Claire Gordon (3:26)

I mean, I think it was Also revealing of the different things people heard when he spoke. And there was part of the interview that got the most reaction. It was also a clip that circulated a lot on social media, was him talking about October 7th and describing the attack as unavoidable.

Mahmoud Khalil (3:44)

To me, it felt frightening that.

Ezra Klein (3:47)

We.

Mahmoud Khalil (3:48)

Had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle. And I remember I didn't sleep for a number of days and Noor was very worried about just my health and it was heavy. I still remember I was like, this couldn't happen.

Ezra Klein (4:11)

What do you mean? We had to reach this moment. What moment is this?

Mahmoud Khalil (4:13)

I was interning at UNRWA at that point point the United Nations Relief and Works Agency at the UN at their New York office. And as part of my internship, my research and work was focused on Palestine, on the situation in the west bank and Gaza. And you can see that the situation is not sustainable. You have an Israeli government that's absolutely ignoring Palestinians. They are trying to make that deal with Saudi and just happy about their Abraham Accord without looking at Palestinians as if Palestinians are not part of the equation. And they circumvented the Palestinian question. And it's clear it's becoming more and more violent. By October 6, over 200 Palestinians were killed by two Israeli forces and settlers. Over 40 of them were children. So that's what I mean by like, unfortunately, we couldn't avoid such a moment.

Claire Gordon (5:22)

A lot of the reaction was heard in his words, someone who was endorsing violence, someone who was at least sympathetic, if not just outright supportive of Hamas. What did you hear when he said that?

Ezra Klein (5:38)

My intention with that episode, first just to kind of level set was here with somebody who the US Government had in a very profound way tried to silence for his speech, moved him around to different detention centers and made a very public example of him in a way meant to chill. Not his speech specifically. The idea that Mahmoud Khalil, this grad student at Columbia, is in any way a threat to US foreign policy is an absurdity. And I think everybody knows it. But you can make an example of Mahmoud Khalil as a way of making other people afraid to speak. So I wanted to hear his story. Right. I was, you know, if you go, I think, to that interview, I'm in many ways more interested in what happened to him. I didn't bring him on specifically, in my view, as an expert on the Israeli Palestinian conflict, I'm interested in his thoughts. But the show has not primarily rooted its coverage there in kind of college activists, not because they don't have things to say or worth hearing. Just I don't think it would be the most sensible way to go about it. The way I heard him talk about October 7, which is a way I've heard a lot of the Palestinian guests I've had on the show and who I've spoken to off the show talk about it, which is to them, October 7th is not Day Zero. To them, October 7th is NOT where this chapter or anything begins. October 7th is a punctuation of tremendous violence, maybe murderous, maybe war crimes. I think Khalil, when I was asking him in a follow up question, said, look, there should be an investigation and people who killed civilians, which he said is always illegal under international law, should be held accountable for that.

Mahmoud Khalil (7:36)

What I know is targeting civilians is wrong. That's why we've been calling for an international independent investigation to hold perpetrators into accountability. And it's very important for us who believe in international law that this should.

Ezra Klein (7:54)

Happen, but they understand that moment. I think I am portraying this fairly as revolutionary violence that might be very in the way it gets carried out, even evil, but it reflects a society in Gaza under tremendous, relentless oppression where the kind of Israeli policy was to functionally make the experience and lives of the Gazans a non issue, trying to make the Palestinian issue, as it gets called, disappear. And out of that comes a lot of things, including the March of Return and other things that did not get a lot of international coverage but were more peaceful. And then ultimately October 7th. Now, to be very clear, I think Hamas is a, or was, because I'm not sure how much it even really exists at this point as an organization that looks like what it once was. But I think very little has done as much damage, including to Palestinians, as Hamas. And I think October 7th was a series of war crimes. It was a mass murder of civilians, a mass act of terror and barbarism. I don't think it can be explained away. I think that it was also done to elicit an overwhelmingly violent Israeli response. Sinwar was not an idiot. It had to have been understood at every level that if you did breach Israel's defenses and you did carry out a mass murder of Israeli civilians, Israel was going to come in and flatten Gaza. And that was the project, as I understand it. Right? That's what they wanted. And the sacrifice of Palestinian civilians was part of their calculation, that Hamas, as it did in the second intifada with suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and teenagers on buses and at nightclubs, that they've always been working with this tactic of leveraging the lives of Palestinian civilians to try to do something that would change the situation for Palestinians. So I think Hamas has just done extraordinary damage to Palestinians, to Israel, to everybody. But when I talk to Palestinians, they understand Hamas more in a lineage, whether or not they like them or hate them, sort of revolutionary and insurgent violence, which much more often does target civilians, which gets out of control. And they understand the fundamental oppression is coming from the Israeli side. They look at the death tolls on the two sides. So when I heard Khalil speak, I think if you listen to Palestinians, which a lot of people in this conversation don't, the range of acceptable and well heard opinion tends to come from people with differing levels of commitment to Israel and Zionism. He didn't say anything that sounded surprising to me. So yeah, I understand why it's hard to hear, but I also think how hard it is to hear reflects to some degree how seldom Palestinians are heard in our conversation. Because to them, what is often hard to hear is the explaining away the normalization of what they understand as now decades and decades of continuous Israeli violence against them and their lives and their existence. And again, it's not how I see it and not how I see Hamas. But part of my project on the show has always been to accept that there are very different narratives of this conflict, of this moment. Not just two, but many, many, many existing alongside each other. And there's no capacity to see it in any way clearly if you're only willing to listen to one of them.

