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.
Go back a couple of decades in American politics, and it was extremely common for the representative of a district to be from a party different from the candidate it voted for at the presidential level.
But year after year, election after election, it has become a lot less common. At this point, only a handful of Democrats represent districts that Donald Trump won. One of them is Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, from Washington’s Third Congressional District.
Gluesenkamp Perez doesn’t sound like other Democrats. She has a pretty different economic philosophy — one built around the right to repair and around, I would say, a moral critique of what our economics have come to look like: Who we value. What we value. The way we have lost respect for those who work with their hands. And the way the economy has become profoundly imbalanced toward consumerism and away from producerism.
Which makes her particularly interesting in this moment because all of a sudden, people in the Trump administration began saying similar kinds of things: that we should be making so much more in America, that we’re addicted to cheap stuff from abroad, that we’re on a sugar-high economy from which we need to detox:
Archived clip of JD Vance: Let’s talk a little bit about what we believe in the Republican Party. We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.
Archived clip of Stephen Miller: If they had a choice between a doll from China that is not as well constructed as a doll made in America and those two products are both on Amazon — yes, you’d probably be willing to pay more for a better-made American product.
Archived clip of Scott Bessent: The market and the economy have just become hooked, and we’ve become addicted to this government spending. And there’s going to be a detox period.
Archived clip of Donald Trump: Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again. And it’s happening, and it will happen rather quickly. There’ll be a little disturbance. But we’re OK with that.
For a lot of Democrats, this is a pretty easy moment in economic policy for them. The tariffs are causing all this upheaval. Trump is significantly less popular than he was when he was elected. Simply opposing him is enough.
But if you’re someone like Gluesenkamp Perez and your marginal voter is a Trump voter, how does this look to you? How has it changed your politics?
I was curious to see how Gluesenkamp Perez has been absorbing everything. Things have become a little bit weirder in her district. There have been some very raucous town halls.
So how is she thinking about what Trump represents and the broader economic arguments she has been making as the politics of this begin to come into direct conflict with reality?
Ezra Klein: Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, welcome to the show.
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: Thank you. Glad to be here.
I wanted to start with a clip of President Donald Trump from Wednesday, talking about China and his tariffs.
Archived clip of reporter: Did you speak to President Xi of China?
Archived clip of Donald Trump: Look, right now, and I told you before, they’re having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business. They made a trillion dollars with Biden. A trillion dollars. Even a trillion one with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don’t need. Somebody said: Oh, the shelves are going to be open. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.
What did you think of that?
You’re talking to a lady who doesn’t give my child toys. I’m a big believer in dirt and string and sticks. But at a broader level, tariffs are a tool. A tool can be used destructively, or it can be used productively. And it depends on how it’s wielded.
Talking to folks back home who really don’t care at all about most politics, they have very sophisticated views on Canadian lumber-dumping practice — we lost seven mills in my area last year. I think it’s about seven.
We want domestic manufacturing. We want self-sufficiency. We want the ability to make things ourselves. I think it’s a mistake to defend our identity around being just consumers and not producers, as well.
But these reciprocal trade deals are a back-room deal for multinationals. How it’s used is what matters.
It’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about the tariffs. Because, in a way, members of the Trump administration have moved to making a critique that you’ve argued at times — and that many people argue — which is that over decades we became somewhat addicted to cheap stuff from China. We lost values that we should have had in terms of what we want in the economy, in terms of what we value in the people who participate in the economy.
On the other hand, it’s yoked to this sometimes almost random-seeming set of economic policies.
So I’ve just been curious how you’re processing this. Do these feel like people allied in thinking about where we’ve gone wrong? Do they feel like people who have hijacked arguments you make for something completely different?
When you think about that economic philosophy, which you have been trying to push in Washington, how have you processed both the overlaps and the contradictions?
I’m pretty focused on my community and what we want and what we believe. And I think people have pretty nuanced views.
The specifics really matter. One thing that’s weird is watching the Democratic Party suddenly become the defenders of the stock market and Nasdaq. That’s a weird thing to me.
And I think the question is not what the nominal picture of wealth in these terms are, but how much economic agency and self-determination we have. Do you have the power to stay home and spend time with your family? Or are you working three jobs? Are you able to own a home, to own land, own farmland? Or are you stuck in a cycle of perpetual running that you don’t want to be in? Do you have the right to make your own stuff? Do you have a level playing field to start your own business? Those are the questions.
So that’s kind of the lens through which I think about these bigger international arguments on trade: What is worth having at the end of the day? What do people really want?
