Ross Douthat Has Been ‘Radicalized a Little Bit, Too’

Am I too panicked about the future of American democracy? My colleague Ross Douthat thinks so. He points to research suggesting that voter ID laws and absentee voting have modest effects on elections and the reality that Republican state officials already have tremendous power to alter election outcomes — powers they did not use in the aftermath of 2020 and show few signs of preparing to use now. So I invited Ross on the show to hash it out: Am I too alarmed, or is he too chill? We also talk about his trio of recent columns trying to find a middle ground in the fight over how America understands, and teaches, it’s own history; as well as how his own medical struggles with treatment-resistant Lyme disease have shaped how he’s understood and covered the coronavirus. Mentioned: "Can Anything End the Voting Wars?" by Ross Douthat Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign by Frances Lee "What Progressives Want, and What Conservatives Are Fighting" by Ross Douthat "The Excesses of Antiracist Education" by Ross Douthat "Why a Patriotic Education Can Be Valuable" by Ross Douthat "Why the Lab Leak Theory Matters" by Ross Douthat "Use of Alternative Medicine for Cancer and Its Impact on Survival" by Skyler B. Johnson, Henry S. Park, Cary P. Gross and James B. Yu The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Recovery by Ross Douthat "The War That Made Our World" by Ross Douthat Book recommendations: Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson Champlain's Dream by David Hackett Fischer Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct by Abigail Tucker You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein, and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  So if you've been listening to the show, you know I'm a little worried about the Republican Party's turn against democracy. But look, maybe I'm being alarmist. There's a case for that. If you dig into the research, whatever you think of voter ID laws morally, they don't seem to have a huge effect on outcomes. These various laws Republicans are passing to politicize election administration, they don't really need new laws to do that. They have all kinds of powers that could be used or misused now. So maybe it's all just for show. Donald Trump, he's a waning force. The guy doesn't even have a Twitter account anymore. And so maybe the unique dangers he posed have passed. This isn't my take exactly, but it's close to my colleague Ross Douthat's take. He's had a series of

• 1:04Ezra Klein?

  columns arguing that people need to chill a little bit on the alarmism around elections and democracy. And I've known Ross a long time. We were bloggers way back when, and I respect him tremendously. So I wanted to have him on the show to hash it out. Am I being alarmist, or is he being too chill? We also talk about the fight over American history and how it is taught, which has been a big theme of his columns recently, and how getting treatment-resistant Lyme disease has shaped the way he views not just coronavirus, but the roiling debates around science and vaccinations, and journalistic certainty, and the culture of scientism, and much more. As always, my email for guest suggestions, feedback, book recommendations, [email protected]. Again, [email protected].

• 1:56Ezra Klein?

  Ross Douthat, welcome to the show.

• 1:58Ross Douthat?

  It's great to be back, Ezra. Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:01Ezra Klein?

  I want to start in our point of maximum disagreement and that we're going to move to less and less disagreement over the course of it. But let's begin with a fight over democracy. I've been on the side of people really alarmed about some of the voting bills moving through Republican states and much more than that, to be honest. The election administration bills and the apparent motivation for them. You've made the argument this fight is overheated, that these bills are the Republicans' way of moving on from 2020, not making it easier to do in 2024, or what Donald Trump wished they did in 2020. So make the case to me. Make me less alarmed.

• 2:35Ross Douthat?

  Okay, I'll try. I want to start by saying that I too am alarmed by the prospect of having Donald Trump as the Republican nominee in 2024, which seems to me quite likely and deeply undesirable. And I think that I can see scenarios not completely different from the scenarios feared by liberals, where that, in a worst-case scenario, leads to some kind of crisis in the House of Representatives and the Senate wrangling over electoral votes, right? I'm not here to offer you a case for like total blithe relaxation, Trump is in the rearview mirror, everything's normal again. I don't believe that. But I don't

• 3:17Ross Douthat?

  think hardly any of the bills that have been passed or seriously considered in state houses by Republican majorities are all that relevant to what would actually be the potential crisis or potential challenge in 2024. And I think you may agree with me in part about this, in the sense that I think at least some liberals have sort of come around to the view that things like voter ID provisions and sort of limits on the number of days of advance voting and so on, those kind of things, while liberals may be against them, don't seem to have a huge impact on turnout in elections, haven't had a huge impact in the last five or 10 years.

• 4:03Ross Douthat?

  Are not actually a sort of new Jim Crow that's going to install permanent Republican majorities. So then the secondary question is, are these bills also setting you up for situations where, you know, a Republican Secretary of State is going to essentially perform a kind of miniature coup after an election and say, we're going to disallow every vote cast in Fulton County in Georgia, and declare that Donald Trump is the winner. I don't think the provisions in question actually make that kind of thing particularly likely. I don't think a Republican Secretary of State is likely to want to do that. The scenario that's just sort of there, right, because it's there in the Constitution itself,

• 4:48Ross Douthat?

  is a scenario where state legislatures sort of overrule their own voters and assign or try to assign electoral votes in the name of some kind of nebulous voter fraud to the loser of that state's election. And that was what obviously Trump wanted state legislatures to do. So I think the only way you can get to a really plausible constitutional crisis is via the state legislature scenario. Do you think that's wrong?

• 5:18Ezra Klein?

  So I have some points of agreement and disagreement, but I want to draw out something at the end that I that I think I very much agree on, if you're saying the thing I think you're saying, which is that the fundamental vulnerability in the presidential system is the Electoral College for two reasons. One, as you say, there isn't an established mechanism by which you have to bind electors, right? You really could have electors come in and just do random things, or you could have states decide to, you know, replace their electors with people who will go in the way the state legislature wants them to go and betray the will of people. My counterargument to you on things like the voter ID laws, although probably not so much a voter ID laws and some of the things around mail-in balloting and other issues,

• 6:02Ezra Klein?

  is that I agree that they don't have a gigantic macro effect. But since 2000, we have had many presidential elections that in the Electoral College states, the hinged states, were decided by less than 100,000 votes and in some cases, in a couple cases, less than 25,000 votes. And you don't need a big policy to change 25,000 votes, 10,000 votes. And so these elections were not nearly as close in terms of the actual electorate, right? In terms of the number of people who voted. So, you know, little policies would cancel each other out if we did this on national popular vote. But the Electoral College allows for such weird things to happen and then pressure to

• 6:46Ezra Klein?

  be applied, you know, wherever it looks like a weird thing could have the most effect, that I get much more nervous. And so a lot of things flow, both in terms of new things being done, but also the existing vulnerabilities, in my view, from the Electoral College itself.

• 7:02Ross Douthat?

