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.
In 2016, when Donald Trump won for the first time, there was this self-published book by a former C.I.A. media analyst named Martin Gurri that became kind of a phenomenon in Silicon Valley.
The book was called “The Revolt of the Public,” and it described how politics was changing because media and information had gone from scarce to abundant. This new informational dynamic creates constant recurrent crises for whoever is in power: The ability to control a narrative is gone. And in this world of fractured media, there is always an incentive and ability to show what is wrong with whoever is in power.
Gurri argued that this dynamic is fundamentally unstable. It’s one that knows how to destroy but not how to build.
His politics have evolved. He didn’t vote in 2016 or 2020, but he voted for Donald Trump in 2024, and he’s become much more positive about Trump since his first term. Gurri is a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, and he writes for The Free Press, Discourse magazine and City Journal, among others. And I’ve watched him come to the view that maybe Trump is building something more stable, creating a positive agenda that might endure. So I thought his argument was worth hearing out.
Ezra Klein: Martin Gurri, welcome to the show.
Martin Gurri: Great to be here.
In 2014 you published this book, “The Revolt of the Public.” Lay out the basic argument you were making about attention, media and publics.
The argument of the book goes back to my days at C.I.A., where I had one of the least sexy jobs you could have. I was an analyst of global media, and it was a relatively straightforward job. If the president asked you: How are my policies playing in France? You went to two newspapers that were considered authoritative sources — that’s what we called them.
Around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake generated this tsunami of information that was essentially unparalleled in human history. And there’s numbers backing that up. And we just got swamped.
My first response, of course, as somebody who deals with authoritative information, was: What’s authoritative in this infinite mass of stuff? The second part was: What is the effect of going from a world where information is extremely valuable to one that is so abundant that you don’t know what it’s worth?
We could track it. As different countries digitized, we could see ever increasing levels of social and political turbulence right behind it. So the book is trying to explain that.
What became very clear was that the set of institutions that hold up modern life in the 21st century — the government, the media, business, academia — were shaped in the 20th century. Very top down, very hierarchical.
So what the internet did, what the digital revolution did, was essentially create the possibility of this gigantic information sphere that was outside the institutions. And it turned to the institutions, and the first one it turned to was media. It was this big fight between the blogs and the mainstream media, which was the enemy.
And sure enough, when that happens, you can find many errors and many mistakes, some bad faith, in the institutions. It’s institutional failure and elite failure that set the information agenda on the web. I mean, that’s pretty clear.
It can be any number of things. But the total effect of that is a gigantic erosion of trust in the institutions, which then builds up even stronger in this digital world that is noninstitutional.
It’s an inversion of what had gone on before. Before, you had the Walter Cronkites of the world — very respected, most trusted man in America. Think of a journalist such as yourself being voted the most trusted man in America today. It’s not even a joke.
Give me time.
[Laughs.] OK, Walter.
One thing that I took from your book, and it’s held with me for a long time, is that you have to understand media and attention as a separate causal stream into politics.
I don’t think we like to do that. We like to think about politics as a relentlessly rational response to mostly material conditions, maybe cultural conditions, maybe the quality of elites, maybe the quality of governance, maybe inflation.
I understood you as saying: No, the nature of the information flow now creates a constant pressure for distrust. And fractured media will always point out the problems in governance, creating very fast backlashes to whatever the status quo is, such that the status quos get overturned and overturned. The populist right comes in over the establishment. Then they become unpopular. Then the establishment comes back. It’s this endless ricocheting.
But that’s not necessarily just about material conditions. It’s about the dynamics of information having a momentum of their own.
I believe that the information structure is one of the most determinative factors in any society. It shapes the landscape. It’s an ecological force.
So if you’re dealing with mass media, 20th-century style, it’s top down: You need to have a printing press or a TV station, which takes a certain kind of overhead and money. And you can’t talk back to it. So the mood of information — that’s Marshall McLuhan-ish —
Make my heart beat faster. [Laughs.]
Yeah. I’m a semi-McLuhanist. I think he was right on about a lot of things. And I think one of the things he was right about is that everything else is downstream from how we exchange information. Politics is downstream. Even culture is downstream. Because it gets exchanged in certain media.
Now, I would say, in part, you’re right, that the rise of digital media just crashed into a world constructed around analog media and broke it to pieces. And there’s the question of how the digital media in and of itself stimulates controversy and hostility and uncovers a lot of negation toward the institutions that was almost certainly already there but was masked by that former top-down system — where, if The New York Times is talking down at you, you didn’t get or go to the comment section or on X and say, “New York Times, you’re wrong.” No, you just got to either throw it away or write a letter to the editor or something along those lines.
I think a lot of the hostility, a lot of the negation, a lot of what’s happened with the public is now a global phenomenon. We Americans are very provincial, but it’s by no means an American monopoly. This rise was there. It was just masked by the previous information system. And this information system stimulates it but also releases it.
Do you think the elites of today across different domains — media, military, government, economics, business — are actually worse than they were? Or do we think they’re worse than they were because we have access to so much more critique of them? Or does access to all that information make them worse than they were, because they have less room to act and to correct mistakes?
