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March 15, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:21:36

Ezra Klein | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 86

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	I would not be here if I thought it was going to destroy my career forever.
	So I think sometimes the amount of bravery people suggest it takes pundits to wander around and have conversations in the current era is amplified by a kind of desire to make things all seem a little bit more dangerous and polarized and make the other side seem more unreasonable than they are.
	Before co-founding Vox.com, Ezra Klein started his career in political media, working for mainstream publications like the Washington Post and Bloomberg News, along with frequent appearances on primetime MSNBC.
	In 2014, Klein and his co-founders teamed up with Vox Media, a massive media enterprise with influence in all aspects of the culture through brands like The Verge, Polygon, Vulture, and more.
	Since then, Vox.com has become a widely influential presence, with tens of millions of website page views, 7.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and a collection of successful podcasts.
	Vox.com bills itself as explanatory journalism, though as we'll discuss, conservatives tend to think of Vox.com as opinion journalism of the political left.
	No matter what you think of Ezra's politics, there's no question he's one of the most important voices on today's political scene.
	We'll discuss his new book, Why We're Polarized, Our Disagreements on the Value of Identity Politics and the Role of Government, as well as the internet-breaking controversy between Steven Crowder and former Vox.com explanatory journalist, Carlos Mazzo.
	Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday's specialty.
	Today, we have joining us Ezra Klein.
	Ezra is the editor-at-large and founder of Vox.
	First, just a reminder, we will be doing some bonus questions with Ezra.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a subscriber.
	So, head on over to dailywire.com, become a subscriber.
	You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Ezra, thanks so much for joining the show and welcome to the show and welcome to the end of your career since you're on the show.
	I'm canceled.
	Yeah, you are.
	I mean, I hope that you've enjoyed all of your illustrious success so far.
	Honestly, it'll be good to get a rest.
	So the book, Why We're Polarized, I want to get into that.
	First, I want to ask a little bit about Vox.com, the foundations of Vox.com.
	So one of the things that's great in the book is you talk a little bit about your own political point of view.
	Obviously, you're of the left, you're a liberal.
	You know, you're drinking, ironically, from our Leftist Tears tumbler.
	I'm drinking excitedly from the Leftist Tears tumbler.
	This is my whole reason for coming here today.
	I've always made a distinction between sort of leftists and liberals, the difference being that liberals are people I disagree with on taxes and government interventionism, and leftists are people who are interested in going after my advertisers and deplatforming me and ensuring that I am unable to make a living on the other side of the aisle and or utter things on the other side of the aisle.
	In the book you call yourself a liberal, so how do you define liberal just to kind of get that out there?
	So I wouldn't cut leftist and liberal that way, by the way, number one.
	So liberal is, I think, tricky to define, in part because it's become under attack.
	So now there's this distinction between neoliberal and leftist.
	You have a moderate lane, the democratic primary, a more left lane.
	I think of liberalism as fundamentally about a mixture of equality with a relative high level of confidence in the ability of the government to provide those services.
	In different eras in American politics, we've cut that pretty differently.
	So you have periods in time where the liberals were somewhat open to the state, and then also periods of time where they have been more critical of the state, but they have always wanted to make society in general more equal.
	They have always believed, at a pretty firm level, that people's life chances are very defined by luck.
	Very defined by chance.
	And so the question of what our just desserts are is actually a pretty hard one to answer.
	And once you believe in that fundamental change of what do we really deserve and how hard that is to attribute, then it becomes very different what you should make sure people have to have a fair shot in life.
	So I want to come back to that in just one second.
	I want to ask a quick follow-up just about Vox or publication.
	So obviously Vox is sort of billed as explanatory journalism.
	People on the right perceive it to be left.
	Our publication, Daily Wire, is obviously conservative.
	We say openly it's conservative.
	So does Vox acknowledge that it is a publication of liberalism, that it is a left-wing publication?
	I don't think you could read Vox and not recognize that where we tend to come down on most issues is left of center.
	I don't define us as a liberal publication, and I never have, because that isn't a way that I want to box us in.
	I've tried a number of times to hire conservatives at Vox.
	I think I've done that five or six times, occasionally succeeded.
	But in general, it's been harder sometimes to open it up than I've always wanted to.
	Look, Vox reflects me and it reflects other co-founders of the organization.
	And as you know, I'm a liberal, so that's made sometimes pulling it out harder.
	But I don't want to be in a position where Vox has to follow movement wherever it goes.
	Right now in American politics, I'm pretty comfortable where the liberals fall.
	In five years?
	In ten years?
	I may not be.
	And so I don't want Vox in a position where what it has is an identity as a liberal publication as opposed to views that may put it at this particular moment in American politics on the liberal side of things.
	And look, sometimes Vox ends up a little bit more leftist, and there are other places where it ends up being much more critical of sort of reigning liberal orthodoxies.
	Like I think, for instance, you look at a lot of our housing coverage.
	Increasingly, I think there's more of a connection between YMBs and liberals.
	But for a long time, liberals were not great on a lot of occupational licensing and housing issues at the local level.
	We cover that stuff a lot.
	So it's important, and I talk a lot about identity in the book and how it can wrap you in and box you in.
	It's always been important to me that there is space for Vox to change and space for it to hold a bunch of viewpoints.
	Which, you know, three days out of five, we're able to do.
	Let me just say, the reason I'm asking the question was not meant as a gotcha.
	It's more as a sort of recommendation for defensive posture with regard to Vox.
	Because it feels like, you know, I do a thing on Twitter where if a so-called journalistic outlet like CNN, which portrays itself as objective, is being overtly of the left.
	I'll say so much journalisming.
	And I found myself on occasion doing that with Vox, and I feel like I don't do it with MSNBC, because MSNBC is pretty clearly of the left, they kind of build themselves of the left.
	My only recommendation with regard to Vox is just say what you just said, right?
	And say it more and more publicly, which is, of course, it sort of reflects what the founder's vision for the site is, as opposed to it's just the site for explanatory journalism, which is, I think, the top line that people sort of get.
	I don't want to hurt feelings.
	I did not break that news here.
	I've said that exact thing many times.
	I will say, one of the things that I think distinguishes some of the approach we take, like, let me ask you, why am I drinking out of a leftist tears mug?
	Because it's funny.
	But so, when you do that, right, if I wanted to sign up as a Daily Wire insider, the thing I'd get is a leftist tear smoke, right?
	That is my prize.
	Right.
	And don't you think that creates a very clear sense of who your site is not for?
	Yeah, well, it's not for leftists by my definition.
	And why?
	Because I don't believe that those people are interested in my site existing.
	But they are, right?
	There are a lot of leftists who have open minds.
	You define leftists earlier in a way that I think doesn't actually make a... You define leftists earlier as... But I specifically made this call, right?
	I mean, like, the original draft of this mug was Liberal Tears mug.
	You define leftists a couple minutes ago just as somebody who hates you.
	But a lot of leftists, basically what they believe is we should have single-payer health care.
	Things should be much more equal.
	And isn't it a problem to cut the identity so sharply, right?
	To say so clearly.
	You guys also have that book from Michael Knowles, like, what is it, Reasons to Vote for Democrats?
	Reasons to Vote for Democrats, yeah.
	You're on there, it's like thorough.
	It seems to me there's a lot of work at The Daily Wire to say, like, this is our side and that's the other side.
	And it seems to me that when you do that, you make it harder for yourself to move.
	You make it harder for yourself to absorb new information.
	You make it harder for yourself and for your team.
	You can get trapped a little bit by that audience.
	So one of the reasons I'm a little bit careful with Vox is I don't...
	One, I don't want to be trapped, and two, I want people to feel it's for them.
	If we're not doing a good job of that, if we're not—look, I have no problem with where we come down on things, but it's always my hope that people will be able to see themselves and their arguments well-reflected, right?
	You talk a lot with my colleague Jane Koston, and one reason you talk a lot with Jane Koston is that Jane works really hard as part of the Vox team to understand trends on the right, movements on the right, ideas on the right.
	I want people on the right to be able to read Vox and at least feel we're taking them seriously, that we don't hate them.
	You know, I think the message of leftist here is that you don't like them.
	Like, they're bad.
	Well, I do think leftism is bad, and that's why I deliberately do slice the difference between liberals and leftists.
	It may be a distinction that you don't think agrees with.
	But I mean, reasons to vote for Democrats is going to include a lot of liberals there.
	Well, I mean, that's really a critique of the Democratic Party and obviously a joke.
	I mean, at a certain point, you do have to say, if I have to explain the joke, it's no longer a joke.
	But yes, I mean, we are a jokey site.
	We do have a sense of humor about politics.
	But I mean, to your point, as far as open mindedness about people on the other side of the aisle, as far as I'm aware, You know, we're one of the few conservative sites where we'll have people like you on for an hour long conversation or people like Jane or people like Andrew Yang or people on the left side of the aisle.
	And that is something that I like engaging with.
	And I think it's fun.
	I'm not going to give up the humor of politics.
	Politics is inherently stupid in many ways.
	And I think that and I think that giving up the sense of humor for a for a sense of sincerity that I don't think actually reflects politics in our country is I'm not sure that that's a winning proposition.
	I think also you may be more optimistic about politics than I am, oddly.
	I probably am.
	Because your book is very realistic about the prospect of polarization, but sort of the way that you're articulating the way people see your site, as opposed to my honest recognition of the way I think people see our sites.
	That may just be a difference between, in my opinion, realism and optimism on your end, or realism and pessimism, or optimism and pessimism.
	I think, so I have a media chapter, and I'd love to talk with you about it, because this is something I struggle with, right?