Claire Gordon (11:59)

Well, that ties into my next question, which is a critique that we've been getting in the inbox for a while, definitely after the episode on family group chats and also to Mahmoud Khalil, also to the sans episode on genocide, that a lot of these episodes, and certainly the cumulative effect of these episodes was pretty one sided and focusing on criticism of Israel and not including as much the larger context of Hamas, not just October 7th, but what Hamas's responsibility in continuing the war and not putting down arms, not surrendering and still having hostages. And that's gotten a lot of reaction from people. How do you respond to that?

Ezra Klein (12:49)

Israel is at this point the primary actor in the war. I wouldn't even call it a war anymore. I'd call it a siege. If you believe what I believe about Hamas, if you believe what the people sending these emails believe about Hamas, they will tell you, I will tell you in the same breath. Basically, Hamas is an organization that does not value civilian life, that uses civilian life as pawns. That is why, or partially why it is classified as a terrorist organization in America? Yes. Do I wish Hamas had done none of this? I wish Hamas had done none of this? Do I wish they would give up all their arms immediately? I do. Do I wish they would release the hostages immediately? I do. The fact that they have not, will not, do not, in their incredibly degraded state does not mean Israel can starve Gaza. It does not mean Israel can commit war crimes with impunity. It does not mean Israel can or should corrupt its own soul in pursuit of something that at this point is not even defined any longer. It's also worth saying that that logic goes both ways. There have been deals from Hamas that Israel could have taken as well. If Israel would withdraw from Gaza, if it would accept a permanent ceasefire, Hamas would release the hostages. This is partially why you see protests going on in Israel right now, where the families of both the hostages who have been released and those who remain in captivity are demonstrating and leading demonstrations against the Netanyahu government. Because they don't believe, and I don't believe and nobody believes that Benjamin Netanyahu's goal is to get the hostages home safely. It isn't the goal he has chosen, which I, and virtually everybody who studies war or talks to people who studies war, said was impossible from the outset. Was the total and complete destruction and eradication of Hamas not just as a governing authority or as something that poses effect to Israel, just as a thing that exists. They have not been able to do that. They will not be able to do that. They have not defined what doing that even looks like or how it will be measured or who will certify that it is done. And so right now, the thing happening that endangers huge numbers of civilians in Gaza and the hostages is what Israel is doing. And for Israel to be just continuing to devastate Gaza and kill this number of children and civilians and have hundreds of people killed lining up for aid. I mean, it is a moral atrocity. If people think I am focusing on Israel, I am. Israel is the actor that America has a deep relationship with. Israel is the actor that we are sending arms to, that we are sending money to, that we are supporting in this war. These are our arms doing this. I am a Jewish American with a connection to Israel. So what they do is meaningful to me. What they do affects what it means to be Jewish in the world, what it will mean for my children to be Jewish in the world. So I also care about Israel in a way that I don't care about other countries and other places. I Don't think that is always a thing. Israeli's love, but nevertheless. And Israel could decide right now to just let the food through. This famine could end with the word of one man. If Benjamin Netanyahu and his government wanted there to be enough food, there would be enough food tomorrow. I think what Israel is doing now is an atrocity, right? It is heartbreaking. It needs to stop. And I don't think we know what its consequences will be in the long run. I think we understood in the years after 9, 11 that enraging mass populations over a long period of time. Sometimes it takes a long time to return to you, but it often does return. And the abandonment of that learning, the complete letting go of the idea of what happens if you traumatize entire societies and turn them against you in the most fundamental way and you create huge numbers of people with a burning desire for vengeance in their hearts who lost mothers and fathers and siblings and cousins and friends and teachers and grandparents. I don't know how you look at this. And you don't think. You don't just look to the future with a kind of horror.

Claire Gordon (17:54)

You called it an atrocity several times. You did not call it a genocide. You did a whole episode that sort of explored that question and why you don't use that label. A lot of the reaction to that episode, particularly on YouTube, was, of course it's a genocide. Obviously, this is a genocide. Almost offended that you would do this episode at like, this, this point in time, this long into the war. And also just people who thought having this whole debate about terminology was beside the point. How do you take that reaction?

Ezra Klein (18:35)

So the labeling of this as a genocide began very, very, very soon after October 7th. And it began at a time when I think that was obviously the wrong term. As I've said before on the show, there is no country in the world with a capable military that would not have responded to something like October 7th with unfathomable force. If some country bordering China went in and massacred 50,000 Chinese citizens, if there was a government or terrorist group or drug cartel operating in Mexico that came in and killed 50,000Americans, the idea that there would be some very tightly targeted counterterrorism response, even if that might be the wise option, is fantasy. The very, I think early use of the term genocide, I think, reflects two things. One is that, as I was saying earlier to a lot of Palestinians, this is part of. It's not discontinuous. It's continuous. What we are seeing now is part of an ongoing effort to Erase the Palestinians, the people make their lives unlivable, make the places they live unlivable.