There is no question that we think that they’re worse because we know so much more about them. How many sex scandals that we know about today would never have come up in the 20th century?
I also think, however, that elites today are particularly bad. And they’re particularly bad because they haven’t made the leap yet to the new information system. In other words, in the 20th century, we had people like Kennedy and Reagan, who were masters of television. They knew the information systems that they were conveying their message on.
Today’s elites do not. No. 1, because they’re old. No. 2, because even the young people tend to have old heads. And No. 3, because it’s a very uncomfortable medium, because you do get talked back to a lot.
So I think what we need are people who are just totally comfortable with this crazy information system. Trump, for example, was like the Beethoven of Twitter in his first term. Basically, he is the guy who said: No, I did everything wrong. He’s like this gigantic bull seal, with hide so thick that no matter what you stab that thing with, it doesn’t touch him. He’s full of scars. But that’s his magic. He’s already done all the things. You can’t find a skeleton in his closet because all the skeletons are right here in his living room. You can see them, and he doesn’t care.
Am I for that? No. But it gives you some idea of how you need a kind of elite that deals with the fact that if you project an image that is false, you’re going to burn and crash.
Here’s my “Revolt of the Public”-informed model of the past decade or so in American politics: You have this almost hydraulic informational process by which high-engagement movements — people or ideas that create a lot of energy — rise. You then have this counterprocess by which their opposite then begins to rise as soon as they gain power.
So you have Barack Obama, who’s followed by Donald Trump — someone who is his opposite in a striking way. But then as Donald Trump rises in power, you get this countervibe to Donald Trump — the resistance, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, wokeness.
I think Biden’s complicated because he’s Barack Obama’s vice president. But he’s so not of this era that in some ways I think he’s informationally almost a pause. Then Trumpism comes roaring back with even more force.
What fascinates me about this period is that it doesn’t seem to be selecting for one thing. It is selecting almost endlessly for the strongest thing and then the opposite of the strongest thing.
It’s this crazy ricochet process. How much do you buy that explanation?
What you said is true at the descriptive level. It’s back and forth.
What I think is happening is trial and error. The electorate is searching for somebody to make sense politically out of this moment. And so far, everybody has failed.
Obama did OK — he got re-elected. But in the end, he did not set the standard for politics at the presidential level in a digital age. Trump came. Out. Biden came. Out. Now you have Trump. Who knows what’s going to happen? If Trump succeeds, it may be that that’s the model. The odds are massively against it.
Let’s talk a bit about the Biden era. One thing that you emphasized a lot in that — and you’re pretty critical of Joe Biden — is that the form of the elite that he led, the Democratic Party in that era, became defined around what you call the politics of control. What is that?
First of all, I want to apologize to Joe Biden. If I had known — I mean, you could sort of see that the guy wasn’t there. But if I had known the degree to which he really was not in charge of anything —
I’ve read you on this. I think you’re wrong on this.
Yeah, I know. That’s pretty clear to me.
Whoever was running the White House during that time I think had that impulse to go back to the 20th century. The ideal internet for people like that would be The New York Times circa 1958 or something.
And they have converted this into an almost ideological construct. They now seem to be promoting what you might call a guided society, where ordinary people, like me and others, need Sherpas to make sure we don’t fall off the cliffs and keep going upward and onward. So we’re protected against disinformation, hate and all these other things. An attempt to erect a censorship apparatus that would de-emphasize people or silence certain voices, silence certain opinions and get experts and bureaucrats to basically proclaim that certain truths were false. It was completely futile as it was happening. And I think it paved the way to Trump.
I come from Cuba, where censorship —
I didn’t know you came from Cuba.
Oh, yes. By the time I was 10, I had experienced a pretty stern right-wing censorship and a left-wing dictatorship that basically killed the media. There was no media left. So I’m pretty touchy about that sort of thing. And I guess I have an antenna that can feel things coming. Thank God for the First Amendment. They can’t do it here.
This feels completely fundamental to the right’s self-definition right now.
JD Vance goes to the Munich conference and tells the Europeans they’re doing too much to restrict speech and expression and political expression in their countries.
Elon Musk has tagged “cis” or “cisgender” as hate speech on X. The Trump administration is telling all the agencies they have to go through and look for words that are now out of favor — “diversity” and “D.E.I.” and things like that — and it all has to be erased.
So I see this world of people who understand themselves as free-expression warriors. And then as soon as they get into power — whether it’s running X or running the government — they certainly seem to me to be on a campaign of censorship.
What do you think I’m missing?
You’re missing the dimension of censorship under Biden. He basically told the platforms: You have to adhere to European standards of good behavior online.
Well, the Europeans don’t have a First Amendment. We tend to think of the Europeans as being just like us. But when it comes to speech — and this has always been the case, and it is more the case every day — they’re halfway between us and China. So I think the difference is that.
Do you, as an ordinary person, feel like you can say whatever you want? If you don’t like X, you can go to BlueSky or something.
But that was true then, too. You could go to Rumble or Gab or Truth Social.
