Ezra Klein: Protecting People Means Winning Power

Summary

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The Bulwark Podcast: Ezra Klein — "Protecting People Means Winning Power"

Date: September 25, 2025
Host: Tim Miller
Guest: Ezra Klein (opinion columnist, New York Times; host of The Ezra Klein Show; co-author, Abundance)

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Episode Overview

This episode is a wide-ranging, candid conversation between Tim Miller and Ezra Klein about the stark choices facing American liberals in the Trump era, political strategy in the age of polarization, and the dangerous escalation of violence in politics. The theme revolves around Klein’s core argument: protecting vulnerable communities demands the willingness to win — and use — political power, even if that requires strategic compromise or discomfort. The episode covers debates over Democratic strategy on government shutdowns, candidate selection in red and purple states, the necessity (and difficulty) of building broad coalitions, and the moral complexities posed by recent political violence, notably the assassination of right-wing figure Charlie Kirk.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Polarized Reception of Klein’s Arguments (02:08–03:36)

• Klein discusses being a "lightning rod" for criticism from both left and right for his recent writings and comments — particularly regarding Democratic strategies toward government shutdowns, the need to broaden the tent, and the appropriate response to political violence.
• Quote:
  "We sort of get a very warped vision of the public when we log on to X or Bluesky and say that's the reaction. When you're inside something, you see something very different.” — Ezra Klein (02:17)

2. The Shutdown Strategy Debate (03:36–15:54)

• Miller challenges Klein’s call for Democrats to refuse to cooperate with Trump on the budget, questioning the endgame. Klein clarifies his argument: Democrats have a moral responsibility to oppose the “corruption” of institutions under Trump — but recognizes the risks and limitations of such a move.
• Klein on the healthcare-vs.-corruption framing for a shutdown:
  "Imagine a world in which they're executing a very real crackdown in Chicago... but they're like, yeah, we'll delay the Affordable Care Act cuts. Are Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries going to tell all of their members to vote for this at a time when the entire base is freaking out over the end of the country?" (09:01)
• On the point of losing as an opposition party:
  "You barely hear from them because there's no particular reason for anybody to listen to them. They're not doing anything." (15:45)

Notable Moment

• Miller and Klein agree both feel “ambivalently for” Klein’s more confrontational shutdown approach—acknowledging the risks and lack of clarity in Democratic leadership or communications strategy. (15:54)

3. Democractic Ambivalence, Normalcy, and the Split Mindset (18:20–23:07)

• Miller asks about Democrats’ private and public sense of crisis. Klein describes a split between those who see danger but believe things will muddle along, versus those believing in a true "authoritarian breakthrough."
• Klein:
  "The biggest divide in their caucus is between the people who think this is bad, but we will kind of get through it just fine... and the ones who don't.” (18:40)
• There’s little “theatrical opposition,” he observes, which leaves the party looking unresponsive and flat-footed.

4. Broadening the Democratic Tent: Electoral Strategy (24:27–36:07)

• Miller segues to Klein’s controversial argument about nominating more culturally conservative Democrats in red states.
  • Cites examples of past Democratic victories with pro-life or culturally moderate candidates.
  • Klein argues, sometimes sharply, that “protecting people means winning power,” and that failure to expand the coalition leaves vulnerable communities unprotected.
• Quote:
  “We are failing to protect everybody we say we are here to protect and we are failing to protect them because we have lost power. And I think losing power in that way... should force us in a disciplined fashion to ask what do we need to do to win it back?” — Ezra Klein (28:27)
  • He stresses the need to “work with public opinion as it exists,” not as activists or donors would ideally like it to be.

Memorable Exchange

• On why strategists avoid this obvious approach:
  "I think the analysis you need here is sociological, not political... The first thing they worry about is what the people around them will think about them and how they will be treated and if they can get future jobs." — Klein (32:02)
  • Miller’s rejoinder: "Democratic strategists get paid a lot of money to win races ... it's time to nut up." (35:00)

5. Political Violence and Dehumanization After Charlie Kirk’s Assassination (38:16–69:57)

• Klein reflects on his much-debated column defending the right to peaceful political engagement after Kirk’s murder.
  • Clarifies what he meant by “doing politics the right way” (38:16) — participating in public debate, not violence.
  • Klein steadfastly refused to "litigate all [his] disagreements" with Kirk in the hours after his murder:
    "The 12 hours after somebody is publicly murdered for participating in politics is not the time when you need to fully litigate all your disagreements with them.” (38:48)
• Miller and Klein warn about the rise of dehumanizing rhetoric on both sides:
  • Miller: "There is a decent chunk of people on the left that have decided to dehumanize anybody that voted for Donald Trump... and I think that takes us to a very dangerous place.” (42:27)
• Klein draws a line between “political community” and “deplorables” rhetoric:
  • Laments the 44% of Harris voters willing to cut off family for politics (43:49)
• Political violence is contagious:
  • Klein connects Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson and the celebratory memes to the risk of a cycle of violence (55:08).
  • "Political violence is always wrong. Political violence is profoundly wrong. It is an attack on all of us and it will very, very, very quickly become an attack on all of us." (62:54)
• Warns of a dangerously combustible moment:
  • "If something doesn't break the cycle... we seem to be moving into that scenario." (57:06, 59:37)

6. Can the Left Relearn Broad Coalition Politics? (66:30–69:57)

• Miller describes the dilemma of “moral difference” in family and national politics — but insists “we have to figure out a way to live together.”
• Klein situates this struggle as the ongoing work and burden of American democracy.
  "That is the story... of this country, right? The periods of time in which you wouldn't say that was true, in which the kind of agreements of politics were pretty well firmed up. Those are short periods of time." (68:00)
• Klein:
  "I don't have a problem saying I believe a lot of what Charlie Crook believed is fundamentally immoral... and I'm still somehow in political community with him." (69:07)

7. Quickfire: 2028 Democratic Hopefuls & Klein’s Own Ambitions? (70:01–70:59)

• Miller reads aloud speculation from the "Ezra Klein subreddit" about Klein becoming a future Democratic candidate. Klein laughs it off with a “Shermanesque denial.” (70:51)
• Both are underwhelmed by the current slate of contenders, but Miller names a few he finds promising.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the necessity of winning:
  "Politics is about winning power and then using that power well. And sometimes to win that power, you have to have a tent big enough that it includes real disagreement.” — Ezra Klein (29:23)

• On party culture:
  "I think we've begun to see the work of politics, the work of being in coalition... as a kind of betrayal. To maintain community is to betray others in your community. And I don't think it's working." — Ezra Klein (44:27)

• On political violence:
  "Violence is contagious. It is viral. ... Political violence has this dimension. And I've been worried for some time." — Ezra Klein (55:08)

• On the work of democracy:
  "The work we are called to democratically is not so much grander or harder than what those who came before us were called to." — Ezra Klein (68:13)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:43 – Miller introduces Klein, teases episode topics.
• 02:08 – Klein discusses polarized reactions to his recent comments/columns.
• 03:36–15:54 – Deep dive on the Democratic shutdown strategy and Klein’s controversial column.
• 18:20–23:07 – What Democratic lawmakers are actually thinking and the “peacetime vs. wartime” mentality.
• 24:27–36:07 – The urgent need to broaden the Democratic tent and run culturally moderate/conservative candidates where it matters.
• 38:16–69:57 – Long section on the dangers and moral complexity of political violence, echo chambers, dehumanization, and the Kirk murder.
• 70:01–70:59 – Ezra Klein as future candidate? “Shermanesque denial” and closing laughs.

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Memorable Moments

• Ambivalent advocacy: Both host and guest can see both sides of shutdown brinkmanship, providing a rare candor missing in partisan media (15:54).
• Riffing on Democratic culture: Klein: "Everything's high school cafeteria." (36:10)
• On political violence: "Political violence is profoundly wrong. It is an attack on all of us." (62:54)
• Darkly comic moment: Miller: "Democratic strategists get paid a lot of money… and it's time to nut up." (35:00)
• Subreddit speculation: Miller reads a comment about Klein’s “glow up” and presidential potential, which is met with mock embarrassment (70:24).

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a masterclass in contemporary political analysis, marked by Klein’s consistent plea for moral seriousness and electoral flexibility. The main message: Protecting the vulnerable isn't about staking out the most righteous position — it's about building coalitions wide enough to actually win and wield power, even amidst polarization and violence.