Well, maybe we want contradictory things. On the economy specifically, I think we want plentiful, cheap goods, and we want the self-determination and resilience — an economy that values and rewards production in exactly the way you say.
I always think one of the real problems for politics is the collision of those two things. People want policies that will get us to that self-determination and sovereignty. But then, as we saw a bit during the Biden administration, if the price of things at the grocery store goes up, people get [expletive] real quick.
Yes, I think that under the North American Free Trade Agreement, there was this argument presented to the American public of: Well, look, you’re not going to have jobs anymore, but you have a bunch of cheap [expletive].
And then when people don’t have the cheap stuff and they don’t have the jobs, it accelerates into a really profound anger — and I think a righteous anger.
So one point is: We don’t just want cheap stuff. We want stuff that will last. I think that was one of the issues with the CHIPS Act. It’s like: Well, what’s driving the chip shortage? Do I want a washing machine that can play Tchaikovsky? Or do I want a washing machine that will last more than three years?
My washing machine is from 1997. My stove is from 1954. And I think about how many times that has been bought and sold on Craigslist — how much durable wealth that has created in the middle class. Not just because people were paid a living wage in America to make those things, but because then they held value and created value for the household who owned them. And then they were sold and bought again — and bought and sold and bought and sold.
So the durable wealth — people kind of belittle this argument about washing machines and dishwashers, but it’s real. And particularly for people who are in the trades, it’s like: [Expletive] it’s got 0.5 percent lower energy consumption or whatever. But they put the control panel right underneath the drip line. So of course it’s going to blitz.
The marriage not just of the technical but of the applied. I used to run this bike shop, and I will never forget teaching a physics major how to hold a wrench — like: Move your hand back.
It is this overspecialization that has deprived the underlying value itself.
One thing that I think is always challenging in this discussion is: Is what people buy the signal for what they want? Or is what they will say in a deeper conversation the signal for what they want?
That’s one of the things. We’ve replaced the idea of freedom as the freedom to consume. And I would argue that we’re not just consumers, we’re stewards, we are producers.
So it’s not just what you can buy, but it’s what you can make and how you can make things last. And your values. Your inner values manifest in the world around you.
I have a bill that would require manufacturers of household appliances to put on the sticker the average life expectancy of that washing machine along with the annual maintenance cost. Because I think the persistence of Speed Queen — or something like that — does show that people will pay more. But having a class of buyers who has that information available changes consumption habits.
Do you think of these as economic policy arguments? Or arguments that are almost more moral and spiritual in nature?
They’re both. My dad used to say: You can talk about your values all day long, but you see somebody’s tax returns and you know what they really think.
The depowering of the environmental movement has been supplanting real environmentalism with a consumption habit. True environmentalism is not just buying a mat package at Target. It’s not a consumer good. It is a way of being in the world. It’s a relationship to the natural world around you. It is the way that you spend your life developing skills and allocating your time to live in relationship to the world around you.
One of the things I really love about where I live in rural Skamania is that we don’t have trash service. So I have to look at all the trash. And it’s why I’m not going to buy a single-serving yogurt cup. Because I’m going to have to smell that for two or three months before we go to the dump and load up the truck and take everything. You have to see it. And I think it enforces the reality that there is nowhere else. You can’t export emissions. The climate is global, and your relationship to the world around you — not just as a terrarium but as a dependence and as something that informs your life daily — I think that really matters to informing what trade-offs people will make.
I take that point. But most people want trash pickup. I want trash pickup.
Sure.
You represent a city. And cities are not going to work without trash pickup. I’m not necessarily here to defend single-serving yogurt cups, but some of this is a marvel of modernity that does have remarkable benefits and has allowed us to live in different ways.
I have this distinction that I sometimes make between green and gray environmentalism: There are ways of living deeply in harmony with the world around you, and then there are ways of living that are, aesthetically, very unharmonious with the world around you but actually quite a light footprint. Living in a pretty tall high rise is, in many ways, quite good for the environment because you have a lot more economies of scale in the heating and a bunch of other things.
Yes, there are economies of scale, but often they can exclude the fuller reality. Yes, there is modern convenience. But is the climate better? Are we happier? Are we healthier? Do we have what we actually want? Or has it been supplanted?
And, yes, I would like to have trash service, but would I like to have trash service enough to move to a city? No.
I very much take the point that you don’t want trash service enough to move to a city, and that’s totally fair. But what do you think about, and how do you talk to your constituents who do?
Oh, that’s great. If you want to live in a city, you should. I think it’s also true that you could put an apartment building in a rural town, and a lot of people would get a lot of utility out of that.
