The Spectacle of the G.O.P.'s Shrinking Tent

On May 12, House Republicans voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, from her leadership post. Her transgression? Vocally rebuking the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. But Cheney’s ouster is just the latest plot development in a story about the contemporary G. O. P. that goes back farther than Nov. 3, 2020, and even Nov. 8, 2016. Over the past decade, the party has decimated its former leadership class. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were pushed out. Eric Cantor lost in the primaries. George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush and John McCain were viciously attacked by Donald Trump and his supporters. Cheney is just the latest victim of this ongoing party purge, and she certainly won’t be the last. So how did the Republican Party get here? And what does that tell us about its future — and the future of American democracy? Nicole Hemmer is the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and a host of the podcasts “Past/Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” A political historian by training, she has followed the development of the contemporary Republican Party as closely as anyone, with specific attention to the role right-wing media has played in the party’s development. We discuss how Republican Party loyalty has morphed into unwavering fealty to Donald Trump; whether the G. O. P. is a postpolicy party; the vicious feedback loop between the G. O. P. base, right-wing media and Republican politicians; how the party of Lincoln became a party committed to minority rule; Hemmer’s grim outlook on what the current G. O. P.’s behavior will mean for the future of American democracy; and much more. Mentioned in the episode: "Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics" by Nicole Hemmer “Living in the World of Pants-on-Fire Lies,” by Nicole Hemmer, CNN “George W. Bush Is a Flawed Messenger for Republicans,” by Nicole Hemmer, CNN Recommendations: "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America" by Kathleen Belew "Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century" by Charles King "The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr. and the Debate Over Race in America" by Nicholas Buccola 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.

• 0:18Ezra Klein?

  I've been trying to think about how to cover the Liz Cheney ouster with the House Republicans. On the one hand, of course, she lost her leadership position. The Republican Party has been telling us for years, over and over and over again, what it is. It is a first and foremost cult of personality around Donald Trump. You can say almost anything except anything that hurts Donald Trump's feelings. If you say anything that hurts Donald Trump's feelings, you will be removed from any position of power in the party. You will likely lose a primary. It has told us what it is over and over again. I don't know how many times it has to repeat itself before we listen. On the other hand, to treat all this as a fait accompli, to simply allow the Republican

• 1:01Ezra Klein?

  Party to become this thing, and that is just, well, that's how American politics works, is to, in a way, become complicit in like the crumbling of America's party system and maybe American democracy. Because it is not true, as many liberals have said, that the Cheney episode shows you cannot be a House Republican or elected Republican and believe Joe Biden won the election. But it is true that you cannot be a Republican in House leadership and believe it is important to make the point that Joe Biden won the election. You don't have to believe the big lie yourself, but you have to enable and treat with kid gloves those who do. For a party that says it does not believe in cancel culture and safe spaces and wants

• 1:45Ezra Klein?

  free speech and robust argument, quite a performance. Trying to understand what the Republican Party is now, I think, requires a little bit of a broader view. And so I asked Nicole Hemmer to join me on the show. Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project. She's the author of the great book On the Rise of Conservative Media: Messengers of the Right, Conservative Media, and the Transformation of American Politics. She co-hosts a history podcast, Past Present and This Day in Esoteric Political History. She's a co-producer of the podcast, Welcome to Your Fantasy. She's a CNN opinion contributor. She's all over the place, but she's somebody who's a real bead on how the Republican Party

• 2:24Ezra Klein?

  has changed over time and how its media ecosystem has both driven and reflected and absorbed those changes. So I think it's a very specific way of understanding what has happened here, but probably the most useful. As always, my email is [email protected]. Here's Nicole Hammer.

• 2:47Ezra Klein?

  So back in February, there was an effort to oust Liz Cheney from her leadership position. This has already happened. It failed big time. It lost 145 to 61. Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, brags that GOP is a big tent party. It includes both people who believe, I guess, the election was stolen and those who don't. So then what changed? How did Cheney lose support since February as we get further from the election and Donald Trump's presidency?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  I think it's actually a really good indication of what the Republican Party's strategy is when it comes to the insurrection and the Trump presidency, especially how it ended. And that is to just memory hole the whole thing. So the problem with Liz Cheney wasn't that she voted to impeach Donald Trump. It wasn't that she was outspoken immediately after the insurrection, but that she kept bringing it up. And their strategy was to stop talking about January 6th altogether, but they couldn't get away from it because she just kept poking at it and kept pointing to it and saying, this is a bad thing that happened and we have to stop this from happening again. And that's what ultimately got her the ax.

• 3:57Ezra Klein?

  I do want to emphasize that because this is a mistake. I think I've seen a lot of liberal reporting on this, that there's a view that you can't be a House Republican in good standing now if you believe the election was correctly decided. And that's not quite it. I mean, as you're saying, Kevin McCarthy, right after the vote that ousted Cheney, says, I don't think anybody is questioning legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with. But I do want to twist it because what it does seem to me that you have to do to be a House Republican good standing is not to believe the big lie, but to be an enabler of it. You have to be willing to be on good terms with the people who continue pushing it. You have to be willing to indulge it. Right? So the idea is you are going to be

• 4:40Ezra Klein?

  a Big Ten coalition of people who believe the election was stolen and people who don't. You can't try to fight that out in the party and have one side win.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I do want to challenge the notion that this intent is all of that big. I'm not sure that, you know, those who believe the election was legitimate should not be seen as an indication that they're suddenly a broad-based party. But I do think that's right. I think that we shouldn't even be that surprised that this is the strategy. I mean, remember how many times reporters would ask, you know, have you seen Donald Trump's tweet? And it's just heads down, over your gaze. And this is the same kind of strategy. You don't necessarily have to embrace it. You don't have to agree with everything, but you can't talk about it. And that was Liz Cheney's big sin. She just kept talking about it.

• 5:29Ezra Klein?