Claire Gordon (20:01)

Do you understand it that way?

Ezra Klein (20:03)

I understand Israeli society as split with there being a part of it that does favor functionally expulsion of the Palestinians and wants to achieve it by making their lives completely miserable. Do I think at high levels of Israeli politics they think that they are going to somehow move all the Palestinians out? I don't really. I don't think they're actually planning that far forward at all. I think Netanyahu lives for the next.

Claire Gordon (20:34)

Day, or not necessarily just moving out, but to expand the settlements in ways that just like Palestinian life is just completely controlled and constrained and do the same thing in Gaza.

Ezra Klein (20:47)

I think at least in the west bank, that has been the strategy. But again, I almost think calling it a strategy that is being coherently applied is a little bit misleading. But they have been trying to make their lives miserable and the hope is that at some point they will figure out a way to really take over what they call Judea and Samaria. I think that the faction that wants actual peace and still believes in any kind of coexistence in a peaceful way has become very small. And then I understand the largest faction in Israeli politics as fundamentally disinterested. They just don't want to think about the Palestinians. Their intention, at least prior to October 7th, was not expulsion. It was not peace, it was not make their lives miserable. It was not make their lives better. It was don't think about them at all. Israeli politics is like any politics, very, very fractious. Like think about our own politics. Gaza, nobody was thinking about building settlements in, in any serious way a couple of years ago. There is no set of plans being debated. It's not like you have the far right putting up their plans for what should happen in the west bank and Gaza. And then the center has its plan and what remains of the left or the liberal side has its plan. There is still no what used to get called the day after plan in Gaza. It's not just that. I think Israeli society, to the extent it has decided, at least under Netanyahu, it is just going to do occupation for a period of time. But that's never been debated. What it looks like has never been described to the Israeli people. What will be the governing structures of that occupation? Who's doing it? Nothing there is decided. It is a society that has on some level decided just not to think about a future horizon here.

Claire Gordon (22:41)

So then how much does the intent matter versus just the effect?

Ezra Klein (22:44)

I think that's a good question, I guess, to go back to the question that you asked me or that some of these listeners asked me, the reason I stay away from the word and have on the show genocide is that I think from very early on, there has been sort of two different ideas there, or maybe more than that. One is a kind of political project, which I understand and I don't think is without legitimacy to change the meaning and the global understanding of the Israeli state and what it wants. The Jewish state is born of the crime that leads to the word genocide, Right? The Jewish state is born of the Holocaust. For Israel to then become the first state in history to be held accountable or understood as, you know, under the international law as it forms, the first state in history to be accused of and convicted of genocide would profoundly change what it is legally. It doesn't change actually anything. And this is sort of the other weird side, I think, of this conversation. What is different if Netanyahu gets convicted of genocide versus crimes against humanity versus war crimes? Nothing. They carry the same penalties in many ways. Has there been some different level of international protection for the Palestinians because of the preliminary findings around this? No, there has not been so much. You have this legal definition and legal structure on genocide that has one set of meanings and is much broader than what was entailed in the Holocaust. And then I think you have a political effort that has, I think the term people used to be trying to use here as apartheid, that was a question like, could you make people globally see Israel as an apartheid state? Apartheid being in recent modern history, one of the worst things a state has done, I think largely speaking, that effort has succeeded, and I agree with it. I think Israel does run an apartheid.

Claire Gordon (24:55)

I feel, interestingly succeeded in the last two years. I remember us doing episodes soon after October 7th and apartheid feeling like, you know, charged language that.

Ezra Klein (25:06)

I mean, it is charged language, but.

Claire Gordon (25:08)

More editorially sensitive language that might be right.

Ezra Klein (25:11)

And so, yeah, so now there's this question of genocide. And for those who just want the label genocide applied to Israel, they can apply that label to it, right? I'm not here to stop anybody, but the question of, to me, what genocide is, where it came from, and the incredible historical tragedy that Israel is now plausibly guilty of it, tracing that story from its beginning to where it's going. I mean, to me, that carried a lot of force to others for whom it. To them, it's more settled. I mean, fair enough, right? What I try to do on the show is give people a space in which to think about things. I think, as, you know, as somebody who watches the inbox, there's almost no complaint we get more often than, how come you just let that thing stand?

Claire Gordon (26:15)

Or your vocal fry or my vocal fry?