But I think one of the things that is missed frequently in this discussion is that the shift to a service economy or a knowledge economy means that now your barber has to move to a city where they’re not able to afford housing. And when you have domestic manufacturing, if you’re a mill in a rural community, you’re able to own land. You’re able to spend time with your family.
I’m not trying to slight the urban issue. But I think it’s that divorce from the farms you rely on, from the water that you drink, from being able to ship your garbage somewhere else and not have to smell it yourself — it changes your relationship to the natural world around you.
And if you’re not clear about that and those relationships, you’re losing something necessary.
I think you’re losing something profound.
Something that you’ve been involved in recently is the revival of the Blue Dog Democrats.
For my younger audience members who might not remember: The Blue Dogs of the 1990s were traditionally the more moderate Democratic coalition. And it may still be that now, but the argument you all made — and I thought this was interesting — is that what you really want to bring back is localism — that politics have become too nationalized.
Tell me a bit about that. I feel like this is actually pretty important to your politics — a sense that nationalization has maybe broken the way politics is supposed to work, and one answer is going to be bringing back a localism that we’ve lost.
Yes. My dad is from Mexico, and my mom’s family has been in Washington state for five generations — prestatehood. And the last time that people in my gene pool were Democrats was when they were Blue Dog Democrats. That still means something to people — when Blue Dogs were a large caucus because we were holding seats that we have lost and not regained.
And so it is a clear urgency of having a gavel and having the ability to govern. But it’s also the question of on whose behalf and toward what end.
I think having loyalty to your soil and to your community — and not something that has been focused-grouped in D.C. or that came from a think tank but what matters to people at home — that is what is fun.
I don’t want to be a mouthpiece for any agenda besides my community. Because it matters to me. This is where I’m trying to die. It’s where I got married. It’s where I’m really trying to give birth. And that loyalty and the lens that: If you can build a political body that is bringing that local lens together — fierce loyalty to the specifics of our community — that is how you build the Venn diagram of what is a useful federal policy. That’s how we break the stranglehold, this duopoly. It’s being useful and relevant and building good policy out of the urgent, specific realities of our community.
I think something you have correctly criticized the Democratic Party for is a politics of dignity and indignity — where things that you value are not well-valued by either the party or cultural elites more broadly. You talked about the physics major you showed how to hold a wrench. There is a valuing of office work and a devaluing of shop work.
One thing I hear you saying is that, in some ways, we should reverse the moral hierarchy — that it’s actually bad to have this trash service that alienates you from your trash. It’s OK for people to live in cities, but you have to understand that we’ve probably gotten off track in a pretty profound way in modernity.
There are a lot of people in politics whose critique is very surface level — that we should change the dials on the tax code a little bit.
But when I listen to you, I hear something much more fundamental — a sense that we’ve gone off course in terms of what and who we value and the correction. Stickers on home appliances is a good start to tell people how long they last and what they cost, but there’s something that has gone wrong to you morally here.
Is that fair? Or would you say I’m overreading you?
I think that telling a child that what they’re interested in isn’t interesting, or what they’re good at isn’t good enough, is deeply toxic. There are a lot of forms of intelligence — millions — and exactly one of them is academic intelligence.
To your point, it’s like: Well, we’re going to shut your mill down, and we’re going to stop harvesting timber. But hey, here’s a grant that you could apply for. If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll give you money.
That’s not what people want. People want self-determination and agency. And I think it presupposes a hierarchy that is pretty offensive to a lot of people I know — that you’re going to tell me I have a problem, and that you’re the one that knows how to fix it.
It’s this masturbatory interest in policy without a reality of implementation or localism. You can’t be all brain and no muscle. They’re equally necessary to have a healthy body.
There is also a false dichotomy: Not everything worth knowing you can learn in a book. We don’t all want to go to college. Don’t tell me we need to go to college to be useful and to be self-realized or whatever.
We can know things and be in the world in a way that is not strictly capturable — or capturable at all — by a spreadsheet.
This is why I started with this Trump quote. Because something really interesting and strange is happening in politics and economic politics right now.
Donald Trump has been, for decades, the living, breathing embodiment of materialist excess. And Republicans broadly have been quite free trade and very excited about cheap stuff from all over the world. Generally speaking, Democrats have been a little bit more pro-tariff and a little bit more skeptical.
And even during the campaign, Trump is running aggressively on the cost of living — how much everything costs, how much things would be at Walmart. And as he has layered on these tariffs, you’ve begun seeing this other argument that was burbling around the edges of the New Right for a while become more central.