  I agree about the Electoral College, although I think it's partially also how the Electoral College interacts with the 1870s-era laws on the books for what to do in the event of a disputed election, which I think almost everyone agrees are unreadable and nobody knows what they actually mean and how they would cash out. I guess on the point about the specifics of the laws, I think it's reasonable to have those kinds of worries, but like if you look at a number of the Republican laws that have been up for debate in the states, in many cases, they're basically taking things like early balloting back to pre-pandemic rules, or they're finding sort of a place in between the pre-pandemic and the pandemic rules.

• 7:47Ross Douthat?

  And you can argue about whether, you know, maybe the pandemic rules were the optimal rules, but if your worry is that the rules create a situation where, you know, an extra 1,000 vote swings here and there, that's been true of every shift in election rules that you've had for many years. And it's not clear to me that saying, all right, we're going to strike a balance between our emergency provisions for early voting and our pre-emergency provisions for early voting is sort of a particularly...

• 8:19Ross Douthat?

  Gross injustice or unreasonable. All early voting date numbers are arbitrary. And I mean, I think even even the most aggressive pro early voting people don't think you should have early voting, starting like the moment the prior election ends, right?

• 8:34Ezra Klein?

  No, I think that's fair. And it's something I've tried to make an argument for in my columns, which is that you have to understand what's happening right now as a Republican Party trying to constrain how easy it is to vote. And a Democratic Party is also trying to change the rules in a way that I think to be correct and virtuous, but nevertheless, a difference of something like H R one passed to expand how easy it is to vote beyond where it has been nationally in this country ever. So like, there's a fight over, you know, where the the dial is here. Although one thing I would say sort of adding to my list of electoral vulnerabilities is that partisan election administration is a very strange quirk of our country. And I don't think it is a good idea.

• 9:16Ezra Klein?

  Like, I think you should have this up to up to some some players who are not direct partisans, you know, elected by in primaries of their own voters. But I do want to cash this out a little bit because the place where I think I get more nervous than you is that motivation matters. And what I see is a Republican Party where most House Republicans voted against certifying the election. I mean, Senate Republicans overall performed better in that. You've had a lot of state legislatures and a lot of state Republican officials, you know, siding with Trump. In the aftermath, there's efforts to primary people who were in key positions who did not side with Trump, like the Secretary of State in Georgia.

• 10:00Ezra Klein?

  And I mean, there's some level at which I take them at their word, right? That they are passing laws, including the election administration laws, meant to try to keep what they think of as a tremendous injustice from happening again. And when you have that ferment in the Republican Party. And when you have that as the place it seems to be going and the pressure that Donald Trump, but not only Donald Trump is still putting on it, like that's where my concern comes from. I can, I can talk myself in and out of concern about varying provisions. But in part because we have partisan election administration and weirdly close quirky outcomes because of Electoral College, having a Republican Party where at the very least a pretty large swath

• 10:45Ezra Klein?

  of it seems to be detaching from a neutral perspective on election administration and democracy just strikes me as pretty scary.

• 10:57Ross Douthat?

  Right, but so what do you think is the sequence of events here? Because the whole contested phase of the last election is like everything about the Trump era, a Rorschach test, right? Where you can look at it and say, as you're saying, oh, my God, look at all these Republican congressmen and state legislators who made statements or cast votes implying that they thought that the Pennsylvania state legislature should assign Pennsylvania's electoral votes to Trump. But you can also look at it and say, under pressure from an incumbent president, which Trump will not be in 2024, who controls the White House, controls, you know, the bully pulpit in the party completely, has actual power through the Department of Justice

• 11:41Ross Douthat?

  and other mechanisms to pursue and enforce his will, under all of that kind of pressure, no important Republican at a decision point whose decisions were actually meaningful to the outcome went along with Trump. And that starts in the Justice Department with Barr and Rosen and others. It goes down to the state level to Raffensperger and figures like that. It goes to the courts, to the people Trump himself appointed, and it goes to the leaders in the state houses in these states that had Republican majorities in the legislature, none of whom clearly wanted anything to do with a plan where they would actually cast some kind of vote to overturn their state's own voters.

• 12:21Ross Douthat?

  And to me, to get to a point where that can happen, you need it to be pre-established. So it's not enough. To say have, you know, a couple of people get primaried and more Trumpier figures come in. You have to have a group of people in leadership in Michigan or Georgia or Arizona, who are pre-committed to the idea that the legislature can assign electoral votes. Because if they aren't, then what happens is the state votes and the politicians in that state are still, you know, affected by public opinion in that state. If you're a state leader in a state that just voted for Joe Biden, your future career is going to be in the balance if you become the guy

• 13:06Ross Douthat?

  who leads the charge to overturn the election. So to me, again, I'm not saying that it's not a concerning situation, but to me, where I go to like an Ezra Klein level of alarm is if in 2022 and then in 2023, you have the replacement of all these state house leaders by guys saying, next time, if there's any evidence of voter fraud, we're just putting in the electors ourselves. If they're pre-committing, then that's a crisis in the making. If they're just saying, though, we want to pass some voter ID laws in order to firm up people's faith in the elections, it's just still a big leap from that to, oh, guess what? We're going to like throw our careers away for the sake of Donald Trump,

• 13:49Ross Douthat?

  who just lost the election on a move that just goes to DC. Maybe doesn't result in his victory, maybe gets swatted down by the courts, we don't know. I want to see the state house leader who is pre-committed to that idea before I join you on the virtual barricades or whatever metaphor we're using.

• 14:07Ezra Klein?

  Well, yeah, the virtual fretting room.

• 14:10Ross Douthat?

  The fretting room.

• 14:11Ezra Klein?

  That's what. The fretting room. So let me offer a couple of versions of the scenarios that worry me. So one is simply, I look at this less as 2020 as an apex and more as 2020 as a trend line. 2021, further than I thought it was going to go. I mean, it wasn't out of the question to me that it went there. But if you had asked me to place my bet, I would have never bet that a majority of House Republicans vote against certifying the election. And you can call it symbolic, but symbolic votes create precedent and they reveal things about about players under pressure. Now, you you make the the completely true point that the key Republicans in decision points mostly behaved well.

• 14:55Ezra Klein?

  But I look at what's happening to them now. Brad Raffensperger in Georgia is going to be primaried. In Michigan, where I think things got closest to getting really weird, where there was a board that was considering not certifying the vote, the key Republican who ended up killing that initiative, he got replaced, like they took him off the board. So I look at stuff like that, I'd say, OK, this trend line is getting worse, right? I mean, it went far and some of the key people who stopped it from going further, they're not being celebrated as heroes, they are being cast out of the party. Liz Cheney, right, who refused to drop the idea that a lot of Republicans had acted dishonorably. She's no longer a member of leadership.

• 15:39Ezra Klein?