  But you're a historian. Isn't that a little bit weird? I mean, I've covered many parties after losing a presidential election. And they cannot stop talking about why they lost. I mean, you think about Democrats after 2016, it's just years of arguments between the Clinton and Sanders wing of the parties, then with like a couple people like my friend Matt Iglesias, like out in the wilderness saying, oh, Malley would have won. And you think of the Republican Party in 2012, right? There's a whole autopsy. You think of, you know, Democrats after the Reagan and Bush years and the DLC and Bill Clinton. It's a pretty normal thing in political history that parties go through a wrenching internal debate after losses. My sense is the Republican Party right now is really trying to suppress

• 6:13Ezra Klein?

  that debate, to learn no lessons and to allow for no infighting. Does that feel historically unusual to you?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  It does seem really odd because parties generally are coalitions. And so they are factions that fight one another for power. And so much of the time, the story we tell after elections is exactly about that fight. So think about 1964, when Barry Goldwater was just annihilated in that election versus Lyndon Johnson. There is a real fight between moderate and liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans. And even though the conservatives ultimately went out, there is a period of time in which there is a legitimate debate happening about what direction the party is going to go. And that kind of cyclical analysis has been part of what the modern party system looks like. And so the fact that that is breaking down in the Republican Party right now, I think,

• 7:06Speaker 01

  suggests to us that something fundamental is changing about how at least one of the political parties operates.

• 7:15Ezra Klein?

  I want to express a conflict I'm having as I think about where to go in the questioning right now, because there's a way of talking about what is happening with the Republican Party in, let's call it like, political analyst voice, right? You just take it all as a given and like, okay, like, where's the party going? What do you think about Elise Stefanic? And that's important because it is still the Republican Party and it, you know, will probably win back the House in 2022 if midterm election dynamics hold. And so understanding is important. And on the other hand, I feel like to analyze it that way is to bind to a kind of lunacy that a party is doing something really profound and dangerous that Cheney, who is not somebody I have a lot of agreement with, is trying to point out. And that they are repeating a pattern that has driven them into a very dangerous place

• 7:59Ezra Klein?

  over the past couple of decades, where it's like the party elites feel something bubbling up from the base, they indulge it, they think they can control it, and then it becomes like the new baseline next time, you know? Barack Obama is born in Kenya, America is becoming a socialist tyranny, all the way up to, you know, the election has been stolen. I'm curious how you keep these dynamics together in your head. Like, the Republican Party is like an institution that is almost normal by virtue of its size and role in American politics. And the Republican Party is an institution that seems to be going off the rails and possibly threatening the very foundations of American politics.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  I think the most helpful way to think about that is to think about the intersection between those two things, that the Republican Party has become so dangerous and so radicalized, in part because it is one of two parties. So it's not just a small faction that has become radicalized, but because of partisan pressures, that radicalization, because it was embodied so much by Donald Trump, because it's been picked up by members of Congress, because it's seen as a reflection of the base, has manifested throughout the party. So it's been empowered so much more than if it were just limited to a small faction or to a smaller party.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  To be a Republican right now, as the Liz Cheney scenario shows, it is almost a requirement that you buy into the big lie, that you buy into the trumpeting of the party, that you consume conservative media and distrust all other media outlets. And this isn't just a process of the past five years, it's a process of decades, as you were pointing out, but that the lunacy is located in an institution and has overtaken that institution, gives it so much more power.

• 9:48Ezra Klein?

  Is this part of the argument for a multi-party system? That in a multi-party system, you might have, you know, 20% of the country be in agreement with, let's call it like the anti-system Republican Party, that we see the Trumpist Republican Party. But here, that was enough to take over the Republican Party. And so by virtue of the kinds of partisan and polarizing pressures and media pressures that you point out, that 20% is now functionally 45%?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  It's a good question, because my initial response is, yes, wouldn't it be great if this was like a minor party that was working within a coalition? But the warning note that I would add is that the United States and its bipartisan system is not the only place where these kinds of-

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Growing illiberalisms are taking root. Right? A parliamentary system has not necessarily proven to be totally able to ward off nativist politics, to ward off illiberal politics. I mean, we're seeing this in a lot of different places in Europe and the UK. And so I don't want to posit the parliamentary system as a cure-all. I think that it can help keep some of these politics at bay. But, you know, a minor party can very quickly become the pivot point, right? It can become the place where you need to build a coalition and that suddenly empowers a small group of people as well.

• 11:08Ezra Klein?

  There's a way in which we talk about movements in the parties on this single-dimensional left-right axis. But the replacement of Liz Cheney with Elise Stefanic is a little bit more complicated than that. Because on the one hand, Cheney believes the election was correctly decided, and Stefanic has really indulged like the worst fantasies of Trumpism. On the other hand, Stefanic, by normal ideological measures, is much more moderate than Cheney is. She voted against a Trump tax cut. She voted against funding Trump's border wall. She voted to condemn President Trump for trying to overturn the Affordable Character in the courts. So how do you read this? Is like the party becoming more moderate but more anti-system? Is it just about Trumpism? Like, what is the direction the party is going?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  So you're right to challenge the idea of a left-right axis, because I even feel that in the question or the description of Stefanic, right? To describe her as more moderate, I mean, she was a Paul Ryan acolyte. And I don't think we would describe Paul Ryan's economic policies as moderate. So the left-right axis and the moderate-extreme axis, I think, both end up confusing things. I think one way I might begin to talk about it is, in the 90s, we talked about the Republican Party as growing much more ideological, as it's shifting very strongly toward the right. And indeed, it did. But the Republican Party that we see today, there are ideological factions within it. But

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Republican identity and loyalty to, in this case, Donald Trump. He's a manifestation of this change. That has become, I think, more important than ideological policy issues. I mean, certainly, it is the case that Donald Trump was for cutting taxes. He helped put people in the courts who would be pretty hardline on things like abortion and reproductive rights. So I don't want to suggest that he did not have conservative positions. But if you look at the way the party changed on issues like trade, that's a pretty significant change that it does feel has at least something to do with loyalty and partisanship than it does necessarily ideology.

• 13:21Ezra Klein?