And all of a sudden, Donald Trump is talking about how we have too much cheap stuff in this country, and kids shouldn’t have all these dolls, and we’re too materialistic, and we’re not valuing the right things.
And the Democratic Party and liberals in the Democratic Party are becoming very pro-free trade, which is not their traditional stance. And you’re watching this thing reorient really fast.
And Trump is good at that. He reorients politics around him. But when you watch this and you talk about the Democratic Party becoming the party that is defensive of the line on the stock market — how have you experienced this? Do you feel like your allies are changing?
I guess I asked this before, but do you feel like your critique is being hijacked for something that doesn’t really serve it?
There’s something changing around you. I don’t think you’re changing that much, but something is changing around you, and people are talking in a way they didn’t speak before. How do you take it?
Things have moved and shrunk. You’ve got 8 percent hyperfocused on the left and 8 percent hyperfocused on the right. And it’s like they’re talking, they have the mic and it’s leading this.
But to your point, people in my community, their experience of the economy hasn’t changed that much. They still can’t afford rent. Can’t get a loan from the bank to get a house. Still working three jobs. Still worried about their truck getting repossessed. People’s experience hasn’t changed that much.
And it is kind of wild to me to see the same playbook getting picked up again from Trump’s first term to today, where it’s like reflexive resistance.
And I would argue that the urgency here is to have a positive policy agenda that is relevant to more people. If you’re somebody who has the ability to go to a protest every day, that is not reflective of the average American experience.
Thinking about: How do you build an agenda that is more useful to your neighbors, that is relevant? If you want to bring in more people, you have to present a policy position that is more popular than the policy position Trump is proposing.
And I think he has done a good job of amplifying and echoing broad dissatisfaction with the way things are going. And we can’t put ourselves in a position of just negating and refuting everything he has said. It’s about presenting an actual policy agenda that will address those concerns and the rage that people are feeling about their loss of agency in the world.
Sometimes there are critiques about: The world is on fire, and she’s talking about bananas and washing machines and right to repair?
But talking to people about the things they care about and fighting for the agenda and priorities of my community — that is the job of a representative.
I held a lot of roundtables with farmers in my community when we were working on the farm bill, and not a damn one of them said antitrust. But farmer after farmer was telling me: Yes, I used to be able to sell my chickens to 12 different buyers, and now I can sell them to two.
That matters to people. Having a level playing field for their business, having economic self-determination matters to people.
I’m not sure if this is what you’re saying, but the tariffs are going to matter to people. This is not some elite Washington fixation. Your community is going to feel them. You know this much better than me.
I mean, that we don’t know they’re staying is the other thing. So just being the anti-Trump —
But you have to treat policy that he is proposing — it might not stay if it is opposed in a certain way, but he is making an argument for these things that sounds, in some ways, similar.
I take the stylized policy here as: We should dramatically raise the price of every single good that comes into this country and really dramatically raise the price of goods from China so we wean ourselves off a lot of cheap [expletive] and we make it here. And if that means things cost more and if that means you can’t have things: Good. It’s time for you to start making things here again and get over this neoliberal delusion that we can have everything shipped in from another continent at half price.
The tariffs will go up and down. But is that right? Is he going about it wrong? Is he right on half of it?
This is a big policy. This is not weirdo Washington stuff. We’re all going to feel this. It’s going to affect every store in the country.
I think most of us in my community share a lot of those sentiments. When they shut down the paper mills, like: Congratulations, now we’re packaging everything in disposable plastic from Saudi Arabia, and we’ve got wildfires at home because there’s no value in the residual — in the slash piles.
So I would say that the policy position can’t just be anti, anti, anti, anti. But saying: All right, what is it going to take to build manufacturing? It’s going to take permitting reform. It’s going to take some antitrust work. It’s going to take shop class in junior high. It’s going to take the elite re-evaluating and acknowledging the nobility of people in the trades and the reality of dirty hands, clean money.
So I think it would be a mistake to just be like, anti, anti, anti. But instead saying: All right, if this is the thing they’re going to do, how do we harness it in a way that is productive in the long term for having the things that we actually want?
Tell me a bit more about what that looks like. I hear you on permitting reform. The argument the Biden administration used to make was: We are trying to compete with China by building our capacity here. We’ll put tariffs on a limited number of things from China — electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, things like that. And we will invest a bunch in domestic manufacturing capacity and infrastructure, and that’s going to get us where we need to go.