Ezra Klein (26:18)

How come you just let that thing this person said stand? And the answer is, the show's not here to do your thinking for you. The show is here for you to think in. And I will push and get the answers that I think are the person's real answer. But once I understand what they think, my point is not then to come in with the editorializing that wraps the whole thing in a bow. And it's interesting. My perception of episodes is often very different than the audience's. What I think a person said, what I think their views obviously really are, are sometimes very different than what people here. I think that's a good thing about the show. I think it should be open to interpretation. And there's something very head spinning about having Khalil on one week and you get a New York Post cover, you know, deport him now. And my inbox is full of people saying, how fucking dare you? How dare you have him on. How dare you let him say that? And then the next week, it's like, from the other side, you know, how dare you explore, like, even the question of Jitsa. How dare you not just, like, take it all settled. There's not really a way right now to create work that everybody who you might want to reach can hear.

Claire Gordon (27:43)

Yeah, I mean, you have a wildly impossible job in these interviews, but I will say you do push back differently in different conversations. And the episode that got a lot of reaction before Mahmoud Khalil, which then got even more reaction, was the Yoram Hazoni interview, which, interestingly, was not about explicitly about Israel, Palestine, although he is implicitly. It's quite a implicitly. It sure was. And a lot of the reaction that we got was sort of circling the idea of how you heard his theory with regards to race. You said at one point in the interview where he's making the point that national conservatism is not racialist. And you said, like, I take that point, but trying to restore and then maintain. I think his language was like Anglo Protestant core in the US and give each country its core smacks a little racialist. How do you understand the line that he is drawing there?

Ezra Klein (28:49)

I think that in this case, I think there are certain words people feel like if they can get the word agreed on, then the word holds so much power, it will somehow win the argument. For them, and it won't. So I don't think Yoramuzzoni's project is actually racialist because I understand it's actually fundamentally an Israeli project. I first met Yoram when I was on my reporting trip to Israel and I went to see him. And I remember thinking after I had coffee with him that I really understand better the national Conservative project being in Israel and understanding it's imported from there because Israel has become such a fundamentally unified ethnostate, increasingly right wing ethnostate.

Claire Gordon (29:36)

So how does that make it not racialist?

Ezra Klein (29:39)

It's not racialist. This is.

Claire Gordon (29:41)

What can we define racial?

Ezra Klein (29:42)

Jews are not. They're not all Ashkenazi Jews.

Claire Gordon (29:46)

I think they see Palestinians as a different race.

Ezra Klein (29:49)

Maybe they do. But you cannot look at. You can say Israel's a lot of things and Israeli Jews are a lot of things, but they're not one race under any definition we have of races. Right. Again, people, I think, who are.

Claire Gordon (30:00)

I think they're redefining and I think they have a different framework for race than we do in the US I.

Ezra Klein (30:04)

Don'T think they do. But see, I feel like this is the thing that people think that if you can define it as racialism, then it is religious, it is maybe ethnic in some way, but the idea that Arab Jews coming from Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, and Russian Jews and Eastern European Jews, and for that matter Ethiopian Jews, which are sort of separate and in some ways come with different complications in our society, the idea that that's a racialist project, I mean, the conflict with the Palestinians I don't even think is fundamentally racialist either. It's about land. I don't think that the issue has to do with a view of race and Palestinians. It very much has to do with the politics and supremacy over land and the desire to have full dominance and Jewish supremacy in that land, it's still.

Claire Gordon (31:07)

About a hierarchy based off of ethnicity with the religious component.

Ezra Klein (31:11)

Okay, so fine. But now we're just defining it away from being. I think certainly what in the American terms would be racialist?

Claire Gordon (31:18)

Okay, yeah. This feels like now we're getting lost in semantics. But you understand that his theory is about privileging certain ethno religious groups over others that don't necessarily map neatly onto skin color.

Ezra Klein (31:34)

I think this comes through very clearly. I mean, I am happy to say I don't think it's fundamentally or in all of its incarnations going to be built around race, but in every place, it's going to be built around something that something is going to be, in my view, probably very, very, very problematic. Maybe that will map onto race or what we think of as race or what we have decided to call a race. Maybe it won't. Maybe it's going to be some mixture of races, mixture of race and religion, mixtures of race and religion and history, or just of history. It can become many, many different things. But it's going to be about a core group that they have somehow decided is the real group. And that group is supposed to maintain a sufficient level of dominance and control over society. And in I think Yoram's view, when that group loses its control over society, loses sufficient numerical majority, whatever it might be, that society, its cohesion, its unity, begins to dissolve. My view, I think articulated pretty clearly in that episode, is that that's wrong. And one way you know it's wrong is that the strongest country in the world does not abide by that. And that in fact, the states and particular parts of this country that have driven so much of its success, innovation, its genius, New York, where we are right now, California as another, Texas is another, are the places at least abide by that approach. You have to, I think, also understand Hazoni as in a debate, that when he was building these ideas, it did not look like he was winning in Israel. And now Israel has given into itself as a right wing ethnostate. And Hazoni and ideas like his are completely preeminent. They have very little challenge. But it wasn't always like that. So he's been in a fight in his country that's more like the ones we're in in this country. And right now the other side of that fight is functionally lost. And I think that if you look at the way Zionism has been adopted as an almost aspirational identity by the American right wing, if you look at sort of the American left for a long time, going back way before October 7, identifying with the Palestinian CAUS was a way of identifying with oppressed peoples around the world. It had long been much to the confusion of many American Jews, it had become part of a basket of left causes. You know, you would go to a, go see a protest about the Iraq war and you would see a bunch of Free Palestine posters. But Zionism wasn't quite like that. And now Zionism, which I've now seen and talked to people on the right who they've adopted it in a way they really hadn't five years ago. To them it's an embrace of a kind of strength.