  And you could say it's because she was being an irritant, not because she believed the election was rightly decided, but that's telling. So, OK, so you put those things together. And then the question to me is, what if you get in a murkier scenario even than we had in in 2020? 2020 was a pretty big decision for Biden overall, right? It got close in some key October college states. I mean, it was decided by just a bit over 20,000 votes in them. So that's unnerving. But in terms of the overall popular vote, Joe Biden took this one home. But imagine the 2000 recount playing out here or a situation where it was just Michigan. And for whatever reason, people were more willing to believe that that was a strange

• 16:23Ezra Klein?

  or murky result, that it is the combination of where it looks to me like the Republican Party is going, and then our history in this country, and then things like the Electoral College, it's supercharge it, of having very, very, very close elections that sometimes happen under some chaos because we don't have uniform election laws, we don't have uniform election administration, we don't have best practices in terms of keeping a paper record of all the ballots and all the rest of the things one might worry about, that it's not hard to imagine some genuine level of confusion. And then it looks to me like you're getting sort of like not the pre-commitment of we're going to throw

• 17:03Ezra Klein?

  out the election if our guy doesn't win, but certainly a moving of the players into place where, at the very least, the people who stood up are not being treated as the future Republican Party wants to see.

• 17:18Ross Douthat?

  Some of this is the unique case of Trump, right? That like Trump has a sort of had a total shamelessness that no prior nominee of either party had shown, a mix of self-interest and lunacy and paranoia and all of these things. And I have at least some hope that you have a sort of delegitimization process happening from below, but you also, what happens at the elite level also matters. And if you replace Trump with even the Trumpier potential future Republican nominees, I'm not sure the dynamic of 2020 is at all, at

• 17:59Ross Douthat?

  all the same. And also, 2020 is a year of massive street protests, the worst pandemic in 100 years, and various other things that would lead one to expect it to be maybe a spike rather than just one more mark on a trend line. I keep issuing caveats that I don't think you're wrong to be concerned, but I'm just trying to play my part here as the Ezra Klein reassurer. There's also a dynamic here where

• 18:26Ross Douthat?

  It wasn't Republican areas that were preparing for street protests in the event that Trump won the election in early November. It wasn't Republican areas that were boarding up businesses and all of these things. One scenario, I think, that is imaginable to me as someone who's not a liberal in regards liberal arguments here with maybe a little more skepticism is a scenario, yeah, where it's like a Bush v. Gore scenario, where under constitutional rules, the Republican wins, and the pressure that has built up across multiple eras of Republicans winning Electoral College victories without national majorities finally bursts on the Democratic

• 19:09Ross Douthat?

  side, and you get an attempt to do a kind of color revolution in America. I don't think that's an entirely crazy reading of what some people on the left would like to see in the event that, like, Trump beats President, well, let's say President Harris, because I think that would be the more likely scenario for him to actually win outright in 2024. So in the event of a close election, a Republican president has the right to make legal arguments and go to the courts and do all the things that Trump did. In a Bush v. Gore scenario, that would not be sort of bizarre and norm-breaking in the way that Trump's actual arguments and his call for state legislature moves were.

• 19:49Ezra Klein?

  I totally agree with that, actually, and I'll say this as clear as I can. I think that if we are to have a rupture-level legitimacy crisis, I think it is as likely it comes from Democrats who think an election was wrongly decided as Republicans. I mean, I think these things have a complete ricochet tendency to them. I think there's still a lot of woundedness in the Democratic coalition over 2000. Which whatever you believe about what truly happened there, unlike 2016, where in general, the view was that Donald Trump won the election clearly in the key states, even if he lost a popular vote. I think a lot of Democrats feel they were robbed either

• 20:31Ezra Klein?

  truly or just because, you know, there were bad ballot designs in key parts of Florida from 2000. And with the Supreme Court, the way it is, I don't think 2000 would play out in 2024 or 2028, the way it did then, which is actually part of my like background level of alarm, which I would like to see the two parties like actually take seriously that election administration needs to work a lot better and things need to be more verifiable and that this is a genuine risk to the country. This could get really, really, really, really, really bad. But I don't see that at all. Instead, I see a bunch of things coming that are more likely to create that kind of outcome. Also, if we just have

• 21:12Ezra Klein?

  a continuation of the current trends where the Electoral College and the popular vote keep diverging, where that creates continued Supreme Court dominance for the Republican Party, where the Senate is getting more and more Republican, just because of the way the sorting is happening in the country, it is not a stable situation to have a party feel like it is continuously losing elections or at risk of losing elections by winning the vote.

• 21:39Ross Douthat?

  Well, but there's a pretty big difference, right, between feeling at risk of losing elections and actually losing elections.

• 21:46Ezra Klein?

  Yes, I agree. That's why it doesn't happen yet.

• 21:48Ross Douthat?

  Because the Democratic Party actually controls the government of the United States at the moment, right? It controls the presidency, it controls the House, and it controls the Senate. Now, you can say that in a perfectly just world, it would have 10 more seats in the House and an extra Senator or two, and Joe Biden wouldn't have had to sweat Pennsylvania, right? That's fine. But in fact, the Democratic Party controls all of government. And the real pattern of the last 14 to 16 years in electoral outcomes is not this sort of counter majoritarian consolidation by the Republicans. It's constant swings. The House of Representatives are the most representative body, you could say, swung

• 22:32Ross Douthat?

  in 2010 and again in 2018. You know, the Senate has swung repeatedly, the presidency has swung repeatedly. So the reason that the Democrats have not been able to sort of Consolidate their, let's say, 51 to 48.5 majority into something that can win more consistently is in part that they haven't been able to win the landslides that used to be the way that America was governed. And this is one of my hobby horses, but I'll just ride it for a second, right? The American system, as it evolved, basically, across the 20th century, was set up, not that anyone per se designed it this way, but it was very

• 23:15Ross Douthat?

  responsive to presidents and political parties, maybe especially presidents, winning like 55%, 54% victories, which then set you up to sort of govern at a like 55 or 60 vote or more majorities for your agenda. And part of what's happened over the last 20 years is that no one is able to win those kind of majorities. And so you have repeatedly presidents, Obama came closest in 2008, and in fact, did get the most done in certain ways as a result. But you consistently have presidents winning narrow majorities, as Bush did in 2004, say, or Biden did in certain ways this time, and trying to govern like FDR and LBJ and Reagan. And that just doesn't work. And that may be a case for some of

• 23:59Ross Douthat?

  the constitutional reforms the Democrats want to see. But I think having that history in mind, like, there's never been a moment in American history where parties have consistently won 50.5% of the national popular vote and then just sort of govern the way some liberals want to govern at the moment. It's just not part of 20th century American politics, certainly.

• 24:19Ezra Klein?