	I started Vox, and along with my co-founders, and it's hard, right?
	I mean, you know this, you built a site, it's hard.
	And you're in a media ecosystem right now, in a media business model, where it is harder.
	I talk about this a lot in that chapter, but things have moved to this very choice-based model.
	There's a tremendous amount of attentional competition.
	The audience is more polarized.
	That has made the folks appealing to the audience more polarized, right?
	The left is tears mugged at a very simple answer, right?
	The real answer is that it helps you guys sell subscriptions.
	It's a powerful identity, right?
	Delroy, you are a champion, right?
	The point of Ben Shapiro in some ways in the public discourse is Ben Shapiro destroys, right?
	You are a champion for people who often feel in colleges or in other places like they're not being heard, like nobody's arguing for them.
	They're getting shouted down.
	You come and you show, no, this is a fight you can actually win.
	And one of the things that I struggle with in the media is the push towards all of that.
	As you say, the book in a way is grim and some of what I'm trying to do in the book, in my podcast, in both self-presentation and broader Vox presentation, is you're a little bit trying to create the politics you would like to see in the world.
	And the politics I would like to see in the world is little more open.
	Well, and this is what I found so fascinating about the book is that it's, there's so much in there that's really interesting material about polarization and why we're polarized.
	But I wonder if it sort of elides the main reason why, why I think we're polarized, which is that there are true and real chasm wide ideological differences that are breaking out in the American philosophy right now.
	And that all of these systemic things that you talk about, why people polarize and why they tribalize and all that can be true.
	The question is why now?
	And does that reflect a broader difference that is not merely going to be papered over by sort of treating each other more nicely?
	Oh, yeah.
	Or is it, or is it, or is it, or is it, so, So I want to get into that in just one second.
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	So let's talk about the book now, since we've referenced it a bunch of times and not actually got into the content.
	Why we're Polarist.
	Why we're Polarist.
	You can buy it wherever you buy your books.
	100%.
	Go get it.
	It's actually a really interesting read.
	Obviously as somebody who reads a lot of books on the other side of the aisle, I found this to be a particularly informed take with regard to, especially the social science research on tribalism and how people group and how people find identity.
	I want to start with one of your premises.
	And it's a premise that I actually think, it certainly divides the two of us and our perspective on American politics and the world.
	You talk about identity politics, and you defend identity politics.
	You have a pretty staunch defense.
	Why sort of redefine identity politics?
	Right, and this is sort of the question.
	So I want to read you the quote on it, because I don't want to take it out of context or anything.
	So you say, unfortunately, the term identity politics has been weaponized.
	It is most often used by speakers to describe politics as practiced by members of marginalized groups.
	If you're black and you're worried about police brutality, that's identity politics.
	If you're a rural gun owner, decrying universal background checks is tyranny.
	So here's my question.
	So here's my question.
	I read this, and my first reaction was, this seems like a category error to group all these things together.
	The reason being, that in one case you are talking about race, an immutable characteristic of human beings that is not innately linked to politics.
	And in other cases, you're talking about actual ideological groups which are innately linked to politics.
	I mean, how you identify as a Christian is certainly going to have ramifications based on your interpretation of scripture for politics.
	How you identify as a gun owner obviously is going to, that is an activity.
	It is not you were born a gun owner, it is you chose to be a gun owner, possibly based on your feelings about guns.
	Like for me, my Advocacy for the Second Amendment began before I owned a gun.
	For a lot of people who are in favor of lower tax rates, they're not millionaires, they're not billionaires.
	63 million Americans voted for President Trump.
	The vast majority of them are not millionaires or billionaires.
	But a lot of them wanted higher tax rates on the rich people.
	Well, that's true.
	Including at some times Donald Trump.
	I mean, that's true, but it is also true that for the senators who are being voted for and for congresspeople who are being voted for, people have voted for lower taxes in the past.
	I voted for lower taxes when I was not making as much money.
	I vote for lower taxes now that I am making a lot more money.
	So the question that I have when it comes to identity politics is, if you are going to kind of lump all of this together, I do have an objection, which is, I think it is fair to object to identity-based politics on the basis of immutable characteristic, because there is no necessary conjunction between skin color and politics, whereas there is a fairly necessary conjunction between your religious outlook or your political outlook and identifying with other people who have that political or values-based outlook.
	We tend to, in life, associate with people who share our values, but if we in life only associate with people of our same race, we tend to get very uncomfortable with that, and I think that's perfectly appropriate.
	How do you define just identity?
	Take politics out of it for a minute.
	What is identity?
	I mean, in my view, I mean, identity on a broad level is obviously all the things that make you you.
	So presumably race would be a part of that, of course.
	But in terms of what is appropriate to bring into the political square, what is it appropriate to polarize politics around?
	I know I'm jumping past your question.
	So the argument you make, because I want to make sure I'm following it, is that race is immutable.
	And as such, it poses, and you can tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth, it poses a particular danger to politics in a way that something like religion, something like an ideological perspective, something like where I'm from, I'm a Californian, that doesn't.
	The sense of identities chosen or built on at least shakier ground inherited are different than identities that are somehow something you can't take off.
	Yes.
	Why?
	Because if the conversations that we have about politics are designed to shape each other, if we're actually, the conversations that you want to have and that I want to have, the conversations about convincing each other, if those are to have any effect in the real world, they cannot be based on immutable characteristics because those characteristics are immutable.
	Hold on, they're not based on immutable characteristics.
	When people talk about identity politics coming from race or coming from anything, the idea is not that the politics itself is an immutable characteristic.
	The argument being made, at least in part, is that something about the way you're moving through the world, whether it's because you're African American or Hispanic or Jewish or Californian or you live in a rural area, Is alerting you to some experience or giving you some experience that then, at least in theory, is speaking to a broader truth.
	I know that sometimes when you argue this point you like to make a cut between a politics based on experience and a politics based on data.
	I think of experience as a way of pointing you towards what is true about the world.
	You then have to validate it, but nevertheless you can bring that in.
	The idea that you would take that out, that something that was immutable in you, that you couldn't take off, is something you can't have in politics.
	That seems wild to me.
	I mean, of course it's something you need to be able to have in your politics.
	If you're having a distinct experience because of your race or because of your sexuality or whatever it might be, to say you're going to wall politics off from that, not only does that seem weird to me in terms of what politics is for, but isn't how politics ever worked?
	No, but the point that I would make is that you are now conflating experience with an immutable characteristic.
	And that is an argument that I object to on the left.
	I think I don't understand what you're saying.
	So the argument that I'm making is if you and I share an experience... Yeah.
	Right?
	And that experience... Right, we're both Jewish.
	Okay, but that's not an experience.
	That's a characteristic.
	But there's something in moving through the world as a Jewish person that can be similar.
	I mean, we both get a lot of anti-Semitic hate on Twitter.
	Right, okay, so that's an experience, right?
	Our experience of anti-Semitic hate.
	But that does not suggest that we have a common interest except against the anti-Semitic hate.
	Okay, when you suggest that there is such a thing as a black interest, or as a... I don't want to use Jewish because Jewish actually has religious overtones, obviously.
	Judaism is both an ethnicity and a religion.
	And you and I disagree, I'm sure, very widely on the ramifications of what it means to be Jewish, even.
	So Jewish identity is a little fuzzy because it actually branches off into a couple different areas, but race is... But all identities are fuzzy in that way.
	Not in that exact way, but all identities have big groupings within them, and you're doing a crude cut, right?
	Whenever you're talking about demographics, you're modeling the world in a crude way that is going to get things missed and wrong at the individual level.
	If the problem throughout American history, and I think it largely has been, is white identitarianism, then why is that a problem, but black identitarianism or Hispanic identitarianism is not?
	I think that the problem is when the policy is bad.
	But you don't actually believe that.
	I do believe that.
	The reason I say that you don't believe that is because the same policy applied to one group becomes good, and a policy that is applied to another group becomes bad.
	The problem is when the policy is bad.
	If we have a policy that it works better when applied in one direction or another, as you, I guess, occasionally do, although we should talk about examples because I'm not really sure what you're referring to there.
	Affirmative action, for example.
	I think affirmative action as a way of writing a historical injustice is a pretty straightforward policy.
	It seems to work when you're dealing with something that has actually happened in American history, to say that you're dealing with a very straightforward effort there to pay down a debt.
	Well, so the argument in favor of affirmative action is now being based on the experiences of people presumably under segregation or Jim Crow, and we are now in the year 2010.
	First of all, the efficacy of affirmative action is very much in doubt according to the research of the Thernstroms, but putting that aside... I disagree that the efficacy is in doubt, but we don't have to go through a peer review here.
	Let me ask you this question just straightforwardly.
	Why is it that if you are the head of an African-American household and you have a full-time job, you're going to have a lower net worth on average than the head of a white household who is unemployed?
	Or similarly, if you're the head of an African-American household, you have a college degree, you're likely to have a lower net worth than a white household headed by somebody who dropped out of high school.
	That is speaking to something that has happened historically, right?
	No question.
	Wealth is an intergenerational transfer.
	Of course.
	At some point, if you want society to be even roughly equal, you're going to have to do something about that interrational injustice.
	Or, alternatively, the idea of equality would be that everyone is treated equally under law, not differentially by race or based on past discrimination.
	That is one idea of equality.
	Well, this is correct.
	And this is why, when you say why we're polarized and the implication is that we are polarized because of tribal identity, the real reason I think that we're polarized is because there are two very different visions of the world and how the government ought to operate in that world.
	Meaning that you're positing a sort of Rawlsian view of justice.
	I fundamentally disagree with the Rawlsian view of justice.