Claire Gordon (34:41)

Do you think IZZONI has played a big role in that.

Ezra Klein (34:43)

I don't think specifically him. I think this has much more to do with, I mean, maybe some, maybe the natcon project has played some role in it. But I also think that it has been part of this moment in which there is a, maybe a fetishization or a belief that.

Claire Gordon (35:03)

Weird time to do it.

Ezra Klein (35:04)

No, but it's not actually. It's not a weird time to do it because I think if you look at people like Elon Musk, J.D. vance, in a weird way, Fetterman, but a lot of different political figures across who I think are on the right of center of the spectrum in different ways, there's a sense that, I mean, there's not really a different way to put it than this, that American society became liberalized and feminized and it has lost the appreciation of strength, of martial ambition, of aggression, of territorial expansion that were what made this country great, its frontier spirit, it's expansionist spirit. There's a reason Donald Trump is fixated on territorial expansion. Canada, Greenland, et cetera, maybe Gaza sometimes when he's telling it. And this sense that what made countries great in the 18th and 19th, the early 20th century was somehow pushed to the side by. It wouldn't have been called this then, but wokeness, neo Marxism, whatever the sort of enemy du jour is. And what we've been left with is these countries denuded of their strength because we're now just countries of lawyers and bureaucrats and people telling you why you can't do anything. And we're terrified of risk. And even words cause us harm and words are violent and we need safe spaces. Right. It's all part of a generalized sense that America became soft. And Israel sits for many of these people now as an example of a hard country, a country that did not become soft, that is rich and highly educated. And I mean, the Israeli stock market has been doing amazingly, right. Israeli tech companies are very, very strong. And the people serve in the military. And when they were attacked, even the.

Claire Gordon (37:16)

Women serve in the military.

Ezra Klein (37:17)

And when they were attacked, they destroyed the people who attacked them and now have decapitated Hezbollah and bombed Iran. And so the meaning of both, I mean, there's a meaning around Palestine, but there's a meaning around Zionism that has expanded. Now that's not just about the ethnostate, but it's about the Marshall State. So I think you have to see some things going on here. They're not really about the Israel, Palestine conflict. They're about what kind of country we were, and people wanting to go back to that thinking that we actually made really profound wrong turns in the 20th and 21st centuries and that Donald Trump, with his very 19th century approach to everything, is bringing us back to the world and attitude that fostered our greatness and the cruelty that is part of it. I mean, there's a reason you have this attack on empathy as a concept.

Claire Gordon (38:13)

Can a woman ever be president, Ezra?

Ezra Klein (38:15)

Yes, I think so. But you're gonna have to beat this stuff back.

Claire Gordon (38:21)

That's a nice segue to American politics. Move away from Israel, Palestine. Put that to bed. All right, onto what Democrats should be doing right now. This question is from Brenton P. Lately, there's been debate on the left about whether Democrats should continue playing by the rules and acting with restraint or adopt a more aggressive scorched earth approach similar to Trump's style. Is it time to take a tougher stance and push the issues Democrats care about? For example, should they consider expanding the Supreme Court, accelerating the transition to green energy while imposing stricter regulations on fossil fuels, or withholding federal medical funding from states that restrict abortion access? These steps might seem drastic, but given the current political climate, some argued that the traditional approach is no longer effective. What are your thoughts on this? I would add to that question about the current seeming race to the bottom on cravenly political gerrymandering that Texas started.

Ezra Klein (39:18)