  I want to hold on to that idea of positions for a minute because there was always this idea that maybe you could have Trumpism without Trump. And Trumpism was taken to be these rhetorical stances Donald Trump took, mostly just rhetorical stances, you know, that he said he'd give everybody healthcare or, you know, he tweeted that we should have $2,000 stimulus checks or, you know, he said he would raise taxes on people like him. As you point out, he did not govern that way, but partially didn't govern that way also because he just left that up to congressional Republicans who have more or less Paul Ryan's economic views. But in the aftermath of Trump, it seems to me that what we're getting is Trump without Trumpism, weirdly, that the parties in no way united around any kind of populist agenda.

• 14:03Ezra Klein?

  They have no big movement within the House Republican Conference towards a big infrastructure bill, towards an expansion of the social safety net, even towards like, quote unquote, their people. But there is a, like, a lockstep behind the figure of Donald Trump. So is that right, that like, there actually is no such thing as Trumpism? There's only Donald Trump? And Donald Trump, in some ways, is becoming like, not more powerful, but maintaining his power?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Trumpism is such a slippery term that even if we can kind of set that aside, I think that you're right that there is no cohesion around a populist agenda. In fact, there's a greater rejection of that in large part because the Biden administration has moved so much more in the direction of providing more of a social safety net and infrastructure spending and all of those things. And so that natural anti-Biden politics on the Republican side is pulling them back from any sort of generosity on that front. So you have that dynamic going on, but I think a lot of politicians took from the Trump experience that it wasn't his policies,

• 15:10Speaker 01

  it was his style that won him the presidency, that it's that red meat, anti-liberalism, insult-driven, media-oriented style of politics that won him the presidency and that allowed him to govern the way that he did. And they're not wrong. I mean, I think the two things work together, that Trump's style and his politics were of a piece, or at least that they reflected off of one another, that they were bound together. And so his policy positions were part of his anti-establishment stance, right? That he was going to reject the things that the Bush administration did, that he was going to reject the things that Paul Ryan had done in Congress. So they're connected. But I think that the lesson

• 15:55Speaker 01

  that Republicans have drawn is that it's all about the style. And so they're trying to replicate Trump's style and they, you know, where they land on policy is a little more ambiguous at the moment.

• 16:07Ezra Klein?

  I've made the argument before in columns that one of the interesting things about Joe Biden's approach to politics is that he is using a more moderate stylistic presentation. He's quieter, he's more conciliatory, he's gentler, in some ways obscure, actually, a much more ambitious, progressive agenda. He's managed to look pretty moderate, even as he's governing to the left of any Democratic president in certainly recent American history.

• 16:37Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump maybe is like the inverse of that. And I think you see this with Stefanik too, that if you can in some ways hide a slightly more, I do not want to say moderate agenda for Trump certainly, but Stefanik compared to some others in the party, like actually has even disagreed with Trump on things like the border wall. But if you have the correct level of fight in your politics, like if you are sufficiently against your enemies, you hate the media, you hate the Democrats, cancel culture is everywhere, that you actually create more ideological space for yourself because people intuit what your policies are from your political positioning. But if you just get the political positioning into a place where you look like very, very Pro your side, then they don't look as closely at your policies.

• 17:19Ezra Klein?

  There have been a bunch of House Republican conservatives saying they don't want to vote for Stefanik and they're upset that she's like the likely successor because they think she's functionally a liberal, but she's going to win anyway because she's managed to like build this identity-based affinity with like the Trumpist forces. And it strikes me as actually a kind of interesting hack for both sides to have discovered at this moment in history.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that the difference between the two suggests that they're talking to two very different audiences and that there's a very different underlying theory of politics underwriting it, which I think is true. And that is that Republicans are speaking to a very loyal, committed base that responds strongly to that kind of rhetorical red meat, that responds strongly to the fight, that wants to see their representatives take it to the left, whatever that looks like. And on the other hand, you have Democrats who are trying to build a majoritarian coalition that includes a much broader base of politics that has a lot of variation in it, that relies

• 18:24Speaker 01

  a lot on independent and moderate voters. And in order to build that coalition, what Biden has learned is that it is really productive to present yourself as somebody who is reasonable, as somebody who is just doing the common sense kind of things. There's a populism in that too, right? That it's just common sense, that it's Joe from Pennsylvania, you know him, he's not a radical. And it speaks to the difference between a party that has decided that it is going to pursue minoritarian politics and a party that is reliant on majoritarian politics.

• 18:59Ezra Klein?

  But why did Republicans make that decision? I mean, like, if you step back, this is really quite weird. Donald Trump, he lost the popular vote in 2016, but he won the election fine. Then he loses in 2020 by more. So he loses the popular vote and the Electoral College. He lost the House. He's losing white, more moderate suburban voters, exactly the kind of voters Republicans need in many places. And yet, the party is moving more and more into his theory of politics. And what strikes me as strange about that is that you would anticipate, and it's been true in the Democratic Party, that when politics is very polarized and the stakes feel very high, parties become more desperate to win. And that includes

• 19:43Ezra Klein?

  sometimes making the compromises, like for many Democrats nominating and voting for and working for Joe Biden, that get you that big coalition. Strategically, the Republican Party seems to have settled into this much narrower approach. But most parties don't. Do you have a view on why they have?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  It's a great question, and I think a complicated question, because it is a road that they have been on for quite some time. I mean, part of it is rooted in that it's a republic, not a democracy idea that Barry Goldwater espoused back in the 1960s, and a resistance to the new majoritarian politics, not just of the civil rights movement, but of the one-person-one-vote ruling that comes out of the Supreme Court in the 1960s, that there was a resistance to majoritarianism, at least in a strain of the Republican Party in the 1960s, that would continue to grow. I mean, in the 1990s, you see this too, beginning

• 20:40Speaker 01

  to question, in a post-Cold War America, how much they want to embrace egalitarianism, how much they want to embrace what some folks would call rank democracy, and a desire to restrict who exactly gets to vote. I mean, you begin to see some more voter restriction laws coming to the fore, although that really picks up in the 20-teens. And why they opt for that is a difficult question. I mean, you could say that they see the writing on the wall demographically, but I actually think that it's They can't figure out how to square it. They've become more and more reliant on their base. They've become reliant on conservative media as the messaging arm of the party,

• 21:20Speaker 01

  that all of the energy in the party comes from a base that wants to brook no compromise. And so they don't know how to build a majoritarian coalition on that base. They were able to do it under Reagan. And they were able to do it a little bit in the early 1990s with the victories in Congress. But since then, two out of the last three Republican presidential victories have been through the Electoral College and not through the popular vote. And so minority hearing politics in a way have, you know, not worked beautifully for them, but have worked for them.