  And even more, I mean, I'll just back this up a little bit more, which is to say that it has never been this competitive. There's a great book by Frances Lee, the political scientist, called Insecure Majorities. And she makes a real argument that a lot of the polarization, a lot of the super intense campaign strategies, and a lot of the inability to cooperate in Congress comes from the fact that we do not have a consistently dominant party, which has been the norm through most stages of American politics. When you have a dominant party, the minority party has an incentive to learn how to work with them. But when you don't, when everybody's always on the knife's edge of taking back the House, taking back the Senate, taking back the presidency, then it's much more all out legislative war because you're trying to make them fail

• 25:03Ezra Klein?

  because then you're going to get into power next time. I talk a lot about this in my book, Why We're Polarized. But one thing I want to back out on that is that that's why, to me, like the 2000 scenario is scary. The two real points of worry for me at the national level are, one, because I think, and I have obvious sympathy for this view, that the Supreme Court's heavy Republican dominance reflects the counter majoritarian tendencies of the country. George W. Bush's victory in 2000 leads to him getting that second term, which leads to his appointments. Donald Trump's Electoral College victory in 2016. Of course, the Merrick Garland thing is a big wound for liberals in this.

• 25:44Ezra Klein?

  I'm not saying that like that is like against the rules of American politics. But if you had it come down to the Supreme Court in the same way, I think the liberal coalition is a tinderbox on that. The other one is a sort of House of Representatives tie that goes to state delegations there. But those are the two places where, when I think of what would create a legitimacy crisis on the left, where people might take something that, according to the rules or decision makers of American politics, like that's how the cookie crumbles, but would feel unfair at the level where you could get a color revolution style reaction, as you were saying, those are the two I really see.

• 26:22Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, and I think it reflects a certain curious feature, shall we say, of the moment where there's a lot of liberal discourse about the Republican Party as, if not a fascist threat, at least a sort of authoritarian threat to American democracy. But in reality, and this is something people on the left who don't share that view like to point out. In reality, the roots of Republican power are very clearly in the actual constitutional order. To the extent there's Republican countermajority power, it is constitutional power, and it is the Democrats imagining a dramatically revised constitution, which is not how, you know, in sort of 20th century terms, you imagine like, you know, an authoritarian menace emerging

• 27:06Ross Douthat?

  to overthrow the Constitution. But Republicans don't want to overthrow the Constitution in the slightest. They need it. And again, in the current alignment, where it magnifies their power by a couple of percentage points.

• 27:19Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, and certainly they need those features of it. I'm not a big believer that we're at imminent risk of Republicans overthrowing the Constitution. I do worry about power held constitutionally being used to choke off elections or create some of these administration problems, but that we sort of covered. But I want to go back to something you said a minute ago, because I do think this is another reasonable case for optimism, which is that what happened in 2020 reflected distinctive features of Donald Trump that other politicians do not and even cannot mimic.

• 27:51Ezra Klein?

  And I think you may be right in terms of the way he treats losing elections, like going back to him saying that the Iowa caucus that he lost to Ted Cruz was rigged. I'm like, this has been a real pattern with him that is not present in other leaders.

• 28:03Ross Douthat?

  The Emmys were rigged.

• 28:04Ezra Klein?

  The Emmys were rigged.

• 28:06Ross Douthat?

  I mean, there's been a lot of rigging.

• 28:07Ezra Klein?

  Lot of rigging, lot of rigging.

• 28:09Ross Douthat?

  Lot of rigging, Ezra.

• 28:10Ezra Klein?

  But I am struck by how many Republican aspirants now have remade themselves to look more, sound more, act more like Trump, when you know that it is not their true nature. The person I'll use here as the example is J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, big figure a couple of years ago, now running for Senate in Ohio. And you and I both know Vance, you probably know him better than I do, but he's been on the podcast before with me, I've talked to him a number of times. You know, kind of genteel, thoughtful guy, a venture capitalist for Peter Thiel, writes this book about actual cultural failings in Appalachian white communities and how a lot of it is an individual responsibility collapse.

• 28:55Ezra Klein?

  And as he's become more ambitious in Republican Party politics, he has just turned himself.

• 29:02Ezra Klein?

  In the weirdest, most awkward, most visible way into this copy of sort of Don Trump Jr. is almost the way I would put it. It's like constant owning the libs and super conflictual on Twitter. I'm curious what you make of him because he's a smart guy and he's reading the electorate and he has decided, it seems to me, that they want something very different than what he was. And that's been in some ways, one of the more unnerving signals of the coming campaign for me.

• 29:32Ross Douthat?

  So yeah, I mean, I know Vance, I guess JD, well enough that I wouldn't want to like, you know, do some sort of intense psychological reading. I'm going to offer some generalizations instead, if that's okay.

• 29:47Ezra Klein?

  Sure.

• 29:47Ross Douthat?

  I think in general, there is no question that Republican politicians have looked at Trump's combativeness, the desire to pick fights with not Democrats in general, but like, you know, the libs, right?

• 30:05Ezra Klein?

  Us, the New York Times.

• 30:06Ross Douthat?

  Us, the New York Times, yeah, New York Times. And as something that is in certain ways, the easiest part of Trump's sort of shtick to imitate, right? Because on the one hand, you can do it without being a billionaire, real estate mogul celebrity, right? And two, you can own the libs without going on long paranoid spiel about all your enemies within the Republican Party who have failed to steal the election for you. Figure like Ron DeSantis and so on, I think, has done very well in the party by doing this, by basically trying to separate out the most effective parts of Trump's own the libs stuff and run with it.

• 30:48Ross Douthat?

  So that is absolutely a sort of widespread political strategy that takes different forms. DeSantis is in government, right? I mean, he's running the state of Florida, so he can do it, he doesn't have to do it on Twitter. He can do it by doing something, attacking critical race theory, or, you know, his sort of anti Fauci shtick, right, is a good example of this, which he's sort of, you know, they're selling anti Fauci merchandise in the state of Florida. And in the Ohio Senate race, right? It's not like J D Vance is the only candidate doing this. I saw a story that, you know, Jane Timken, the model of an establishment Republican, has one of these absurd Donald Trump on a tank murals in her campaign headquarters. And Josh Mandell, who's always running for office in Ohio and is sort of the Trumpiest

• 31:33Ross Douthat?

  figure of them all, he does stuff on Twitter that the libs don't even notice. Or, you know, they notice and say, well, we can't pay attention to this because it's so transparent. Whereas, you know, maybe the Vance campaign is hitting the sweet spot where you get the lib anger and thereby leverage it for, for gain. So, one, there is a strategic element of trying to be Trumpy in the way that you go after liberals. That is a novelty of the last five years. There's also, though, a real radicalization on the right. The assumption that, well, because I, I'm not accusing you of this, but other people saying, well, you know, I met J D Vance five years ago when he was at Aspen and he seemed like such a reasonable guy and what happened to him?

