Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Can the Democratic Party Reclaim Freedom? About this episode Democrats spent the third night of their convention pitching themselves as the party of freedom. In this conversation, my producer Annie Galvin joined me on the show to take a deep look at that messaging. Why do Democrats see an opportunity in this election to seize an idea that Republicans have monopolized for decades? What’s the meaning of “freedom” that Democrats seem to be embracing? And how does this message square with other Democratic Party values, like belief in the ability of government to do good?
Mentioned:
How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
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You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced and hosted by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Transcript 6,744 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23 Ezra Klein? It is Thursday, August 22. We just saw the third day of the Democratic National Convention, an evening dedicated to the Democrats' evolving theory and message on freedom. I'm joined today by my producer, Annie Galvin. Annie, welcome to the show.
0:38 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me. So, as you mentioned, the stated theme of last night at the DNC was "A Fight For Our Freedoms." And from the jump, we heard a lot about freedom.
0:50 Speaker 02 Tonight, let's talk about freedom.
0:54 Speaker 03 This election is about our rights, our freedoms, our democracy, and our future.
1:01 Speaker 04 Kamala Harris is fighting for our freedom. Kamala Harris is fighting for our families. Kamala Harris is fighting for our future, together.
1:11 Speaker 05 Kamala Harris cares deeply about other people. She will fight to protect our freedoms, because those are the values that her mother passed down to her.
1:21 Speaker 06 Let us choose. Let us choose truth. Let us choose honor. And let us choose joy. Because that's the best of America. But more than anything else, let us choose freedom. Why? Because that's the best of America. We're all Americans, and together, let's all choose Kamala Harris.
2:06 Speaker 01 How were Democrats talking about freedom last night? What did you notice?
2:11 Ezra Klein? They've been talking about freedom across the campaign since Kamala Harris became the nominee or presumptive nominee. And they've been talking about it in a way that has an old echo in Democratic politics. So FDR very famously gave this speech about the four freedoms. This was his 1941 State of the Union.
2:31 Speaker 07 We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
2:41 Ezra Klein? And the four freedoms, which everyone in the world, he said, should enjoy, were freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. And obviously, freedom from want and freedom from fear are more significant promises. But you often hear among political philosophers this distinction between the negative and the positive freedoms, right? There are the freedoms from, I'm supposed to be free from the government busting into my room and searching it without a warrant. But that does not necessarily mean I am free to have a life that flourishes because
3:20 Ezra Klein? I have good, reliable health care, or childcare, or elder care, or guaranteed income. And you see some of the Democrats moving between these two ideas over the course of the week. Kamala Harris, in being a lawyer who thinks a lot in terms of rights, I think, found this very natural as language to adopt. And now you see it filtering through the party.
3:40 Speaker 01 So to illustrate this, I'd like to play a clip from Tim Walz. And just to set this up, right before this, he went on this pretty moving riff about how he and his wife Gwen used fertility treatments after struggling with infertility for quite a while. And in that riff, he made the point that having access to fertility treatments is a kind of freedom in and of itself. So let's hear that clip.
4:09 Speaker 08 I'm letting you in on how we started a family because this is a big part about what this election is about. Freedom. When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor's office. Corporations, free to pollute your air and water. And banks, free to take advantage of customers.
4:41 Speaker 08 But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love.
4:51 Speaker 08 Freedom to make your own healthcare decisions.
4:57 Speaker 08 And yeah, your kids' freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.
5:05 Speaker 01 So, how is Walz putting his spin on this? How is he approaching this project of reclaiming freedom for Democrats?
5:13 Ezra Klein? I mean, I would call what he's doing negative freedom. Freedom from the government getting involved in your life. Freedom from the fear of your child being shot dead in the halls. Freedom from intrusion from other things. And that speaks to a broader set of arguments that Walz was on that stage to make. One of his big applause lines was that in the kinds of communities he comes from, they have the golden rule. And the golden rule is mind your own damn business. That is not how Democrats traditionally speak. The Democratic idea is not mind your own damn business. It is help, and it's help from the government. But there is a tension in the argument being made here. When you begin talking about those freedoms from, right?