	I do not think that society or government is in a place to achieve equality of outcome, nor do I think that the attempt to, in Thomas Sowell's phrase, to achieve cosmic justice is something that is either possible or desirable from the government.
	When you say we can't achieve, I can totally buy the argument that you don't want it to, or that you think it would be unfair, but I think there's a very big difference that's important to keep in mind between cannot and should not.
	Well, I mean, you're right.
	We could achieve equality of outcome.
	It would involve the oppression of hundreds of millions of people.
	It's not even equality of outcome.
	You can achieve low levels of reparations for past injustice through things like affirmative action.
	I mean, we can disagree about whether or not affirmative action works, but positing that it could, Just doing a little bit to try to do things about what has happened in the past is not going all the way towards totalitarianism.
	Let me actually back this up for a minute because I think we should talk about identity and polarization because I think something in my definition of polarization is getting missed here.
	Alright, go for it.
	So, two things.
	So one, I agree that polarization is dramatically about ideology and dramatically about very different ways of looking at the world.
	The argument of the book is that what is different right now is that those are sorting so neatly by party.
	So go back to the 1960s, let's say.
	Civil Rights Act, right?
	There's part of the country that is against that, part of the country that is for it.
	That's clearly a very big difference in belief about how the country should be governed, what we should do, and what is right for the government to do, right?
	I mean, to take that as more than just a racist argument, there's also a set of arguments about, you know, what is the proper role of the federal government, what are states' rights, etc.
	What is remarkable about that moment in American politics is it does not split by party.
	in the House and the Senate, you have a higher proportion of congressional Republicans vote for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.
	And then a Democratic president, of course, pushed and signed it.
	So you have a truly bipartisan effort on civil rights and also a truly bipartisan opposition to it.
	So it isn't that we have, in my view, deeper ideological differences today than we did then.
	I think the ideological difference over is segregation by law an okay or even commendable thing to have is a much more dramatic ideological difference than most of what we're dealing with today.
	The difference is that a lot more of our distinctions drop across party lines.
	Not just ideological, but identity as well, and it is the merging of those ideological, identity, experiential, demographic, and then the cutting of them by our politics that is really different here.
	So, polarization, we've always been disagreeing, and we've had much more dangerous moments of societal fracture than this one.
	What is distinct about this moment is the degree to which they layer onto party, and then how that interacts catalytically with our American political institutions.
	So I don't in any way wipe away the idea that there's a great ideological debate to have here.
	Just that we're not in a new era of great ideological debates.
	What we're in a new era of is party polarization.
	So, I mean, I agree with an enormous amount of that, and that I think is the most solid part of the book.
	I think that what I disagree with is that the prescription is that identity politics generally should be treated the same based on the group that is claiming identity.
	So I want to get into that in just one second.
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	Again, I come back to the question of you suggested that the only question is whether a policy is good or bad.
	Well, good for whom, bad for whom, great for the majority, good for all, but in the interests of some?
	How are you defining good?
	Because I really have serious doubts, and I don't mean to cast aspersions at intent here, but to your credit, I have serious doubts that if a white majoritarian party came up in a white identitarian party and said the interests of white people are the most important here.
	Also, this policy that is expressly designed to benefit white people happens to benefit everybody else.
	I doubt you'd be like, oh, well, you know, that's okay.
	Because, you know, sure, they're white identitarians, but that's also helping black people, so that's okay.
	I think that depending on how—there are a lot of different ways to think about whether or not a policy is good or bad, and we can go through them— But I think that I want to go through identity for a minute here, because one place where I think we disagree a little bit, and one thing that I try to define in the book, is I want people to see identity as, one, obviously something we all have, and you've agreed to that earlier, but also it's something that's challenged and activated in politics.
	And primarily the thing I'm trying to do with identity politics here—I've got to admit, I'm a little bit confused by some of the distinctions you draw, because What we're seeing in politics all the time is that identities converge, they diverge, they activate, they spin down.
	And we need to see it as a psychological process that spins up.
	And once it spins up, it changes how we relate to each other, changes how we absorb both contrary and positive information, changes how we feel about the other party.
	And the idea that everybody has identity and that it all works off a pretty similar psychological basis in the mind, I think that's pretty much unchallenged in the social science literature.
	That's pretty straightforward.
	And so this idea that you're going to allow some identities into politics and not others, I don't even know how you could do that, even if you wanted to, or even what exactly.
	What I'm making is that it's more dangerous to graft politics onto certain identities than to others.
	And I think that's a proposition with which, again, I don't understand.
	Are racial politics and religious politics all that?
	Because you've cut those apart from each other.
	Is religion something more chosen, people can move in and out of?
	But, I mean, you know, look worldwide.
	There's plenty of religious wars, plenty of religious violence.
	People cleave to a lot of different identities.
	Some of them are racial, but also racial identities are more complicated than even I think this conversation is making them sound.
	They change over time, right?
	There was a time when the Irish and the Jews were not considered white.
	Now, later on, they become white.
	Sure, but that's not nearly as flexible as simple political affiliation based on tax rates, for example.
	Right, but that's why I use religion as the example.
	Tax rates, I agree.
	Even use religion as an example, one of the things that the founders, I think, very wisely did is they stumped in favor of separation of church and state, specifically to minimize the impact of a state being made the weapon of a particular religious sect.
	So the founders recognized the problems of religious identitarianism.
	Right, I think you're making, I think you're arguing for my position.
	No, no, the opposite.
	No, I'm arguing that affiliation specifically by, there are gradations in the dangers to be posed by affiliation with particular identity groups and how those manifest in politics.
	And I'll agree with you that religion is in some ways, because it is largely inherited from parents, and because it is not directly politically related in some ways, that in some ways it stands between sort of the poles of race and, say, tax rates.
	But there are gradations there, and I think that to pretend that these are all the same, which is sort of what you claim in the book, that all identity groups to which you choose affiliation should be treated equally in politics, and that when politicians appeal to those identity groups, that that is equally... Oh, I don't think I agree with that at all.
	Well, so then clarify for me, because I'm a bit confused.
	So clarify for me, which do you think that there are increasing or divergent dangers based on attempts to appeal to particular senses of identity in American politics?
	Let me think for a second what I think about this.
	I don't think it is different now than it has ever been.
	If anything, one of the arguments I make in the book is that identity politics is paradoxically weaker now as we see it more clearly.
	So one of the big-picture arguments I make in the book is that we are in an era of very rapid demographic change.
	So we are en route to being a majority-minority nation racially by about 2043.
	We've seen the percentage of Americans that are foreign-born go from about 4% in 1973 or 1974, I think it was, to about 14.5% now.
	That's a couple points off from a record, but we're expected to hit a record.
	And then to bring religion into this, we are again en route to seeing the religiously unaffiliated become the single largest religious group again that's expected by demographers in about the 2040s.
	So about 7 out of 10 seniors are white and Christian.
	Only 3 out of 10 people under 30 are white and Christian.
	It's a very, very rapid change in religious mores in the country.
	And all that is creating a lot of pressure on the system, but one of the things it's creating is an ability for groups that traditionally have not been strong enough to put their needs and their claims onto the political agenda to do exactly that.
	And that's why one of the arguments I make is that identity politics is often most powerful when we don't see it clearly at all.
	I mean, you've said already in this conversation that white identitarianism has been one of the foundational sins in American political life for a very long time.
	Oftentimes it is acted-- - Unspoken white identitarianism.
	Exactly.
	Oftentimes it is acted almost completely invisibly.
	Like one of the points I make in the book is that presidential cabinets for the vast majority of American history were just all white men.
	And when that was going on, nobody said, ah, identity politics, like only white men are being chosen for this.
	But then if somebody comes out and says, I think we need a cabinet that looks like America or a cabinet that is 50% female or whatever it might be, that all of a sudden is identity politics.
	So to your question about whether or not... And I agree with that critique.
	Right.
	So this is what I'm saying.
	Not your critique.
	I agree with the point.
	So I agree with the point that it is more identity politics to suggest today that we ought to, in today's politics, forget about Sixty years ago, I agreed that it was unspoken white identitarianism to have only white males at the cabinet table.
	Agreed.
	Today, if somebody says... Two policies.
	One is, whoever is most qualified gets into the cabinet.
	Somebody else says, I need a transgender person on this to pick my secretary of education, as Senator Warren recently sort of suggested.
	The secondary claim is to me significantly more disturbing than the meritocracy claim, no matter where things come down.
	Do you have any preference?
	I want to hold for a minute on first the first question, then I'll go to your second question, which is, my point is simply that identity politics has always been part of America.
	Right, but it was kind of bad.
	It's very powerful.
	And I don't think you're going to get it out of the whole thing because people interact through not just the political system but the world through their identity.
	But it's one of the worst things that has happened in American history is the unspoken white identitarianism.
	I agree that it has terrible dimensions and I agree that it has, oh, maybe I don't agree, but I believe it can have good dimensions.
	Like everything in politics, it's complicated and it can go in multiple directions depending on who's doing it and whether or not the causes are going forward.
	Stand up to some basic analysis.
	I think in the general question of how to build cabinets that you're bringing up there, oftentimes the way people see it is not actually that what they're doing is betraying the meritocracy by trying to make a more diverse cabinet, but actually forcing themselves to be meritocratic in building something and also creating a world where you can be meritocratic in the future.
	If you've created a system where it's endlessly white privilege regenerating itself through, then it becomes very hard to have a system 20 years from now Where there are enough people who have come up through the pipeline and have had their needs recognized and have had their talents seen to be able to have the kind of system that we want to have.
	I think one of the places that I probably disagree with you pretty profoundly in politics has to do with what do you do about historical injustice now?