I want to push you a little bit here. I think your point is interesting — that partially what you’re seeing people like the Biden administration respond to is an effort to try to get control of an information space that they no longer know how to control and even no longer know how to operate in.
I am struck by seeing very aggressive movements from the Trump administration immediately to impose control on what, say, civil servants can say.
So is that a dynamic of the left that you’re describing? Or is it that in this era of information overload, both sides are fighting for control? And whatever their professed values, as soon as they get into power, the thing they really want to do is decide what the boundaries are and what you can say and how you could say it?
Well, let’s give it time. You may be right. All I have to say is: I find it remarkable — and you can look at me, I am not a young man — that free speech is a right-wing cause. When did that happen? You have people on the left, John Kerry most recently, bemoaning the existence of the First Amendment. I had never seen that in my entire life.
Everybody always pretended, at least, that they were for free speech. Even when secretly they wanted to control it, they always talked the talk.
And now only on the left you find people saying: “No, we need boundaries. We need this. We need that — protection against.”
So that’s my take on that. You may be right that this crowd ends up being even worse. So we got to watch that. I have no dogs in the political fight, but in the free speech fight, I’m all in.
Well, tell me about your movement on this. In 2016 and 2020 you don’t vote. In 2024 you vote for Donald Trump. What moved you toward him in that period?
In large part, it was free speech. It was the normalizing of the censorship.
This is what we fought for in the ’60s, was to be able to say whatever we wanted to and to expand that to whatever the limit is that doesn’t break down social peace. So that was my No. 1 thing.
No. 2 was that I just felt like the world was becoming more and more dangerous. And I knew, regardless of what you say, that this was an empty skin suit in the White House and that we were just like an airplane on automatic pilot, circling and circling, waiting to run out of gas.
I do not love Donald Trump. I never have. But I felt like he was for free speech, and he’s a live brain in the White House. Hopefully he will be more than that.
I think it is underestimated how much the meaning of Donald Trump changed from 2016 to 2020 to 2024.
You write that Trump this time had become a kind of mythical figure, that he has been “transformed into a living symbol of the progressive elite’s abuse of power and contempt for the principle of equality.”
I’ve heard something like that from a lot of people, particularly the mythic dimension of Trump. Tell me what you mean by that and how you felt that change in your own perspective.
I can tell you the moment it happened, when I went: Jeez, OK.
It was that near-assassination episode, where — I don’t know how lucky you’ve been, but if you’ve been lucky, you have never been in a place where bullets are flying. I come from Cuba. I can tell you that when bullets start flying, you think you’re a hero until that moment. And then you hit the ground, and you make like a pancake.
And here’s a man who not only was being shot at but had been hit. And he probably had no idea how badly. And he stood up and told the Secret Service agents: You people have knocked my shoes off. I’m going to put on my shoes. I’m going to turn to the crowd. I’m going to say, “Fight.”
That, No. 1, took a lot of courage, physical courage. No. 2, presence of mind. But there’s a third element, and I don’t even know what to do it with that one — you can call it the providential interpretation of Trump. He thinks that God saved him to make America great again. Or you can give a mathematical explanation. He’s kind of like a strange attractor, and these incredible coincidences keep happening all around him that completely defy the laws of probability.
The fact that the bullet missed him. That image where he’s standing there shaking his fist at destiny and he’s got those Secret Service agents wrapped protectively around him and there’s a flag in the background. What are the odds of that thing happening spontaneously? No wonder people think it was acted.
But if you look at the last, oh, eight years, there’s a series of bizarre questions. How did he beat Hillary Clinton? How did his popularity resurrect from Jan. 6, 2021? How did he just kind of dispose of a pretty good field of Republican aspirants, including proven winners, like DeSantis? Endless numbers of questions. Every event tends to skew in his direction. You can say that what he did — being exiled and coming back — was kind of a hero’s journey.
That’s not necessarily a moral quality. And he could do many bad things with all those qualities. But that’s part of what I think the mythic side of Trump is: the fact that the world around him is not the world around the rest of us.
I think there are seasons to the way we understand the world. Certainly in the Obama era, we were in a season of empirics and technocracy. And I don’t mean that just in terms of the reports people produced and the way they argued. I also mean it in terms of the aesthetic.
This is a point my colleague Ross Douthat has made, but it’s also something that I’ve been thinking about. It has felt to me for some time like we’re re-entering a slightly more mystic, mythic turn of the wheel.
I think you see it in the popularity of Catholicism, with its pomp and its circumstance and the strangeness of Greek Orthodoxy. The return of astrology as a major force.
And something about Trump ended up fitting that, for a lot of people, at least. I’m not saying that I have this particular interpretation of him, but the degree to which, even within his own movement, he’s almost like the grand ayatollah of national conservatism. That even the people who like him don’t view him as this precise technical policy thinker; they view him as somebody with a kind of intuitive, almost spiritual connection to the country that they see him leading and the people they see him representing.
And with the revolving of all these other powerful figures, like Musk and so on, it wasn’t just his show anymore. He became like this demigodlike or popelike figure, presiding over a moment.
I think you’re 100 percent right. That’s actually a pretty deep observation.