• 21:57Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a really important point. And I agree that it's like, it's central to understanding the Republican Party, that if it actually had to face normal democracy, where you need to win more votes to win the election, it couldn't survive in this, in this way. And so it would make new decisions. At the same time, there is something just still quite weird here. And maybe I'll place it here. You used to have this line that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line, that the Democrats don't make strategic decisions in deciding who to support, what Republicans do. Like in recent years, Democrats just nominate whoever's next in line, Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden. And Republicans are basically engaged in a continuing process of regicide. Like they knock their top players out in primaries.

• 22:42Ezra Klein?

  John Boehner got pushed out. Paul Ryan got pushed out. Eric Cantor got primaried out. I mean, Donald Trump came in and said, you know, that John McCain and George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush were trash and terrible presidents, and they made endless mistakes. And it is a party that has disconnected itself from virtually all of its recent history.

• 23:03Ezra Klein?

  And that strikes me as like one part of it is like it is developing a very narrow set of people listens to as well. Like you've studied it historically. So what is that change? Like, was it never true that Democrats fell in love and Republicans fell in line? Or is something actually transformed structurally that has let the party begin adopting this? Like, every year is a new, is like a whole new fresh start strategy?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Well, we definitely always want to add an asterisk to any sort of political adage, because it's not always entirely true. But it is a really important point that you're landing on, because what we are seeing now is a Republican base that's falling in love and a Republican establishment that's falling in line.

• 23:45Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that's very well said.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Right? After they ousted Eric Cantor in that primary in Virginia in 2014, the party gives up on immigration reform, because they see a signal coming from the base that says, you will not survive if you continue to move in the direction of immigration reform. We're going to withhold our support from you. So then the question is, how does this base become so empowered? And that's where I think that the story of conservative media becomes really important. I think the 1990s is a really pivotal moment in this. Because one of the things that you see, just to give you a sense of how things are changing in the 90s, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan really did talk about a big tent, one that included Reagan Democrats. So folks who had been traditionally Democratic Party voters who come over and

• 24:31Speaker 01

  they vote for Reagan. And there's the sense that the Republican Party is growing into this majoritarian party. And the way that it does that is it brings in people from outside, and it gives them a seat at the table, and it includes them in its vision of where the country is going. And by the 1990s, you're not talking about Reagan Democrats, you're talking about Rhinos, Republicans in name only. So this idea that there is now a litmus test for being a Republican, and that litmus test becomes tighter and tighter and tighter during the 1990s. And so there is this sense that

• 25:10Speaker 01

  How the party is conceiving of its power is changing and how the base is conceiving of the party is changing. And I think that if we, if we're thinking about why that's happening, there are probably a lot of reasons. I think there are structural economic reasons that people are feeling alienated from politics in the 90s. There were huge changes that are happening in media. I mean, we're talking about the rise of conservative talk radio and the rise of Fox News. We're talking about the rise of political entertainment. We often talk about the left as being really good at entertainment and liberals as being good at comedy and things like that. But, you know, there was a real space for political entertainment on the right, on the Rush Limbaugh show, even on shows like Politically Incorrect in the 1990s, that

• 25:53Speaker 01

  gave space for a kind of conservative punditry that was hardline, that entertained its audiences and really created a sense of loyalty between pundits and entertainers and the audience that began to short circuit the control, to the extent that the party had control over its base, the control that it had, and started increasingly not just putting voters in the driver's seat, which sounds very populist and small D democratic, but putting these media corporations in the driver's seat, putting donors in the driver's seat, particularly as you get into a post Citizens United world. And so there's a lot of complexity in there.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  And I don't want to suggest that it was frozen in time in the 1990s. I think there have been some really important changes since then. But that's where I think you begin to see something changing in the party that makes it increasingly a smaller, tighter party that has some idea of loyalty. Loyalty to what changes over time, but some idea of loyalty at the center of it.

• 27:21Ezra Klein?

  Does conservative media drive the base and through driving the base, drive the party? Or does the base drive conservative media and through driving conservative media, drive the party?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I think it's a more complicated question than that.

• 27:34Ezra Klein?

  Damn it.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  I know. I know. I wanted to give you a nice little adage to take away from this. But the reason that I say that is, we'll take the issue of immigration. In 2013, you had Marco Rubio and others going around, talking to people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, saying, you gotta give us cover on this immigration reform. And Sean Hannity goes all in on Fox News. He's like, this isn't amnesty. This is something that we need just to get past and move forward. And so we are going to support this gang of aid in the Senate. And he heard from his viewers that that was not going to fly. And he gets such a backlash that within a month of backing this new immigration reform bill,

• 28:19Speaker 01

  he's calling it amnesty on air. And he's completely turned on it. And he's saying behind the scenes, this is a political killer. You've got to let this one go. So that's an instance where you can see the base very clearly switching around the policies that conservative hosts are embracing. At the same time, you know, they might push back on something like immigration. But conservative hosts do a really good job of defining conservatism to the base. So you might feel very strongly on immigration, but you might not have like, you might not have really strong thoughts on the export import bank. But you hear from Fox News hosts and from talk radio hosts where conservatives stand on that issue. And so in a way that

• 29:00Speaker 01

  they're able to shape the broader political sensibility of the base.

• 29:07Ezra Klein?