Then you have Trump, who says: No, what we need to do is actually make the things unaffordable, and that’s what’s going to get us where we need to go.
What would you keep from the two approaches? Or would you keep nothing from them? When you say it should be a positive agenda, what should that agenda look like?
I mean a re-evaluation. There’s been this obsession with technology and whatever lobbyist is in your office shilling triple-glazed, argon-filled windows. And a blindness to the actual skilled trades of: You know what? If you put the long side of your house facing south, you put an eave on it — if you put a skirt around a mobile home — a metal sheet that connects the bottom of the mobile home to the ground — that creates an air gap and saves a [expletive] ton of energy. And now those folks, a lot of whom are on fixed income living in a mobile home, their energy bill just went way down. You don’t put a hip and valleys in your roof line, you’re going to get a roof that lasts for 50 years.
We ignored a lot of the things that we know in the trades are the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency and utility and a progressive tax system.
That’s one of the things that bothers me. The electric vehicle tax credits, the heat-pump tax credits — those were profoundly regressive tax strategies.
Let me try to give the best version of the argument for electric-vehicle tax credits as I understand it.
People will buy many new cars over the next 10, 20, 30 years. That’s just the base line. We want there to be a big electric vehicle transition. We also want a lot of those electric vehicles to be made here.
So when the Biden administration does this, they put pretty heavy tariffs — 100 percent, as I remember it — on Chinese electric vehicles, which are a major competitor. And they do a lot of investment in domestic supply chains on that.
This sounds to me, in broad strokes, like a policy you would like. It’s not the only policy. It doesn’t take away from the question of a million things we could do to weatherize homes and make homes more efficient.
But there is a case for the tax credit if we want to make EVs here, if we want people to choose to buy EVs over combustion engines, and if we want to accelerate this technology so it gets cheaper more quickly and it’s not a decision only richer people can make.
That’s how I map out that policy in my mind. What’s wrong with that logic to you?
I’ve never bought a new car in my life —
But most people do eventually. That’s not a rare thing in this country, for people to buy new cars.
I think first there’s a priority on being a good steward of what you already have.
Manifest environmentalism is getting your rig to make it to 500,000 miles. It is making what you have last longer and wanting less.
I think that there’s been a bit of a lack of pragmatism. A Tesla Model S Plaid with a 300-mile radius uses 10 times as much battery minerals as it would take to have a hybrid on the road. So that’s one side of it.
I think the other side of it is a selection bias. My colleagues and I fly a [expletive] ton. We’re always on the road. We’re always seeing consumer transportation. So that’s what gets echoed.
But in reality, if you prioritize stationary electrification first, then you’re not moving that heavy battery everywhere with you. You’re not wearing roads out.So port infrastructure being electrified — things like that — that is, I think, a much better bargain. That is where you should look first if you’re trying to decrease the carbon footprint of the American basket of goods.
And it’s not just what feels good or what virtue it’s signaling but: What is the actual absolute value you can get?
Tell me about some of the divisions over these ideas or over Trump in your district right now.
You’ve had some very raucous town halls recently, and you’ve got these voters who are both the voters that Democrats win reliably and the voters that Republicans win reliably. You have a bigger and more complicated coalition behind you than most Democrats have. And you have urban and rural voters in your district.
So how are the various constituents you come into contact with experiencing this moment differently?
Six out of seven counties are highly rural. Vancouver, Wash., is the big city in my district, and it has voted for Trump three times in a row.
I outperformed Trump and Harris in the last election. So yes, I have a unique coalition. I have a very independent community — like I was saying before — where it’s like 8 percent here and 8 percent on the other side.
But most of us feel like it’s all sound and fury, and nobody actually gives a [expletive] about our lives.: the kind of unglamorous, deep, bitter erosion of fentanyl addiction and farm consolidation and job loss.
I really believe in showing up. I do town halls in all my counties. I’ve done 15 now, and I think it’s really important that you’re available and accountable and present and meeting them where they are.
When I’m talking to people I have these two buckets in my head: Was this person paid to talk to me? Or did they have to get a babysitter to come here?
And I weight the input proportionally to reflect how many people in my community are paid to engage in politics.
What do you mean by “paid to engage in politics”?
Oh, like a lobbyist or somebody who is a director. They’re paid to be in government relations. They’re on the clock when they show up in my office. And if somebody had to take time off work to come talk to me, I take that really seriously, and I try to spend my time going out and talking to them — going to where they’re at to be available. That’s one of the reasons I believe in town halls. At its best, it’s a really powerful forum for civic dialogue.