So I think you have to take these in different pieces. I am very much of the view that if Texas and other red states are gonna do this kind of gerrymandering, that the blue states are gonna have to respond in kind and that the hope for end of this is that people get fed up with gerrymandering and we end the practice nationwide. Somehow or another, that's a hopeful end. It is. But there's no other approach right now, this idea that you can unilaterally disarm while the red states are gerrymandering their way to some kind of attempted permanent majority in the House. You can't do that. I mean, if you look even at just basic game theory, oftentimes in these sorts of dilemmas, the optimal theory is what's called tit for tit or tat for tat, if you prefer that you do what the other side does. And when the other side changes, you also change. But the idea that you can just let the other side run roughshod over you, that doesn't work. So I think what Newsom is doing is the right thing, not because anybody on the left wants this to be the place we end up. But you can't just hand over control to the people who want everything to end up in a terrible place. It's very, very, very unfortunate. Life sometimes gives you bad options and you have to choose the best of them. I think the thing elsewhere on that list actually reflects questions that we have to think about not just as politics. Right. There's the way the questioner asks that question. The other ways aren't effective. Well, your way might not be effective either. Right. It was very ineffective in many ways for FDR to try to pack the court, though some people credit it with kind of cowing the court. It seems here to me that Donald Trump cowed the court somewhat. This will be brought up or explored in a future episode. But the court, I thought they would kind of give Trump 20ish percent of what he wanted in order to avert a showdown. I think they're giving him 60 or 70% of what he wanted. It might play out very differently under Democrats. I don't know the answer to that, but I am not, and I never have been against efforts to remake the court. I would definitely put term limits in place, not because I think you need term limits, but because I think you actually need retirement ages in politics at this point. And so for the court, I would like to see 12 year terms so you don't have this absolute insanity around lifetime appointments where you're just waiting for people either to die or to retire strategically. And I do think you have a gerontocracy problem that has gotten worse on the left, by the way, among the Democratic Party, right? You look at who are the elderly members of Congress who have died just in this election cycle, and it's Democrats. I mean, the disaster. You can really tell the story of American politics in Democratic retirements that did not happen. What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had retired in 2013 when many of us, myself included, wrote pieces saying please retire, like Democrats are going to lose the Senate in 2014 and you have no idea what will happen after that. Please retire. And we got howled at by people saying, how dare you say that. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an American hero and she did incredible damage to democracy. There's a very, I think, reasonable argument that if Trump had not had that open seat to promise to the evangelical right, he would not have been able to build the alliance that helped him win what was in 2016, an incredibly close election. And even if you then say Trump still wins in 2016, at least right now you have a 5, 4 court, not a 6, 3 court, then obviously Joe Biden. You can't run the counterfactuals, but I think that retirement ages would make a lot of sense. Then there are other things that wouldn't. I think a place where Democrats have to be really careful is wielding incredible power to do very unpopular things does not make you politically strong. And so being attentive to and aware of public opinion is meaningful here. It's particularly true, by the way, when they have the disadvantage they do in the Senate. Right. The Senate is built to overrepresent rural voters and states with a lot of rural voters and small states. And that just means that in order to maintain any kind of majority in the Senate, Democrats have to win. I mean, I've seen different estimates of it, but called they need to win something like be overperforming by 4 to 6 percentage points, which is quite hard. And so, you know, right now, if they're going to take back the Senate, they need to win in places like Ohio, Kansas. That's become very, very difficult for them. I think people want to see you fighting, but you have to pick what you're going to wield power on thoughtfully. Gerrymandering is unpopular. The amount of money spent on politics is unpopular. Wielding power incredibly aggressively if it makes you horrendously unpopular and you already have a disadvantage in the House and Senate is not a great strategy. So I do just. The only cautionary note I'm offering here is it's fine to be on some level ruthless, and there are many places where I'd like to see a lot more ruthlessness from Democrats. But that cannot become an excuse for not thinking strategically about where the country is and how to meet it or how to lead it.

Claire Gordon (44:48)

Our last ama, I was just remembering was basically the week your book came out.

Ezra Klein (44:56)

I remember that.

Claire Gordon (44:58)

Exciting. It was exciting days for you.

Ezra Klein (45:00)

Abundance available anywhere. You might want to buy a book.

Claire Gordon (45:03)

Or an ebook and a lot of people have.

Ezra Klein (45:04)

Or an audiobook.

Claire Gordon (45:06)

Where is it? Is it still on the charts?

Ezra Klein (45:07)

It was 21 weeks, which is pretty fucking cool.

Claire Gordon (45:09)

All right.

Ezra Klein (45:10)

I don't think I would have seen that coming.

Claire Gordon (45:12)

So just to start off, like, what's been the most exciting thing for you in terms of seeing these ideas get embraced different places?

Ezra Klein (45:19)

I think the fact that they've actually gotten embraced different places, that legislation is moving in different parts of the country that is abundance oriented, that I'm hearing from the politicians moving it, that the book has been a permission structure for them, a spur for them, a way of thinking about things for them and also to my surprise, how big of a role it's playing in other countries. So abundance, the book has become just a big deal in the UK where it's become a big book on Downing street in Canada, where, you know, Mark Carney's build baby Build agenda has been very aligned to it. I'm not saying we were the inspiration for it, I don't think we were. But it's. We know that a lot of people in that government are reading the book in Australia. It's been talked about a lot and there have been these articles about how it's become super popular in the Australian government. It's been really interesting to see a book that was very rooted in American politics for me, somewhat in California and New York and some other big blue states. I wouldn't have written the book the way I did. Me and Derek wouldn't have written it the way we did if we didn't think that the problems generalized. But the degree to which people in other places where I don't know their problems and I don't know their politics feel the problems generalized has been very, very exciting to me.

Claire Gordon (46:30)

Is there a particular part that you see people mostly grabbing onto or is being most immediately reflected in the performance?