Having lived through the ’60s, which was kind of like that — astrology brought it to mind — there was that sense of mysticism, almost, of a connection to something beyond everyday life, that there must be something more to it than this.
There’s a huge hunger for that right now. A lot of our politics sublimate that, honestly. It’s impossible to measure empirically, but I profoundly believe that.
The Obama era was cool, calm, collected — the rule of technocracy. And that was very flavorless, I think, for a lot of people. People want red meat. And what is Trump?
I think we’re beginning this era. I think there’s more down the road. So let’s keep our eyes open. Because it can manifest itself in a number of good or bad ways.
Well, it’s also cooperation versus dominance.
I think that the promise of the Obama era, of Obama himself, in a way, was that you could cooperate your way to this future. You could talk your way, think your way through the conflicts.
I’ve been in D.C. this week talking to people from different factions of the right, and something they all say is: America is strong, and we stopped throwing around that strength. We have the ability to shape events in our image and to our interests, and we have bound ourselves in ways that we didn’t have to. We have this huge economy, but we didn’t use things like tariffs to make others bend to our will. We let ourselves get taken advantage of by China. We don’t do any territorial expansion anymore.
Policies that were more common in the 19th century and early 20th century have become morally uncommon — not just a thing we don’t do but a thing we don’t even consider doing.
And Trump brings back this old spirit, a kind of more domineering, frontierlike energy.
I think there’s some truth in that. I would say that a lot of the people that I know who are pro-Trump feel that he’s not their dominator. He’s their liberator.
In other words, he’s the guy who’s breaking up this very dominating system of elite institutional governance and allowing the normies, as they call themselves, to do what they wish.
I think the word “frontier” that you used is critical. This is a great country. I’m an immigrant, so I kind of feel like the frontier spirit is part of my spirit. I think Americans, basically, that’s who they are. They have this craving for some far-frontier-like thing that they must master, conquer, populate, coordinate — it doesn’t really matter. The modality doesn’t matter. It’s the challenge that matters.
And I think on this, honestly, under Obama, there was no real challenge. What were we headed toward? It was unclear. And I think for the moment — and we’ll see with Trump — the clarity is in the negation, in undoing that controlling apparatus that the Biden administration had set up.
I think this is really important. I want to try to put two things into conversation. It’s a lot of why I wanted to have you on the show.
If you are a normie liberal, let’s call it, the way you’re experiencing Donald Trump, Elon Musk, DOGE — broadly, the Russell Vought war on what now gets called the administrative state — is as this incredible assertion of power that is maybe even a constitutional crisis.
They went in and just destroyed U.S.A.I.D. in a day. That wasn’t something that the people thought you could do. They fired huge numbers of federal workers, saying it was for cause, even though it had nothing to do with their individual job performance. They’ve knocked out all these probationary workers. They’ve tried to break huge amounts of the federal government and reshape it to their will.
Liberals have experienced all of this as an extraordinary assertion of power that the executive is not supposed to have. The way you’ve described it, and the way I’ve seen other people describe it, is as an act of breaking up control.
I’d like you to try to describe how it looks from that perspective — thinking about an audience who is experiencing it in the opposite way.
I was probably deamplified by Facebook at some point. I don’t even know what I said. But when my wife would send out my articles, they got a lot more response than when I sent out my articles on Facebook. And when Mark Zuckerberg saw the light and suddenly realized he didn’t like censorship anymore — strangely, after Donald Trump got elected. And I’m not a Trumpist. Like I said, I believe in free speech.
And I thought the idea that you were supposed to say certain words — the right has never had this power. The power to impose certain words, to basically to come up with entirely new definitions about things that were pretty settled, like who’s a man and who’s a woman has been settled since Adam and Eve. And all these constantly changing new permutations of ideas that were not intuitive — let’s put it that way — but mandatory from the moment they get proclaimed. And by whom? I don’t even know.
I had a friend who was a professor. About five or six years ago, I asked him: What’s it like? He said: It’s like a mine-clearing operation being a college professor. Sooner or later, something’s going to blow up on you. [Laughs.]
So it’s not just the elites being controlling. It’s a culture of control or an ideology of control.
I understand the culture you’re reacting to here. But I want to keep focus on the actual acts of the president here.
I asked you about the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the actions of DOGE, which you’ve written pieces on. And you moved to whether or not Facebook shadow-banned you. I don’t know if Facebook shadow-banned you. If they did, they shouldn’t have. But the actions of the administration have been the assertion of an extraordinary amount of executive control over the administrative state — things that the Biden and Obama administrations did not think they were allowed to do.
The amount of stories I have heard about how difficult it is to work through the privacy regulations of the I.R.S. in order to make social insurance programs be smoother. And in the end, they just weren’t that smooth because everybody is so concerned about privacy and you just couldn’t get access to the systems. And then the Trump administration just comes in and busts their way to the systems.
I mean, you must know enough liberals to know that they are experiencing this era of Trump and Musk and DOGE as the dawning of authoritarianism. How do you tell them to see it from the way you’re seeing it?