And I think at its worst, it turns into a mob where you have folks who are really spending a lot of time reading news articles, and they have the income to come out. And it’s not reflective of most people’s experience. It’s also a valid experience and it’s also a valid opinion that I should, that I do, take into consideration.
But you still have to account for the fullness of your community. And whether or not people have time to respond to a survey or make a public comment on some agency’s website, their opinion still matters.
Your position now is tricky. There are a lot of Democrats whose marginal voter right now is absolutely furious. Their marginal voter is a Democrat, is somebody who might read The New York Times or listen to my podcast, and they just hate Trump. They hate what’s going on. They don’t see any good in it. And all that person has to do is show up and tell them how bad everything is, and they’re good.
Your marginal voter is somebody who is at least open to this. Your marginal voter is somebody who maybe voted for Donald Trump —
Who definitely voted —
Who definitely voted for Donald Trump.
So put aside the people paid to talk to you. I agree that the lobbyists and the government affairs class are different. How are the two sides of the people who just vote for you — where do they diverge, and in your experience of your own constituency, where do they converge?
For a while I was getting a [expletive] ton of letters about Hunter Biden’s laptop from people who are mad he wasn’t being investigated. And I think it’s easy to dismiss that as silly. But if you lift up the hood on that, what a lot of those folks are saying is that they feel like there’s a legal system that works better for you if you have a different last name or you have the right lawyer.
So if we offhandedly dismiss these concerns as silly or biased, we miss an opportunity to build a coalition of people who are actually all quite unified in wanting reform of our judicial system.
I think that’s the intersection of trying to delete the proper nouns out of the argument: Figure out how terms are being used differently, what things mean to people and what the path is to building an agenda that is more popular than what Trump is offering.
Is that true, though, about the Hunter Biden laptop issue?
I take your point that there are people all over the spectrum who see a judicial system that works for some people very differently than it works for others — because they’re right, this is true.
But you’ve got Donald Trump offering out pardons left and right. He is making God knows how much money off what certainly seem to me to be incredibly corrupt crypto schemes.
I wrote a book about political polarization. To me, some of this just reflects very different news sources and the tendency we all have to believe that the people on the other team are fundamentally corrupt, even evil. And the people on our team: It’s understandable. These are old relationships. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.
I guess I wonder if deleting the proper nouns from that can actually mislead. If you had gone from the Clinton email security fights in 2015 to where we are now with digital security under the Trump administration and the accessing of all these internal government databases and doing war plans on messaging apps, I don’t think that’s going to be a consistent line. I think that’s just partisanship reshaping people’s brains.
I guess what’s the consequence of me being wrong about that and finding common ground and common cause for things that we all believe are worth having at the end of the day?
You’re probably right for a certain segment. But it’s very easy to overaccount and say that that’s all those people who are [expletive] about the laptop.
And the truth is, yes, most people are not thinking about it at all. They’re handling their lives day to day. But those same people still know that some kids at their high school can’t get out of a D.U.I. and others can because their parents could pay for a lawyer. And that’s going to set them off in a different track.
I agree with you on that.
The Hunter Biden story — I’m scarred by past email-security debates, but I think that’s why I was asking about this moment with the economy. Because so much in politics has no visible ground truth to people. We’re arguing about these bizarre complex systems that are far away or stories we don’t really know —
What’s “ground truth”?
That you can’t go and feel it around you.
OK.
That’s why I’m interested in the debates about the economy. Because I do think people have common ground in the economy.
They might want a lot of things all at once. But they want a lot of what you’re describing: They want to be able to have a good job. They want to have autonomy in that job. They want their children to be able to do well. They want things to be affordable in the store and also for them to have good wages and for the factories to be open and the goods to be plentiful.
So one question I’ve had is: Do you feel people shifting in one direction or another? Are things splitting apart for you in your district? Or as this becomes something real and people either worry or get excited about the tariffs, does it become more of one thing that you can work with?
I think you’re right about this fracture. I’ve talked to folks from home who used to be a part of the Democratic Party and left. They were like: Yes, we can never be correct enough for you, and the Republicans are having a kegger. So I think that it has become quite loud. Folks not seeing the reform they want and this frustration — just like saying it louder.
And also a decay of social institutions. I was talking to a friend who runs a veteran’s assistance nonprofit, and they told me that volunteer rates have fallen through the floor since January.
Why?
Well, for one, some folks are more in politics. Also the cuts to food assistance programs mean that more veterans are coming in for food, and so the volume has gone up. But the availability of people to do that work is declining.