  But let me push on a little bit, because your point of the export import bank is very well taken. But I think people really don't have positions on that at all still, right? You get told and maybe you sign on, but you don't really, you know, like, it's not a really held position. That's just like, it becomes part of the portfolio. There is a very dominant view among liberals that what has happened to the Republican Party is Fox News and maybe behind Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart and others. And over time, watching it, I've come down more on the side of the base drives conservative media, the conservative media, because it's talk radio, because of analytics and other things it has, because it's also, it has a very narrow audience as opposed to like mainstream,

• 29:52Ezra Klein?

  but maybe liberal-ish publications that are trying to win over a lot of people. It has a very good sense of where the base is and then it ends up channeling them. And like conservative media is where the base is able to translate its views into power. And through doing that, it then moves politicians around. And the reason I ask this is that Fox News strikes me over the past decade as having lost a lot of fights.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 30:16Ezra Klein?

  They did not want Donald Trump initially, right? They had this big debate where they tried to kind of cut him down at the knees with Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace and Bret Baer. You know, eventually like then Trump says, I'm not even going to come back on and the late Roger Ailes now burgers apiece. More recently, they then basically remake their entire primetime lineup to be more Trumpist. Now they're facing all this pressure from OANN and other sort of weirder conservative outlets because Fox News didn't fully get on board with like the big election lie. So it just seems to me there's a situation here where the conservative base wants something very different than Republican elites have wanted over the past couple of decades. And that it is the media where they have been able to get more power and they are slowly

• 30:58Ezra Klein?

  turning the Republican Party into the thing they want it to be as opposed to the thing that Paul Ryan and John Boehner and the head of the Chamber of Commerce want it to be. Do you think that's fair?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  I do, and I think that you're getting at a change over time. So my historian brain was thinking about the 90s and the early 2000s and thinking about the power that conservative media had in sort of shaping the sensibility of its audience. But that has changed, as you're pointing out, that there has been a shift in the locus of power. And I think that you're right, that conservative Media rather than, you know, back in the William F Buckley National Review days, they were trying to translate politics to their readers. And now you have the pressure coming up from below.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And Donald Trump's campaign in 2015 and 2016 was certainly one really important place where that became clear because in a way, it's kind of a pincher maneuver around conservative media because they don't want to break from this very big source of power, Donald Trump. And on the other side, they can't break from their base, which is Trump supporting. And so they're wedged in a lot of ways between the president and their base. And they almost all, including Glenn Beck, who was a standout for a while for not embracing Donald Trump, but they all eventually wind up, with very few exceptions, where the base is. And ultimately, the base was where Trump was.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  So I do think it has shifted over time that conservative media, which was once a tool for sort of an elite level of conservative activist, has become more powerful to a broader range of the base. And so that makes sense, given the rise of social media, given the rise of the internet versus the early days of radio and television.

• 32:52Ezra Klein?

  That's where I get nervous because if you look at what the base really believes, there is a level of almost civilizational conflict and stakes that can justify almost any maneuver. There's an Echelon Insights poll from this year that asked respondents whether they believe politics is about enacting good public policy or ensuring the country's survival as we know it. Only 25% of Republicans said policy, almost 50% said survival. You know, if you really believe the election was stolen from you, that is a tremendous theft, right? That is a tremendous political crime inflicted upon you and upon the country, right? That's the kind of thing that creates civil wars, civil unrest, right? I've always said this, that if you believed what a lot of the January 6th insurrectionists

• 33:35Ezra Klein?

  believed, then what they did was not crazy. It was the believing of it. And by the way, the Republican politicians who like indulge that belief, who bear the responsibility, but if I believed an election was stolen, like I might go into the streets too. And so I don't know that there's a bottom here.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yes, and I'm not going to be the voice of optimism here because It does seem that all of the political incentives within the party are stacked toward continuing down the road that they're on. There is no break at this moment. And if the break before that we used to think about was, well, eventually they'll just lose so many elections that they'll have to change. Right? What you were talking about earlier is that you lose so many elections, it conditions you to want to change so that you can win. But if winning elections is no longer necessary, if you're willing to manipulate what's happening

• 34:35Speaker 01

  in state governments and on election boards in order to render an election null and void, then there is, there is simply no incentive to stop. And the ultimate consequence of that is that you destroy our system of government. And that sounds really dramatic, but remember, we just are four months away from a presidential transition that was not peaceful. And that is a landmark moment in US history that requires a much bigger response than it's been given so far. And seeing the Republican Party double down on that type of politics is something that

• 35:19Speaker 01

  should be genuinely alarming because it doesn't end well, this path they're going down.

• 35:28Ezra Klein?

  If you were a historian from another country, looking at American history in present right now, would you say this just looks like a society headed for schism?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yes, I think, I think you would say that it's a society headed for some kind of break. And you wouldn't just look at it through the last five years of wrestling with Donald Trump and the turn the country has taken in that sense. But you would go back further. You would go back to the decision to invade Iraq. You would go back to the 2000 election and flash scenes of the so-called Brooks Brothers riot and the unrest over that election. You would probably flashback even further to the 1970s and the economic decline that the US was going through in that period and has not responded to in a way that has been economically satisfying for all but a small percentage of Americans.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  And so There's a story, not just like from the viewpoint of another country, but just put into the perspective of the last 50 years or so, where you look at the path that the United States has been on, and it is some form of decline, whether that decline ends in a political schism, whether it ends in sort of a rotting husk of an empire. I mean, it's hard to say what exactly it looks like, but you would not say that the US is on a glide path toward another golden age.