	I think sometimes there's an effort to say, I call it sort of zero day equality, right?
	As of today, things are equal.
	And so as of today, everything goes in the same direction.
	As of today, everybody gets treated equally.
	And then all the accumulated power, the accumulated wealth, the accumulated position in society, you just sort of wipe it away and you hope people are going to swim through that entire thing.
	It's why I brought up earlier this question of an African-American family with a head earner and a full-time job having significantly less wealth than a white family with an unemployed head earner, an African-American family with a college-educated head earner.
	having a lot less wealth in a white family with a college dropout head earner.
	Like that is something where you see that there's something going on in the background there, that if you simply begin running the race right now, it is not going to be a fair race.
	Now you have to handle these things carefully.
	I don't think anything is easy, right?
	My background, as you know, is as a policy reporter, it is hard to fix difficult problems.
	It doesn't mean you shouldn't try or it doesn't mean you shouldn't see them as problems.
	Well, you can see historical injustice as a problem and still recognize the limitations of government, which goes back to one of your original statements about kind of the nature of liberalism, about the ability of government to get this stuff done.
	I mean, Lyndon Johnson specifically talked about kind of moving toward a Rawlsian equality of opportunity as opposed to the sort of equality of rights that is guaranteed under the Constitution or should be, right?
	The idea that equal rights before law and equal application of the law was the basis of Americanism, and he sort of replaced that Speaking clearly with this idea that it was not a fair race if somebody was starting off ten yards behind, which is a nice metaphor.
	Or hundreds of yards.
	Or hundreds of yards behind.
	Or a thousand yards behind.
	And that's a nice metaphor and that's true to the extent that it's true.
	There's only a couple of problems.
	I mean, it is true.
	Well, when I say it's true to the extent that it's true, what I mean is that there are a couple of problems with it.
	One, everybody in society, to a more or less extent, is born different from everybody else in society with certain advantages and certain disadvantages, and that's accurate.
	Also, everybody is born either with a certain advantage or disadvantage in terms of historical circumstance.
	What makes You believe that either it is right and just for the government to then come in and act as a sort of godlike figure in figuring out who deserves to have something taken away from them and handed to somebody else, even if they don't necessarily bear personal responsibility for it.
	Well, it's not a godlike figure.
	It's a democratic figure, right?
	It's a figure that is imbued with the powers we give it through consent.
	Do you believe in pure majoritarianism?
	I'm a lot closer to pure majoritarianism than where we are now.
	That's pretty shocking given the history of the United States.
	You want a fair amount of rights to protect individual rights.
	But that doesn't mean that a community can't come together and say we want to tax people to provide universal health care.
	We want to tax people to provide reparations for something.
	I'm enough towards...
	Fair majorityism doesn't mean, I think, for me what it means for you.
	I think we are fundamentally so far from being an actual democracy in this country, given that the White House is occupied by the candidate who won fewer votes, the Senate is occupied by the party that won fewer votes.
	Because of that, the Supreme Court is occupied by the party that won fewer votes in the relevant elections to offer Supreme Court nominations.
	We are so far from democracy, I would like to see a pretty big move towards being a democracy.
	Pure majoritarianism in the sense of, like, running a California proposition process or not having individual rights, of course not.
	But majoritarianism, way closer to where we are now, not having a filibuster, that kind of thing?
	Absolutely.
	And the question of whether or not it is legitimate for the government to do those kinds of things, if the people want them done?
	A hundred percent.
	So then what are the limiting principles?
	Meaning, what are the things that ought to be protected?
	Well, the reason I ask this is because... We've done a lot of work on this throughout American history.
	So the founding argument, for better or for worse, the founding argument, I think very much for better, is that there are certain individual rights that pre-exist governments, and the government was instituted to protect those individual rights, and that a government that surpasses those individual rights ceases to act as a function of its original Mandate and therefore is illegitimate.
	I mean, this is the basics of the Declaration of Independence, right?
	And then the Constitution is designed specifically with all of these checks and balances.
	As you discuss in the book, it was designed for gridlock.
	I mean, when people yell about the gridlock of American government, I always am confused by that because literally the thing was designed for gridlock.
	I mean, the founders are not unclear about this in the Federalist paper.
	I think it's a pretty tremendous zone of range within where we are now and what we've agreed is legitimate to do within our constitutional structure that you could do.
	Let me ask you something.
	Do you think Medicare for all would be legitimate within our constitutional structure?
	I mean, I think that under the fundamental, as interpreted by... Are you asking me a descriptive question or a normative question?
	I'm asking you a normative question.
	So, normatively... You believe, as you understand our constitutional structure, that you should be able to do something like single-payer health care?
	On a federal level, no.
	So I just do.
	And I think that's a pretty clear point of case law, right?
	In the way Medicaid and Medicare have been done.
	But now you're shifting from normative to descriptive.
	So I asked you already.
	Normative or descriptive.
	Under case law, probably you can do anything you want.
	So your view as a case law has just been wrongly decided?
	Yes, for the last hundred years.
	Since Wickard v. Filburn.
	On the expansion of the federal government through the Commerce Clause to include being able to grow pot in your own backyard.
	It's ridiculous, yes.
	So I disagree with that.
	But I don't think we are going to get too deep in the great founding struggle of America here.
	But I think that struggle is behind this.
	I don't think it is.
	And this is where I think that we have our great divide on your book, which is that you believe that the divides in America are chiefly due to reorientation of identity.
	No, no, I don't.
	Again, I want to be super clear about this.
	I think these divides have been much bigger at other times, and they were very similar divides.
	It's not like people didn't have the argument you and I are having right now in 1950.
	I mean, you had an argument in 1950 that was much more between communists and going all the way to, say, like a Barry Goldwater.
	The range of political opinion in 1950 was vast.
	My point is simply that back then, It didn't split by party, and that has very particular, distinctive implications for a political system like ours.
	I want to be clear, because I think this is something that people really get wrong.
	The way in which our political system, we equate polarization with disagreement, we equate it with bitterness or argumentativeness or incivility.
	None of that is true.
	The divides have been here from the beginning.
	I think, as you're actually saying here, they've been bigger at other times.
	We had a lot more political violence in this country a hundred years ago than we have now.
	Fifty years ago.
	And 50 years ago than we have now.
	So I think it is important for those of us in this moment who are political pundits and who are trying to assess this to not play into the idea that we are living through some level of fracture and friction that America has never experienced.
	I think that there is, particularly by the way on the left, a tendency to overstate how bad the current moment is and how deep the divides are.
	We have our arguments, right?
	The point of the book is that those arguments didn't used to sort by party.
	You would have had liberal Republicans who agreed more or less with me in the Republican Party.
	You would have had conservative Democrats who were in many ways more like you in the Democratic Party.
	You don't have that now.
	And that is the change the book is tracing.
	I'd be interested if you think it's true.
	I don't think that even our divides on economic policy, to say nothing of our divides on race and social policy, are deeper now than they were 50 years ago.
	But even if you do, I don't think that is the main thing that has changed.
	And I think those arguments are quite similar.
	I mean, we can go back to early issues of the National Review and see these debates playing out.
	The difference is who they're talking to and how those things establish themselves by party and then how they're mechanized by party.
	Right.
	Because when parties are internally united, they are able to act with a level of discipline and a level of competition between them that is.
	creates one kind of political system versus when they're internally divided and they try to handle disagreements either through internal compromise or, as was often the case in American history in the 20th century, through suppression of those disagreements.
	So when it comes to sort of the acceleration of divides, I think you're right on some issues and I feel like you're a little bit off base on other issues.
	No, I'm right on all of these.
	So what I feel, so here's an example.
	So you do talk about sort of the bipartisan approval of greater government interventionism in the economy in the 1950s.
	And it is true that the Republican Party reshifts itself and reorients it.
	But also bipartisan opposition.
	Right, bipartisan opposition and correct.
	Strom Thurmond was a very conservative Democratic senator.
	Right.
	100%.
	And then you see the Republican Party reorienting largely, you make it sort of a racial story, but I think that that ignores the fact that a lot of other things went on in the 60s aside from the civil rights movement.
	I mean, there was a sexual revolution and there was an economic revolution under LBJ that really grew government at extraordinary rates.
	I mean, people tend to pay a lot of attention to the New Deal and not enough attention to the Great Society, which was an exponential growth of American government.
	And that really did result in sort of the Reagan backlash to that.
	And that's where the modern party system really begins, is really in the 60s.
	You talk a lot about the Civil Rights Act, as I said, and the Voting Rights Act, and all of that is appropriate, although I would challenge some of the assertions of the Southern shift, which I think, again, has been statistically exaggerated and a little bit— it ignores some of the underlying economic trends.
	It ignores— It ignores the fact that Republicans really only took over the South in terms of Congress in the early 1990s.
	No, but I talked about that pretty explicitly.
	Yeah, that's true.
	There are reasons for that.
	In fact, it gets at some interesting things.
	Upper income Republicans and younger Republicans in the South were the ones who were voting increasingly Republican.
	Older Democrats stayed Democrat.
	Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating thing, right?
	Identity is so powerful, including partisan identity, that to change it you often need generational... the polite way of saying it is generational cohort replacement.
	It is very hard to change people's political identities, and it often doesn't happen until one generation dies out and those loyalties begin to fade because the next generation doesn't have them.
	I mean, this is an old piece of insight that a lot of social change is actually generational.
	For sure, but the reason that I'm tracing the history a little bit in terms of the 1960s is that there is a feeling in the Republican Party, and really inside the kind of conservative base, that you're right, and that you were right that there was agreement about the growth of government, but then there was this explosion in government that happens in the 1960s, and that extends into the Republican Party via Nixon.