• 32:18Ross Douthat?

  Well, you know, the Democratic Party moved substantially to the left. A lot of crazy things happened. Again, like we had massive street protests, pandemic turmoil in all kinds of institutions. A lot of stuff went on in the last four or five years. You know, the Kavanaugh hearing was an inflection point for some conservatives. And, you know, there's, there's been a general and, I think, sincere radicalization of a lot of people who fall or fell into, you know, an Ezra Klein's thoughtful conservatives camp in 2015. And, you know, obviously this hasn't happened to me because my livelihood depends on being

• 33:00Ross Douthat?

  a thoughtful conservative who, you know, who writes for a liberal readership. And so because of that, I am, you know, I'm sort of constrained and talk to my conservatives. Do you think it would have otherwise? Well, I mean, I think I maybe I've been radicalized a little bit too, but, you know, I'm not going to tell you all of my most radical thoughts. Some of it is a little more mysterious to me, right? I look at, looked at the Kavanaugh hearings and saw it as a case where I felt like I could see where both sides were coming from and the fact that he ended up actually being put on the court. That was not a like radicalization moment for me. I think some of the shifts in sort of internal left wing discourse and politics over the last year or two, maybe some events, you know,

• 33:46Ross Douthat?

  cost people their jobs in certain liberal institutions. I won't go into any great detail here, but some of that has had some kind of inevitable effect on me. Yeah, absolutely. I guess I'm just saying when there is both a performative element to Republican Trump imitations and also a sincere shift in how some conservatives think about the left and what it wants for America. Both of those things are in play in general.

• 34:37Ezra Klein?

  You wrote a trio of columns recently, and I think one of the things that has been a locus of radicalization, frankly, on both sides at this point, but for you, among others. And in your way, it's a trio of columns trying to find a middle ground, but it's around this fight over how we teach American history in schools and particularly America's racial history. And let me ask you a meta question about it. Why is this all happening now? The Critical Race Theory bills, like three Ross Douthat columns, like I'm talking to people about it. Why are we having this fight?

• 35:08Ross Douthat?

  Three Ross Douthat columns?

• 35:09Ezra Klein?

  In a row?

• 35:10Ross Douthat?

  It's really like a hinge. It's a hinge moment in our history.

• 35:13Ezra Klein?

  But there is a way. I'm always interested by the slightly mystical process by which something becomes the issue of the moment. So why the fight over American history now?

• 35:25Ross Douthat?

  I would say that its starting point is a kind of...

• 35:31Ross Douthat?

  Crisis within the mind of liberalism that starts in the Obama era. That's brought on by disappointment in the Obama presidency itself, which had, you know, sort of promised a kind of culmination of African American advancement and, you know, this sort of vague idea of a post racial future and instead led to Republican backlash and gridlock and, you know, through birtherism and other things, a sort of return of dark racial paranoias. All of these things, I think, led to a sense on the left that the

• 36:11Ross Douthat?

  kind of Obama's style of rhetoric around race was just not sufficient to the opposition from Republicans and the depths of racism in American life. And then connected to that was a sort of a larger sense of disappointment with, to use an overused word, a kind of neoliberal approach to racial uplift, right? Like you had this long phase that's now back in the rear view mirror where the idea was that like charter schools and education reform, this is bipartisan, right? That charter schools and education reform and these kinds of things were going to dramatically close racial gaps in American life. And somewhere in the early

• 36:53Ross Douthat?

  2010s, that didn't happen, or it became clear that that wasn't happening in the way that people had hoped. And so out of that too, you had this sort of search on the left for other alternatives. And that led sort of back into the more both pessimistic and radical arguments of people associated with, among other things, critical race theory, the word on the phrase on everyone's lips, right? It led to a sort of attempt at a deeper reckoning. And part of that was an attempt, and you really see this, I think, in Ta-Nehisi Coates' work, even before like the 1619 project comes along, but an attempt to sort of do more

• 37:33Ross Douthat?

  historical reconstruction, basically reconstruction is maybe the right word or the wrong word, I'm not sure, but to sort of essentially. deepen our understanding of the weight of slavery and in Coates's work especially segregation and its impact on African Americans and racial racial divisions today. Right. So that there was sort of this historical piece of it. There was a policy piece of it that showed up in Coates's arguments for reparations. And also in other sort of policy arguments, you know, you could fold in even like Cory Booker and baby bonds and these kinds of things into that discussion.

• 38:13Ross Douthat?

  And then there's the emergence slash reemergence, because all of these things have deeper roots of this kind of therapeutic anti racism that is definitely associated with like a Robin D'Angelo, also associated, I think, in certain ways with someone like Ibram Kendi, who you had on, who is officially arguing for a sort of structural vision of racism, but whose views I think sort of in their practical impact shade into this kind of therapeutic approach, like he has his book Anti Racist Baby for a reason. So all of that is there. I'm telling you a long story, but it's a long story. All of it gets turbocharged by George Floyd and the aftermath where people are sort of

• 38:57Ross Douthat?

  looking around for a narrative, a way to educate themselves, a way to define themselves as more racially progressive, and all of these arguments are there. And so there's a transformation that happens on the left that goes mainstream in a big way in 2020. And now you have inevitably critique and backlash manifest in, you know, state legislation, endless anti woke punditry and, you know, 50% of each of those three columns.

• 39:28Ezra Klein?

  There's a version of this argument where what is being argued about is ideas. And there's a version of this argument where what is being argued about is power of a very certain kind in this in this respect, which is to say that the power to center your historical narrative. I think there's something where the best versions of all these narratives have truth to them, not the worst versions, but the best versions. I mean, I certainly, I think it's not going to be a surprise. I'm very sympathetic to the 6019, you know, Tomasi codes. Like, I think that part of the American narrative is broadly true. Like, I have my quibbles with things here and there, as anybody will. But, but I think that the, the understanding of America's racial history is integrally in tension with

• 40:13Ezra Klein?

  its own ideas of itself, not a question simply of perfection, but a question of unending conflict is a true one, and that its reverberations remain is also very, very true. Of course, it is not the only story to tell about America, but sometimes I wonder if we're really having an argument over American history, or we're having really an argument over whose telling of American history is going to be included, and that the, the actual thing happening here is a fight simply over like, who gets to decide the curriculum?

• 40:45Ross Douthat?