For progressives, centrists, and anyone who cares about the future of democracy, Klein’s warning is urgent: If you want to protect, you must first govern.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back opinion columnist at the New York Times, host of the Ezra Klein show, co author of the book Abundance, which you may have heard a little bit about. It's Ezra Klein. What's up, man? Hey.

[A]

Good to see you.

[B]

It's good to see you. We actually didn't do. You were on every single podcast in America for the Abundance tour except this one.

[A]

Waiting for my invitation back.

[B]

Is that true? Is that Troy true?

[A]

I thought we were gonna do it.

[B]

We'll do a little abundance chat at the end. A lot of other stuff has happened since then. You're like a. You're a light bulb.

[A]

We all know you like Derek better than me though. I saw that little bit of you guys. Don't pretend.

[B]

Put a little glimmer in my eye when I'm talking to Derek.

[A]

You can always tell when the warmth is really there.

[B]

Yeah, I'm easy to read. Yeah. You know, with Derek, there's just something a little extra special. We all feel that way. Thrill up my leg. Okay. You've been a lightning rod lately. Two columns and one comment on Ross's podcast. You said it's immoral for Dems to go along with the budget essentially in one column. And you supported this shutdown. You said that if you believe the other side is a threat, you need to run more socially conservative people in red states. That was you with Ross. You said Charlie Kirk did politics the right way. We shouldn't celebrate his assassination with maybe a few quibbles. I was with you on all of them. And the Internet was not different people. You got it coming at from all sides on all those things. I guess dealer's choice on which one of those you want to do first.

[A]

I mean, I think it's podcast host choice. I think I would contest a little bit. The Internet was not okay, which is that certainly on the shutdown column. I think.

[B]

Yeah, that's true. You had a different crowd. You had kind of the. You had the Josh Barrows of the world mad at you on that.

[A]

Yeah. But I think that Actually gets to something important about the way things are received, which is people see controversy and pushback in the chambers of the Internet they've chosen to inhabit. And in some ways, that is the thing I'm trying to push on here a little bit that, you know, particularly when you're talking about tent broadening, you have to be thinking about, well, how do people react outside those chambers? So what I keep saying about, say, the work I've done on Charlie Kerr after Charlie Kirk's murder is that it has had the most polarized response of anything I've ever done. Very appreciative from some areas, very, very angry from others. I mean, I have Tom Alice Coates on my show over coming this weekend to sort of talk about his push. So we sort of get a very warped vision of the public when we log on to X or Bluesky and say that's the reaction. When you're inside something, you see something very different.

[B]

Or maybe you're just being a good content man. All engagement is good engagement.

[A]

Yeah, I've never quite had that view.

[B]

Me neither. I'm just teasing you. All right. Podcast has choice. That's fine. We'll do Charlie Kirk last. Let's do the shutdown stuff. In each of these cases, even though I'm basically on your side, I'm going to represent the most credible pushback I saw from you and kind of hash it out.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

The pushback that I saw for you in some circles about the shutdown fight, and I guess you can summarize for people your argument, but is the Democrats don't really have a lot of leverage here. There's no real end game. It'd be one thing if you're like, hey, Democrats should fight hard because it's important to fight. And this is an immoral administration and you can't trust them to execute on the budget anyway, even if you pass it. And so why play ball with them? Like, essentially one side of the argument, but the other side as well was the administration doesn't mind a shutdown fight. Gets to decide what levers they get to pull and who gets funding and who doesn't. They decide who they want to punish. They're happy to do that. And if at the end of the day the Democrats are going to fold anyway, like they did in March, like, what was the point of the shutdown fight except for, like, feeling good about yourself and getting. And getting reskates on blue sky. So what would you say to that?

[A]

Reskeets? Sorry. What a world we live in. Let me Try to summarize the argument I made a little bit more fully, because one piece of pushback I got, which I thought was the most fair piece, was that the argument itself was too ambivalent. But that's because I myself was somewhat ambivalent. The argument I made is that Donald Trump is corrupting the functioning of the federal government. He's corrupting it the way a mafioso would corrupt industries, that he is turning things that are supposed to work one way into tools of his own wealth and power. You saw this very, very clearly, say, with the FCC using its power to go after Jimmy Kimmel. Right. That is not how the FCC is supposed to work. And the argument I made is that on some level, as the word used earlier was correct, in my view, it would be immoral to fund a government that is being corrupted into a tool of power and wealth accumulation. Okay. The counter argument, which I did try to represent in the piece, is that Democrats will just lose a shutdown. They will lose a shutdown because they are intentionally weaker than Donald Trump. The question of winning a shutdown is always a little bit of a weird question. I mean, is what you're doing trying to have a normal negotiation over, say, Obamacare subsidy levels, which is, I think, where Democrats are trying to go right now, or is what you're trying to create an attentional event that creates a ongoing political crisis or controversy that the media uses as a focusing mechanism for its coverage? And then you can make the argument to the public, you, Chuck Schumer, you, Hakeem Jeffries, you, the Democratic Party, that we are in some kind of rolling crisis around what Donald Trump is doing. The best argument against a shutdown is twofold. And I put this, you know, in the piece, which is one, the Democratic Party was not united on even what its demands and a shutdown would be. There's a faction of the party that just wants to treat it the way you might have treated it in any other presidency. You know, fight on your best issues.

[B]

Healthcare, say, that seems to be where they're landing.

[A]

Seems to be where they're landing and not where I thought they should go. Right. I thought this should be about making a broader argument, using the idea of corruption to tie together both the corruption of lining your own pockets, of turning the government into a tool of power accumulation of having a paramilitary and ice. And you could do that. Tax cuts to gutting Medicaid to fund your tax cuts and tariffs, by the way, which Nate Silver's argued should be the what a shutdown is over. And I think this is actually a pretty good argument because tariffs actually tie a lot of this together. They're using tariffs in a very corrupt way and using them as a way to get tribute from other countries. Or tariffing Brazil over prosecuting Bolsonaro. Right. That's not how the government and not how tariff power is supposed to work. The argument against is that, one, they had not decided to do this yet. Right. They had not come up with a theory, and two, that Schumer and to a greater or lesser extent, Jefferies, I think to a lesser extent, but still have not really been able to win, I would say, the public argument with Donald Trump. I mean, they would argue with me on this, but they've not been able to turn the tide on him. The place where the piece ends is saying, if you really think that Democrats, they don't have the leadership right now to win a fight, then they have the wrong leadership. Either they need to be able to fight, or they need to find people who can win public arguments. But those, I think, are the two ways to think about this.

[B]

Yeah. So let's just go through both paths really quick. On the healthcare path, which I think is what they're choosing. The strengths and weaknesses of that. The strengths are it does focus folks on an issue that is a troubling one for the Republicans, for the administration. It's at a time where they're gonna have a lot of premiums coming up, and this used to be your beat, so you could talk about this and, you know, tell you a lot about this. People aren't gonna like it, and people might not know otherwise that it's, like, Trump's fault. So they might not connect it. Like, this might be an opportunity to connect a direct rise in cost to Trump. So it's an argument for it. An argument against it is like the administration could just say, okay, that's one possible way out of this, and, like, we're fine to kick the can on those subsidies till after the midterms. And maybe that isn't strategically smart. Maybe you don't want them. You want maximized pain about the Trump administration policies. That would be a cynical argument. You know, So I guess that's kind of the pluses and minuses of that route. Why are you unsatisfied by going the healthcare route?

[A]

The minus to me is that I think the public always knows when you're not telling them why you're really doing something. Imagine the counterfactual Nikki Haley won the presidency.

[B]

Who knows what I'd be doing then?

[A]

Yeah. I could see the thrill grow up. You're like, yeah, you know, out on the beach.

[B]

We're probably not on this podcast.