5:58 Ezra Klein? Freedom from having the government involved in your libraries, in your doctor's office, etc. Then you get the Republican counterargument, well, what about my freedom to have the kind of car I want, or to use plastic straws in California, or my freedom to not be covered by a vaccine mandate, if you're thinking a couple of years ago? So, this is where sort of Democrats began to lose that argument, because there's quite a lot they want the government to regulate. There are a million places where Democrats do not mind their own damn business. So, that's the tension here. It's being portrayed as a principle, but it's not a principle in either party, by the way, right? Republicans who have often portrayed themselves as more small-government and libertarian, they're not at all. And what you're seeing here...
6:40 Ezra Klein? Is not a sort of new agenda being adopted. It is a bid for rhetorical high ground based on which issues are salient in this election. And the reason Democrats are being able, or at least seeing opportunity to flip this, is that in repealing Roe v. Wade and the reproductive freedom, which is built on a right to privacy, Republicans have created space for the government to become much more intrusive in people's personal and sexual and familial lives. And having done that, having made that kind of government intervention and intrusion salient, now, all of a sudden, Democrats can turn around and say, "The hell is wrong with you all? Get out of here. Get out of the doctor's office. Get out of the bedroom.
7:25 Ezra Klein? Leave us alone." Which is usually not an argument Democrats have a lot of standing to make, because honestly, usually it's a Democrat saying, "We're going to force you to have healthcare insurance. We're going to make sure you're following good environmental practices and standards. We're going to try to get you to get rid of your old furnace and buy a electric fuel pump." There are all these different things where Democrats want the government involved, but Republicans have made salient the single biggest plays where they want to expand the government's control over people's intimate lives.
7:53 Speaker 01 We also heard a version of this from Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania and almost vice presidential pick. So let's hear that.
8:02 Speaker 09 But you know what? You know what, Democrats? We are the party of real freedom.
8:13 Speaker 09 That's right. The kind of real freedom that comes when that child has a great public school with an awesome teacher, because we believe in her future.
8:26 Speaker 09 Real freedom. Real freedom that comes when we invest in the police and in the community, so that child can walk to and from school and get home safely to her mama.
8:42 Speaker 09 Real freedom, real freedom that comes when she can join a union, marry who she loves, start a family on her own terms, breathe clean air, drink pure water, worship how she wants, and live a life of purpose where she is respected for who she is.
9:06 Speaker 01 So Shapiro there is obviously trying to flip freedom from being a Republican value to a Democratic one. How effective do you think Shapiro was in making that rhetorical move there?
9:18 Ezra Klein? I don't know that the question for Shapiro is whether he's being effective, right? You're not going to do that in one speech. You're not going to do that at a convention. If the Democratic Party wants to reclaim freedom, which is something that factions within it and pollsters within it and strategists within it and philosophers within it have wanted it to do for a long time, that's going to require time. That is going to be a multi-administration, maybe even multi-generational effort. That said, I've always thought the argument for positive freedoms, or what Shapiro called a "real freedom," is pretty powerful. I don't know what vision of freedom you are really talking about. When you say you are free,
10:01 Ezra Klein? this is within the sort of hardcore capitalist way of looking at the world, you are free to freely contract, but just to say that you are free to not have a job. You are free to walk away from something without any power in the marketplace and be poor and go hungry and be homeless. That is not freedom, right? That's not real choice. A thicker idea and understanding of freedom has always included within it what you need to flourish, right? To be free, to make the choices you want to make in your life, requires the furnishing of a foundation and protections that people need. Social Security is a remarkable enabler of freedom among older Americans.
10:45 Ezra Klein? Among other things, it is the freedom to retire. Absent it, you might be free to retire, but you are not actually capable of making that choice. So there's power in this.