	And then there's a backlash to that in the Republican Party that consolidates around, okay, we have now gone too far.
	And that the continuation of the going too far has not abated.
	So there's one point you make in the book where you say, you know, Democrats have constantly sort of striven for change and Republicans increasingly are the party of stop, no, don't do that.
	Well, there's two explanations.
	One is that, as you sort of suggest in the book, that the people who are anti-change and who are genetically and psychologically predisposed toward non-change have now centralized in one party.
	The other possibility is that we've pushed pretty damn far in the last three decades on a wide variety of issues.
	And I think those are catalytic with each other.
	Well, yes, but I think that the psychological explanation seems to lay at the feet of psychology of political change, whereas the explanation that I'm laying forth is that the Democratic Party, the media, that particularly there's been a real social move toward the left, and that the reaction to that, centralizing the Republican Party, is not chiefly a psychological one as much as it is a psychological reaction to a perfectly justifiable I don't think.
	I mean, I think an argument I make pretty explicitly in the book, particularly in the demographic change chapter, is that all of this is being activated and amplified by genuine real change.
	It's simply not that people are inventing that the country is changing dramatically.
	It is not that people are inventing that things are different around them.
	I think some of the economic changes, particularly over the last 30 or 40 years, are probably a little less substantial than this, and I think that's born out of the data, but it's also there.
	I mean, I don't disagree that the Great Society and before that the New Deal changed politics.
	Part of the story about the Civil Rights Act is not that what happens, and I think that's actually an important and often missed point about American politics.
	What happens is, not the Civil Rights Act passes, and then all of a sudden Barry Goldwater wins the South, and tomorrow everybody's a Republican in the South.
	That doesn't happen at all.
	You keep a tremendous amount of Southern Democratic senators, Southern Democratic members of Congress.
	You keep a lot of those long-time elites.
	South becomes more competitive in presidential elections.
	This is a big era of ticket splitting.
	It's why you get a lot of cross-party coalitions during this period.
	It's why Joe Biden is out there saying, hey, remember when I used to make deals with segregationist senators?
	That is the moment of politics that he grew up in.
	I think it's always interesting how different it was in living memory.
	But what happens there is that what the Dixiecrat blockage did, and that's sort of how I describe it, functionally, and this is a longtime view in political science, functionally American politics was a four-party system in the 20th century.
	You had Democrats, as we think about them now, Dixiecrats, which were a conservative, pretty racist party.
	That entered into a national power sharing agreement with the Democratic Party as long as they were allowed to keep going to segregation in the South, liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans, and that it was the Civil Rights Act and a lot of changes began happening after that, and happened slowly, that allowed for realignment.
	The way I think about it is that, particularly that racial dimension of politics, and if you look at measures of party polarization, you can't explain it unless you add this racial dimension in mid-20th century America.
	But at some point, that fades.
	It doesn't split the parties in two, internally, the way it once did.
	And that is what creates the possibility to have so many people who feel, as you were talking about, about economics, move over to the Republican Party.
	It's that move where you didn't have this foundational split inside the parties that then creates a kind of flywheel process of polarization and everything else.
	I mean, the process of identity sorting I talk about, where you first have this move towards ideology, where Democrats become the party of liberals and Republicans a party of conservatives.
	And then you have, layering on top of that, a move by race.
	I mean, you used to have a lot more as a percentage African-American Republicans than you do today.
	Jackie Robinson is very famously a Republican.
	If I'm not wrong, the earlier black senators were Republicans.
	And so that change in the Democratic Party becomes very much a party of a non-white America, right?
	50% of Democrats are non-white.
	90% of Republicans are white.
	Religion splits much more.
	The largest religious group in the Democratic Party now is religiously unaffiliated.
	Right.
	That psychological dimension, which I think is really interesting.
	I have some issues with the research in this area.
	I think it's getting at something important.
	I don't think it is yet strong enough to base a huge amount of your political argumentation on.
	I was going to ask you about that, and I totally agree with that.
	I think there is something very real in the openness to change and conscientiousness, like dimensions, fixed and fluid.
	And I talk about it.
	I think there's some cross-cutting to that, too.
	I think there's cross-cutting.
	The so-called authoritarian personality is not merely a right-wing figment.
	I think that's right.
	And so I talk about it as something that is sorting.
	To be honest, it is something that I think is truer than we are able to get at, but I don't trust the research enough yet to layer much on it.
	But nevertheless, from what we know, there is a sorting around that, right?
	I talked about the book.
	I actually think you've talked about this book, Prius vs. Pickup, by Weiler and Hetherington, and they really do show that over time there's been a very sharp sorting by this sort of fluid, which is this like high openness to experience dimension, and fixed, which is this more conscientiousness dimension.
	Different people cut it different ways, but that's clearly happened.
	And so the way I see it is more that once the process of polarization and sorting begun, it happened to a lot of things on top of each other and created what political scientists call conflict escalation.
	Instead of disagreeing on one thing, now things go together much more cleanly.
	The Republican Party in 1976 had a national convention platform that said, there's a disagreement in our party on abortion.
	Some people in our party think you should be able to get an abortion whenever you want it.
	Others think it should always be illegal.
	And we respect that disagreement.
	It wasn't until later the parties polarized on abortion.
	I also note in the book, you look at Bill Clinton's 96 convention platform, he sounds like Donald Trump on immigration.
	The parties are substantially more different now, not because those opinions, and I think this is something we're circling a bit, not because those opinions that they're fighting over now didn't exist in American politics, but to the extent they did, they existed as cleavages inside the parties too.
	And when a cleavage is inside the party, the party tries to compromise it or suppress it.
	When it is between them, they try to escalate it.
	And so what I'm trying to describe is a difference in political conflict dynamic, not not a difference in political opinions.
	It's sort in the public.
	The thing political scientists argue about in my book is that they feel the mass public is not polarized on policy very much at all.
	And in fact, if you look at most people, they're very unpolarized on policy.
	I mean, Republicans very heavily support higher taxes on the rich.
	Democrats have all kinds of views that would get canceled on liberal Twitter.
	Like it just doesn't fall the way political elites fall.
	We are unusually, all of us, super ideological.
	And And going way back to Converse's studies in the 50s and 60s, only about 15 to 20% of the population has a very clear, coherent ideology, a sense, as they say, of what goes with what.
	What's changing is just how sordid those parties are at the top level, and that changes how the mass public reacts to them at the bottom level, because people are sitting there.
	It's much easier to make a distinction between two parties that have very clearly different views on abortion then two parties are mixed on them.
	Easier to make a distinction between, on immigration, if you care about that a lot, between the party of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than the party of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
	And so as parties change, as these disagreements locate in parties as opposed to, or between them as opposed to inside of them, it very much changes the dynamics of American politics more broadly.
	So I want to get into that in just one second.
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	To get back to the sort of identity politics question, because that's really the area where we disagree.
	I agree with so much of your analysis on the polarization of the parties.
	And it's obviously true that all of the ideological diversity within the parties is basically gone at this point.
	I mean, the blue dog Democrat is basically gone.
	The very liberal Republican is effectively being moved out.
	I mean, you can see people who are not even liberal Republicans, if they if they cross the party, are now being sort of sent into the wilderness and wished into the cornfield.
	So, you know, that that out on the ice ice flow.
	Right, exactly.
	So that sort of stuff is obviously happening.
	I guess the question is when it comes to how to have political conversations and how to cure the polarization, a lot of that, to me, is going to rely on having conversations like the one we're having, where neither of us feel that our quote-unquote identity is threatened, as opposed to most of the conversations that are being activated.
	And this is true right and left.
	People who are activating conversations solely on the basis of identity.
	And this goes back to the question I was asking before, and that I think we sort of escape and I want to come back around to.
	And that is, do you think that there are gradations of danger in the kinds of identity that are appealed to in politics?
	Yes, I don't think there is any doubt that certain kinds of identities are more fundamental.
	And they are harder for people to cross, and when they are threatened, people react more strongly.
	And I think that, in general, the two that have dominated American politics, or maybe the three, are racial, religious, and then party.
	And I do think party is a bigger kind of identity than we often give it credit for, and should be understood as an identity.
	I mean, again, this is why I push you a little bit on the leftist tier, saying, I agree it's funny.
	That's why I want the mug.
	That's why I'm not leaving this place without a mug.
	And I also think it's the least dangerous conflict.
	But I do think that when these things all begin to layer on top of each other, And that's the story I'm telling in the book.
	One of the points I'm making is that we have to understand political identities as identities.
	And that's why I go through a lot of this other—separate from, because I want to be clear for the audience, we were talking a couple of minutes ago about political psychology research, about psychological substrates of people's politics later in life.
	Here I'm talking about research about how people form identities, which I think is much, much stronger, and we can go through the Henry Toshville stuff if you'd like.
	I think that what is happening now is we have to understand that a lot of the polarization in the country is actually coming from political identity, which is fed into by racial, by religious, by geographic, is another, I think, quite big one, kinds of identity.
	So I'll give you an example of this.
	Michael Tesler, the political scientist at UC Irvine, he shows that in polling, if you looked at racialized controversies, which we had plenty of in the 90s, they were very divisive in the country, but they didn't split by party.
	So if you polled the O.J.
	Simpson verdict or the Bernard Goetz trial in New York, People had different views, but those different views were not different by Republicans and Democrats.
	If you poll racialized controversies now, George Zimmerman or a couple years ago, whether or not—this is my favorite—whether or not 12 years a slave should win an Oscar, which is not something the parties took position on.
