalities in Germany before the actual centralization under Hitler with the final Enabling Act in 1933.

The bizarre misunderstanding of history — in which there’s one bad guy and nothing led up to the bad guy — is not right. And I fear we’re coming to a point where grievance-based politics is becoming dominant.

And this is why, as you say, I’m assiduously avoiding right and left in this book. Because of this: A grievance-based politics suggests that the very things that have made America awesome, prosperous and a force for good in the world are actually bad — and that those things need to be torn away. That American history has to be seen as a series of actual bizarre conspiracies — complete with brainwashing of the American population. We didn’t actually win World War II. We didn’t actually land on the moon. Was America actually founded on slavery and not on the basis of the Declaration of Independence?

When that becomes the dominant ideology of the American people — that our problem is the system — then the next thing that happens is not something that anybody of traditional bent is going to like.

And the internet makes all of this so much worse. So much worse. Because it used to be that we used to interact with human beings. As I’ve said many times on the show, we all need to go out and touch grass. Go and talk to another human being. It turns out that most human beings aren’t actually in the mold of the comment section on YouTube — either left or right. But the problem is that politicians, especially now, use the comments on YouTube as a proxy for public opinion. They use retweets as a proxy for what public opinion says.

Twitter is not real life, but they sure confuse it with such.

In some ways, it feels like what you’re saying behind a bunch of this is that the thing you fear behind the door — it’s Tucker Carlson’s right.

The thing about Trump — and the reason he could be the end of something and what comes next could be completely different — is: Any attempt to philosophize Trump — the left has been trying to do this, some parts of the right, too — is a fool’s errand. You cannot philosophize Trump. There is no Trumpism, there is just Trump. “There is no Dana, only Zuul.”

So what you’ve seen is an attempt to turn Trumpism into a theory of economic disempowerment, which I think is actually quite wrong. Because as it turns out, Donald Trump quite likes hanging out with people in Silicon Valley and crypto bros and others he thinks of as innovators. But at the same time, he’ll yell at China about how our manufacturing base is being emptied out.

As you say, he contains multitudes. But I think that whatever comes next is not going to.

I think it’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Marian Tupy has a great book called “Superabundance,” in which he discusses the progress of economics over time. It’s not meant to overcome your book “Abundance” — it actually predated it.

I think it’s a really important book because I think it’s important that we’re grateful for our civilization. And I think it’s just as important that we be accurate about the great positive movement in economics that has happened over the course of the last 40 years. One of the great grievance-based culture and economics points is the idea that you’re worse off than your parents or your grandparents were. And it’s just nonsense. It’s not true. So “Superabundance” by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley is, I think, a really informative and useful read.

I’ll go classical here. I think that “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville is still the best description of what America is — and, in many ways, ought to be.

The Mansfield translation is the best version of it. It’s really terrific.

And maybe I’ll go with “The Constitution of Liberty” by F.A. Hayek, which isn’t a complete statement of where I am politically, but I think it’s a good statement of the evolutionary basis of liberty and why checks and balances are necessary in order to preserve that liberty.

Ben Shapiro, thank you very much.

Thanks so much.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the 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.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads. 

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