10:55 Speaker 01 Since maybe 9/11, the right really claimed a monopoly on freedom. I mean, you had kind of silly things like freedom fries, but you also had the rise of the Freedom Caucus. You now have Republicans branding basically every Democrat as a socialist, and not a friendly Swedish socialist, but a Stalinist, basically. And then on the left, I think maybe around Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, you would hear words like equality, justice, maybe progress, but freedom seemed sort of off limits or uncool. So why is this the moment for Democrats to kind of step in and try to seize freedom as their value?
11:33 Ezra Klein? I think one reason is that Trump and Vance don't speak in terms of freedom.
11:38 Speaker 01 Hmm.
11:39 Ezra Klein? Donald Trump is not highly engaged with discussions of freedom one way or the other. It's just not what his politics are about. And I think you have to understand a lot of this election as being shaped by Vance's spin on Trumpism. Vance's spin on Trumpism and the sort of post-liberal spin on Trumpism is very dismissive of freedom. To take the philosophical roots of what is going on in the right seriously for a minute, when you read these critiques of liberalism, when you read Patrick Deneen, when you read Adrian Vermaule, the thing that they are critiquing in liberalism is its emphasis on individual freedom. And their argument is that individual freedom has led to social atomization, has led to
12:20 Ezra Klein? people having too few children for societies to grow and flourish and replace themselves. It has led to loneliness. It has led to companies that can, you know, ship their jobs overseas and destroy communities. But it has led above all to this world where individual choice and individual freedom have become the dominant values. And so people can go off and live these lives of sexual libertinism and atheism and they don't have children, and that all this freedom has become hollow and rotten at its core. You know, to make these arguments about these miserable cat ladies is at least to begin to make the argument there should be social and cultural sanction over people exercising an individual choice not to have children.
13:03 Ezra Klein? So part of what is happening is Democrats are responding to a reform, a shift, a pivot inside the Republican Party. And add in then Dobbs and
13:15 Ezra Klein? Book bans and a bunch of Republicans saying publicly that they want to use the power of the state to bring other institutions ranging from businesses to universities in life to heal. So they stop being so woke and they stop being so liberal and they stop being a deep state and so on. And all of a sudden, the Republican Party that is coming to a very, very different understanding of freedom, right? It's not interested in freedom. It's interested in using the power of the state and the power of the culture to reshape decision making quite powerfully. And all of a sudden, the Democratic Party could turn around and say, the hell are you weirdos doing? Get out of here. That was the argument that launched Tim Walz. And part of elevating Walz to the ticket was also Harris elevating
13:59 Ezra Klein? the critique and argument he was making to the ticket.
14:02 Speaker 01 I think that's a really good point that Trump fans, DeSantis have created an opening in a way that McCain, Romney, maybe didn't. I'm curious then about the appeal that Democrats think this might have because I think over the last three nights, we've seen a lot of appeals from actual Republicans, former Trump staffers, Oprah, who said she's a registered independent and spoke very directly to independent voters, trying to get them to come over to the Kamala side. And you see that at most conventions, right? You saw it at the RNC a bit. But do you see this turn to freedom as an attempt to woo these people? I'm just curious what the point is of this electorally.
14:48 Ezra Klein? One of the inversions of politics right now is traditionally, the Republican Party is the party that wants to conserve, the party that doesn't want to do all that much, the conservative party. You can argue that's not been true for a long time and Republicans have been more radical going sometime back, arguably since Reagan. But there has always been, or for a long time has been, a theory that, you know, Democrats are the party that wants to change everything. Barack Obama, hope and change. And Republicans are the party that wants to preserve America as it is and as it was. And as Republicans become more radical and more oriented towards upheaval, J.D. Vance, again, if you go listen to things
15:31 Ezra Klein? he said, is very straightforward about this. And so too is Donald Trump, right? You know, Donald Trump has always portrayed himself as a wrecking ball, not as a conservationist.