[A]

Who knows, man? It's so many ways we could have ended up on a podcast together. Nikki. You got President Nikki Haley or President John Thune or whoever it might be. President normalish, old school Republican. They could have done a lot of what was in the obbba. Gutting Medicaid, gutting Obamacare to fund tax cuts. I mean, that is the molten core of Republican Party policy making for. I mean, President Paul Ryan would have done that. I don't think in that world you have a shutdown. I think everybody knows it. I think you're having a shutdown because there are masked men in the streets. I think you're having a shutdown because the FCC is using its powers to silence comedians. I think you're having a shutdown because Donald Trump is weaponizing the workings of the federal government into something that is like what we see in Hungary. I think you're having a shutdown because we are in fundamentally abnormal political circumstances. And a shutdown is one of very few ways for Democrats to yell really loudly, stop. This is some kind of emergency, like you have. Like, we are going to try to throw ourselves in front of this truck.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Even if health care polls well. And I'm not saying it shouldn't be part of what you're saying. As I said, I think it can weave into a corruption argument. Even if health care polls well, I think on some level, both your people and the public know when you're talking that this is not really about health care. I think Democrats on some level would love if politics were really about healthcare right now. My worry is just it's not going to read as real to people and it's not going to. To work. Like, imagine a world in which they're doing. They're executing a very real crackdown in Chicago. Just troops all over the streets. This shooting we just saw at the ICE facility has led to some kind of crackdown. Right. That the authoritarianism on this administration is turned way up. But they're like, yeah, we'll delay the Affordable Care act cuts. And then are Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries going to tell all of their members to vote for this at a time when the entire base is freaking out over the end of the country? I think they might be setting themselves up for some very weird and harder to navigate situations.

[B]

Yeah. And I don't think they know exactly what the end game is to this which is my whole hesitation on all this, because I take you to the other side. I'd say they do take your advice. They're out there every day making the case. This is an emergency. This is an emergency of democracy. List all the things you laid out. There are other things you could mention. The mask in the streets, the home and corruption, the crypto corruption, the tariffs, the cryptocurruption.

[A]

This is all in my piece. I'm with you on this. Yeah.

[B]

Okay. You're listing all that. So we cannot be complicit in this government. You know, like, they need to follow the rule of law. Until they follow the rule of law, we can't provide a single vote for their government or their budget. Well, then what? Then the shutdown happens through next year. Because if you're making that argument, then you can't come back in three weeks when there's real pain. When the government, when the Trump administration decided, okay, we are shutting down the government, we're going to keep funding ice, but we're going to stop giving people their SNAP benefits or whatever. And when the administration calls their bluff on that, and then in a month, they what, they let seven senators vote for cloture, I guess, and then tuck their tail between their legs and run. And to me, that feels like the likely end of this.

[A]

So I think there are two things to say there. So, one, you have to go into shutdown having pretty clear and a limited set of policy demands. I mean, right now, one of Schumer's demands is restore PBS funding. Like, how did that end up on there?

[B]

Yeah, I wouldn't put that on there.

[A]

Yeah. So, I mean, I like pbs. Right. I want PBS to be funded, but.

[B]

I don't think I do okay in the free market. For me now, my Republicans coming back.

[A]

Yeah, there you go. Would this were still what politics was about, man. We had this weird.

[B]

We were shutting down Big Bird. I was like, big Bird is going to be fine.

[A]

Actually, you need a series of demands that are containers of the large argument you're making. You're not going to get Donald Trump to stop doing Trumpism. That's not the point. But you can have ice, but they can't be masked.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They have absolutely gutted inspectors generals, gutted jags, gutted ethics offices, gutted the people who make sure that the government is not being looted. Like, you can pick three or four or five things that are about making the argument you want to make.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that are not so impossible. You can't imagine getting some set of them. Right. That they're not Trump saying, yeah, abolish ICE or don't run deportations. But, you know, the masks that puts you on the right public opinion. And I think people get why you don't want the government having, you know, masked forces go out and grab people out of cars. But then you get to this other thing you said that I think is actually really important. They're probably not going to win a shutdown in the sense that they will get a massive set of policy demands agreed to. Shutdowns are partially about making arguments that are picked up in midterms. You go back and you look at recent shutdowns, people forget that the longest shutdown in history was 2018. 2019. Democrats won the 2020 election. There was a very brief shutdown before the 2018 election. Democrats won that election. There was a shutdown before the 2014 election. Republicans who triggered that shutdown won that election. You can sort of lose a shutdown in the sense you don't get the things you wanted. Ted Cruz did not get Obamacare repealed in his shutdown prior to the 2014. Republicans still had a big victory in that election. So having a shutdown the year before an election I don't think tends to be the determinant of what happens the following year. But sometimes it is a place to show that what your argument is to kind of cohere your base behind it. I will admit, though, and again, this is, to me, the best argument against my piece, that there was an ambivalence in it, because I take this point you're making. I just don't think Democrats should just treat all of this as normal. I mean, something that other smart people in the Senate said to me, they were like, look, forget a shutdown. We are working with Republicans on all manners of bills. We are giving them votes to move forward on the National Defense Authorization Act. Right. We're doing appropriations with them. Like, Democrats in Congress are acting like things are normal and they're not normal. There are a lot of strategies they could choose to use to say we are not going to go along with the government that you are corrupting and running in this way. We are going to throw sand in its gears and we're going to. Maybe you'll destroy the filibuster for that, but we are not going to just say, okay, you can do all this and we'll still give you the votes on things where we agree or just don't want to stand in the way. I don't think it's working. The Democratic party's brand is garbage. They're polling lower than they've ever polled since we've been polling the popularity of the Democratic Party. They're not looking very good in the generic ballot. They're not raising money. The DNC is at a huge fundraising disadvantage right now to the rnc. You're not seeing the ferment of an opposition party cohering, in part because I think to most people who are Democrats, are most people unhappy with what is happening right now? They barely look like an opposition party. You barely hear from them because there's no particular reason for anybody to listen to them. They're not doing anything.

[B]

I agree with this. I'm ambivalently four as well for exactly that reason you just laid out. And this is why Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens are beating me in the podcast rankings, because they don't do ambivalently for anything. They go whole hog. But I'm with you on that. All right. I'm not sure if I've ever had a podcast and sponsor that was better aligned than this one. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. A lot of you are looking for places to get support in troubled times. Some of you tell me that you come to this podcast to make you feel sane. That is confusing to me. It remains confusing to me. I appreciate it. I'm a little bit concerned that you're in some kind of cosmic sense sucking the sanity out of my organism and it's being just kind of delivered into yours through the ether. And if so, I'm happy to do that sacrifice for you, the listener. But for folks for whom this podcast is not providing mental clarity or calmness, you might want to consider a therapist. Therapy's been great for me. It's something that I could not recommend more. I never thought I'd be a therapy guy, but when I was in a time of emotional distress, stress, honestly, my therapist saved me and I hope that it's something that you guys turn to too. If it's something you need, or even if it's something you think you might need, or even maybe if it's not just for a little check in. So there are a bunch of different quality betterhelp therapists. They do the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. The short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and our 10 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they get it right the first time when finding a match a therapist that's good for you. There's also flexibility, though it's fully online, so you can pause your subscription whenever you need to and switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of Expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first [e-mail] the bulwark that's better H E L P dot com the bulwark you said you were talking to Democrats in the Senate. I guess it was probably two times ago when you're on the shows last summer, we were talking and one of the things that alarmed me that you said was that you were talking to some Democrats in Congress and privately they weren't as panicked about the state of democracy as maybe it was the conventional wisdom of the public.

[A]

Biden. Biden, yeah.

[B]

This was around the Biden summer, right. I wonder what that is like now. And a lot of these folks talk to you, obviously. Listen to your read your columns. I like how does their private level of agita about the authoritarian threat match the public? And if it is high, it does kind of feel like they're not really acting like it.

[A]

So most of the Democrats I seem to talk to in the Senate, which I think is not a terrible cross section of them, seem pretty alarmed. I mean, they are more or less where I am, but they tell me that they feel the biggest divide in their caucus is between the people who think this is bad, but we will kind of get through it just fine. You can just roll on towards the midterms. And the ones who don't, right. The ones who are saying this is some kind of abnormal moment in politics and you have the genuine threat of what we get called in the political science literature, authoritarian breakthrough. And they say that is a dividing line. Then there's a division beneath that, which is even if you believe that is a dividing line, is there a way to talk about that that is politically viable? Because I think one lesson many of them have taken or feel or have seen themselves is that if you are a Democrat in a purple state or for the very few, certainly in the House, you have a couple of these warm red districts or reddish states. Talking about the end of democracy is not motivating. Your better issues are health care, your better issues are tariffs, things like that. So my view is that there are ways to loop these into one story. I have this kind of clip of Jon Ossif doing it that I really.

[C]

Like, that corruption is why they just defunded nursing homes to cut taxes for the rich, Corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescriptions. Corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied. Corruption is why hedge funds get to buy up all the houses in your neighborhood, driving you out of the market. And then your corporate landlord ignores your calls during a gas leak. Corruption is why that ambulance costs $3,000 after you just had to get your choking toddler to the hospital. So Trump promised to attack a broken system. I get it. Ripe target. But here's the thing. He's a crook and a con man, and he wants to be a king. Yes, the system really is rigged, but Trump's not unrigging it. He's re rigging it for himself.