Political activism can feel really glamorous and correct. And it’s like: How could you worry about these small things when the world is on fire?
But I would argue the way you put the fire out is by actually going and building community. I don’t think that democracy is something that you buy with a binary vote in one election. It is the muscle of community. It is your relationships with your neighbor and knowing the name of your mail carrier. And talking to folks at day care drop-off and having the time to do that.
So there’s that acceleration. But I was talking to somebody who was saying they’re going to protest Tesla every day. A lot of their family are Trump voters, but they don’t want to talk to their family. They’re like: That’s not the forum for that. But man, it feels good to get flipped off by guys driving F-350s.
It’s that muscle of community and relationships that I think is the path out of here.
What works within a community, within that local democracy?
I heard something you said at a town hall: “Being angry, being loud feels good. But is it productive?”
My assumption is you feel that it’s not productive. So what, to you, is productive?
The part of your brain that is angry is not the part of your brain that you think strategically with. Those are different muscles.
And I think it can feel condescending to a lot of people when somebody is like: The world is on fire, everything is going to hell. And I’m the only one who sees it. You guys all need to wake up.
I don’t think people can hear that. I think that curiosity and humility and relationships are very powerful tools — profoundly powerful tools.
I think that when you have all of your wants and needs met, it’s easier to empathize with someone somewhere else — or a fuzzy animal — than it is to have compassion for your neighbor who has got a fentanyl addiction or your neighbor who is rolling coal or who has the wrong lawn sign up. And I think there’s a reason the greatest Commandment is to love your neighbor.
Sometimes I hear you say things, and you seem really frustrated with Democrats specifically. I take the point that sometimes it can be easier to empathize with a panda a world away than the person right next to you — or at least that’s what I think you’re saying.
But we’re disappearing people to Salvadoran terrorist prisons with no due process. The tariffs will hurt a lot of these people — the same people you’re talking about.
I would not say the Trump administration has been amazing on fentanyl or even strategic about it.
And there is a lot of fear. When I’ve heard the argument: Look, we should be worrying about the people next door, not people being shipped off to Salvadoran prisons, the way I often respond is — I’m Jewish, and I think I bring my own kind of assumptions to this conversation. But I look at history, and I look at other countries, and I feel like when the disappearance machine begins running, if people don’t stop it, it can start going really far. If regimes begin to realize they can use disappearance as a tool, who that eventually comes for is not clear.
I was asking you about common ground among your constituents. And what you said is: Look, a lot of these people are maybe sympathizing or empathizing with the wrong folks.
But is there a part of you that takes the other side of that argument? That feels that Trump is trying to really, fundamentally change the character of this country and its institutions and how it works? And the people who are scared as [expletive] and don’t know what to do because they don’t really have any power over it and don’t know how to get listened to — that there’s a righteousness to the way they feel, too?
Yes, people are valid in their anger. And it is a fool’s errand to try to talk somebody out of their feelings. That’s not a good idea.
But you can affirm the validity of their feelings and also present a productive strategy for resolving the drivers of that anger or that fear.
On your point about El Salvador, my dad was the pastor of a Spanish-language church. And you want to meet somebody who really [expletive] hates gangs? You talk to an immigrant who gave up a profound amount to leave a country that was corrupt and run by gangs. That same person cares passionately about due process. They understand that the only inoculant against a corrupt regime is fidelity to due process.
And if we had due process in these cases, we would be in a position to evaluate a judge’s decision about whether or not that person was involved in human trafficking or whatever the claim is. But the point is that we don’t have it, and it’s a deep strategic mistake to accept that we have to choose between really hating gangs and really loving due process.
When you have experienced truly being afraid of being kidnapped or having your business exploited or human trafficking, you take quite seriously that feeling as real and valid. And the productive strategy is fidelity to due process.
I think it’s a “yes and.” Yes, it makes sense to be scared. And if you are really believing that we are entering a totalitarian state, if you’re really worried that we’re never going to have elections again, why is the second bullet point on your agenda primarying Democrats? That’s not what people do in real scenarios like that.
This has been, to me, one of the very frustrating things about the Trump administration. I also hate gangs. I don’t want MS-13 operating in America. I don’t want them operating anywhere. But we have due process. So that’s a good way to find out if people are part of MS-13.
And I find sometimes it’s a political blackmail that’s applied. And I’m not saying you are, but I’ve heard this from other people, where it’s like: Is your politics really to be on the side of people who might be in a gang? It’s like: No, my politics is to be on the side of processes to protect everyone and also are perfectly good at figuring out if people are in a gang. We can cross-examine some witnesses. This is not a thing that’s going to endanger anybody.