15:42 Ezra Klein? That has created the space among Democrats, who have also become a coalition with a lot of more educated members, with a lot of higher income members, a lot of people who maybe want things to be a little bit different, but don't want them completely different than they are, to be a party that is actually arguing we should conserve things. One thing that has been striking to me about this convention is if you watch it and ask yourself day after day, what promises are being made up there? What is the Democratic Party saying it will do for you? Not that much is being said all that consistently. This is not a convention built around a couple of big promises from an agenda. It's not a convention built around bringing universal health care to the nation, not a convention built around bringing universal childcare to the nation.
16:26 Ezra Klein? To the extent it is about any one policy promise, the policy promise is restoring something people had a couple of years ago, which is the protections of Roe v. Wade. And so in a way, that's actually conservative. It's saying, America was at a reasonable equilibrium for a very long time. And Republicans, built around a quite radical Supreme Court, have upended that equilibrium. They changed the country in a heedless and thoughtless and dangerous way. And Democrats are going to put things back the way they were. And that sort of allows them to be the party of change, because that is different than where things are right now.
17:08 Ezra Klein? But also conservation, conservatism at the same time.
17:14 Speaker 01 The crux of the four freedoms speech that you mentioned was really FDR during World War II, trying to define the free world in contrast to authoritarianism. And when we're talking about freedom too, the most basic one of those in a democracy is the freedom to vote. And I think that word democracy was a huge part of the Biden era of this campaign. So is this messaging around freedom a way to kind of signal the democracy message?
17:44 Ezra Klein? Earlier in the night last night, they did a video and had speakers also, but they did a video about January 6th.
17:53 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
17:53 Ezra Klein? And it was incredibly powerfully done, I thought.
17:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:57 Ezra Klein? And they sort of matched what Trump was saying at any given moment, what was happening. And you saw the video of the officers trying to halt barricade the doors and screaming as they tried to push back the crowd. You heard them on their intercom saying, the line is broken, the line is broken, fall back. You saw their vantage point from high up at the Capitol saying, we're in danger. Like, look at the size of that crowd. It was chilling.
18:29 Ezra Klein? And it also came early in the night. And I wondered if the rest of the night was going to be more January 60, right? They had a police officer after that, but it wasn't. I think if it was Biden's campaign, this convention would have been about January 6th. That was Mike Donilon's theory of the election. But also Biden, putting aside some of the ways his communication capabilities had changed, Biden was a good messenger on democracy. Biden really does believe America and democracy to be a sacred trust. You could feel that he felt it, right? He's always said that he decided to run after Charlottesville. He read How Democracies Die by Leibitzky and Zibla. That influenced him in running.
19:09 Ezra Klein? And then January 6th was, as his people remind you, an effort to steal the election, not just from the American people, but from Joe Biden personally. Biden is not that good of a messenger on abortion. Among other things, his own history on it is checkered. He opposed the Roe decision when it came down. Now, he's evolved quite a lot on that issue since then, but just not that good at talking about abortion and Dobbs, right? You saw this in the debate. And Harris is. And so I think that the emphasis has really shifted from this being about democracy
19:47 Ezra Klein? with January 6th as the evidence to this being about freedom with Dobbs being the evidence. And I think that's a better place for Democrats, just because I think Dobbs is, January 6th happened, but it is not currently happening. It could, of course, happen again, something like it, or something worse. But most people who are open to voting for Donald Trump do not believe Donald Trump is just going to do endless January 6th. Maybe they should believe that, but I don't think that's how they look at him. But they do believe, because it's true, that he was the one who appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe and that the people in his party want to ban abortion. January 6th
20:29 Ezra Klein? failed. People died. It was horrifying, but it failed. Joe Biden became president. Dobbs succeeded. There are many states now where you cannot get an abortion. And unless Democrats get rid of the filibuster, even in a situation where they win the Senate, they're not going to be able to restore Roe, though maybe they will get rid of the filibuster for that. I don't think it is a completely unimaginable turn of events. It is true that in power, Democrats can do a lot to protect abortion rights or to open access to it, particularly chemical abortion. And it is also true that Republicans, if they get a chance, might take this in a very sharply different direction. If you had a Republican trifecta, you know,
21:14 Ezra Klein? Donald Trump now talks about wanting this all to be on the states, but if Republicans send him a 15-week abortion ban, House and Senate Republicans, would he veto it? I'm skeptical of that. I think one should be skeptical of that. And so this has been a shift in where the party is. And I think it's a good shift because it's very hard to get people to vote on the abstraction of democracy. It's not how I wish things were, but I think it is how things actually are. But it is not impossible, and we've seen it, to get them to vote based on the extremely tangible stakes for whether or not people have access to abortions if and when they need them.