• 36:58Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk about that idea of continuity, because there is certainly one narrative that gets told, I think often self-servingly, where there is like the good Republican Party, even if you disagree with it, of, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, and then like the bad Donald Trump Republican Party. And Liz Cheney is very much saying this, right? She's a scion of, you know, the Cheney family. Dick Cheney is George W. Bush's vice president. You recently wrote a great piece on George W. Bush, where you said that while he did many things that were inclusive from the perspective of the Donald Trump Republican Party, outreach to Latinos, trying to calm anti-Islamic sentiment, embracing more immigration. He was also, and I'm quoting you here, "He played a leading role in the party's shift toward the minoritarian politics

• 37:42Ezra Klein?

  and enabled to remain a party of exclusion." So can you tell me a bit about that? How that sets up this modern era?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Sure. I think you're hitting on a really important point, because the idea of Trump exceptionalism that Donald Trump just rode in and blew up the whole system, I think ignores some really important continuities. And so when I was writing about George W. Bush on the basis of some comments he'd made after his recent book came out, again, the 2000 election and the fight to declare victory, to stop the count in Florida, to stop the count in Florida, not just through the courts, but again, through localized disruption. That was pretty anti-democratic. That was a really troubling moment. And the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision is a really challenging one

• 38:30Speaker 01

  for people who want to embrace this idea of democracy and liberalism. But also the 2004 election and the decision to lean into the anti-marriage equality initiatives and referenda across the country as part of a campaign strategy to win that election. It modeled, I think, the way that you could mobilize

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Resentment and mobilize exclusionary politics in order to win an election, which is something that, you know, we should say in 2004, George W. Bush did. And so when he talks now about this idea that the Republican Party won't win elections if it plays the politics of exclusion, well, he played the politics of exclusion and he, he won an election that way. He played the politics of minoritarian politics and he gained the presidency that way. And so there have certainly been massive shifts in the Republican Party since the days of George W. Bush, but he is not exempt from the story that we're telling about where the Republican Party is today.

• 39:32Ezra Klein?

  He also played the politics of like relentlessly raising the stakes, right? There was the, you know, you're with us or against us, period. You know, the, the politics and the structure of nine, post nine 11 politics was very much like a clash of civilizations, you know, it was very common for conservatives to talk about a fifth column inside the United States. And Cheney was very front and center in that. And then Liz Cheney has kind of held that politics together too. And in 2019, she said, 2019, right? Not a hundred years ago. She said of the Democratic Party, quote, "They've become the party of antisemitism. They've become the party of infanticide. They've become the party of socialism." And then a couple of years later, she was saying, well, I mean, I don't know why Republicans

• 40:17Ezra Klein?

  are not accepting, we've been defeated by the party of infanticide socialism and antisemitism, that there has to be some reckoning with the fact that if you tell people everything is on the line, they're going to act like it.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that rhetoric does have to be dealt with and there has to be some sort of internal reflection, right? Like the politics of the 2000s set up the politics of the 20 teens. And so the choices that the Republican Party made in that period, in a period, by the way, in which that's really the era in which Republican punditry and conservative media began to genuinely go off the rails. I mean, this is the era of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin writing in defense of internment camps and Dinesh D'Souza. Writing about how liberals are responsible for nine 11. So you have signals coming from the presidency, right? Saying that the stakes have never been higher, that you're with us

• 41:13Speaker 01

  or against us. And that then gets translated in a much coarser way in the media. And there's a real response from the base to that, right? They love it. And that then feeds back into the politics of the party. So that kind of, that kind of reckoning has to happen. And that doesn't mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? We can celebrate that there is a member of the Republican Party that is willing to say, this is a lie. This is a lie that the party needs to move away from, while also recognizing that one of the things that helped lift Donald Trump to victory, both in the Republican primary and ultimately in the 2016

• 41:53Speaker 01

  election, was that he was defining himself against the Bush-Cheney years, right? He has a legitimate critique of how badly run the government was, how bad the decision to go to war in Iraq was. And so it's interesting to have Liz Cheney as the person who's out there as the avatar of the Republican resistance to Donald Trump, because she's probably the worst possible person that it could be. But she's the only option at this point, if you want to point to a voice of conscience on this issue in the Republican Party.

• 42:30Ezra Klein?

  I want to speak to an objection that I think, you know, a listener more on the right might have right here, which is that if you listen to Democratic rhetoric now, it's very civilizational, too. If you listen to our conversation, even just a couple of minutes ago, about the way the Republican Party is becoming anti-democracy, and how America might be headed for a schism, like, that's pretty profound rhetoric. And what's tricky is that it feels like we're in a self fulfilling cycle, as people believe the stakes are more profound. They actually do get more profound. Right? This is a key theme of my book on polarization, but it is true that as a Republican Party has reacted to its view of like how America is changing by believing that like

• 43:10Ezra Klein?

  anything is acceptable in its quest to win, that then if you care about, say, American democracy, it is more dangerous if Republicans win. I remember Mitt Romney running in 2012. I disagree with Mitt Romney on all kinds of political questions, you know, and I was very concerned he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and like that would like really, really, really harm people. But I didn't think it was the end of the American political system if you won. Whereas if Donald Trump runs and wins in 2024, I think it's a very, very unclear question whether or not America's political system has a future. And that's a tricky thing. Like, on the one hand, indulging the language of high stakes creates self fulfilling prophecies in what people are willing to do to win. And on the other hand, the stakes

• 43:55Ezra Klein?

  do legitimately seem to me to be getting higher. And I'm curious as a historian, how you parse that.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, being unwilling to name the stakes is also a problem, right? So you're caught in a bind because as the Republican Party becomes more dangerous, if calling it out as dangerous is considered raising the stakes and raising the temperature and making politics more dangerous, it's like, where do you, where do you land ultimately? And from a historical perspective, and this is just going to feed into the apocalyptic rhetoric, but you have to go back to the antebellum period and look at all of the attempts to bring down the temperature in the 1850s, right? To put gag rules in Congress so you can't talk about slavery and that will keep people from fighting and that will

• 44:42Speaker 01

  help keep the Union together because we're not actually having the conversations that we need to have about this core issue in American politics, in this case, the enslavement of 4 million people. And

• 44:56Speaker 01

  It didn't work, right? If you don't deal with the problem, if you don't talk about the problem, if you don't name the problem and name the stakes, right? That slavery fundamentally undermined any sort of small D democratic commitment that the United States had. If you can't say that, then you're nowhere. And you end up where the US ultimately ended up, which was in a civil war. And so this is a really challenging problem because it speaks to, or it lands on one of the core problems that you've written about and I've written about, which is this idea of an epistemological divide. Because I hear your question and I say, well, yeah, you know,

• 45:37Speaker 01

  when I looked at Mitt Romney's run, I thought this could be very bad for the Democratic Party because it would make Barack Obama a one-term president. He would not be able to sort of like seal his legacy. But it did not seem like a make or break for the country kind of election. There's a very evidence-based case to make for why Donald Trump running and winning in 2024 would be catastrophic. And you only need to look back at January 6th in order to understand why that is. But if we can't have evidence-based arguments and make evidence-based points about what the stakes are, where do we go from there?