[A]

But so you have this divide of like, are we in peacetime or are we in wartime? From the perspective of, you know, the actual political system, can we just treat this as normal? They're too diffuse, they're too distracted. They're not going to actually change the nature of the system. And then even if you are, is the best way to fight it by pretending it's normal and fighting on healthcare, Medicaid, the things where you're maybe, you know, at least in the polling, you know, more likely to win over the vote as you're losing?

[B]

Yeah, I have. I also, I talked to a few of them, but I also hear from folks in Congress about that same dividing line, that they're like, there's a surprising number of people in the Democratic Party who, they don't like Trump, they're really upset about, but they, like, they feel like it's a little bit abnormal, bad. But muddling along is more of a plausible path than doing the more theatrical opposition. And maybe in part, it's because there's not a lot of good people modeling useful theatrical opposition, you know, which I think is maybe a fair thing to think about. Right. Like, if you kind of look at some of the Democrats who are extremely visible, you know, it's not like there's anybody that you can look to and say, hey, people mention Chris Murphy a lot. Like, what that person is doing seems to be very effective and also reflects the gravity of the moment and also will reach people outside of our bubble like that. It's tougher than it sounds. Kind of.

[A]

It's tough. It requires people to be listening. So I think, again, the argument for a shutdown, the argument Hakeem Jeffries made around the shutdown he wanted to have last time, Right. When Schumer didn't want to have a shutdown, was that people will listen to us and we will win the argument. So the whole argument for a shutdown is that it changes the dynamics of political tension, but then you have to believe you have an argument you can win and you have to be somebody who can make an argument winningly. Like you. I feel like a worryingly few number of Democrats feel like they are alive to this moment that I have been with them. And the. The normalcy that radiates off of them is unnerving to me. But there are those who do. I mean, I think Gavin Newsom has developed a very interesting politics in the past couple of months, actually, in both directions, both as the Democrat who will have MAGA figures on and talk to them at great length and in a very friendly way and sort of weirdly the leader of the opposition at the same time. I didn't really know you could do that, but that's an interesting move. Right. To the question of should you be the opposition or should you talk to maga? Like, yes, you should do both.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I would like to see more people who seem like they are trying things. One of the people I think is smartest and one thing I hear internally is I also think there's like a difference between those who think it's just worth taking a risk. Something Donald Trump does is he tries things out and if they fail, he capitulates.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He just backs right off. Right. The joke about the taco trade, Trump always chickens out. It's actually one of Trump's stronger moves. He'll try something, he'll see if it's working. If it's not working, I'll be like, eh. And then he'll back off, try something else. The thing about the shutdown to me is it's not Armageddon. There are shutdowns. We have shutdowns every couple of years. Most people don't even remember them. Six months after they happen, you can see how it goes.

[B]

On to gravity of the moment. Someone that is in their posture in me and how are you acting? Right. Like some of it is in the. Are there other ways to throw sand in the gears in the Senate and otherwise for some of their actions? And I agree with you that there's more things to do. Another is like the political objectives of a party that sees the other party as an existential threat. Right. Like you would imagine that a political party that sees the other party as an existential threat would want to try new things, not just tactically in D.C. but nationally. As far as trying to appeal to.

[A]

More people, I feel like you're executing a Topic segue here.

[B]

Yeah, we're doing a topic segue.

[A]

Yeah, I see you.

[B]

How did I do? It was good, I thought, and I like you. On how they should try new things. I'm like, I'm all for you should try new things, like try lefty populist shit and throw those candidates up there. That's fine with me. That's not my cup of tea, per se. But I'm interested in Graham Plattner in that model. But it's also try more culturally conservative people that have wrong thoughts on social issues and run them in red states. See if that works any better. This was one of the points that you were making. As I said earlier, that was a lightning rod. You said, maybe Democrats should have pro life candidates in red states more comfortable with that. A lot of Democrats pointed out that pro life ballot initiatives have not done that well in red states. Maybe there's a different topic that you could pick. That was the same point that like in Kansas and Missouri, they'd passed ballot initiatives that were pro choice, essentially, that were. So anyway, maybe the nitpick is on that particular issue of abortion. But the premise to me seems obvious. And while there seems to be an excitement on the Democrats for trying out the Graham Platner type candidates where there's no evidence of them actually winning in red states, there seems to be no excitement for trying out John Bel Edwards type candidates where there is some record of success in winning.

[A]

It's worth thinking about why we. Why Graham Platner is a candidate in Maine and we have to think about Maine at all, because Maine is a fairly blue state at this point. It has a Democratic governor. The other senator caucuses with the Democrats, and it is Susan Collins who is a Republican and is pro choice. And one way she has managed to remain a Republican in Maine is that she is pro choice. But what she does is she votes for John Thune and before that for Mitch McConnell for majority leader and then confirms pro life justices to the Supreme Court, which is part of how we ended with. How we ended up with Dobbs. And so I'm all for Graham Platner. Right? Graham Platner seems to be like a candidate who is doing really, really well at figuring out how to do attentional politics. I mean, we'll see how he performs in Maine. I don't want to count my chickens there. We've watched people be very certain they're about to beat Susan Collins and then fail. Right. That's the story of the last race.

[B]

Or very certain he can beat Janet Mills. And there's another Maine beer company candidates in there. Like, who the hell no, I don't want. Maine politics are finicky.

[A]

Yeah, we don't know what's going to happen there yet. But I'm all for Graham Platner, but I think the, the telling thing about Maine politics is Susan Collins. Right. The idea that a Democrat could win in Maine is not surprising. The idea that a Republican has held on in Maine is surprising. And she has done it by being more culturally liberal than the rest of her caucus. So I've been thinking about the Affordable Care Act. As you mentioned, I used to cover healthcare a lot. When the Affordable Care act passed, There were about 40 pro life Democrats in the House. Forty Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, in Louisiana, in North Dakota, in South Dakota, in Ohio, in West Virginia, in Montana, you know, in Indiana. I think to a lot of people, I've been thinking about this in the email I've been getting recently. I think for a lot of Democrats to twist the old line about capitalism, which you may have heard right, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It has become easier to imagine the end of America than Democrats winning a Senate seat in Arkansas. Like, they just like. It's become like a completely inconceivable thing. But not that long ago we had Senate seats in Arkansas. Not that long ago we had a Democratic president from Arkansas. And so you have to begin, I think if you take how bad this is very seriously, and I really do, I think you have to say politics is about winning power. It's not about only choosing strategies I am personally comfortable with. I am very, very, very pro choice. My wife had medically horrific pregnancies. There's almost nothing that I feel more emotionally intense about as that a woman should be able to. A family should be able to choose whether or not to go through that. It would be very dangerous for her to be pregnant again. Have we protected reproductive rights using the political strategies we have employed over the past 15 years? We have not. We have failed. And I think core to my view is failure. We are failing. We are failing to protect trans people. We are failing to protect immigrants. We are failing to protect everybody we say we are here to protect and we are failing to protect them because we have lost power. And I think losing power in that way and failing in the way we have and watching the consequences be as bad as they have been should force us in a disciplined fashion to ask what do we need to do to win it back? And that Means expanding the map on which we can play. Barack Obama ran for office as both a Democrat who is much better than other Democrats at persuading people who thought they would disagree with him that he liked them and he understood them, and he. They had a place with him. I think all of us thought Barack Obama believed in gay marriage. But in 2008, Barack Obama ran to somebody opposing gay marriage, and that put him in place to name Supreme Court justices who would then create a constitutional right to gay marriage. This idea that your politics are only.

[B]

Allowed from our politicians. Yes. Yeah. More. More hiding the ball from politicians, more.