21:55 Speaker 01 So I want to talk a little bit about the difference between the RNC and the DNC, specifically their focus. And you said to our team that the two conventions have had a feeling of the Marvel Universe versus Thanos. And I'll admit, I do not know what that means, but I'm confident there's some merit there. So what did you mean by that analogy? That way of describing the difference here?
22:19 Ezra Klein? You've never seen Avengers Endgame? Come on, Annie.
22:21 Speaker 01 I've seen one or two, but I don't even know which one. I'm so sorry.
22:25 Ezra Klein? You would remember. So the argument I'm making there, look, you look at the Democratic Convention, like every major Democrat from the last 40 years of American life, it's Joe Biden, it's Barack Obama, it's Bill Clinton, it's Hillary Clinton, it's Michelle Obama. I saw a picture of John Edwards standing in the hallway. Like, if Jimmy Carter were well enough, he would be here. Every Democrat who has had any significant national profile and is still upright and walking, more or less in my lifetime, is here lending their talents,
23:06 Ezra Klein? their particular political profile to the fight against Donald Trump. Go look at the Republican Convention. Who in national Republican politics, who was significant in 2020 or before that, is still there? There's no Mike Pence. There's no George W. Bush. There are no Chaney's, right? Liz Cheney's been ejected from the party. There's no Mitt Romney. No Paul Ryan. They're all gone. So it does have this feeling, if you're a comic books nerd, and I am, like, the Democrats have this feeling of the Avengers, right? It's like every significant figure in the party, like, coming together, like, we're assembling a
23:48 Ezra Klein? team. And the Republican Party is sort of the big, powerful, bad guy with a billion henchmen. They're all smaller than Donald Trump. They're all the guys he orders around. Whereas the Democratic Party, the way it is presenting itself is this sort of union of significant figures. You have the young heroes in Harris right now and Walz, but they're going around and pulling out of retirement, anybody who's a heavy hitter, who can possibly be conscripted into the cause. And I guess just another way of saying that without the perhaps too cute by half comic book analogy, is just that the Democratic Party is a political party and the Republican Party is a personality cult. And what you see when you look at the Democratic Convention is a political party, a lot of different people,
24:33 Ezra Klein? representing a lot of different factions and eras. Somebody on social media made, I thought, a quite funny point, that the Democratic Convention is like the eras tour for liberals, which is true.
24:43 Speaker 01 I mean, yeah.
24:45 Ezra Klein? And the Republican Party has functionally erased its history before, I mean, you could call 2016, but a lot of people who are significant in the Republican Party between 2016 and 2020 are now also a persona non grata, right? Again, thinking about people like Paul Ryan there and Mike Pence. So it almost doesn't have history pre-January 6. That's just a very different structure.
25:10 Speaker 01 So just to dig into the portrait of a party that I think the DNC has pretty successfully given us so far, I think you see this coalition across ages, which is kind of interesting because aging was kind of the problem a month ago, two months ago. But you're now seeing these elder statesmen all given speaking slots, the Clintons, the Obamas, Biden himself. But I think you're also seeing this kind of murderers row of new talent, and you're free to name check some of these. But just to start with the elder statesmen, what did you make of Bill Clinton's speech last night? What was his role there? And how did he execute on that?