Yeah, I mean, what is authoritarianism? I do know that most of my friends who are liberals don’t think he’s an authoritarian. But what is he doing to the government? What I see being done is the very earliest moment in which A.I. collides with the analog world.
The I.R.S. thing you were describing — I was a bureaucrat for many, many years at the C.I.A., so I know perfectly well how that works. First of all, there’s all these controlling mandates. In the end, they all checkmate each other, so you have this paralysis, and it’s all: Take this sheet of paper, write the memo, take it here, take it there. In the end, it gets lost, and nothing happens. What you have is Elon Musk applying A.I. to all those rules and regulations. And you can identify exactly where you can go. Perfectly legal, right?
It’s not clear that it’s perfectly legal.
Well, it is not unclear to me. I mean, they’re moving so fast that there’s probably a lot I don’t know. For example, U.S.A.I.D. was set up by executive order. So you can crash that down by executive order. There was no act of Congress —
No, it was set up by Congress —
That’s not what I understand —
It was set up in 1998. Its current structure was created through Congress. U.S.A.I.D. is statute.
Well, all I can tell you is: I see this as the application of the human A.I. mind to the analog world. And — let’s put the legality aside — it allows for the identification of things that can be cut way faster than the analog minds can follow.
And I have to ask you: If you want to be an authoritarian, are you going to cut back the government? Let me tell you, I have lived under authoritarians. Cutting back the government is not what they do.
See, but I don’t think they’re cutting back the government. I think they are trying to take control of it.
I’ve heard this A.I. thing from a couple of people. I am open to the idea that one thing Elon Musk wants to do is bring A.I. into the federal government. But I am not super open to the idea that that’s what DOGE is doing now.
Efficiency for what? A.I. for what? Every A.I. system has some kind of value function or prompt you have to be giving it. The question of the prompt is really the important question.
Yes, you could, in theory, unleash A.I. on the entire range of Treasury payment data. But what are you trying to get it to find? If you’re trying to get it to find fraud, fine. How is “fraud” defined?
To be honest with you, I don’t even think that’s what you think they’re doing. You wrote a piece about why you thought it was good that they were getting rid of U.S.A.I.D. What was that argument?
My take on U.S.A.I.D. is: What was the point of it?
You look at a lot of the programs, and there clearly was no point to it. They were trying to find some point to it. We give aid. What do we give aid for?
Well, in the old days, you know, we fought the Commies. And if we could bribe some government or some movement to fight the Commies along with us, we didn’t care how corrupt that was. It was good. Now they’re on our side.
But we’re not in that kind of a world anymore. These people are not sophisticated thinkers of what to do with government mission. And what you were saying — which is: To what end? — is the ultimate key.
So I am with them so far. Because the government is just such a monstrous bloat that, honestly, what they’re doing is fingernail parings.
But to what end? Do any of these people in the Trump administration have an image in their minds of: Once we’ve taken the government and we squeezed it and we broke it and we reshaped it, now it’s going to do what? I am not sure. I have not seen that anywhere.
Maybe some marginal people, Musk minions. There is this mysterious Substack person called Eko. He’s as close to an ideologist — and maybe this is a fantasy world, but he persuades you that with A.I., the entirety of the government becomes intelligible. And it becomes intelligible horizontally, so you can follow every agency that is trying to find little cutouts and rabbit holes to hide waste in or whatever. But it’s also intelligible vertically, so if you’re allocating money for a bridge repair, it can show you the actual bridge and what’s actually being repaired. But I mean, this is utopian stuff about where do we get to this bottom-up world or whatever.
Members of the Trump administration themselves have not said anything. They’re not very articulate about this. And should we be paying attention? Yeah. Should we think that it’s authoritarianism? I don’t think so.
I haven’t read Eko, but I have seen the “Let’s put all government on the blockchain” kinds of ideas before.
And I think they tend to reflect people who are not trying to follow where the government spends its money, because actually we know quite a lot about that and people just don’t like doing the spadework.
But here’s one argument that I think you agree with and that I’ve heard from other people. Let me try to state it as generously as I can: that the administrative state is a unelected fourth branch of government. And in this era of the revolt of the public, it is not just frustration about information. It is frustration about unresponsiveness. Government doesn’t work. It doesn’t do what you tell it to. You don’t feel it in your life. And when you do feel it, it’s often not felt in a good way.
Particularly for the right, because the government is staffed by liberals, because liberals like the government better than the right does, you come in as a sort of antigovernment disrupter, like Donald Trump was in 2017, and you find you’re stymied left and right by these procedures and processes, by these bureaucrats and civil servants. So what you’re trying to do is break this power center that stands between the people and the government they elect.
And I think the thing that I am personally a little surprised by is how much the right has adopted this view that the executive is the will of the people and that you need to give Donald Trump this power because he is the accountable one. And the government should just do what he says in a pretty much unquestioned way.
That is responsiveness: You break the administrative state so these populist leaders getting elected on top of public dissatisfaction can control it and make whatever it is they think that the people want.
What really matters, honestly, is the restoration of trust.