	But if I'm remembering the numbers here correctly, 69% of Democrats said yes, 12 years a slave should win an Oscar.
	12% of Republicans said yes.
	So what you have is a layering of these identities on top of each other, and then they come out in these political identities, which in many ways are much more comfortable arguing about.
	Just to finish one more study here, I show in the book a study that I think is pretty disturbing, which is by Shanto Yengar and Sean Westwood, where they show that if you give people a form and you ask them to rate somebody applying for a scholarship, you now see very, very high rates of discrimination simply based on whether or not the hypothetical scholarship applicant was a Republican or Democrat in high school.
	These political identities are standing in for a lot.
	They are very powerful in how we treat each other.
	And they're at the core of a lot of political polarization.
	And I think much more so at the core of it than some of these other identities you're talking about.
	So I think the opposite.
	It feels to me like the politics have been layered onto the political identities by politically motivated actors.
	What I mean by that is, right, and so what I'm suggesting is that the layering is the problem.
	Not the identity group identification, which as you identify has been part of American politics forever, but people identifying by party, people identifying by value group, even to a certain point, apolitically by religious group is not a problem.
	Politically by religious group it starts to become more of a problem, right?
	If you identify- But we agree they've always done that, right?
	Yes, but doing it by racial group has always been the biggest problem in American history and doing it by racial group today and layering politics on top of racial group makes it almost impossible to have a conversation in the sense that if you believe that you're- an immutable characteristic about yourself is threatened by somebody else's political position, then there's no possible way to have a rational conversation.
	And this is how you end up with the idea that you appearing on my show, you're gonna get unbelievable blowback because I am a threat to people who are transgender, or I'm a threat to people who are black, or I'm a threat to people who are Hispanic.
	Now, I have never said a word about black identity as being bad, because black identity is not bad.
	Meaning like, if you are a black person, that is not bad.
	There's nothing wrong with you.
	And not only that, I have forcibly Gone after and taken more abuse for it.
	Anybody going after the alt-right and racism coming from that particular purview.
	You're going to get hit for being on the show, specifically because the idea is that because I believe that Trayvon Martin was acquitted, that George Zimmerman was acquitted, and that the DOJ could not come up with evidence that George Zimmerman was racially motivated in the killing of Trayvon Martin, that therefore you are speaking with an overt racist because I took a position on that trial that obviously threatens identity.
	So, one, I think sometimes people overrate the bravery it takes to appear on a show.
	Like, I will live through my cancellation.
	Like, I would not be here if I thought it was going to, like, destroy my career forever.
	So I think sometimes the amount of bravery people suggest it takes pundits to wander around and have conversations in the current era is amplified by a kind of desire to make things all seem a little bit more dangerous and polarized and make the other side seem more unreasonable than they are.
	I have plenty of conversations on my show With people I disagree with, like Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan and so on, and my show doesn't get cancelled.
	It's all fine.
	People live.
	You get a lot of blowback.
	I think some of it is deserved, frankly.
	But I was looking at a speech you gave a couple of years ago, and I don't know what it was actually titled, but of course on YouTube it's titled, Ben Shapiro destroys the concept of white privilege.
	I think that when you do these speeches, the way that speech was constructed is full of a lot of jabs.
	You talk about the people you disagree with sounding like you're 22-month-old spitting up.
	You don't try to lower the amount of threat people feel from you, but I actually don't really want to talk about you in this.
	What I want to make is a bigger point about race and politics, which is, it is true that being, say, African-American in this country, politics has often been a threat to you, like a deep, real threat to your ability to live a decent life.
	Of course, that's true.
	And that is true for people of different sexualities and it's true for a lot of us in different ways.
	And so one of the things that I do think I profoundly disagree on with you is that the idea that bringing that into politics, the reason is often combustible, is that that is a place where there's been some of our deepest injustice.
	Not our only injustice.
	No, I agree.
	And in particular, I think it's combustible because people have a sense deep inside that if we were to really account for historically what we've done, the amount of societal disruption that would take, reparations and other things, it would be so much that people don't even want to face it.
	It's much easier to suppress it, which again, by the way, is what we did for much of 20th century politics.
	I'm not coming here with an agenda to solve politics, much less an agenda to solve racial divisions in politics.
	But the idea that racial divisions are part of politics, you're going to somehow, like, lock them out, it just seems wild to me.
	I mean, of course one of the many things we have to deal with in politics is racial division.
	Politics is a place where we're able to take our divisions and hopefully deal with them non-violently so they don't explode in other parts of our country and other parts of our society.
	Now, I have very deep concerns that we've become unable to deal with anything in politics, be those racial divisions, be it healthcare, be it anything.
	But that's a set of arguments I'll make about the way our political system now functions, not so much about whether or not it is viable to bring these disagreements into the political sphere.
	But I think that at root, there is also a fundamental disagreement here on how many of these political disagreements go to identity.
	And that may be the biggest disagreement of all, which is that I agree there are obviously certain points where there are policies that are threatening to black people and were designed to be threatening to black people.
	I mean, most of American history was replete with exactly such policies.
	The invocation of policies that are not only facially neutral but not designed to be discriminatory toward black people, the activation of the racial trigger when it comes to the invocation of group identity in response to that, I think is incredibly dangerous and it ought to be used with great care.
	And I feel like you downplay the amount of care that ought to be used for that because you're pretty sanguine about the idea that policy is generally racialized.
	I don't think I do downplay the amount of care you need.
	I think I take a lot of care with it.
	And I think actually one of my criticisms of you is I think you don't.
	I think that you say a lot of very inflammatory things that offend people and then when they're offended you weaponize that offense back at them.
	And I think it's a careless way to treat people in this and I think the whole idea that you shouldn't bring race into politics is a careless way to treat Yes, it needs to be careful.
	Yes, you need to be cautious.
	Yes, you need to try to hear the best of all sides.
	And something I do in the book, which among other things has given me a little bit of blowback, is I try to have a reasonably sympathetic account, though it is not my account and it is not my position, of the feelings of white fear in the country right now.
	I try to have a pretty sympathetic account of what it feels like to live in a country Where you thought you understood what the power order was, and it is changing.
	And I talk about that loss of social status as being something that you have to take seriously in American politics, sort of no matter what you actually believe about American politics, because if you don't, it's a very dangerous thing.
	So it's actually not my view that you should deal with it without much care.
	It's my view that you just do still have to deal with it.
	We don't get to dodge our hard issues because they could be combustible.
	It just requires us to deal with them in more decent faith.
	So, I mean, obviously, I think we ought to deal with hard issues, and I want to get to that in just one second.
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	Sort of fascinating.
	The example that you just gave, and it is an example that I came across in the book, obviously where you're talking about sort of the fear by white people of the burgeoning demographic minority, but burgeoning demographic majority.
	You posed it just now as sort of an attempt to understand the mind of people who feel that fear.
	And as a conservative, I've always felt, and when I read the book I got this feeling too, that you're sort of speaking conservatism as a second language.
	When you're trying to provide an explanation of how people are feeling, that what you're actually doing is racializing a fear that most people don't feel racially, they feel culturally.
	Why did I say that in the book?
	Well, I mean, I talk a lot about Ashley Jardina's research here, which is that there is a tendency, particularly in periods of demographic change and threat, to see, and I think this is a distinction that is not often made well on the left, but I do say it quite explicitly in the book, that you can have, one of the things that is happening right now is we're seeing, and you can see this very clearly in survey data, an increase in white identity.
	When you ask white people, just like, how do you feel about being white?
	You see a change there.
	And you see a change in the direction of feeling more connected to whiteness and feeling that to be an identity that people possibly need to defend.
	That can happen with or without an increase in outgroup hostility.
	And so I talk a fair amount, actually, about the fact that for most people who are seeing an increase in white identity, you actually don't see it alongside an increase in outgroup hostility.
	Now, for some, you see it with a very sharp rise in out-group hostility.
	But one of the things that I actually think is an interesting question in our politics is Donald Trump, and I know we haven't been talking about him that much here, but Donald Trump mixes these things in ways I think are probably quite politically suboptimal for him.
	The kind of politician who worries me more is somebody who would be very good at catering to white identity without offering as much out-group hostility.
	Because that kind of out-group hostility is actually quite unpopular.
	But the question of defending privilege, I mean, I actually talk in the book about a study that shows that if you go and you remind white college students and talk to them about white privilege, they're going to score, like if you test them after, higher in various racial resentment factors.
	You have to be very careful in the way you talk about this, particularly in a country with a lot of change.
	I don't think I'm racializing things that aren't racialized, but I am trying to deal with the fact that we have a series of interlocking demographic changes that are happening all at once, on top of, by the way, a lot of technological changes and political and social changes that are creating a sense of just change.
	It is happening too fast.
	I mean, I quoted some length by William Barr's different speeches about how the secular left is pursuing an organized destruction of religion.
	It's very much not my view that you're just seeing one kind of threat under operation here.
	And in fact, I think people actually way underestimate the power of the religious threat going on right now, which is why I've had Rod Dreher on my show, why I've had Robert Jones on my show, and I've been trying to explore that as well.
	I think these things are very important, but I think people underestimate the degree to which they are—and I know you won't love me using the word—intersectional.
	Well, no, I mean, listen, the thing that I've seen a lot of folks on the left doing, Jane Costa and I have talked about this at length, is going back to, you know, sort of the original definition of intersectionality, which of course is perfectly valid.
	The idea that you have intersectional identity in the sense you could be a woman and you can be discriminated against and a black person discriminated against and a black woman is discriminated against in a different way, that's perfectly valid.
	But the idea that you can sort of set up a hierarchy of victimization inherently at the hands of white majoritarian society is inevitably going to set up the white population in opposition to that.