• 46:43Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk about the role of the media in this because we've been discussing the way there's the magnetic attraction, particularly in the Republican Party, to the most extreme voices. And part of that reflects, I think, the actual views of the base. But part of it also reflects the medias. And here I don't mean the conservative media. I mean, the mainstream media, The New York Times and others, the attraction to conflict, to crazier ideas. You know, I would say if you look at the members of the House in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, who get the most coverage, they are not the ones with most institutional power inside the House of Representatives. Like, that is not how that lines up. What do you think the responsibility is, or in some ways like the optimal strategy is of the media in deciding what is newsworthy?

• 47:28Ezra Klein?

  Because that is a decision we're making all the time in this era when the stakes are continuously going up and so many political entrepreneurs have recognized the way to get coverage is to say the craziest possible thing you can think of at any given moment.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Well, first I would say that it is not a new problem. I mean, this idea of leveraging journalistic values against journalism has been something in the works for quite some time. So just a couple of examples. In 1980, during the Mariela boat lift, which was bringing refugees from Cuba to the United States, there were debates about immigration in the US. And news organizations had such a difficult time finding somebody to argue the anti-side that they brought on this group known as FAIR that was a pretty extreme anti-immigration group, but it got presented alongside pro-immigration groups.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  And it was presented as this is a debate in the country, you know, for or against this. We've seen this with climate as well. The idea that you bring on an anti-climate change person and a pro-climate change person, and you present it as an open debate and the sides as equivalent and having kind of equivalent backing. That kind of both sides journalism is something that activists have found a way to use to advance their, their cause. And that idea that conflict attracts press is also something that politicians have used very capably over the years. I mean, Pat Buchanan in 1987 was talking about this. He said at the time that he was thinking about running for president and he was like, the bias in the media is not liberal bias. It's biased towards conflict. You gotta give them a line.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  You gotta give them a fight. And he won inordinate amounts of media coverage in the 1990s, in part because he understood what the motivations of journalism were because he himself had been a journalist. And so. I think that the, you know, where do we go from here in journalism terms is thinking very clearly about what the values underlying media are. And by that, I mean, there is a set of values behind giving what is now sort of derisively called both sides journalism, that you present a voice from the left and you present a voice from the right and you

• 49:50Speaker 01

  give your audience the information they need in order to make a decision. That doesn't always help your audience get to what is real and what is true. And so what is the value behind the value? What is it that you're actually trying to do? Like, what is the, what is the journalistic function? I think that kind of first principles reflection has been taking place over the last five years. I think that it will continue to take place. But there's a, obviously, a shiny object problem in the media. And this was very clear during the Trump years. And what we found through studies of media ecosystems

• 50:29Speaker 01

  is that by spending so much attention, talking about Donald Trump's lies tended to amplify them, right? Tended to present them to more people. And so one of the things that I've recommended is just going back to a very deeply contextual kind of journalism, which is problematic, right? Because there is an economic system that tends to thrive on controversy and clicks. And your deeply contextualized article about how lies function within the current Republican Party are not necessarily the ones that drive the most revenue towards a journalistic outlet.

• 51:06Ezra Klein?

  See, I think it's worse than that even, to be honest, which is one, I don't think the reevaluation of values has happened at all. The most fundamental choice we make in journalism is what to cover. And that is, we have no framework for how we make it. We have nothing published that we allow ourselves to be held to. On any given day, we can cover a vast range of stories and we choose a very small number of them. And in part because we know that choice is one that is very powerful to make. And that we don't have great frameworks for making. We like to outsource it. So one way we outsource it right now, I think, is social media. What is already generating attention on social media?

• 51:50Ezra Klein?

  Well, obviously that's newsworthy or else everybody wouldn't be talking about it. But social media trends towards the most extreme voices. And then journalism reifies it by covering those controversies. And so it's like this like closed loop of like bad engagement incentives. You know, at the same time, let's say you try to break it. So I try to do this on the show and I don't have the same mandates on my specific podcast. It has my face on the tile that like a whole newspaper has. But, you know, I want there to be a diversity of voices here. But I also want them to be good voices. So I've said to myself, okay, I'm going to cover and elevate conservative voices that I think are good faith, that have good points to make, that are, you know, arguing more or less from the facts, that are rigorous. But I get the criticism.

• 52:32Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a, it's a correct one that I'm giving people in many ways, an untrue look at the Republican Party. You know, the Republican Party is not the people I have on the show. It's people I wouldn't have on the show in many cases because, you know, I don't think they're honest. I don't think they're, you know, arguing, are arguing in a way that makes the system better. I don't think there's a good answer to this problem. I'm not sure there's a way to solve it, particularly in the Republican Party that looks the way it does right now.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's why conversations like this are so important. Something that I ran into as somebody who also works on white nationalism and white power movements, writing about incidents like Charlottesville. There was a very clear decision in the work that I did, that I wasn't going to elevate the voices of people like Richard Spencer or Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the Unite the Right Rally. But rather to talk to experts on white power, to go through the things that had already been published by those people and talk about where their ideas come from, but not give them a platform to lie to people. And that I think is one way that you begin to address it.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  It's not a sexy answer, but it is one step in the right direction.

• 53:45Ezra Klein?

  Basically, I think the implicit idea in this whole conversation is the institutional Republican Party is being driven or driving itself further and further off a cliff, right? Into being something really quite dangerous. And so, one version of that is like, you look at that training, you try to get ahead of it, like, so, okay, like Madison Cawthorn, right? I think he's frankly more representative of a lot of the Republican Party, even though he's a relatively new House member, who I don't think commands a lot of respect from his colleagues even, but he's functionally like a meme lord, and like, that's how he got into the House. And like, I think that's sort of the nature, the true face of the Republican Party right now. But, he's one of its worst voices.

• 54:26Ezra Klein?