I think today trust has just evaporated. And we can discuss the justice of that. I think there is some justice to it. I think some of it is utopian expectations versus just the way the world actually runs. But there it is. It has evaporated.
What is done, honestly, as long as there is no law breaking or anything like that, whatever gets done, whatever gets broken, if you can restore the trust of the public and democratic institutions, then you will have done a good thing.
Whether these people can do it, that’s a serious question.
I think this creates an interesting question about whether or not there is a corollary theory to yours — that what we are living through repeatedly right now is not revolts of the public but revolts of elites.
Let me try to make this argument to you and see what you think: You look at the public, and it’s moving by a couple of points in each election. The movable public is narrow.
But if you look at the elites, who are all on Twitter talking to each other — or X or Facebook or whatever — they’re swinging unbelievably far, election to election. Joe Biden gets elected in a fairly narrow election, by historical standards. And they come in certain, even though they have a 50-50 Senate majority, that what the public wants is an F.D.R.-size presidency.
The Trump people are all talking to each other on X, and they’re in these intense communication dynamics with each other. They have, by any measure, a very narrow victory. And they believe that it’s time to remake the entire state.
What’s really swinging here are not normies. What’s really swinging here are elites. They’re the ones most exposed to the communication dynamics you’re describing, because they are really intensely on these platforms talking to each other. Nobody comes in and says, “That was a pretty small win. We should be careful here.” It’s all, “We won by a bit — and now the revolution.”
Yeah, there’s an element of truth in that. But I think you have the public wrong. Because the public is not two-sided. The public is fractured into many pieces. And those pieces tend to coalesce.
Sometimes spontaneously in protest, for example. They don’t need an elite to tell them to go to Tahrir Square or Plaza del Sol or whatever.
And they mobilize entirely by being against something. Take the crowd in Tahrir Square. You had socialists, the youth of the Muslim Brotherhood, everyday Egyptians. You had all kinds of people that if you asked what to do next, they would start fighting with each other. But they were all against Mubarak.
The public is against. Against is a very mobilizing emotion. And the thing we have to watch out — and I’ve been saying this for years — is: OK, taken to its logical conclusion, you become a nihilist. You basically believe that destruction is a form of progress.
Now that’s my flag for the Trump guys. Are they tearing this out to a purpose? I’m willing to put up with a lot of noise, a lot of mistakes if there’s a purpose and I approve of the purpose. I don’t see a purpose. But are you doing it just because you can?
I take your point about Tahrir Square. But America has not had an election decided by more than five points in the popular vote since 2008, and that was during a once-in-a-generation financial crisis.
We keep talking about the public, particularly after elections, as if they’ve been these overwhelming things. But the truth is most people vote the way they did before.
Right. I think the two-party system is a completely artificial construct. The two parties don’t really hold too much allegiance anymore. They’re among the institutions that have lost a great deal of trust. The number of independents keeps growing, and what is an independent? Well, a hundred different things.
So part of the difficulty of this political moment is that we look at it in very old-fashioned ways — Democrat, Republican. But I look at the ground level, and I see this fermenting mosaic of different passions. I think it’s very fluid. Maybe the overall numbers, not so. And as long as we’re given this choice of Republican and Democrat, maybe that won’t change. But I’m wondering how long that’s going to last.
I wonder that, too. Or at least what the nature of being a Republican or a Democrat is. It used to be very different, right? Democrats were the much more racist party in America for a very long time.
I know. I landed in Virginia when there was still Jim Crow. There were no Republicans.
So things change. There’s been this argument that the parties are in this weird transition.
To be a Republican in good standing, you need to believe the institutions are fundamentally broken. That is what Trump represents. That’s why R.F.K. Jr. can fit in the coalition now, despite being a pro-choice Democrat a couple of years ago. Because he fundamentally believes the institutions are corrupt, are broken, do not represent the people, etc. And then the Democratic Party is in tension over this with itself, but certainly under Biden and Harris, it was a very pro-system party.
It’s not really about liberal and conservative. The reason Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney were clearly in coalition with Kamala Harris while R.F.K. Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard were in coalition with Donald Trump is that what politics is fundamentally about is changing. And neither side has fully known how to express that change. It’s still nascent. It’s a transition from one kind of system and one kind of polarization to another.
You’re 100 percent right, in that we’re still speaking in words that make no sense when you attach them to what’s actually happening out there.
I would point out that not that long ago, Barack Obama was elected, and he was going to be a transformational figure. He was not elected to be lord over the institutions. He had a style of governance and a rhetoric that allowed him, while still being president and in charge of everything, to distance himself from the institutions. So he could criticize the government very sharply as being racist or anti-feminist or whatever. And yet he was the president. That would have been a moment when the Democrats could have seized that high ground.
So even what you’re describing is just of now. At the time of the first Obama election in 2008, the Democrats were the ones who were trying to storm the institutions and change them.
I think that in the movement of the Democrats to become the pro-institutions party, they have lost something pretty important.
Really talented politicians like Obama could keep that in balance. But Biden, who is very much a creature of Washington, couldn’t. And if you lose the mantle of reform, I think it’s very hard to win in American politics.