[A]

Working with public opinion as it exists is the way I put it. Right. The people who called, who said Seth Moulton was like a Nazi collaborator crazy after he said that Democrats need to accept that you should not have full trans participation across the sex line in sports. The way to protect trans people is for Democrats to be in power. And that means willing to give on issues that 80% of the country is against you on. And I think that the sense we have that doing that kind of politics is betrayal, that it is abandoning people. We have misunderstood so many people. It's like we assume Twitter is politics. Politics is about winning power and then using that power. Well, and sometimes to win that power, you have to have a tent big enough that it includes real disagreement, but it includes agreement on the key things, like who should be majority leader or what kinds of people should be on the Supreme Court. So this is my argument. I mean, you can pick the issue. You can. We should be disciplined about it. Kansas is not where I meant. You should run a pro life candidate. Kansas is a place, as people noted, where you've had actually great success on reproductive rights as, like, a wedge issue. But choose your things. Immigration is another where we've gotten way out of step with the public. After Donald Trump, he polarized us against him on immigration, and we began debating if we should decriminalize illegal border crossing. Did that put us in position in the long run to protect immigrants? No. It helped elect Donald Trump. And now immigrants are in trouble. They have not been in this country in a long time. So I just think the thing I'm trying to, in a way, weirdly do is raise the status of doing politics as we've traditionally understand it. And that is what working to build a large coalition across disagreement so you can win power.

[B]

I'm sorry, that's not right. Politics is about feeling good about yourself and feeling superior. Your point is so obvious. It's kind of like, I want to Move on, because it's like we could have a heated agreement about how right we are on this. But my one follow up question, though is like, it's so obvious that what do you attribute to the fact that there's so much resistance to it? And I'm not talking about among rank and file people on the Internet commenting on your posts. I'm talking about among Democratic strategists. This is. So why are Democratic strategists putting up generic D candidates in red states time after time thinking that the result is going to be different? It's insanity in the literal definition.

[A]

I think the analysis you need here is sociological, not political. I think that political strategy for parties is downstream of political culture. The first thing they worry about is what the people around them will think about them and how they will be treated and if they can get future jobs and so on. And I think it has become incredibly uncomfortable. I mean, I know this to be true. It has become incredibly uncomfortable, less so now than it was maybe a couple years ago, for Democrats to step out on these issues. I mean, I mentioned Seth Moulton, who's a congressman, Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, a couple minutes ago after the 2024 election, when he says, look, I don't want to see my daughters, you know, playing sports and getting, you know, run over by somebody born male on the field. He gets a huge amount of backlash. You know, he's condemned by, you know, people in the sort of Democratic Party in the district. You know, the local college says they won't send interns to his office anymore. He's compared to a Nazi collaborator. Nothing happens to him. He's fine. But that's very unpleasant for people.

[B]

Right?

[A]

And the donors are more part of this world. Right? The donors are expressive in their politics. So maybe it dries up your money. And people feel strongly about these issues. They don't want to get attacked on Twitter. I mean, this stuff is unpleasant for people. They don't like it. And so to me, what you want to do is redraw a line that used to exist more brightly than it does now. The activists, the people who push you, the people who are more prophetic in their politics, they have a very, very, very important role in all this. And the politicians, the hacks, the strategists, they do too. And it is the job of the first group to push, and it is the job of the second group to not get pushed too far. And I think this had to do with social media, and I think it had to do with how much our politics polarized I think it had to do with the reaction to Donald Trump and how outrageous the way he treats people is. And it kind of creates a. I call this oppositional mirroring. You kind of become the opposite of the people on the other side. I think it became both. It felt to people like it was career level dangerous. I mean, I got called a white supremacist at the Atlantic Ideas Festival last week.

[B]

Yeah, me too, yesterday. I'm Blue sky, actually. So welcome to the club. What did you do?

[A]

I talked to Ben Shapiro.

[B]

Oh, got it. When you get to that. Yeah.

[A]

What's next for my career? I'm pretty solid. It's not going to hurt me. But if you're not where I am, that's much more threatening. To have these kinds of. You become a trending topic on Twitter, as I did a week or two ago, everybody's mad at you. And when you go to the next job, it's like, oh, do I want this person who. I mean, the first thing you said about me when I came on the show today, it's like, you're a lightning rod. Right? Wasn't that the term used? Not. Hey, you're doing a lot of great work lately. But it's all good for me, you know, that's my job, is to be sometimes a lightning rod. But people don't do things that are very uncomfortable for them. I do think that culture in the party is changing. I really do.

[B]

Final point on this, because I do want to talk about Kirk, the other thing you're a lightning rod on, but Democratic strategists shouldn't be fucking worried about this. I hear you, but, like, Democratic strategists get paid a lot of money to win races, and they've built nice houses and pools with it, and they have nice lives, and it's time to nut up.

[A]

I agree with that. And in the long run, it was fine for him. But just as an example of, I think, something that reverberated around how Democratic strategists act. You remember David Shore, who's now Blue Rose and remains in front of the party, actually did get fired because he tweeted out political science literature showing that.

[B]

The said that violence hurts.

[A]

The riots helped elect Richard Nixon.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, he lost his job at that time. Now, it was such a ridiculous thing that people rallied behind him and he's fine and he's at Blue Rose and it's, you know, he's doing his thing. But that stuff scares people. And so I agree with you that the Democratic Party strategists need to nut up and that the Democratic Party leadership needs to do its job and lead. And leading is not always comfortable. But when you ask me, why did this happen? That's why it happened.

[B]

It's social pressure all the way down. Yeah. Everything's a high school cafeteria.

[A]

Everything's high school cafeteria.

[B]

Hey, everybody, you've probably heard me mention that the Bulwark is headed back on the road this fall. But we've got some big updates that I want you to hear first. Most importantly, we are adding a show in Toronto. I told you Canadians I was doing my best to make it happen. We've so I'm so thrilled by the response we've had from our Canadian friends and wanted to make sure if you wanted to be able to come, you could. So we added a matinee, a brunch show, whatever you want to call it. Maybe a drag brunch. Don't tell JD Vance the next day. No promises on drag queens there, but, you know, maybe the spirit of the drag brunch. And so that will be Saturday the 27th. Go to the bulwark.com events to get all the details and to get your tickets for that encore show in Toronto. Also, New York, that's going to sell out here any minute. So if you want to see us in New York on October 11th, get your tickets ASAP. There's still a bunch of tickets left for DC on October 8th, but we've got some exciting guest announcements coming soon. So if you're interested in coming to dc, get on that as well. All the information available@the bulwark.com events. It's me, Sarah and Sam up in Toronto. Me, Sarah and jvl and some of our other Bulwark friends and a special guest in Washington, dc. Look forward to seeing you all out on the road. We'll catch you soon. Get those tickets now. Charlie Kirk, I agreed with everything in your column except for the one sentence that everybody got really mad about. I didn't get mad about it. I thought maybe we'll give you a chance to have an editor right now. The nut graph of your post was not the wrong sentence. It was the foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk and his family just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too. To me, that sums it all up and seems obvious, though apparently you got some pushback on that. But the key line that folks did not like was that you said Charlie Kirk did politics the right way. If you had a redo on that, would you use it the exact same way or explain it?

[A]

What I said there, I think the exact sentence from memory is something like, you can disagree with everything he believed and believe Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way. What I meant and what I think I say in the rest of that paragraph, I meant the right way up on that stage, being there at that college, talking to people. It's funny, the thing that maybe I would have kept the first way I wrote that line was, you can detest what Charlie Kirk believes about politics and believe he was doing politics there the right way. And I thought, you know what? This guy just was murdered. His whole side is grieving him. People are terrified. They don't need to hear that I detested many of his views. They could just hear that I disagreed with him. I would not write that column dramatically differently. I just have a view that the 12 hours after somebody is publicly murdered for participating in politics and is not the time when you need to fully litigate all your disagreements with them. I think it is a time when we can try to sit with each other across a pretty wide party divide and say, I see you. I can see your friend, at least partly the way you saw your friend, and I can grieve with you. And I think that's part of the political practice that I hope will keep us from falling into genuine, ongoing political violence. Although today I think we came a step closer to that with the ice shootings, which I'm very concerned about. I then did a second piece after the pushback that was more about, I think, something deeper, which is the piece was called We're Going to have to Live Here with each Other. And one of the questions I had after that piece was, to what degree do we feel we are in political community with each other or not, that an attack within that community is something we can all grieve or not, that these are more like enemy combatants. And in that piece, I'm much more clear about my disagreements with Kirk. I think among the things I say was that that everything Kirk poured himself into trying to create in our country, I pour myself into trying to prevent. And that's true, if anybody follows my work at all. But the question of, can we find moments in which people are not, you know, the people on the other side of the political divide are not so far from us, we can't see them as part of our community does feel important to me. And it feels important to me as much as I Am like genuinely somebody who believes that authoritarianism is happening here right now. Right. That we are watching authoritarianism breakthrough try to happen. But it also feels important to me because in addition to the values level and the wanting, the believing, we need to do the genuinely hard work of being in a democracy together and thinking that is genuinely hard and honorable work to do and feeling like we could lose it, like genuinely lose it. But also because I think that it is a stance, it is part of a strong politics. I mean, Obama came out a couple days later in between my two pieces, and he said more about the place where he disagreed with Kirk, but the way he spoke about it was more the way I thought we should be speaking about it. And I've been thinking a lot about the way Obama spoke when he was rising up in 2004 and 2008. And people forget how divided that was. I mean, I think it's less than this particular moment, but it was really quite bad. And his famous speech about not being just a red and blue America and thinking that there's actually a lot to rediscover in that politics that radiating to people, that they're on the other side from you. They're deplorables. Right. The sort of politics of deplorables as being the other path here, I think has been bad for us. I think it has been part of why we have lost. And I think it is something that should be challenged as much as it feels kind of an emotionally obvious place for you to be in as you're in the opposition.