25:54 Ezra Klein? Bill Clinton has gotten a lot older. This was not the kind of speech Bill Clinton was able to give in, say, 2012, when he was the star of the convention. There was a, for me at least, a kind of sadness watching him up there. You could see his hands shaking. His voice, right? His voice has always been such a remarkable instrument. His voice was thick and he would lose control over it. It would crack. It'd be hard to hear the intonation be wrong. But Clinton had a real capability, a real self-awareness about that, in which to strike the tone of the truly elder statesman.
26:34 Ezra Klein? But one thing Clinton did, very effectively, was use his age against Donald Trump.
26:40 Speaker 10 Two days ago, I turned 78, the oldest man in my family for a generation. And the only personal vanity I want to assert is I'm still younger than Donald Trump.
26:57 Ezra Klein? And he did something else, too, which is Clinton has always had this capability to slip into the highly idealistic register of what American politics can be. And I'm just speaking for myself here. I found it powerful when he made this argument that it's not Trump's lying that should be our focus, it's his solipsism, his narcissism, his inability to talk about anything other than himself.
27:25 Speaker 10 What does their opponent do with his voice? He mostly talks about himself, right? So the next time you hear him, don't count the lies, count the eyes. Count the eyes. His vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies. He's like one of those tenors opening up before he walks out on stage, like I did,
28:10 Speaker 10 trying to get his lungs open by singing "me, me, me, me, me, me."
28:18 Ezra Klein? Clinton's just good at delivering that kind of thing. I think both with Obama and with Clinton, what you should understand them as doing is saying, "I am one of the best to ever do this." They are two of the best campaigners to ever campaign. And what they are saying is like, "If I were doing it, this is how I would do it." But Clinton wasn't there as the representative anymore of a politics that he was saying, you know, Harrison Wall should pick up from him. You know, he was there as a party elder, just being part of the Avengers. I've been interested in this convention, at who I feel is picking up different, I don't know, torches in the party. I don't know why, but you're right, Annie.
29:00 Ezra Klein? This convention has felt like a real moment of generational change in the party. It's easy to forget just for how long we've had Obamas, Clintons and Bidens on the ticket. And I thought one of the best speeches of last night, and the one who sounded most like Bill Clinton to me, was Buttigieg. Pete Buttigieg, who is an amazing communicator, I think arguably the best communicator right now in the Democratic Party, if you don't count Michelle Obama, who doesn't like doing politics. But he gave a very Clinton-like speech in his ability to talk about, to marry the high level, the aspirational level of American politics, with the kitchen table level of American politics.
29:44 Ezra Klein? Buttigieg is often compared to Obama. He kind of seems like him, he comes from that era. But I think the politics he often feels like he is representing to me is a little bit more Clintonian.
29:55 Speaker 02 I'm thinking of dinnertime at our house in Michigan. When the dog is barking and the air fryer is beeping and the mac and cheese is boiling over, and it feels like all the political negotiating experience in the world is not enough for me to get our three-year-old son and our three-year-old daughter to just wash their hands and sit at the table.
30:24 Speaker 02 It's the part of our day when politics seems the most distant. And yet, the makeup of our kitchen table, the existence of my family, is just one example of something that was literally impossible as recently as 25 years ago, when an anxious teenager, growing up in Indiana, wondered if he would ever find belonging in this world. This kind of life went from impossible to possible, from possible to real, from real to almost ordinary, in less than half a lifetime.
31:03 Speaker 01 Yes, as someone who loves literary language, I thought that that was so beautiful. So, a word that keeps coming to mind as I watch is rebrand. And we've talked about freedom, we've talked about some other dimensions of that. But I think if you listen to the subtleties of some of the language here, you hear an attempt to rebrand politics and rebrand government. And just to give some specific examples, in our episode yesterday, you mentioned Raphael Warnock's line that "a vote is a kind of prayer." Oh yeah, by the way, Raphael Warnock should just be on any list like that of Oh, yeah, absolutely. of the covers. He gave a great speech at the convention.