	You have now declared that you are inherently part of this white hierarchy of power that is cramming down on everybody else.
	And of course, that's going to create a reactionary backwash that is going to just be the natural result of being excluded from the coalition of the supposedly dispossessed.
	I mean, that's one of the things that I think is happening, and I think that's less racialized than it is a reaction to the racialization.
	And so, these factors are... The chicken and the egg here is very difficult.
	Well, but the question is how to stop that, but I don't get the sense that you necessarily want to stop that.
	I don't think you're going to be able to stop it right now.
	And I think that's scary.
	I will say, yeah, I do think it's, I mean, You don't choose these colors for your book if it's all about to get better.
	Right.
	What I will say on this is that, just to finish the thought, what I will say on this is that what I'm trying to do in the book, this is, and you've read it.
	Yeah.
	It's not a polemic.
	It's not me explaining to you how I think the world should be.
	I have a little bit of solutions stuff in the back chapter, and I'm sure you disagree with some of it.
	But in general, you can pretty much realize I wrote that chapter as a hostage letter.
	I don't want to write a solutions chapter.
	And the solutions are all, get rid of the filibuster.
	I am trying to describe how a system is working.
	Like this is a book of, to go back to Vox, exponatory journalism.
	It is not a book of like, here is what Ezra Klein thinks is right about the world.
	Whether I treat, I speak conservatism as a second language or not, like I am less interested in sort of who's right in this at the moment.
	than I am in trying to give people stronger and better micro foundations for understanding how politics works.
	What I want people to do is understand why political actors ranging from you and me to Mitch McConnell to Donald Trump to, you know, staffers, etc. make the decisions they do.
	I think I have for somebody who's clearly on the liberal side of that debate, a pretty sympathetic account of what Mitch McConnell did during the Merrick Garland affair.
	Trying to explain like how that was a very straightforward application of his own incentives and the rules of American politics.
	And asking him to take one of the most ideological consequential votes he would probably ever have as a Senate majority leader and not see it as an ideological vote in a time of high ideological polarization, which is at some point that theory is going to fail.
	Right.
	And so I'm trying to change the way people see politics is working because I think we're baselined to a way it worked in the 20th century that is no longer how it works given the party structure we have.
	Look there we can talk about depolarization.
	My I would like to have had and I will tell you that I worked at this.
	It's funny that some of the most.
	I sometimes wish you could have your null hypotheses more clearly in the book.
	I think it's a good thing.
	I spend a lot of time looking at literature on depolarization.
	I don't think anything works at scale.
	I think that there's definitely evidence that you can do things like intergroup contact, and if you moderate and structure things so people are working towards a common goal and so forth, it will depolarize.
	It just is very hard to figure out how you do that at scale given all the forces that are moving towards polarization.
	Given all the media outlets move towards polarization, given how different the parties are from each other.
	I mean, if we have, and I don't know who's going to win the Democratic primary at this point, but if we have a Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump election in 2020, just the size of that difference is really dramatic.
	And that's the kind of size of difference, whether or not we have it this year or not, that we're moving towards.
	I will note that it did feel, since Bernie Sanders is going to win the primaries, the line that you have very late in the book where you suggest that the best evidence that the Republican Party has sort of moved off its institutional moorings is the 2016 race in which Trump won the nomination, but Hillary won the nomination in 2016, and now we're looking at I mean, I don't think there's any doubt that the Democratic Party is polarizing and moving left.
	I mean, there are some differences in the Democratic Party and what it can do and how it can move left, and I talk about that in the book because of the way their coalition is structured and they have to win center-right voters because of the geography of the Electoral College.
	I mean, there is a discussion on the left about how to win sort of downscale, more conservative whites in Wisconsin, that there's not a matching discussion on the right about how to win, you know, like African-American voters in Los Angeles.
	But nevertheless, like, I don't think there's any doubt the Democratic Party is moving in a polarized direction.
	And I think one of the big unanswered questions of the book for me is, are the differences between the Democratic and the Republican parties, is the Democratic Party following the Republican Party on a lag?
	I don't think Bernie Sanders and Trump are equivalent politicians on a lot of different levels, including, by the way, that whatever they say about him, Bernie Sanders is a very longtime American politician.
	He's He's not an outsider for us.
	He was a runner-up in 2016 in the Democratic primary.
	But nevertheless, like, you cannot look at the Democratic Party and not see that it is moving.
	And so that, like, is the story of the book, that year by year the parties are moving.
	I mean, some data I show in there is that Bill Clinton was in his time the most polarizing president we had since the advent of polling.
	Then it was George W. Bush.
	Then it was Barack Obama.
	Then it was Donald Trump, right?
	So every president has gotten higher in this, and those are presidents of different parties with dramatically different personal, rhetorical, political styles.
	So what is happening here is structural.
	I really am trying to move a lot of the analysis off of individual.
	In political journalism, we personalize things that are actually systems.
	This is trying to analyze American politics as a system and see how it's changed over the past, let's call it, 50, 80 years.
	The chief critique that I had of the book, and as again, I recommend everybody read it.
	There's so much good information in it and it really is fascinating.
	Why we're polarized, go get it at your bookstore.
	But the chief critique that I had of the book is I feel like because of the way that you define the problem and then because of the way that you defend identity politics broadly as we are all engaged in identity politics, You have now foreclosed a solution, and everything in the last chapter, as you rightly, I mean, you basically say it straight out, it's a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, right?
	Getting rid of the filibuster ain't gonna cure these problems on a systemic level.
	What I mean by that is you set out a system whereby our increasing identity, our increasing sense of identity invested in politics is separating us.
	But you've laid out at the very beginning a defense of identity politics, broadly speaking, Not identity.
	I do want to push this because whether I defend it or not defend it, I just view it as a force.
	I'm not defending the existence of US politics.
	I'm saying that it's here and we need to understand it.
	That's my view on identity too.
	Something we haven't talked too much about is the foundations of identity.
	One of the foundations of identity, and particularly in the way it becomes combustible in politics, which is I think primarily where you're focused here, is when you just get into ingroup-outgroup dynamics.
	One of the things I show in the book using Henry Tocqueville's research and others is it is incredibly easy to get there.
	I mean, you can do it based on almost anything.
	And sports is a great example of something where the stakes are not objectively that high.
	I'm not myself a sports fan.
	But the identity is very dramatic.
	I mean, people really care if their team wins or loses.
	We have riots in the aftermath.
	I mean, the whole thing.
	And that's a little bit why, when I come here, I think it's interesting to me that you're so down on identity politics, but you're doing strong in-group, out-group stuff.
	I mean, like, facts don't care about your feelings is like a whole—I'd actually love to talk about that if we have time—is a whole different situation around, like, what you're saying is that people on the other side of you, like, they're not factual.
	You don't really have to listen to them.
	They're feelings-oriented snowflakes.
	They're crying into their liberal or leftist tears mug.
	And that's a way of telling the audience, like, that is just identity and in-group, out-group stuff.
	It's very classic.
	Like, in some ways, I see the incentive there.
	But I find it just weird to see somebody doing that and arguing against identity politics.
	Like, that is identity politics.
	That's how it works.
	Again, because I've differentiated between the types of identity politics.
	I know, but that's a differentiation that doesn't fit the social science of how identity actually functions in people's heads.
	And the other thing that I think is important about that.
	I mean, nobody can become not black who is black.
	People obviously become not leftist who are leftist.
	There are people who become leftist who are not leftist.
	There's a malleability there.
	I don't think the malleability thing is such an important distinction as you do.
	And what the hell are we doing in politics, dude?
	I mean, if there's no malleability in our ability to change people's opinions, not only is the book pointless, but all of politics is pointless.
	No, because I don't think identity is determinative in the way you do.
	I think that people from the same identity will have different politics.
	And identity is something that shapes people's politics.
	I actually have a line in there, because I think one thing you will sometimes read, and people have said this at Vox, is that all politics is identity politics.
	And I'm pretty careful not to say that.
	And the reason I don't say it is that I don't want people to think that identity is like classical physics driving politics.
	If you can simply match people's identities on a list, you know exactly what they're going to think or do.
	That's clearly not true.
	I mean, just look around.
	And not only that, but people have a lot of identities simultaneously.
	Some of those identities are contradictory.
	They come at it different times.
	One way to understand a lot of elections is our fights over what identity we should be inhabiting, what identity should be activated, when.
	But one reason I think this is important, I do have a whole chapter about the way we absorb information, and particularly things like identity protective cognition.
	And one of the ways in which I think identity is particularly dangerous in politics is once we've locked into an identity that we feel is threatened, it becomes very hard for us to listen.
	It becomes very difficult to listen.
	And so when you begin doing things with what they actually say to people is, you don't have to listen to the other side.
	Or if you do, if that side wins, you are going to lose.
	It becomes very hard for us to hear.
	It becomes very hard for us to actually change opinion.
	To your point about malleability, I don't think the problem with malleability is identity.
	I think the problem with malleability is outgroup and a sense of personal stakes.
	Right?
	If people understand...
	They're somewhat related, but they're not purely related.
	There are different ways to set up a conversation.
	And if people feel in the conversation that depending on who wins, that really affects them, or they feel that everybody's in the circle together, those are really different.
	A thing I find fascinating about you is that you operate in very different ways in very different contexts.
	Something you've done really well in this conversation, I see it because I do it too or try to in conversations like this, is you've drawn the circle kind of around us.
	You said, we're both here in it together.
	You're a liberal.
	I don't hate liberals.
	I only hate leftists because they hate me.
	You're fact-based.
	I think the book is good.