So when you’re dealing with some of these issues that have become the cleavages, for you, is it reminding people that due process is a question that goes across the immigration divide? What do you find works for navigating that?
Where I live, we believe that countries have a right and an obligation to know who and what is coming across a border. I don’t think that’s crazy. And one of the failures or weaknesses is that words mean different things all over the place. Some people talking about immigration are talking about drug trafficking.
And whether or not you’re mad about that conflation, you do have to hear and try to get at what the productive strategy is to address it. And not just policing the conflation, but saying: Yes, it [expletive] sucks to have a family member addicted to fentanyl.
It has been frustrating for me at times in this new world I’m in. It’s not hitting. They’re insulated. They’re not hearing these horrifying stories about industrial accidents. It’s not their play date that’s getting in a car wreck because daddy is on fentanyl.
Treating that with an urgency of: How do we stop the flow of fentanyl? How do we build resilience against foreign actors who would like to see the entire middle class being addicted and unproductive?
Do you feel that there are fentanyl policies that we know how to do that really work?
Every time I’ve really tried to write or report this out, the level of frustration I hear from the people really working on it is almost unimaginable. Because it is so hard, so concentrated. And it has become so much easier to transport than heroin was before it.
Is there something you feel that, if we did it, would make a big difference that we’re not doing right now? That neither Biden nor Trump has put their weight behind?
Well, a few things. Cartels don’t operate under political boundaries. So I think multi-jurisdictional interdiction works. Ensuring law enforcement has the tools to be able to communicate and cooperate.
I have issues where some of my departments transition to digital radios. And some of them are still on radio towers and they can’t talk to each other. They have to relay through a 911 responder. There are issues like that.
There is the geopolitical question of these Chinese-produced precursor chemicals. I was talking to my dad, and one of his buddies from high school was running a factory in Mexico and figured out they were bringing in fentanyl precursors on the weekends. He went to the cops in Mexico, and they were like: Yes, we [expletive] know. You can shut up or you can move to Canada.
And so he moved to Canada. It’s all of the supply chain going into it.
And I think there are also some — I think the GLP-3s — is that right? Ozempic?
Yeah, the GLP-1s.
GLP-1s.
Unless there’s more that I don’t know about. There might be. They seem to have a real effect there.
They have promising studies on reducing fentanyl addiction and helping people break that chain. But it’s long work.
Then there are other drugs that are promising, where it’s like, rather than having to go in and getting a dose — if you’re living where I live, you can’t have a job and be in recovery — you have to go drive into Vancouver, an hour and a half, whatever, every day to get a treatment. To get the drugs to help you get off.
There’s another drug that’s emergent that’s a 30-day release. So things like that. There’s the long work of addressing the appetite and why people are vulnerable to these drugs.
So it’s interdiction of fentanyl and treatment — and better options for people. If you know that you can run your own business, you can buy a log truck, you can do whatever you want with your life — you really do have the latitude to make things in life — you’re a lot less vulnerable to a cheap high.
And then also a final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
There’s a book my grandpa gave me, “The Wheelwright’s Shop.” It was written in the 1920s by George Sturt, whose family had been building wooden wheels in England for 200 years. And the specifics of it are just beautiful.
He’s like: You had to know that that grove — the elm grows too rich. It’s not good for specific uses. To build a wheel that will last and that your name is attached to and that’s useful to your community, you have to know how the sap is running that year. You have to know when to quarter and wood split. It’s a really beautiful book.
And then there’s another one: “Experiences in Visual Thinking” by Robert H. McKim. It’s kind of a hippie, ’70s — but it is really brilliant at helping exercise the other parts of your brain that analyze problems, like drawing. I think it does a necessary part of rebuilding parts of your brain that are not just the rote, correct answer but how to create a caricature out of your idea and then enlarge certain parts. It’s a really useful, tangible tool.
And then the other thing: I’ve got a 3½-year-old son at home. And it’s like we cloned his father. He’s a really smart, gifted little mechanic, and fun. But he also really loves poetry. So any of the children’s poetry anthologies from Jack Prelutsky.
Reading and language are fun. It’s not academic. It is not for getting a good grade. It is joy. And the rhythm and the cadence and moving from strictly absolute, rote ABCs to the pleasure of rhyming things and just having fun.
It is so fun to have a toddler running around your house making up silly rhymes. I can’t recommend it enough.
Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, thank you very much.
This was fun. Thank you, Ezra.
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.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. 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, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.
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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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