31:46 Speaker 01 And then, in the Buttigieg speech last night that you mentioned, he has this line that "politics," or a certain kind of politics importantly, quote, "can make an impossible dream into an everyday reality." And there, he's talking about just the daily experience of sitting in his kitchen with his husband and his twin children, which is something that quite literally would have been impossible in the 90s, legally, socially. And he elsewhere describes politics as a kind of soul craft. There's a kind of spiritual dimension here, I think a very moving, humane dimension. And I'm just kind of curious where you think that's coming from and how that has struck you as you've watched and listened.
32:29 Ezra Klein? I mean, this to me is an old strain of the Democratic Party. Democrats believe in government. They believe in the government's ability to make your life better. And that also means Democrats, or many Democrats, believe in politics.
32:46 Ezra Klein? And there are different ways Democrats believe in politics. One way can be that politics is a way that the working class or the majority of Americans can band together to overturn the power and dominance of the rich, of corporations. But there's also a way in which they believe in politics for its pluralism, for its ability to build and strengthen bonds in a country that might otherwise come apart. Right? I mean, this is a very old vision of politics, right? Politics is how you work through disagreement without coming to war. You heard Obama quoting Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War, talking about the need to renew our bonds of affection.
33:30 Ezra Klein? You heard both Obama and Bill Clinton, and I think this was important parts of their, not just speeches, but what they were trying to tell the generation coming up, talking about how important it is in politics to talk with the people you disagree, to not demean them, to be open to them, to make space for them even in disagreement, to make sure they know that you will govern for them and you will keep them in mind and you will respect them even if they're not where you are. So there's been a real strain in this convention around politics not as war, which I think is often how Donald Trump portrays it. Right? This is our final battle, right? I am your vengeance. But politics is pluralism.
34:13 Ezra Klein? Politics is a thing that isn't supposed to drive us apart, but is supposed to help us come together or stay together. And that, to me, was why Buttigieg's speech was so powerful. He did a better job than anybody else did at connecting these grand things that happen in politics, these huge challenges and conflicts and campaigns and organizing efforts that it's easy to say politics doesn't do anything, right? There's so much cynicism about what politics can do. But here he is saying, "Politics has made my Tuesday night possible. It has changed the most fundamental thing in my life, which is can I marry the person I love? And can I have two beautiful children who I can't get to eat dinner?"
34:58 Ezra Klein? And like cannot get out the door in the morning.
34:59 Speaker 01 So relatable.
35:00 Ezra Klein? Right, like, yeah, very relatable, but but that it was that weaving of the texture of the extraordinary and the ordinary, which he he said very explicitly. Again, that to me was its power. And it's why it felt very Clintonian to me. That's what Bill Clinton used to do very well.
35:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think Buttigieg is a really good representative of kind of this new class or new generation of Democrats that we're really seeing on display. You know, it's just true that after Obama in 2016 and 2020, even up till a month or two ago, the candidates just have been older. Hillary Biden, you know, Bernie being sort of the radical up and comer. But to me, this convention has felt like a dam breaking. All these people coming in and and really kind of seizing the limelight in a way. And so what has felt exciting or meaningful about this to you as you've watched the past three nights?
35:55 Ezra Klein? The Democratic Party just has a lot of talent in it right now.
35:58 Speaker 01 Hmm.
35:58 Ezra Klein? And it has a lot of communicative talent in a way I'm not sure people realize was true in in say 2020. You could talk about your Buttigieg's, your Kamala Harris's, but if you've ever been in a room with Wes Moore, I mean, that guy's charisma is like a clean energy source.
36:19 Speaker 01 I know, yeah.
36:21 Ezra Klein? He just really lights up a room. Shapiro, really, really good. Kim Walz, nobody saw that coming. It's not the same kind of charisma as some of the others, but wow, can that guy break through in the media? I mean, he came out of nowhere to become the vice president through sheer skill of communication. AOC gave a speech on the first night that completely brought the House down. There's been movement in terms of his leadership, including, by the way, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer handing over power to a new generation of of leaders in the House led by Hakeem Jeffries, who is himself quite a phenomenal speaker.