  And so, the choice to cover him is a choice not to give him more oxygen, and not to cover people who on the one hand may not represent where it's going, but, but, but might be better voices for it. And like, that's the part of this that strikes me as really difficult. And I think that the problem is, we in the media, we're an actor in all this. And I think this very deeply about Donald Trump. We let him dominate coverage before he was a tremendous frontrunner in 2016. And I think we at least partially created his victory, because other, we sort of thought that as long as we were covering, like, lies as lies, or covering bad things as bad things, like, that would be enough. But it turned out that the act of coverage, the act of attention was more powerful than the sentiment of that attention.

• 55:09Ezra Klein?

  I think that the media has always believed that its power is whether its coverage is good or bad, but I don't think that's true. Its power is really just, is something covered or not, particularly on the right, where negative media coverage is like a badge of honor. And so, like, then there becomes this question of, are we just getting played? I think the answer is yes.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  If you're right, and that reckoning hasn't even really begun in non-conservative media, in journalism, about this question of exposure and complicity, man, that has to be the first step. Like, forget about reforming the Republican Party, reform US journalism, and then maybe we can talk about the Republican Party.

• 55:48Ezra Klein?

  Before we end here, let me ask you a little bit about the Democratic Party. So you have a Republican Party that's becoming more explicitly anti-Smaldy Democratic, that just ousted Cheney because she believes, you know, and kept saying the election was, was correctly decided. Meanwhile, across the country in the states, Republicans are putting the sort of big lie idea into practice. They're putting people who would have ruled for Trump on election boards. They are trying to change state election laws. Like, there's a real, there's real activity happening here. What Democrats have is national power. They have a bill, H.R. 1, the For the People Act, H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that try to deal with a lot of this election integrity issues, voting rights issues.

• 56:31Ezra Klein?

  But in the Senate, it's going to get blocked by the filibuster. I mean, and you have Democrats who, you know, your Joe Manchins, your Christian Cinemas, who keep saying they want bipartisanship, so they don't want to do anything with the filibuster. And meanwhile, it seems like behind the desire for bipartisanship, Republicans are going to smuggle in like, not even partisanship, but a complete anti, like, small D democratic agenda that like, could leave Democrats without much of a political system in which to act. I'm curious if you think elected Democrats appreciate the gravity of what is happening on the Republican side and the kinds of responses it might merit.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  I mean, clearly, not all Democrats do, because the least that the Democratic Party needs to do at this moment is pass election reform legislation. Because as, as you're saying, I mean, we saw this happen after the 2010 election, we're seeing it happen after the 2020 election, that when they have the opportunity, Republicans will move at the state and local level into some pretty fiercely anti-democratic directions. And, you know, we saw in places like Georgia, some local and state level pushback that made the bill somewhat less draconian than it would have been in an ideal Republican world. But until the Democratic Party, and, and here, you know, Manchin, Sinema, the people

• 57:48Speaker 01

  who are resisting this, come to terms with the idea that, first of all, that bipartisanship that they're glorifying was in many ways the product of an earlier era, which is not to say that there is no bipartisan legislation, but bipartisanship in and of itself is a valueless kind of thing. And so they need to realize that super quick. And if the Democratic Party doesn't do something on election reform, we are headed into

• 58:21Speaker 01

  A pretty dark period in which the push towards minoritarianism is going to be rooted even more deeply structurally in the states as well as in the federal government. And it's not entirely clear to me why they don't understand that. I think that there's so much evidence thick on the ground, not just of what has happened in the past, but what is happening right now. And we have seen in the United States, you know, it took significant, powerful federal legislation in order to secure voting rights in the United States. You needed to keep that pressure in place. That had to happen after the Civil War. It had to happen in the 1960s. And we're going to need it again, right?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  We're bereft of tools for safeguarding voting rights in the United States. And that's the core thing, right? Like, if we don't have that, even if the Democrats pass wildly popular legislation and have the support of a majority of Americans, they are not going to be able to hold majoritarian power in the United States. I'm going to try not to use the biggest word because I take your point about the ratcheting up of the stakes, but it is, if not an existential question for the Democratic Party, it is an existential question for our conception of democracy, right? I mean, it hasn't always been the case that Americans embrace the idea that every person should be able to vote.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  But over the past 60 years or so, that's kind of where we landed, that we wanted to have a democracy with the participation of as many people as possible. And we should make that possible by making the rules such that people have access to the ballot box. And if that isn't a core Democratic Party principle, the one that underlies every other one, then we have a real problem on our hands.

• 1:00:12Ezra Klein?

  Oof, I think that is a good sobering place to end. So I'm going to ask you all as our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I'm gonna recommend three that have been heavy on my mind lately. One of them is one that I just have to promote everywhere I go, and that is Kathleen Blume's Bring the War Home, which is a history of the white power movement. It is bracing, but it is an absolute must read for understanding white extremism in the US. The other two I want to recommend are, I had the chance to lead a discussion at the Anti-Racist Book Festival last month, and it gave me the opportunity to read two really good books that I think people should pick up. One is Charles King's Gods of the Upper Air, which is a history of anthropology and relativism,

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  and that might sound kind of boring, but it's actually really fascinating. It's populated with all these amazing characters. It's about kind of core values in society. It's about the development of an anti-racist idea in opposition to the kind of racial hierarchies that had dominated in science before the early 20th century. And the third book is The Fire Is Upon Us by Nick Bukala, which is a story about the debate between William F. Buckley Jr. and James Baldwin, two characters that you don't often think about in the same breath. But he weaves together the stories of their lives leading up to that debate over race

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  and racism in the United States. It's such a good book. I really highly recommend it. It's so smart, and it puts together two people and two sets of ideas that I don't think we put together enough. So those are my three.

• 1:02:02Ezra Klein?

  And I'll add to that, if you've not gone on YouTube and searched and watched that Buckley-Baldwin debate, I don't know what you're even doing. Like, that is like the only thing the internet is actually good for, is to get to watch it. It's a remarkable historic document. Nicole Hammer, thank you very much.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ezra.

• 1:02:33Ezra Klein?

  This is a clown show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Virja Karma and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.