[B]

I want to go back to the Kirk criticism in a second, but just on this point, because listening to you talk, one word that comes to mind is something that I think we all don't want is dehumanizing people that we're supposed to be in political community with. And on the left, they talk a lot about that because the right does it a lot. Donald Trump dehumanizes immigrants, dehumanizes trans people. There's a lot of dehumanization in kind of the MAGA worldview and rhetoric, and that's bad and we condemn it. But I have felt in the follow up to Kirk's assassination that there is a decent chunk of people on the left that do have decided to dehumanize anybody that voted for Donald Trump and that they don't obligate themselves to feel empathy for them. And I think that takes us to a very dangerous place.

[A]

I think that's right. I also think even if you. You don't believe that last sentence that it takes such a dangerous place. It's a bad politics. So even if all you are is cold blooded and instrumental, you shouldn't be doing it anyway. The way I would talk about this sort of even outside the language of dehumanization is around the language of deplorables. In this piece I have coming out with Ton Ossie, I played the clip. There are two things that really struck me listening to it again. One is the laughter and the cheering when she says half of Trump voters are deplorables. They're, you know, a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. And then she says they're irredeemable. Irredeemable is the worst word in that to see your fellow countrymen, country women, as irredeemable. Right. That they are out. That is what I'm talking about. Out of your political community. And I think that, I mean, that didn't come from nowhere with Hillary Clinton. That was a culture that I think had begun to gather strength on the left and has informed much of our politics. There are views you hold that if you hold them, we are not working out our disagreements. You should be out of our community. The argument the Substack publication did this poll and it asked is it ever acceptable to cut a family member off for their politics? And 11% of Trump voters in 2024 said yes, 44% of Kamala Harris voters said yes. So that is actually a different thing. The way we think about this on our side, that you would cut a family member, forget just some random person off for their politics. I don't think that's a good politics. I think again, going back to something I was saying earlier, it speaks to, I think we've begun to see the work of politics, the work of being in coalition or even in a country across profound disagreements as a kind of betrayal. To maintain community is to betray others in your community. And I don't think it's working. I mean, if it was working, maybe we could, could do that. But it's not working. And I think it's contributing to things being very dangerous. I don't want to say like that that's the only thing or we are the only ones doing it. I've been following your fights a little bit with Megyn Kelly and following her radicalization, I guess is word to use where she keeps saying the only thing to do is defeat them. We must defeat. And I keep thinking, what does she mean? Because she doesn't mean at the polls, she doesn't mean in the. An election, right? That happened. They're in power now. Defeat them culturally. Defeat like imprison them, destroy them, make it impossible for them to hold jobs. I have a piece that came out, an episode about the blue scare, right. I think what they're trying to build is like a new red scare. But what does she mean by defeat them?

[B]

It does mean just specifically. And you're talking about being in political community with people. She's explicit that she doesn't want to be in political community with the left. Right. Like, it's very explicit in that thing that based on all of her list of grievances against the left, against anti Trump folks, that she sees all of us as complicit in the murder of Charlie Kirk and complicit in every other grievance that she has and that we should not be part of a political society together. We should be a subordinate at some level and they should have all power and control. Right.

[A]

It's a fascistic worldview and I think it's very dangerous. And I don't think we should mirror it, both because it is wrong and also because it's bad politics. Obama said something long ago that I always think about where he said he was getting challenged on this and he, somebody was pushing him on his, you know, endlessly conciliatory rhetoric to this was, I think when he was president, people who are endlessly like, yeah, kind of spitting at him, you know, like we're not trying to work with him. You know, the bird, you know, we live through that. And he said, I think if people can see that my hand is open, it's easier for them to see if the other side is making a fist. And I've always thought there's a lot of wisdom in that.

[B]

It does feel totally lost though, that worldview. And maybe it's not. I know there's a chance to reanimate it, but I worry that I'm gonna get in trouble here. But I just see a lot of parallels I don't like from having lived through the Tea Party era on the other side. This is not to create a false equivalence or to say, I think that in a lot of ways people on the left are well intentioned about the way that they're acting and the ways that some of the folks on the right were ill intentioned or were more cruel about, but just kind of a combination of things. The wanting to be in an echo chamber media and only hearing things about how the other side is bad and how your side is good. A lot of right wing people have been in such a media for a while now and I think that a lot of people on the left are getting ensconced in it. This is going to be my Tom Friedman part of the discussion. Discussion. But I was in an Uber on the Home for the Bar yesterday and a nice old lady, gray haired, hippie lady started like listing out a bunch of conspiracy theories to me about how the voting machines were broken and how the text messages are fake and the bullet carvings are fake and there are always conspiracy theorists and always this. But like I was having a flashback to when I used to work for Republican candidates and tell cab drivers I worked for Republican candidates and have them start talking to me about how Obama was a birther and from Africa. And I just, I have in my life, not on the Internet, in my life, people texting me things that are very conspiratorial and like outside of touch and again, decked to that kind of anger and hatred that the left used to criticize about the Tea Party. I just see like a, just a deep level of anger and hatred and back to the word dehumanization. And I, and I worry about it. I don't know. Do you think I'm overly concerned? Do you think I'm too concerned about that?

[A]

It's a good question. I'm trying to think about the Tea Party because I think of the Tea Party, that its main manifestation was one a lot of public protesting. Right. There was a huge amount of actual organizing happening in the country. It's helped along by the fact that Democrats then, unlike Republicans now, would hold town halls and then also an incredibly both effective in the sense that they won the primaries and ineffective in the sense that they then would lose general elections and Democrats held the Senate for longer than they otherwise would have ever to primary mainstream Republicans.

[B]

Yeah. I just want to say I'm not predicting a Democratic Tea Party in that sense, in the primary sense. I was talking more about like in the nature of the people and how there were negative consequences from the fact that there were a lot of people who were made very mad by being ensconced in a media bubble that fed them some news that was not true.

[A]

I think you have to see where the Republican Party went and Donald Trump as ultimately an answer to that kind of politics. Initially they try Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney fails, and then you get Trump. And I think a lot is going to depend in the next couple of years on leadership. There's not another way to put this, and I wish this weren't true because I don't like betting this much on the right leadership. The Trump administration is a fundamentally corrupted administration in which there are not people there any longer who will tell Donald Trump no. In fact, I think this is a reversal of the dynamics of the first Trump administration, in which the role of much of Trump's staff, the way they saw their role, was holding Trump back from his worst impulses. And I think much of Trump's staff is now more radical than he is. I think J.D. vance, I think Stephen Miller, I think Russell Vote. I think a lot of them going down into the staffing are significantly more radical than Donald Trump himself is. And that is not because I don't think Donald Trump has radical instincts.

[B]

Right.

[A]

He is mixed and intuitive, and they are radicalized and ideological. So the political wisdom, I think, is not going to come from there. And so the Democratic Party is really going to have to make a series of decisions. Exactly right. I think it's a pretty narrow path before some really bad things happen. And it means choosing the right leadership and choosing great candidates in 2026. And you just don't know if we have that Democratic Party, we don't know who will rise. We don't know how they're going to run. I mean, there is. So we don't know what kind of country we're going to be. Look, maybe Trump. Trump does a series of things that by the time we are at, you know, the 2026 election or the 2028 election, his whole administration is in shambles. Maybe this is like Bush, you know, where, you know, in 2004, he looked very strong, and by 08, he had functionally destroyed his entire political party.

[B]

Knocking on wood.

[A]

It could happen.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't think you can assume it.

[B]

Will happen, God willing.