Ezra Klein (46:36)

People are grabbing on much more, I would say, to the critique of how highly bureaucratized liberal governments work and then fail to work. They're grabbing much less than I had hoped and this might be my failure as a promoter of the book's ideas. They're grabbing on much less than I had hoped to the idea that abundance is very much about how do you build a goal oriented liberalism as opposed to a process oriented liberalism. But a goal oriented liberalism requires you to think very hard about your goals. And one of the arguments of abundance is that we should be picking goals that reflect and lead the way towards much different levels of material prosperity. So in America, one of the big questions around that is housing, which is the biggest part of most working families budget. But we also talk a lot about energy. And one of the projects of the book is to move the energy conversation beyond just decarbonization and preventing the worst of climate change and to actual clean energy abundance, the idea of energy as a nucleus of wealth. And that our conversation about energy and the environment shouldn't just be about avoiding terrible things from happening, but making possible abundant futures that right now are almost unimaginable. Like that's very important to me. I mean there's a reason we have so much about science and technology in the book, right These are incredible ways to solve problems that don't even currently appear solvable. As somebody whose partner has some really difficult health conditions, whether or not medications and treatments appear for the things that afflict the person I love most, that's a really important question of healthcare policy to me. Health insurance that cannot buy treatments for my spouse because those treatments don't exist in some cases is worth a fuck ton less than health insurance that does. That can. And so I think we could do a lot more in terms of getting people to talk about a much more future focused form of liberalism. Right? A liberalism that imagines a future that is quite different and just in different ways in the present. We do a fairly good job of that in liberalism around redistribution, parceling out what we have very differently. And that's very important. I'm not an opponent of that. I'm not questioning that. Right. I want a better healthcare system than we have. I want a fairer tax system than we have. But there's a lot we need to do to make things that are not currently possible possible. We can only redistribute what we already have. What about what we don't yet have? What future do we want? What does that future look like? What does it have that we don't currently have? And then how do we work backwards to achieve it? That, I think, is something I'm still trying to figure out, how to more effectively inject into abundance discourse that politics.

Claire Gordon (49:19)

Is the art of making the impossible.

Ezra Klein (49:20)

Possible, but not just possible. Politics is the art of making the impossible conceivable. One of the things that worried me most about Donald Trump at the dawn of his second term was the alliance he had made with the tech right and with Elon Musk and other people who, in addition to being very, very rich and very, very powerful, are also fundamentally influencers around the future. Elon Musk is the most important futurist influencer alive right now. If you're like a young person and you're really into rockets, the person you're into was Elon Musk, if you look at what gets called the manosphere. But this sort of collection of podcasts, it's very futuristically focused. They're very interested in AI. They're interested in crypto. Crypto, right? Oh, yeah, Crypto's another big part of this, that alliance breaking down. Not the crypto alliance, which is still there, but the alliance with Musk. Trump's sort of destroying our scientific institutions and scientific funding. I don't think that that alliance is stable any longer. And that means that there is an opportunity for liberals to take back the future. But that requires developing a vision of the future that isn't just about how you don't like what current technology is doing. It also requires coming up with an agenda in which you put a genuine optimism about what is possible with technology and connect it to a genuine view about how to get that technology, govern it and distribute it fairly, and are able to talk about it in a way that is compelling and exciting to people. And that I don't see happening yet.

Claire Gordon (50:49)

We have time for one last question from Jess K. About your Monk debate experience. We aired the audio of that on our feed. Do you have a tale behind the scenes tale for us?

Ezra Klein (51:00)

So the Monk debate we had this debate on. It was me and Ben Rhodes from POD Save the World. And then on the other side, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage foundation and sort of an architect of Project 2025, and Kellyanne Conway. Here's what I thought was so interesting about that debate. I went into that debate very, very worried about how it would go. Not because I thought anybody would think that in Canada that America was at the dawn of a new golden age, but precisely because nobody would think that. And the debate was scored by audience movement. I thought we had an incredibly hard task. I didn't want the headline to be, Rhodes and Klein Lose Monk Debate to Robertson and Conway on whether or not America's in a new Golden Age. Even if what had happened was we had started with all of the audience agreeing with us, and because of that, because we had no targets or persuasion, we lost 2% in the end, we started with 85% of the audience agreeing with us and gained a point. So technically we won, which is good. Okay, I thought we did a pretty good job in that debate. But if I had been on the other side, I could have beaten us. And what I found so interesting was when I watched Conway and Roberts, just knowing I'm a good debater, I think. And the thing, you know, as a debater is you're trying to win people over. But here's like, the broader vision and, you know, the relationship with Canada is so important to America. There have been so many ways to do it. But to debate that effectively, you would have been needed to be willing to give ground to what the audience already thought and believed. You would have been needed to portray yourself as an honest broker in the conversation in ways that built your credibility with the audience. So then when you said, I understand why this looks kind of crazy to you, I understand that Right now at the beginning of this administration, we're in a period of massive disruption that tariffs are all over the place. You're furious. But what we're doing is resetting the system to achieve X, Y and Z. And here's how we're gonna do it and here's how it's gonna be good for us both. And I think I could have run that argument if I had needed to. And they didn't really run that argument. And I just felt that their argument.

Claire Gordon (53:13)

Was just like everything's been brilliant all the time.

Ezra Klein (53:15)

I don't wanna say literally that is what they said, but you can go back and listen to it. It's on our feed. When I listen to Robertson Conway, I just didn't feel like their audience was in that room and that my co debaters were very worried about someone from the Trump administration hearing them say something Donald Trump wouldn't like and that maybe some enemy of theirs or somebody was in the room or something would have reported it back and then they would have lost influence in the orbit. I felt like they were being watched.

Claire Gordon (53:48)

That's a weird feeling to be feeling.

Ezra Klein (53:51)

Look, I could be totally wrong. I don't mean to be slandering anybody. In a way I'm doing the opposite. I think they're both better debaters than they showed up as at night and in obvious ways. And there were just moments in the conversation where either these habits are so internalized now that they're just second nature for people who are in the Trumpist orbit, or there is a genuine level of fear that you will be caught on camera or on a tweet or something saying something that is negative about Dear Leader and it will get back to Dear Leader or the people around him and your enemies will use it to knife you.

Claire Gordon (54:28)

Do you see this as like having actually been in a debate stage and like felt that feeling? Do you now see this as an affliction more clearly across the Trumpian right?

Ezra Klein (54:37)

Well, I've always seen it as an affliction across the Trumpian right. It's been true for a very long time. It was less true in the first term. People are much more willing to criticize Donald Trump now in the second term. They're really not on the right and it has made them justify things they never would have justified before. It creates these weird dynamics. I think you saw this a bit with the Epstein files, although this was one of the first places you began to see cracks, but where the initial impulse was to endlessly blame Pam Bondi or Kash Patel. But you can never say, dear Leader, did anything wrong. The king is always getting bad advice. The king is never wrong.

Claire Gordon (55:11)

And the specific fear underneath that you think is like a, that he has the power to like, if he sends one tweet, he can make your life hell and send the troll armies out against you. But also that your kind of career within Republican politics just might be done.

Ezra Klein (55:25)

I've said this, I think, on the show before, but on the one level, there's a lot of room for dissent. In the MAGA coalition, you can have a very wide range of views, say, like on vaccines. I think, actually, frankly, a wider range of views than Democrats are currently able to have or were able to have in 2024, at least. Because in the MAGA coalition, the thing you cannot have a wide range of views on is one thing. It's a unidimensional test, which is Donald Trump is great. You can't have the wrong view on the 2020 election. You can't have the wrong view on Donald Trump. You can't be a critic of his. You can't be what Larry Summers was to like Joe Biden during the inflationary period where he was out there, like, really hammering them, but remained actually like somebody they talk to a lot and were trying to bring back into the tent. And dissent on policy and debate was like, much more open because it wasn't necessary to believe that Joe Biden was like the sun God, or at least to pretend you believe Joe Biden was sun God. And in the Trump coalition, you have to treat Trump pretty much like the sun God. And if it gets back that you're not, I mean, all power and influence flows in that world from him. If he comes out and says Heritage is a trash organization who's been screwing up MAGA for years now, created all these problems of 2025, that's basically the end of Heritage, at least as a viable player for a while. If Kellyanne Conway is on the outs with Trump world, that's it. What are you. If people don't believe you're close to and listened to by Donald Trump, then you're just some never Trumper. You're Liz Cheney. Who are you? And so the sense that people on the right now talk about Donald Trump like they are being watched by the Stasi is very alive for me. And I would see it. I mean, I think you see it if you turn on Fox News on any given day. But I just felt it to be true there in a way that I think if it wasn't true. They would have beaten us because in fact, you were never arguing for the people in the room. You were arguing for one person who you have no idea if he would even ever know this had happened. But if he ever did and he didn't like it, you were screwed. So that was what I took away from that debate.

Claire Gordon (57:48)

You said I wasn't allowed to end this episode on hope. But is that not hopeful, perhaps for the Democrats if they're up against a party that has to be so self censored?

Ezra Klein (57:59)

Oh, yeah. I mean, I want to call again. I don't think it's hopeful that we have this kind of coalition in charge in America. But if you're asking what are Democratic opportunities. Yeah. The structure of Trumpism for a talented Democratic candidate or set of candidates offers a lot of opportunity. Do I see people who seem to me to be taking it? Not yet. But, you know, we're not at the point where you have sort of individual voices rising up that much. Yeah, there's going to be a brittleness to the Republican coalition. You know, if you're J.D. vance and you want to be the nominee or you're Marco Rubio and Trump is pulling at 36% but will slit your throat politically if you say anything went wrong and he did anything wrong and yet he and his administration are viewed as pulsing symbols of corruption and incompetence. That's going to be a very hard election to win. Now, will the American people feel that way by then? I don't know. But it's going to create some problems for the right if Trump is not seen by the rest of the country as the Sun God he insists his own people treat him as.

Claire Gordon (59:08)

I think that's hope. How far we've fallen, Claire, and we're out of time. But thank you so much, Ezra.

Ezra Klein (59:17)

Thank you, Claire. This episode of the Ezra Clanche is produced by Claire Gordon and Kristin Lin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineers, Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota and Isaac Jones. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jack McCordick and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Semiluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times pending audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

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