	But there's a lot of work in the macro daily wire world to cut this divide and say to people in a way that deeply offends them, you're dumb.
	You're feelings-oriented.
	You're a snowflake.
	You should stop crying.
	And that stuff makes it hard to hear.
	And so when I think about what you're going to do in politics, I think about a lot of how do you de-escalate conversations, not how do you tell people?
	Not to bring identities they have to have or that they're very deeply rooted to psychologically or otherwise into politics.
	Of course they're going to bring that into it.
	Like they're bringing everything else in their lives, their resources, the actual economic position they're in.
	Like how, once they're there, are we able to have conversations?
	I am pessimistic about it, right?
	That's part of what the book is saying, that I think the way the incentives of the media and other things are structured, it becomes much harder to do that.
	But I really disagree with the cut where it's like, Some identities are fine, others are not, but we can just all be at war with each other, and as long as we are not at war over things that relate to immutable characteristics in the way you see them, it'll be fine.
	I mean, these things all operate in politics somewhat similarly, and in other countries and other cultures, and even here at other times, they've become very dangerous in different ways.
	I mean, my God, look at Ireland during the Troubles.
	So you don't need immutable characteristics to have things get very dangerous.
	What you need is problems you can't actually resolve through a political system.
	That's true, but as you strengthen the identities, and again, I think political identities are the softest form of identity.
	When you strengthen other identities... But I mean, we have evidence that people discriminate, like, very dramatically on political identity now.
	They're not soft to people who hold them.
	Listen, I fully... I mean, you're saying the leftists want to destroy your life, like, take away your livelihood.
	I mean, literally there are groups that are dedicated to watching... No, I understand, but that's what I mean.
	My show is trying to attack my advertisers, so this is...
	No, no, I'm not telling you that people aren't out to get you.
	Like, I saw that video of you and your family getting, like, hounded by right-wingers.
	Like, you, like, like alt-righters.
	That was, I thought, a horrifying thing.
	I mean, this stuff is fairly real.
	But that's what I mean, the political identity is very powerful.
	Right, but the point that I'm making is that, or that I was going to make, is that once you strengthen the idea of, of Identities that are more deeply rooted than politics.
	Because politics is a slightly later human invention than tribe or race.
	I mean, these are things that are a little bit more biologically fundamental.
	Some race.
	I mean, race is very shifty over American, or not American, over human history.
	Right.
	And tribal would be a better description, right?
	Tribal or familial driven or ethnicity, right?
	However you derive that.
	My kin versus yours.
	Correct.
	That stuff is really, really deep in the substrates of the brain.
	Whereas politics can be mapped onto that, but it has to be mapped onto that.
	And so you're opposing the mapping, and I'm suggesting that... I'm not opposing the mapping.
	You're not opposing the mapping, actually.
	I'm opposing the mapping.
	You're opposing the mapping.
	I'm opposing the mapping.
	And so to combine that with the idea that a pure majoritarian, big government can solve the problem scares the living hell out of me.
	Because at the same time that we're polarizing, you're making the case that we should have basically a more majoritarian system, more powerfully able to cram down on an increasingly polarized Well, when you put it like that, it doesn't sound great.
	Let me put it my way, which is what I would say is one of the frustrating things about politics in this era for people is that disagreements are very hard to resolve in any way that they can see change and progress or even change and harm to their actual interests.
	We are constantly, because almost nothing passes ever, we are constantly locked in the conflict part of a disagreement.
	And so you don't get, like, the liberals passing single-payer healthcare and then people can say, oh, did I like that or did I hate that?
	And so do I want to bring them back to power or do I not?
	Or similarly, Republicans run on repealing Obamacare for a decade.
	They get the White House, they get the House, they get the Senate, and they don't repeal Obamacare.
	Well, they made deeply conflicting promises throughout, but yes.
	Well, yeah.
	They definitely promised to get rid of Obamacare.
	That's me critiquing Republicans, by the way.
	They're promising to repeal Obamacare, but also not affect pre-existing conditions.
	You can't do all these things at once.
	I agree with you.
	I don't know if we'll have time, but I'd love to talk about healthcare with you.
	I'm sure we will not have time.
	At this point, I think we're over time now.
	I might have finished all my liberal tears by then.
	I think it is a healthier form of politics for political parties to have to appeal to a majority of the public, not go to some like unbelievably maturitarian system, but just like in general to govern you need 51% of the vote.
	Like that's how most parliamentary systems work.
	And if you get that, which I think is an important distinction here, If you get that, you can actually govern.
	Like in other countries, if you win power in Canada or you win power in the UK, what it means is you have a governing coalition.
	That is like the actual thing that that means.
	If you win the presidential election here, like we might have in 2021 President Bernie Sanders and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
	Right.
	And that's going to be a very frustrating outcome for everyone.
	And so one thing that I argue is that polarization is particularly difficult when it does not allow you to govern because then everybody's just caught in a constant fight for power, but not an ability to have an accountability feedback loop with the public where, okay, these folks came in, they got voted in, either I voted for them or I didn't, but they're in now.
	Like, do I like what happened or not?
	Instead, we're in endless arguments about why things didn't happen.
	Donald Trump says the Democrats are obstructing him and impeaching him and keeping him from doing anything.
	And Barack Obama says that the Republicans are obstructing him, coming after him, keeping him from doing all the things he wanted to do.
	And both of them, to some degree, are right, right?
	Wherever you come down on who's morally right to do it, it is nevertheless the case that neither Donald Trump nor Barack Obama had like 25% of their agenda through in the way that they imagined it over the course of their presidencies.
	And I think that is a problem.
	I think that is something that makes it very hard to see disagreements coming into anything that could shake people out of where they are.
	I am, look, if I could imagine a great way to take down polarization, to take out the groupist impulse in the human psyche, I'd be open to it.
	I'm definitely interested in doing that.
	I just don't believe in it.
	Like that is like in my sort of like facts don't care about your feelings.
	Like, like I don't think that research cares that I don't like it.
	So like that's where I come down.
	Like I'm pessimistic on this.
	But I do think you can have political systems that work better or worse inside conditions of polarization.
	And I think it'd be better to have a political system where people could govern and the public could decide if they liked the way the governance had happened, as opposed to a political system where nobody can govern.
	And the public then has to decide like, why did nothing Why are my problems not getting resolved?
	Why do I feel like I keep trying to make American politics better and it only keeps getting worse?
	And that kind of, in addition to all the other forms of polarization we have, that just building frustration, I think, is very dangerous.
	Again, I would agree with you if I actually agreed with the premise of what government is designed to do, but that gets back to sort of the founding debate about what government is designed to do in the first place.
	I mean, you're assuming that a government is designed to achieve the needs of the majority or achieve the needs of people who, let's say supermajority, who broadly agree that they want to do a thing, whereas I believe the government is designed to protect fundamental rights and basically nothing else.
	So that is a stark difference between liberal and conservative.
	Yes, that is an old and real difference, but I would say that I think for most of the public, that is not the difference in American politics.
	It's a pretty small hobbyist contingent who ends up having the very deep argument between a true Rawlsian liberalism and a true libertarianism.
	I enjoy doing it.
	We can have a beer and do that.
	We can hang out here and do it.
	I like it, and we should have some fun.
	I enjoyed having George Will on my podcast.
	He came on and made that argument for a while, and we go back and forth.
	I think the Republican and sort of right-wing turn against democracy itself, which has gotten stronger as democracy has become more of a threat to right-wing interests, I think that's dangerous.
	It is a good debate to have that gets to very fundamental differences in American politics.
	Most people, if you poll them, they want the problem solved.
	That is what they want government to do.
	So in terms of my view on this, of what is making political decisions— But in different ways, no matter how you govern the majority.
	Just to hold on for a moment here.
	The way the mass public is having a building frustration because nothing changes, that to me, when you talk about what makes politics dangerous, like that is what makes politics dangerous, when you can't resolve conflict.
	That is where things become coups.
	That is where things become violence in the streets.
	The Merrick Garland thing, I make the argument that Mitch McConnell did what you would expect him to do given his incentives.
	You can also very much imagine a future where the Supreme Court becomes unusable or the Supreme Court has three open seats for a period of 10 years.
	Because nobody can come to agreement in an extended period of divided government.
	And that kind of thing, when we lose the capacity to resolve disagreement or make the system function, I think that is what begins to shake at the foundations of systems.
	Because most people, they don't want to watch or listen to our podcasts or our YouTubes.
	What they just want is for their lives to work.
	And, like, if politics isn't doing that for them, they're going to get pissed.
	Yeah, my problem is I don't think no matter how you slice politics, it's going to make your life work.
	I think you're going to make your life work in the best you can hope for as the government to leave you the hell alone.
	But with all of that said, I want to ask you one more question because we've gone way over time because this is so enjoyable.
	It really is.
	And thank you so much for being on the program.
	I do have a couple more questions I want to ask you.
	If you want to hear Ezra's answers on free speech and about the big debate between Carlos Maza and Steven Crowder, Vox took the position that Steven should actually get kicked off of YouTube.
	If you want to hear Ezra's answers on that, become a Daily Wire member.
	Go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
	Well, Ezra Klein, it really has been a pleasure to have you here.
	I'm sorry that we don't have more time, honestly.
	We've gone probably 25 minutes over here.
	We could easily go for four hours.
	Pick up his book, Why We're Polarized.
	Definitely worth the read.
	And be sure to listen to the Ezra Klein Show.
	And as I say again, the title of the book is Why We're Polarized.
	Ezra, thanks so much for stopping by.
	Thank you for having me.
	Thank you.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer, Katie Swinnerton.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Host production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
	Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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