[A]

And by the way, part of how Democrats got into that position is in 06, they were ruthlessly disciplined in what kind of candidates they chose. Rahm Emanuel is a head of dccc. Right. Democrats won the Senate because they chose Jim Webb in Virginia, who, you know, was a Republican. Before that, he was Ronald Reagan, Secretary of the Navy, was a very weird figure and was very culturally mixed and, you know, could speak to cultural conservatives. And he beats George Allen by, like, this much. And Democrats take the Senate. And that also helps create the sort of spiral of loss for the Bush administration. So it's going to require a real. They get discipline, but also a wisdom. You're going to need candidates on the democratic side for 2028 who are intuitively in touch with where the country is, not just where their side is. Obama had that. Do any of the current ones? I just don't know.

[B]

I don't know either. I hope so. I think it's possible. I think there are a lot of good Democratic candidates. I mean well intentioned Democratic candidates. But that's important. Good intentions are important. Whether they're particularly strong, skilled political candidates I think remains to be seen. Though I have some hope for a couple of them.

[A]

Who do you have hope for?

[B]

Well, look, I mean, who do you.

[A]

Think is interesting when you handicap her right now? Who do you look at them and you think that's somebody showing some skill, a deft touch.

[B]

For what?

[A]

For whatever you're. I mean, I guess I think I'm 2020 to think earlier, like I said.

[B]

I think the Democrats need people that are going to run against the party. You know what I mean? And so in a lot of ways, and so I just don't like just generic D candidates. Right. And so in that way I think the main guy is interesting. I think that Talarico is kind of interesting. And Texas, like a more conventional solution is I do like West Moore a lot as more of a he'd be more of a conventional type pick that would be more make more sense for the Democrats if a Trump administration ends up in shambles. But there's nobody knocking my socks off, you know, there's nobody that I was like, oh, that person makes a lot of sense, you know that that person is modeling all the things that I would like to see. And so maybe somebody grows into it. Mitt Romney ended up losing, but he was a way better candidate in 12 than in 08. And so you can see that, you can see people grow. You're trying to get me into campaign politics though, and I'm trying to talk about the dark heart of the country. And so we. I need to follow up on one more thing on that we're taping this Wednesday afternoon so we might know more by the time this airs Thursday afternoon. There's been a shooting at an ice facility. Cash has tweeted the bullets where there's some anti ice carvings on the bullets.

[A]

This memetic bullets thing is really bad.

[B]

Really bad. Editani got killed actually. So if there's ever a lesson, assuming that this story ends up being what it looks like right now and I think we should just be cautious, there's more to learn. But if it really was in case an anti ice case of anti ice political violence and they end up killing a migrant, that should Just be a pretty damn good example for why political violence should be abhorred and opposed in all cases, and why it's wrong, in addition to all the other obvious reasons. But the Atlantic this morning is also saying left wing terrorism was on the rise for the first time more than 30 years. Attack attacks by the far left outnumber those by the far right. It's a study that's in the Atlantic. The fact that it's even close, I think would be news to a lot of people and that get left wing political media, even if that's not exactly right. And I was mentioned several times. But it's just. It is alarming. I've had a lot of alarming in person encounters with people saying very pretty dark things about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Not. Not Twitter stuff, not strangers, not friends, Instagram people, people who listen to this show who sent me a text about somebody in their life that lost their job because they tweeted something. Right. Like real people. I'm worried about it. I also am worried about right wing nationalist violence or whatever, but I'm worried about it on the left. I wonder what you think about it.

[A]

What I think what I said in that first piece about Kirk is that violence is contagious. It is viral. And we know this. We can start in less charged dimensions. Suicide is contagious. We know that when somebody commits suicide, more suicides around them become likely. There are studies that even. What was the name that Netflix show? 10 reasons.

[B]

I 13 reasons why was the show 13 reasons why?

[A]

There was a study that found that that show appears to have increased the number of suicides. We know suicide is contagious. There are actually a lot of guidelines in media about how to report on suicides for that reason. It seems to be in fact, other people. We know school shootings are contagious. We know normal shootings are contagious. I mean, that seems to be more of a reprisal mechanism, but nevertheless. So we know that as people begin to see violence to their self, to others happen, it enters their realm of imagination. For most people never enter something that's desirable, much less something they would ever do. But for some people who are maybe broken or fragile in some other way, it does. Political violence has this dimension. And I've been worried for some time. The moment I began saying this to people the most was after Luigi Mangione murdered Brian Thompson.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And particularly after I began to see people celebrate him. I was saying to people, this is going to get really bad. This guy is going to become a medicine Other people are going to look at him just in the way, by the way, that incel violence became contagious after Elliot Rogers, that people are going to look at him and say I should do that too. And I saw a lot of people, people I know and like not saying it was a good thing but sort of explaining it away like, aren't the health insurers really bad?

[B]

I was at a party where somebody had a Luigi costume at Mardi Gras and they thought that I would like it. It's similar to how I was at the bar recently where somebody came up.

[A]

I found that abhorrent and it was obviously, obviously dangerous. And so my fear right now, and that was, by the way, left wing political violence. Yeah, that's the right way to understand that. There's been a lot of right wing political violence too. I mean, you know, the person entering Nancy Pelosi's home and fracturing her husband's skull. But violence becomes contagious and then by the way, the state then enters the realm of violence. I mean, already has in some ways. But Trump and Miller and, and Vance and others were like nothing more than the excuses for a profound crackdown. I was talking to people over the last weeks. I'm like, what if that guy who an ICE agent killed because the guy tried to drive his car into him? What if he had killed the ICE agent instead? What would Trump have done? Well, now we're about to see a version of that. So this is combustible. It is contagious. It is not going to be contained to the left. Right. It won't just be left wing political violence, but it is going to. If something doesn't break the cycle, it is going to rise on both sides. Maybe the form it will take on the right is state sponsored violence because they're in power. But I think you have to understand this as an extraordinarily dangerous moment for the country. You know, my first book was about political polarization and it ends by talking about all the things that happened in the 60s that aren't happening now. The political violence, the political assassinations, jfk, mlk, rfk, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, George Wall, you know, Squeaky from tries to assassinate Gerald Ford. Later on Ronald Reagan actually does get shot. I mean, you know, there's violence in the streets, Weathermen, right. There's so much happening, there's so much violence in that era. And at that time the parties were non polarized. You had liberal Republicans, you conservative Democrats. A lot of problems with that time. A lot of problems with those parties. But politics did act. Politics at that time acted as a thing that. That the disquiet and the fracturing of the country came into. And it sort of tried to work that into some kind of pathway out. And what I would say on the book tour for that book was the nightmare scenario is that kind of societal fracture with the polarized parties and media ecosystems and social media that we have today, where it becomes an accelerant and an amplifier of that fracture. And again, absent leadership that we certainly don't seem to have right now on the right, we'll see what we have on the left. We seem to be moving into that scenario.

[B]

It's really dark. On top of that, when was the book tour? When was that? What year?

[A]

2020. It was ended by Covid, that book tour.

[B]

Yeah. Okay, so it was in this context. But on top of that, we have a more acute evidence of a Trump administration that's much more interested in targeting people and much more interested in using state violence against people than they had been the first time around. I just want to say I throw this out there because it's both. Because we're both in this shoes. I've had people say this to me. I know you've had people say to you, you're just going soft on this because you're a white podcast host and you don't want to get killed. And that's why you're. You're on the wrong side of this. The Charlie Clark assassination, like that. It's because of your personal ties to the assassination that you're saying what you're saying.

[A]

I mean, I would absolutely say that part of my reaction to the assassination is that when I saw Charlie Kirk get murdered, I thought about all the people I know who do work on the left and who I care about, myself included, but not only. And it helped increase my sympathy and empathy for what was happening on the right. I don't see that as a weakness of mine. On top of that, the idea that this is all just white privilege. I'm fine. The losing power that we're doing, the creating excuses for the right to engineer a state sponsored crackdown that is not first going to come for me or you. The people I am worried about, our immigrants, our trans kids. Like, my heart like fell when it seemed that the murderer had a connection to a trans person. And that might have been. I mean, immediately I began to worry.

[B]

About that nightmare for that woman. For that. For her nightmare for the roommate and nightmare for the absolute nightmare and horrible for trans People.

[A]

Absolute fucking nightmare and horrible for trans people. Wayne, which this guy really betrayed people who he profess to love. But again, going back to something I've been saying throughout this conversation, I think if you care about vulnerable people and you think that our side is the side that is more likely to protect them, then you have to really care about both de escalating this moment and you have to care about winning power. And that should impose a discipline on you and also impose an empathy on you, a desire for de escalation. That should be part of how you experience this. I mean, my worry about violence is precisely because I know it will not stay contained. We don't know who it will target. It will light a fire. Right. This is a very combustible country right now. And so I don't know, I think that kind of thinking, I just do. People who think like that, look around, do they feel like what we're doing is working? Does this seem like the people we care about are protected? If they have a better, more politically, strategically wise approach, I am all for it.

[B]

I mean, it seems like assassination apologia is part of their worldview.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, look, most people I know are not making apologies for assassination, but I do. On the point of political violence specifically, I feel so strongly that it has to be sacrosanct, not caveated with, like, well, we thought this person was bad. But political violence is always wrong. Political violence is profoundly wrong. It is an attack on all of us and it will very, very, very quickly become an attack on all of us. And I think we have to take that seriously.

[B]

Apology is the wrong word. But like we said, the Luigi memes.

[A]

The Luigi memes was worse than anything I've seen around Kirk. By the way, from. From, you know, from people.

[B]

A lot of Kirk jokes. The jokes, it's not funny.

[A]

It's not funny.

[B]

You know what I mean? And that's fine. You might not call it apologia, but anyway, I don't know matic politics. I do have one more thing. I'm going to let you and Ta Nehisi have out his critique with you. I was going to ask you about his critique, but people could turn to the Ezra Kleinshaw on that. I do just want to ask if you think there's a limiting principle, though, to your argument about Kirk. As I was reading it, I was wondering, if it was Nick Fuentes, would you have written the same columns?

[A]

I think if I saw Nick Fuentes gunned down in the street in the same way, I would write a thing about how political violence is very bad. I am sure you could find names of people who are so far on the extreme, just like out and out Nazis kind of thing. I guess this is a question I raised and I raised it myself with like struggling with it. If you are saying Charlie Kirk is not mournable in that kind of moment, I mean, he's the center of maga, right? He is just a down the line MAGA figure who, what he's known for is being able to sit at the contrasting forces of that movement and kind of everybody likes him, right? So you're just dealing with a kind of the MAGA establishment in Charlie Kirk. And I think that if we have decided anybody who believes any portion of what MAGA believes is that far outside of our community, then we have written a huge amount of this country off into the deplorables bucket. And I think that politics won't work. And I think it's a recipe for deep escalation. We all have to have our lines. I'm not going to tell you, I don't, I'm not going to imagine who it is. I don't want to sort of, you know, call that kind of thing into being and you know, cosplay my feelings in that moment. But I, I understand this point, right, that to go back to the thing you said a minute ago, I understand this point that Kirk began to say some weird things about the Jews at some point too. But it's easier for you to say he's in your community. The worst of what he said wasn't about you. I don't find it easy to say MAGA is in my community. I badly wanted this to not be a thing that was acceptable in our politics. And I think we, and I was one of these people to some degree who engaged in a politics early on in it that was about this is unacceptable. Like, we just have to agree that you can't act the way Donald Trump acts on the national stage and be elected and be a respectable figure in our politics. And I think the lesson of these years is we don't get to decide where those lines are drawn. I mean, this was the question, the hard question of that second piece. We are going to have to live here with each other. That is us living here with people who vote for Donald Trump. Love Donald Trump. I have Trump voters in my family. And so I do believe that work of democracy, of being able to see that even as we are political foes in really profound ways, we are also bonded in other ways. That's Part of the work, not easy, doesn't make you feel good, but part.

[B]

Of the work isn't easy. And we're over it. I'm sorry, I just want to say one last thing on this, because there's a video going around of me right now from MAGA folks trying to say that I'm doing crocodile tears over Charlie Kirk. Basically, it's an old video of me from last. There was a mailbag message from last. I forget it was Thanksgiving or Christmas. And I got a listener wrote in and was like, what do I do with my MAGA family at Christmas type question. And I was talking about this. It was raw. It was right after Trump had just won. So it must have been Thanksgiving. It's right after Trump had just won. And I was like, I'm in the same boat, right? And I said, the one thing that sucks about this time that is different from past polarized times, like when Obama did this in 04, is that there's a feeling, particularly from folks on the left, that the people that voted the other way aren't just wrong. Like that there's a moral equation to it, that they. That they are morally flawed or that even bad, it even makes them a bad person to go along with this. And I said, I feel that, and I do. I have that thought and feeling. And then they cut off the clip. And then when I go on to say, which is like, essentially we have to work through that. You have to work through it with people, to live with them in a family or in a community. And it does make it a lot harder. And I do think that there was a very big moral component to the last election. I don't want to pretend like there wasn't. That. That doesn't mean that we don't have to figure out a way to live together and find other ways to commune together as humans, et cetera, et cetera. And that's true about family, but it's also true about our political society.

[A]

I'd say two things. One is that that is the story being in a political community across vast amounts of moral difference of this country, right? The periods of time in which you wouldn't say that was true, in which the kind of agreements of politics were pretty well firmed up. Those are short periods of time. They weren't the 20s, the 1920s. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. You wouldn't say that about those times. You wouldn't say that about McCarthyism about Jim Crow, about. I mean, fights for equality, reconstruction, in Reconstruction and the Civil War. You're dealing with a time where we came to the edge of what politics could do and had to go beyond it. Right. We had to go into civil war. We had to go into civil war. Right. I believe that. But even after that, we have been working across forms of difference that. Or at least as profound as today, more so. I mean, there's something that Taanasi says in the show we put together. He's like, this is one of the better times, even right now still. And so I don't think the work we are called to democratically is so much grander or harder than what those who came before us were called to. So I think that's one thing. And then, yeah, I don't have a problem saying, I believe a lot of what Charlie Crook believed is fundamentally immoral. I believe a lot of what MAGA is, is fundamentally immoral. And I'm still somehow in political community with him. I will pour everything I have into trying to put politics onto a different path than they would put it on. And I also recognize we're here in a country together, and part of this is reaching out and maintaining some kind of open dialogue.

[B]

And because I find it immoral, it's part of the reason why I don't want to become them, why I don't want to mirror them. Also, you know, there's that element of it.

[A]

Yeah, I think there's that too.

[B]

Okay, final topic, very fast. I was on the Ezra.

[A]

How many final topics have we had here? Man 7.

[B]

I was on the Ezra Klein subreddit. You'll be happy about this. Maybe not. Watching Ezra and Colbert, I could see him occupying a Buttigieg Michiang role in the next Dem primary in terms of technocratic substance plus big swing, optimistic outsiderism, plus, he got hot. What do you think?

[A]

I like that. You're on the Ezra Klein subreddit.

[B]

You got hot.

[A]

That's a real.

[B]

I know.

[A]

You tell me.

[B]

Is that true? The beard isn't really for me. But they think that you've had a glow up and you're preparing to be the candidate. Is this why you asked me? I have a whole list of questions I didn't get to Ezra, and that's why I've had seven last questions. But. But you asked me if I'd liked anybody for 2028. I noticed that. That was interesting. It was the only question you asked me. Is it because you were wondering if.

[A]

I see an opening, a leading Question. No. You can have any Sherman esque denial of going into electoral politics you want from me?

[B]

100% sure. Okay. Well, I have a list of much meaner questions from the Ezra Klein subreddit, but we're out of time.

[A]

Oh, it's such a bummer. We're out of time. Yeah. Oh my God. I just got a thing to go to.

[B]

That is Ezra Klein. He's the author of Abundance. You should go get that. We didn't get to talk about abundance. You'll have to come back soon. Soon.

[A]

Why we're polarized. I'm going to plug very quickly because I think it's actually become very relevant.

[B]

Again, why we're polarized and abundance. That's Ezra Klein. I'm Tim Miller. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast. See y' all then.

[D]

Peace the world. You said it quiet. No one could hear you. No one but me. Cynical, you can't deny it. You don't want to win this world. Cause you don't want the peace all mistakes we never tried it. You're a soldier, I'm police. Listen baby, we can't deny it. You don't want win this war cause you don't want the police. The world was weaponized as soon as it had passed your lips. I'm a gentleman I refuse to show my gentleness for go around and find out the anchor child besides this Every day the universe will cry out the truth. Jeez, you've got nothing to say? The dreams I speak gripped by fear you are next. We're all the sons and daughters Vampires who train the old world flex dreams that scream piano the world don't recognize a singer.

[B]

The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.