  Right. But some of that is just an inevitable function of having a public school system in a democratic society, that the public school system has to be in some way, an extension of the will of the people. And, you know, just as liberals have anxieties about, you know, our democracy being undone by Electoral College shenanigans and Senate apportionment, on the conservative side, that manifests in a fear that things that should be under the control of actual voters are instead under the control of education bureaucrats who sort of do do a version of what you're saying, who have sort of an internal debate and decide, here's how we're going to teach kids not to be racist. And

• 41:28Ross Douthat?

  then suddenly it's just there in curricula without anybody in the wider public that theoretically controls the public school system having that conversation. So I don't think you can get away from Some extent to which this is a question that has to be settled through democratic politics. We don't have a national school system, so it's not going to get settled in national elections. It's going to get settled across local and state debates. All that's sort of inevitable. I think the question is whether, whether there's a zone between saying like, it's just a contest for power and we're just deciding, as the language has it, whose narrative to center, or whether you can say, whether it's Coates arguing about

• 42:11Ross Douthat?

  the true history of segregation, or the 1619 project, talking about, you know, the deep history of slavery, is there a way to incorporate those stories into a narrative that still fulfills a fundamentally patriotic function, which I think is a reasonable thing to want a public school system to do. And I think the answer is yes, in part because I think part of what is reacted to against in some of these historical revisionist narratives is not the substance of the facts that they're reporting, but the implications that are

• 42:52Ross Douthat?

  being drawn about like, the nature of the United States and our loyalty to it. And I think it is possible to tell a story about American life that does deep justice to the black experience and does justice through a heroic rather than deeply pessimistic like Coates in some of his darker moment story about, about America. Because the, the black American story is, is a heroic story filled with people triumphing after much suffering over injustice and helping to defeat slavery and segregation both. And I think it should be possible to fit that into a story where you're also looking at the founding first

• 43:36Ross Douthat?

  in a positive light before you turn to its dark side, where you're looking at Lincoln in a positive light, acknowledging his failings. And I think the desire to read the sort of lost cause narrative of the Confederacy out of that. Story is a good one. And, and I think you should be able to say, we don't need to lionize the Confederacy anymore. We can see the Confederacy as the betrayal and the, the insurrection. But we can make a distinction between how we think about Jefferson Davis and how we think about Thomas Jefferson. I don't even like Thomas Jefferson.

• 44:10Ezra Klein?

  So to step back on this, one thing that I wonder about as I try to pack my way through the thicket of this debate is how to figure out what is actually going on. Because, because you were talking a minute ago about you want public schools to be a reflection of the public will, which is of course true, right? If you're going to have public schools, they have to be on some level a reflection of the public will, but which public and America has an extraordinarily fractured education system. And sometimes it's hard for me to tell like what we are actually arguing about or how we would fix it, even if we were. So one of the things that I think drives everybody a little bit crazy in the debate is that it is filled with examples of just random

• 44:55Ezra Klein?

  school districts that are very far to each side, right? A school district in the South that is using, you know, very old textbooks that still have a real loss clause narrative in them. You know, maybe a school district in New York City that has like gone way into anti racism, but maybe hasn't thought through that curricula in any very deep way. But nevertheless, like, that's not a thing that is happening everywhere. That is a thing that if you are going to put schools under the control of different publics all across the country, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, then you're going to get stuff on the edges. And particularly in our highly nationalized, highly social media, like algorithmized environment is going to keep

• 45:34Ezra Klein?

  everybody in a very high state of outrage when my suspicion remains that if you checked out what's happening in most public school districts, history class remains pretty stayed and has probably moved a couple ticks over to the left. But there's not really a huge danger that like all across the country, Lincoln is about to start getting taught to second graders as a villain.

• 45:58Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably true. I think the question of what's actually going on in education is a sort of permanently baffling one, right? The times we did a really helpful feature a few years ago where we actually compared textbooks in California and Texas, like passage by passage, side by side, where you had basically the same textbook with slightly right wing edits in Texas and slightly left wing edits in California. And I think we need more of that. We need more journalism that tries to sort of assess, you know, actual curricula. But even that is limited to the extent that all of the curricula are filtered through teachers, administrators, interactions between students and parents, and, you know, and

• 46:41Ross Douthat?

  the reality that the scale of student attention to some of these things should not be overestimated.

• 46:49Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that has been striking to me, though, is that given that part of the problem is that there is this very fractured nature of curricula, that the Republican response has really been pretty heavy handed legislation. You know, I was looking at the Texas bills, which there was one that's passed, and there's an effort to now amend it to be like even more right wing. The one that passed did mandate that there were certain things in the curricula you had to read, you know, certain things from slave narratives and abolition narratives and certain cases and, you know, that white supremacy was a bad thing. And then there's an effort to abolish a bunch of that, you know, in addition to saying like

• 47:29Ross Douthat?

  Well, not abolish it. So that basically in order, in order to just say that they weren't defending racism, they put all of that stuff into the anti-critical theory or attempted anti-critical theory bill. That stuff is handled by normally, I think, by commissions, not by the legislature itself. So it's not that they're sort of removing rules that had existed for teaching these things. Many of those things are, I think, already in curriculum requirements that aren't set directly by the legislature. So it's not like they're abolishing reading Frederick Douglass in Texas high schools.

• 48:04Ezra Klein?

  No, they're not mandating you can't. It's just that they had just done a bill mandating that you should, and then they decided even that bill, which its main focus was critical race theory, you know, by mandating that you should on some of these issues, it would be going too far. And that bill hasn't passed, at least as of yet. So this is simply the debate happening. But I am struck by it, which is to say that I don't know, there's a little bit of a whiplash effect for me to watch this move from years of demanding free speech and a bunch of debates, which I'm not saying is necessarily how you want to run public education, all the way to bills that are reasonably broad in the way they are written. And certainly, if you are a random teacher who didn't fully understand its implications because you're not an education lawyer, can be a little

• 48:49Ezra Klein?

  bit chilling deciding what you can and can't teach. I mean, it seems like a pretty strong reaction.

• 48:54Ross Douthat?

  Some of these bills, some of these bills are bad. Some of them use language that if it came from a liberal bill, you would think was directed against inviting right-wing speakers to college campuses, right? Like, you could literally take some of the wording, put it in a bill that was used by the left to chill speech at Berkeley or something, and it wouldn't be surprising. And yeah, I think there's been a failure among well-meaning champions of this kind of legislation to actually devise a kind of model legislation for what they want to do. And the legislation we have, you know, there are some examples that are more plausible. But I think the impulse of the original Texas bill was a good one. It would be good to say, here's how we're not teaching about race, but here's

• 49:36Ross Douthat?

  how we are teaching about race and racism, right? I think that if you're doing this kind of legislation, that's what you should do. I do think, though, there is allowing for a certain amount of Republican hypocrisy. Like, there is a difference between fourth grade and college.

• 49:52Ezra Klein?