37:02 Ezra Klein? You know, if you imagine what a primary would have looked like in this year or in 2028, you can imagine a lot of people running at the moment. And I think one of the other interesting things about it is that the energy in the party is not just ideological, it's also very pragmatic. Democrats have been very interested in who knows how to win Pennsylvania? That's why Shapiro has become such a big figure. Who knows how to win in Michigan? That's part of why Gretchen Whitmer has become such a big figure. So you have the people coming ideologically, the people coming through raw charisma, the people who are coming because they have proven how to do something Democrats want to be able to do, which is win the key Midwestern and Sunbelt states that Democrats need to
37:44 Ezra Klein? win in to keep MAGA Republicans out of power. And this convention has been a real showcase for that. And I think you really see that in the sequencing, right? Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton on night one, whether you sort of like this or not, that was a night that was about turning the page. The Obamas on night two, that was a night about passing the torch. The lineup of Buttigieg and Wes Moore and Josh Shapiro and Tim Walz on night three, that was about the rising generation. And then, you know, tonight, which is going to be about Kamala Harris, now the leader
38:26 Ezra Klein? of the Democratic Party, and if she wins in November, the leader of it for some time to come, much more so than any convention I've covered, this convention has been the old guard giving way to the new.
38:39 Speaker 01 Let's close with a bit more on Tim Walz. I think one thing that he did early in his speech, and we can play a clip, is try to kind of recast what government is and what its function is, and almost de-stigmatize it.
38:52 Speaker 08 Growing up in a small town like that, you learn how to take care of each other. That family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they're your neighbors. And you look out for them, and they look out for you. Everybody belongs, and everybody has a responsibility to contribute. For me, it was serving in the Army National Guard.
39:29 Speaker 08 I joined up two days after my 17th birthday, and I proudly wore our nation's uniform for 24 years.
39:41 Speaker 08 My dad, a Korean War-era Army veteran, died of lung cancer a couple of years later. He left behind a mountain of medical debt. Thank God for Social Security survivor benefits.
39:59 Speaker 08 And thank God for the GI Bill that allowed my dad and me to go to college and millions of other Americans.
40:08 Ezra Klein? What is Walz doing there?
40:12 Ezra Klein? I think one of Tim Walz's political talents is making the argument for big government with the aesthetic of small communities. But he doesn't argue it, you know, in the way that a Bernie Sanders might or an AOC might. He argues it as an expression of small state moral values. Whether that connects, whether or not people buy that, I don't exactly know. But I think you have to understand that is one of the things that makes him an interesting communicator in the party. He is able to give quite significant expansions of the state,
40:53 Ezra Klein? quite significant new programs, a very, very familiar spin. And he does that in part by connecting that to his own life story and his own family, right? His dad went on the GI Bill. He went on the GI Bill. I think it's powerful. I think it's why he's on the ticket. Tim Walz is on the ticket because he helps the ticket bridge the political experience and appeal of Kamala Harris, which is fundamentally urban. Born in Oakland, California, rises up in San Francisco to a strain of Democratic Party politics, a strain of Democratic Party populism that is fundamentally rural,
41:36 Ezra Klein? which has a very deep history in Minnesota.
41:41 Ezra Klein? The arena was not full of signs that said Governor Walz. The arena was full of signs that said Coach Walz. The videos about him were about his military service, about the children, I mean, now adults, he taught. Before he came out, a bunch of people who played for his football team and are now adults came out and stood in formation. He is a weaponized Norman Rockwell painting that the Democrats have aimed directly at J.D. Vance and Donald Trump.
42:12 Speaker 01 I think that's a nice place to end. So Ezra, thank you for being here after a series of very late nights and sharing your insights.
42:20 Ezra Klein? Thank you, Annie.
42:36 Ezra Klein? This episode of the Ezra Klein Show is produced and hosted by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
Previous The Obamas Strike Back Next Kamala Harris Wants to Win Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