And I think that’s true on both sides. Because the Democrats or, even more so, anti-Trumpism has been identified with pro-institutionalism, there’s a core of people who will stand up.
I Ubered here, and there was a woman standing on a street corner here in Washington with a sign that said, “God bless the federal work force,” just standing there with that sign. So God bless her. I was one of them.
Honestly, the vast majority of Americans want reform, want change. They are not for the institutions. They have no faith in them. So I would say that for the Democratic Party to regain its mojo, what they need is to bring government, this enormous construct, down to the level of the human being. How do you humanize that thing? In some bizarre way, that’s what Trump is trying to do without thinking about it very much. But the Democrats aren’t even thinking.
I have many worries about Donald Trump, but one is that the ways he is humanizing the government is through himself.
I found the decision to drop the charges against Eric Adams extremely alarming and telling. Because here’s a guy who is under investigation for what appear to be pretty clear acts of corruption. He’s a Democratic mayor. He’s not somebody Donald Trump needs to be loyal to.
And it seems like what they — and, frankly, Eric Adams — saw was the possibility that if he would signal to Trump that he would pledge allegiance, he would be in Trump’s pocket, Trump would take the heat off him.
When I look internationally, I see a sort of similar thing. The countries that are willing to tell Trump he’s great and show they’re on his side — be that Russia or anybody else — can get the deal. And if you’re not willing to do that, you can’t get the deal.
The thing on the other side of this is patronage — a personalist regime, where what you do doesn’t matter. What matters is who you pledge fealty to.
I won’t touch the Adams case because I don’t really know the details of whether that case was good or not. But I think what the sensation is for the people on his side is: Here are all these bureaucrats, this “deep state” and these Democrats and so forth who have been lording it over us. And now they realize they’re just like me. They’re crying out just like we’ve been crying out. But they weren’t listening when we cried, and now he’s making them cry out.
I think it’s a case of the high being brought down. I’m not going to deny there’s a huge personalistic aspect to Trump, starting with Trump himself. But I think as much of that as he is perceived as the hero who’s bringing the high down low. That is very humanizing, and it’s very democratizing, if you believe that that’s what’s happening.
So if you don’t think it’s just personalism, what’s your positive vision of this? You said this was the first time you saw a revolt like this move beyond negation — toward some kind of positive agenda. What do you think they are trying to do?
I would hope the government ends up much leaner, far more responsive, far less politicized, far more A.I. friendly, far more digitized — and therefore the levels of hierarchy are much lower than what we had in the 20th century. And trusted by the people.
If you have a government that is, say, the equivalent of Amazon. You trust it, you push a button, and it’s there on your doorstep.
Providing what? Responsive to what? This is a group that is about to do cuts to food stamps, or SNAP, cuts to Medicaid. This question of what this leaner government is providing and what it is not providing seems like a much more fundamental question.
And then also there’s this question of whether or not public responsiveness is possible under the informational conditions you describe. As an example, they’re doing pretty indiscriminate cuts across the government right now. You have to have a pretty low opinion of the government — and they do, but I don’t — to think that problems won’t emerge from that. Things are going to break. And then people are going to be upset about that. So does breaking the government actually mobilize too much of the public against you?
What we have is a revolution. And it’s, thank goodness, an American-style revolution. F.D.R. had one. Reagan had one. Guillotines were not brought out. Nobody died. But revolutions are messy, and mistakes will be made.
If you want to have a pessimistic view, this is a remarkably un-self-reflective bunch. They’re a bunch of action people — Musk and even R.F.K. Jr. and certainly Trump. These are people who want to do things. That’s not a bad thing, but you need somebody to explain what the hell you’re doing. You need to explain, as we were talking about before: What’s the end state? Why did you take this step here? Are you doing it because the next step is going to be over there and this is a logical place to be? Or are you just ramming through and tearing up things as you go along?
It is unclear to me, by the way, which of those it is. It’s clear that Elon Musk has a plan, and it’s all A.I. But where he’s headed with that, I have no idea.
As we close, I want to go back to a question I asked you at the beginning, because I think this puts a point on it. I had asked you: Are elites today worse than they were, or have modern conditions led us to think they’re worse than they are?
And when we were having that conversation, I was thinking about something Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, wrote: Basically, the point of WikiLeaks was that if you can pull all the internal information out of the system and make it public, you make it impossible for large systems to function. Because they need to have the ability to communicate privately. They need to be able to speak in secrecy. His view is that WikiLeaks was actually a way of destroying the capacity of these bureaucracies to operate. And he thought they were bad, so that was a good thing.
What I see Elon Musk doing right now is pulling in these informational databases and using things that either he is sometimes lying about or that he is pulling out to make the government look bad — like when he talks about the government funding a scientific research study that just sounds weird when you hear it. A lot of them do, but a lot of important findings come out of weird research.
Many people argue that Congress has not been improved by the addition of C-SPAN cameras. Hearings are not better because things can be clipped out of them. It just makes it harder for people to negotiate a deal. There are all kinds of things where, ideologically, transparency seems great, but you can’t negotiate everything in public.