  I guess something I've been wondering about with all this is what does a settlement here look like? And does anybody have the power to broker it? Specifically because it's not something that is going to get settled through national legislation, and specifically also because you're just going to have very different kinds of legislation passing in different places. But I don't think people are happy here with a federalist outcome. And the places that are passing these laws are not like working out a compromise with each other. And so this just strikes me as a situation where the natural fracturedness of it is just going to create like kind of a constant, almost endless feeling that the-

• 50:35Ezra Klein?

  Country's sense of itself is in some state of dissolution.

• 50:40Ross Douthat?

  Which it well, which it is, right? Like that's accurate.

• 50:43Ezra Klein?

  Maybe we're maybe we're teaching that we're teaching the truth here then.

• 50:45Ross Douthat?

  I mean, yeah, I think having arguments over history education is a healthier way of working out the divisions in a divided country than having state legislatures overturn elections or plotting color revolutions. If you know, if you have an electoral college popular vote split, I'm much more here for the history wars than I am for the electoral college wars. And I think there are possible compromises available, but you know, again, like if you look at the original Texas, the original Texas law, right? Like saying, we should have kids read Frederick Douglass and we shouldn't teach them to divide into affinity groups by race

• 51:26Ross Douthat?

  and contemplate their toxic whiteness. It seems like a good compromise to me. Yes to Frederick Douglass, no to telling fifth graders about toxic whiteness. That's obviously an incredibly crude oversimplification, but sometimes in the context of curricula, it's not right. Like, I think it's good to take an example from my own kid's school, right? Like, they did a project this year where they researched a couple of slaves who lived at a house in Connecticut that's now like sort of a historical museum that had never before acknowledged the slaves who worked there. And so they did a project and there was a ceremony and they, you know, they learned about slavery through this through

• 52:07Ross Douthat?

  this local story and added something to Southern Connecticut history. That seems generally speaking, like a good thing. The work of Robin DiAngelo, insofar as it has filtered into educational forums, seems like a bad thing. Again, I'm being oversimplistic, but I think I think there is a zone like celebrating Juneteenth, which lots of Republicans just voted for, even if some conservatives have now turned against because it's like a, you know, a liberal coded thing. Celebrating Juneteenth in the context of a positive narrative about American progress, that seems that seems like a good thing. Arguing that the founding was a fundamentally in defense of slavery or something that seems like historically incorrect and a bad thing to be teaching kids.

• 52:52Ross Douthat?

  So I'm, I'm here for working your way towards compromise and of sort of narrative of America that goes further in incorporating the black experience, but retains a sense of positive connection to the American and human past. That's, that's what I'm here for.

• 53:35Ezra Klein?

  So I'm not going to make a, just a hard turn in the conversation to something that I've been really, really interested in, in your coverage in the past couple of months. Tell me about how your experience with Lyme disease has shaped your view of the coronavirus.

• 53:50Ross Douthat?

  So yeah, so I got Lyme disease about, I guess, six years ago now. And Lyme disease, for listeners who don't know about it, is a tick-borne illness carried by tiny ticks, endemic to the northeastern United States, parts of the Midwest and scatterings, including in California. So be careful, Ezra. But it's also an incredibly controversial disease because nobody is exactly sure how to treat its chronic form. Most people take a course of antibiotics and get better. Some uncertain percentage don't get better. There's controversy over to whether, whether to acknowledge that these people who don't get better still have Lyme disease itself, or whether they have something called post-treatment

• 54:33Ross Douthat?

  Lyme syndrome. So there's all kinds of controversy. And of course, I was one of the lucky people who got sick and didn't get better quickly and had to spend a lot of time doing a lot of unusual things in order to get to where I am today, which is like 95% better. And going through something like this is really interesting because it tells you a lot about

• 54:58Ross Douthat?

  The limits of medical consensus and official science, because those things have real limits. So I just wrote a book about this, which is, which is out in the fall. You can preorder it on amazon.com, I should say. It's called The Deep Places. The book ends with a chapter on the coronavirus experience. And first, I would say, just having gone through an experience like this made me more of a COVID alarmist early, in the sense that like, I was sort of more attuned to weird medical scenarios and possibilities than than some people. So that was the first way it affected things. But then it sort of put me in an odd

• 55:38Ross Douthat?

  position where, you know, I mean, I basically think the consensus on COVID, obviously, that it's, you know, a very bad disease, that we should, you know, not just let burn through our population and should, you know, now that we have vaccines, most people should get vaccinated in order to stop it. Like, that basic consensus is, is correct. But then it's been, I guess I see some of the things that have frustrated me about official medicine over the last six years of my life, get reproduced on both sides of debates over COVID, right? So on the one hand, you have this sort of like, trust the science, you know, spirit, right, that informs a lot of liberal commentary on this issue, where,

• 56:23Ross Douthat?

  you know, it's not just a sort of general trust in science. It's like, whatever, you know, whatever Anthony Fauci is saying today, anyone who isn't listening to that is a science denier and, you know, a tinfoil wearer. And if you have any skepticism about what epidemiologists are telling you, or what the CDC is telling you, well, you aren't an expert, you know, what do you know, you need to defer to experts and so on. That kind of spirit, I think, is completely wrong and doesn't, doesn't sort of reckon with just how easy it is for scientific authorities to get things wrong in general, let alone under conditions of, you know, total uncertainty with a novel disease, right? So that, I see that on the liberal side. And then, you know, among some of the sort of, you know, it's

• 57:06Ross Douthat?

  just the flu people and vaccine skeptics, figures like Alex Berenson, the great, you know, hate figure to liberals, I see things that I disagree with that remind me of arguments that are made by the medical establishment regarding the disease that I myself have had, right? Just this morning, Berenson was getting in arguments with people on Twitter about long haul COVID, right? People who have COVID and start to get better and then it doesn't go away for months or six months or something like that. And Berenson, the crank, the skeptic, you know, the contrarian, doesn't think long COVID is real. And the reasons he doesn't think long COVID are real are exactly the same reasons that

• 57:48Ross Douthat?

  the official medical establishment doesn't want to think that chronic Lyme disease is real, right? So you have the crank applying the same logic to long COVID, like, oh, these symptoms are so mysterious, they're probably psychosomatic, that official medicine applied to my own condition. So that's all really weird. It's just, it's sort of, you know, it's sort of, the sociology of medicine is fascinating and much more complex than I ever imagined before I got really sick.

• 58:17Ezra Klein?

