Transcript
David Remnick (0:02)
From One World Trade center in Manhattan.
Alexandra Schwartz (0:04)
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
David Remnick (0:10)
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Ezra Klein is a political commentator and a self described policy wonk who's very much willing to get into the weeds of how government actually works. He hosts the political podcast, aptly called the Ezra Klein Show. Klein's first book is just out and it aims to tackle a huge question. The book is called simply why We're Polarized. And one of Klein's major themes here is that policies are now far less important to who we elect than who we identify with. In other words, that partisanship has become a kind of identity politics and it's very hard to change someone's mind about their identity. Ezra Klein talked about his book with Isaac Chotiner, who writes the Q and A column for the New Yorker.
Isaac Chotiner (0:56)
Well, I want to ask you about the Democratic race in the context of this book a little bit because you've essentially written this book and you're saying that things like health care, that's not how our political system is where it is because of the debate over healthcare. They're much larger issues of identity. And if you want to understand American politics, you have to understand these much larger forces that are going on. And yet if you look at the Democratic debate, there is a lot of very intricate policy debate about bills or issues that are probably not going to pass the Senate no matter what happens. It's certainly a contrast to the Republican primary of four years ago, where there was racism on the stage and people were yelling at each other and it was crazy in many ways, but in some ways it feels like a more accurate reflection of where American politics is. And I'm wondering if you think the Democratic debate, as good as it is to talk about policy and as important as it is, is actually sort of different from the main conversation about what's really going on in politics now.
Ezra Klein (1:56)
I don't think so. I don't think that Democrats debating policy, that actually goes very deep, in part because it's a party of very different groups. You have to sort of win people over through transactional policy. But the bigger point I would make here, and I say this as somebody whose whole career is covering policy, it's a mistake to think that policy is not a way people express identity. And in particular, Bernie Sanders is genius at this point. When Bernie Sanders talks about Medicare for All and the way he talks about Medicare for All, he's not just Making a policy argument. He's making an argument about values and who he is. And I think you see this in the way the Democratic policy debates play out. They're not really having like a clear debate over who has the idea that is most likely, given the composition of the U.S. senate and the House to pass right, thus, that you will get the most people health care. I mean, you will hear that from Amy Klobuchar, but that's not the way this thing has played out in its macro form. Bernie Sanders has made Medicare for all a kind of litmus test. It's about, are you a certain kind of person who believes a certain set of things about the world and is built on a certain set of value foundations? And so then when Elizabeth Warren, who I think is a good counterexample here, she as far as I can tell, believes in Medicare for All. She came out with a very detailed financing plan for Medicare for all, which he hasn't. But then she also came out with this transitionary bill which, which she felt would help solve some of these political problems. And the reaction to that among the Bernie Sanders wing of the party was not, oh, that's interesting, let's kind of go back and forth. The reaction was, oh, you're not a true, pure, die hard Medicare for all supporter. You will compromise. And when you see something like that, what you're seeing is policy operating at a symbolic level. It's not just operating as who has the best theory for how to get to Medicare for all. You are seeing a sort of identity argument play out about who is truly connected to this, who is truly, in this case, a Democratic socialist.