I’m curious how you think about that, because this seems to me like there’s a constant pressure for transparency. But transparency is typically either bad for the way systems work or is weaponized against systems by people who don’t like the way they’re working.
Large, complex institutions need to have places where things happen in whispers that nobody hears to get anything done.
But we are now in an entirely different world. So what we need is elites — people in charge of things, let’s just call them that — who can deal in this world where you’re under the spotlight at all times in a way that is, No. 1, functional — you can get things done. But No. 2, look trustworthy to the millions of people who are going to be watching you either online or through some system or another.
C-SPAN is a joke. I can’t believe that Congress having a camera in front of it doesn’t provide a show. Is there anything more disruptive, bizarre and almost like theater of the absurd than watching those committees work? They’ve had the opportunity. This is not the camera’s fault. It’s their fault.
But it’s also not better when they try to provide a show. I think the move toward members of Congress who are trying to provide a show does not make hearings better. It incentivizes for grandstanders and performers.
But that’s not a show. That’s grandstanding. A show is a story. A trial is kind of like a show. I actually think it’s possible to do.
With A.I., in particular, it’s possible to get some version of that. But we need people in charge, at the top of the institutions, who are comfortable and believable in that role.
You made this point that we’re now seeing the rise of these leaders who are genuinely comfortable in this information sphere.
Donald Trump is native to Twitter. You called him the Beethoven of Twitter. Elon Musk liked Twitter so much, he bought it and then renamed it X. And I think it’s true for a lot of people in that administration. Some of them are very native to podcasting as well.
You are sort of suggesting this is a good thing. But one thing that I worry about is that I sometimes think these systems select for a very unusual personality type — one that is absorptive of huge amounts of negative feedback and uses that as a kind of fuel. What it wants is engagement. What it wants is attention. It doesn’t have the reaction most normal human beings have to a lot of attention, which is to shrink back from it a little bit, to be upset if people are upset with you. It’s a little bit intentionally sociopathic.
So this idea that what we’re going to get now — and that is a positive — is rule by people who are really well adapted to Twitter. Are you comfortable with that?
That’s a great idea — ruled by digital sociopaths. I think you’re right. My take, though, is: There is this colossal transformation going on. We’re moving from the industrial age to something that doesn’t even have a name yet. We’re at a very early stage of this. And the rule of the digital sociopath, hopefully, will be an early stage that we transcend.
To want to be president of the United States, you’re already not a normal human being.
That’s fair.
Already you are some kind of freak. Also, if I may give my Thirty Years’ War metaphor — am I allowed to do that?
Please. I was hoping you’d do a Thirty Years’ War metaphor.
Well, there you go. It’s not even mine. It’s from Antonio García Martínez, who said: Suppose you take a time machine and go to the Thirty Years’ War — percentage of the population, the bloodiest war that was ever fought in Europe. People were being slaughtered.
And suppose you went there and you asked the man on the street, “What do you think of the printing press?” And the man on the street would say, “It’s the most horrific conflict-inducing thing that has ever been invented. Look, over there, there’s this little church, and over there, there’s another little church. And they’re coming out with their printed books, and the printed books have almost exactly the same words. But, like, eight words are different. And they have to kill each other over that. If we didn’t have a printing press, we’d be safe, right?”
Well, today we know that the printing press was the most liberating invention that ever happened in the human race. We had to get past that. And let’s be thankful — building on the metaphor — we’re not at a Thirty Years’ War level here. We’re not anywhere near that.
So I think we will get past that. I think information systems cycle through moments of adjustments. My concern always has been that when we get to the end, we have liberal democracy still there and maybe even more democratic, because there are many things about the digital systems and A.I. that empower people far more than the old analog world did. So that’s my answer.
Always our final question: What are three books you recommend to the audience?
Anything by Andrey Mir. He is the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. But if I had to pick one, I would pick “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers,” which is basically a very detailed history of the art form explaining — with your newspaper front and center — how the business model has changed from selling eyeballs to advertisers to commodifying polarization. Beautiful book.
The second one: A British economist, Paul Ormerod, has got a book called “Why Most Things Fail.” And you should read it, first of all, because it’s a great title. No. 2, because as an economist, he’s gone through the data, mostly British and American data that goes back 150 years, to show how governments have tried to solve issues like unemployment and ethnically segregated households, and it’s a null hypothesis; nothing has changed. So it’s a fascinating book.
Third: Hugo Mercier, a French American author, “Not Born Yesterday,” and it’s about the question of whether somebody like Donald Trump can talk to you, a fairly liberal human being, and through the magic of his disinformation, suddenly you walk away thinking, “I will vote for that man.” Can he persuade you through some manipulative process?
And Mercier has a lot of psychological data in there that pretty clearly explains: no, not really. People tend not to be persuaded by oratory rhetoric. And they tend to believe what they believe. And if what I say is what you believe in, you’ll think I’m a smart person. But if a person meets, for example, a point of view that they have never heard before that conflicts with their worldview, he says — and has data to show it — that the tendency is to hunker down to what you believe in.
Martin Gurri, thank you very much.
Hey, this was fun.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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