  One thing I've seen in this with you is I think it's made you more alert to places where scientific consensus either leaves people out and we're sympathetic to places or to people who feel left out by it or who simply don't believe it, that you don't have to be anti-science to question what you're being told. But it's a little bit left me wondering, watching the way these fights have played out over the past year, if this is just an era where you cannot have expert consensus in the way maybe, maybe, maybe you once could? Because like, it was never that good, right? Experts have always been wrong about lots of things. And the more attention there can be on what they are wrong about, the harder and the

• 59:00Ezra Klein?

  more they're talking a lot on Twitter and cable news and like out there all the time. The more people are going to see the ways in which these are industries and communities and people sometimes, but not always even doing their best and also getting things wrong and changing their guidance and that it's just going to be a very, very, very hard time for any expert consensus, to the extent it exists, to hold, you know, broad public support or to maintain it as the situation changes.

• 59:28Ross Douthat?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I think it's very, very challenging to be positive for a minute. I mean, I think there are opportunities in that kind of flux. If you look at something like long COVID, right? I was, you know, saying that Alex Berenson, professional skeptic, doesn't believe in long COVID, but in fact, lots and lots of doctors who I think had COVID crept up on the world really slowly, the way a lot of chronic diseases do, would have been inclined to dismiss it in the context of a pandemic where you can see this progression of someone who was always healthy, gets sick and then doesn't get better and it happens in a, you know, clear and discreet amount of time. You have more belief, right? You have doctors taking long COVID seriously and thereby taking,

• 1:00:13Ross Douthat?

  I think, other chronic illnesses more seriously. And you see this in media coverage, I think, of long COVID as, you know, to the extent that it does have overlap with things like chronic fatigue syndrome and so on. Basically, to the extent that there are areas where the expert consensus, you know, can be too consensus-y and can get things wrong, a period of kind of, you know, where it seems hard to establish a single authoritative voice, it offers opportunities for paranoia and crankishness and not enough people getting their vaccines, but it also offers opportunity for people who would otherwise be just really firmly committed to the consensus to see some of the limits on their perspective and

• 1:00:56Ross Douthat?

  worldview. Like, I think it was, you know, the lab leak hypothesis thing, right? Like, it's been good to see how sort of a not necessarily persuasive consensus can get temporarily manufactured. That's useful to know for other diseases and medical conditions and so on. And the core question here, right, which, there's this famous paper a few years ago, right, on non-traditional treatments for cancer. And what the paper found was that using non-traditional treatments for cancer made people more likely to die of cancer. But the reason it made people more likely to die of cancer was that the people in

• 1:01:38Ross Douthat?

  taking the non-traditional treatments were more likely to turn their back on chemotherapy and not do chemotherapy. And the challenge with any of these things is to figure out how not to do that, right? How basically to say, look, you know, you have cancer, there might be some things besides chemotherapy that can help you, but that doesn't mean that you should just sort of throw away the gains that we've made through sort of consensus-oriented cancer treatment. Similarly, with Lyme disease, right? Like, I've done a lot of weird therapies for Lyme disease. I've also taken a lot of antibiotics, a lot of antibiotics.

• 1:02:18Ross Douthat?

  And if I hadn't taken those antibiotics as sort of a baseline for my treatment, I don't think I would be in the place where I am today. So being able to see what the consensus has gotten right, you know, what it's actually achieved, like vaccines generally work, that's good. Let's not be Robert Kennedy, you know, and throw it all away. Being able to hold on to that while also seeing the limits of the consensus and the things that it just misses and gets wrong, that has to be the goal for anyone thinking about these things.

• 1:02:48Ezra Klein?

  When I think about what was done wrong here, though, to be less optimistic, or at least more learnings-oriented, in the media, among experts, it always seems to me like the same mistake got made, which is that the level of certainty of an uncertain thing kept getting escalated in transmission. Where, early on, you know, as a journalist, you would talk to an epidemiologist or a public health expert, and they would say, you know, you never know, but I don't think this is going to be that bad. And then the part of that long conversation that gets into the story in two sentences is the slightly more certain sounding, as opposed to the more caveated part of the conversation,

• 1:03:32Ezra Klein?

  which is a true part of the conversation, nobody's getting misquoted here. And then it goes into the piece, which has its own caveats, but the headline is less caveated. And then like the headline becomes a tweet from the engagement. Team and the tweet is even less caveated than the headline, which was less caveated than the piece, which was less caveated than the than the actual conversation. And soon enough, things begin to sound definite when even the people behind them, if you if you push them, didn't feel definite about it. They felt, yeah, this is like 60% true, 70% true. I don't think that's correct. I don't think it'll be worse than. And to me, the really big question kind of for everybody involved in some of the harder parts about this is, how do you recognize when you don't know something?

• 1:04:15Ezra Klein?

  And then how do you you keep a best guess from sounding like it has wiped out all possible competing explanations or possibilities while at the same time not being unable to give people an answer to a question they're they're actually asking? That seems to me to be the locus of learning and thinking that has to happen.

• 1:04:37Ross Douthat?

  I think that's right. I mean, I think you want there to be rules and best practices. But the way the system is set up now, you are teaching doctors often that these best practices are definite answers to people's questions when in fact they are not. They reflect aggregates and sort of contingent forms of wisdom and all of these things. And there's a real profound way in which medicine has to be understood as an art as well as a science. And it's a little bit different than the question for journalists, but I think that's a tremendously important question, too.

• 1:05:11Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a good place to come to a close. So always final question here. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:05:17Ross Douthat?

  So as a kind of sequel to this, this will be offbeat deliberately. As a kind of sequel to my columns about race and American history, I wrote a column about the French and Indian War, just for kicks. And I think the French and Indian War is not just an underappreciatedly important war in modern Western history, but also one that raises a lot of interesting, complex questions for contemporary debates about, you know, sort of race and history in the American past. It's this war in which, you know, the aristocratic hierarchical French, had they actually won their

• 1:05:53Ross Douthat?

  Victory might have been better for Native Americans in all these complicated ways. Anyway, that's a long ramble to say that I'm going to recommend that people read a book about the French and Indian War called The Crucible of War by Fred Anderson that came out, I think, about 15 years ago. It's called The Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America. So if you're at all interested in American history and historical debates, that's a good book to read. And then if it inspires you to become more interested in the fascinating might-have-been that is New France, you could go read Champlain's Dream by David Hackett Fischer, who is most

• 1:06:35Ross Douthat?

  famous in our circles as the author of Albion Seed, this book about British folkways in America that pundits like to quote from in order to pretend to some deep understanding of American history. I've done it myself. But he also wrote a book about Champlain, Samuel de Champlain, the founding of New France, that is a really interesting read as well. So Crucible of War, Champlain's Dream. And then, as a good husband, my wife has a new book out called Mom Genes. That's about the science of the maternal instinct, a total change from reading about American history. But I'm going to recommend that as well. Mom Genes by Abigail Tucker. Ross Duffett, thank you very much. Ezra, it's always a pleasure.

• 1:07:24Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roji Karma, and Annie Galvin. It's fact-checked by Michelle Harris and original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld.