Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show The Obamas Strike Back About this episode Is Obamaism making a comeback? Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention, Michelle and Barack Obama electrified the crowd with the most powerful speeches of the week so far, and seemed to anoint Kamala Harris as the inheritor of their political movement. For this audio diary, I’m joined by my producer Elias Isquith to dissect those two speeches. We discuss what Obamaism was in 2008 and 2012, and what it means to pass the baton to Harris in 2024.
Mentioned:
“Biden Made Trump Bigger. Harris Makes Him Smaller.” by Ezra Klein
“That Feeling You Recognize? Obamacore.” by Nate Jones
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
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 Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Transcript 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.
0:48 Ezra Klein? It is Wednesday, August 21st. I spent last night at the second night of the Democratic National Convention, which was a night of heavy hitters in the Democratic Party. It was a night of Bernie Sanders, of Chuck Schumer, of JB Pritzker. It was a night of Doug Emhoff, who gave a truly lovely speech about Kamala Harris. But it was, above all, the night of the Obamas. And we'll talk about both of them here, but it was specifically, I would say, the night of Michelle Obama.
1:20 Speaker 01 Please welcome former First Lady, Michelle Obama.
1:27 Ezra Klein? When she came out, the crowd roared for her. In a way, it roared for no one else at night. In a way, I have not heard it roar at this convention. In a way, it would not even roar for her husband a couple of minutes later.
1:41 Speaker 02 Hello, Chicago!
1:46 Ezra Klein? And the beginning of her speech was very different than the beginning of any other Democrat's speech at this convention.
1:53 Speaker 02 Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn't it?
2:02 Speaker 02 You know, we're feeling it here in this arena, but it's spreading all across this country. We love a familiar feeling that's been buried too deep for far too long. You know what I'm talking about. It's the contagious power of hope.
2:28 Speaker 02 The anticipation, the energy, the exhilaration of once again being on the cusp of a brighter day. The chance to vanquish the demons of fear, division, and hate that have consumed us and continue pursuing the unfinished promise of this great nation. The dream that our parents and grandparents fought and died and sacrificed for. America, hope is making a comeback.
3:02 Ezra Klein? So I want to say a few things about this. In this speech, which was one of the great pieces of political oratory I have heard, the best piece of oratory at the convention so far, probably the best there will be at the convention. Joe Biden didn't exist. You would think Donald Trump was president right now in Michelle Obama's speech. She did not do the thing other Democrats are doing of talking about Joe Biden's record, of talking about his sacrifice, but nor did she portray Biden, and nor would Biden be
3:42 Ezra Klein? portrayed across this night as the inheritor of Obamaism. What she did, and what her husband would do a little bit later in the evening, is pass the torch of their movement, not to Joe Biden, but to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. And Michelle Obama's speech was much more explicit about this, because functionally what she argued was that since Obama left, since they left the White House, we have been in the Trump era, in the emotional structure of the Trump era, and only now was there really the possibility to vanquish it. I'm joined here by my great producer, Elias Isquith, to talk about the second night of the Democratic National Convention.
4:27 Ezra Klein? Elias, thank you for being here.
4:28 Speaker 03 It's great to be here. So I wanted to start with a moment on Joe Biden, because like, as you said, Michelle Obama didn't mention him in her speech, but Barack Obama did. And I thought the way he honored him, his choice of language, was pretty interesting.
4:43 Barack Obama? Joe and I come from different backgrounds, but we became brothers.
4:50 Barack Obama? And as we worked together for eight, sometimes pretty tough years, what I came to admire most about Joe wasn't just his smarts, his experience. It was his empathy and his decency. And his hard-earned resilience, his unshakable belief that everyone in this country deserves a fair shot.
5:23 Barack Obama? And over the last four years, those are the values America has needed most.
5:30 Speaker 03 So he makes a point of saying that he and Biden are different. But he also says that Biden is what America needed the last four years. What did you make of that?
5:39 Ezra Klein? There's a dynamic that you often see in startup companies.
5:45 Ezra Klein? They have as their first leader, their first CEO or founder, this visionary charismatic leader, like the ideas guy, Steve Jobs. And when that person passes from the scene, retires, gets pushed out, whatever it is, they are often followed in leadership by a stabilizer, a more managerial type, somebody who doesn't have their glitz and their glamour and their charisma and all their giant new ideas, but knows how to run an organization, was maybe their number two before, and can sort of pull together something that had become sort of too diffuse and was running too hot.
6:29 Ezra Klein? I hear a bit of that in that description of Joe Biden. That what Biden brought, and remember, I mean, Biden runs in 2020. I believe if Biden had been the nominee in 2016, he would have crushed Donald Trump. And a lot of how we understand American politics and American political history would have been different. If you want to see a great convention speech, by the way, go watch Joe Biden's convention speech from the 2016 convention, from Hillary Clinton's convention. He absolutely wrecks Donald Trump.
6:58 Speaker 05 His cynicism is unbounded. His lack of empathy and compassion can be summed up in a phrase I suspect he's most proud of having made famous. You're fired. I mean, really, I'm not joking. Think about that. Think about that.
7:17 Speaker 05 Think about everything you learned as a child. No matter where you were raised. How can there be pleasure in saying you're fired? He's trying to tell us he cares about the middle class? Give me a break. That's a bunch of malarkey.
7:41 Ezra Klein? I watched that speech and thought this guy would beat Trump by seven points. So he runs in 2020 in a different context. But he is the ultimately the successor as a Democratic president to Barack Obama. And he's not Obama. What he represents is not what made Obama an agent and a representation of change. What he represents is a kind of return to normalcy. Right? It's the pandemic. Donald Trump is crazy. Here's Joe Biden. He's 77. He's been in politics forever. He's the most known quantity in American political life. He is calm. He is decent. He is somebody who calls you when there's a death in your family. You can trust him. Right? He's not here to upend the entire order.
8:25 Ezra Klein? That might've been the right thing for 2020. But one of the things interesting last night about the Obama speeches is that they were passing the mantle of change, hope and change to Kamala in a way that made it seem to me like they believed that Biden was a sort of pause from that. Right? He was something else, which I think is actually accurate. Biden did a lot in terms of policy change, but in terms of what he represented politically, he was stability. He was normalcy. He was decency. And there's nothing wrong with that, but he wasn't the forward thrust of the political tendency Barack Obama created in 2008.
9:08 Ezra Klein? He was stabilization after the rupture of Donald Trump and the pandemic. And now the sort of argument they're making about Kamala Harris isn't that it is time to go back to a normal presidency, but it's time to go forward in the thing that that they either started or were at least part of.
9:28 Speaker 03 So let's talk about that thing. You called it Obamaism at the top. What is Obamaism?
9:34 Ezra Klein? Ooh, that's a big question. One place I think to start with it is to say that it is not Obama's presidency. And this was always a very tricky place for Obama himself. But I understand Obama-ism as a form of politics that rewrites the American story, to be at its core about pluralism and social progress. Obama-ism is a recognition that Americans hate how politics feels, right? In that first 2004 speech, this dissolving of the reality of red and blue America, which I think there is a very real reality to red
10:15 Ezra Klein? and blue America, but Obama's ongoing point that who we are in politics and who we are in our lives feel very different from each other. That the people we are when we're watching Fox News and MSNBC and then who we are in our churches and our Little League fields and our PTAs are so different from each other. And that the goal of politics should be to make us feel in our politics the way we feel in our communities, right? To bring out the better angels that are so endlessly evident if you walk through an American community, but then seem so absent when you end up in politics. But then there
10:57 Ezra Klein? was also this effort to shift the American story. Remember that Obama-ism arises after George W. Bush. And in 2004, in one of the real low points in my lifetime for American liberalism, when George W. Bush wins reelection, there is this huge narrative that what has happened is Democrats have lost the heartland. They've become unpatriotic. John Kerry is framed as this French-speaking cosmopolitan who you can't really trust. And Obama comes in and he's a black man with the middle name Hussein, who lives in Chicago.
11:37 Ezra Klein? And spent much of his upbringing abroad, right? It is everything that is easy to paint as un-American in the George W. Bush era. And what he does is he retells the American story and puts him and people like him at the center of it. The American story is a story of an expanding moral circle. It is a story of social justice movements. It is a story of realizing that we have bonds with people who don't look like us or sound like us or think like us. And that the true Americans, the people who are the real patriots, are the people who have endlessly fought in every generation to make what America is more like what the Declaration of Independence says it is going to be. And Obamaism mattered because Obamaism won, and it showed that Democrats could reclaim
12:21 Ezra Klein? that patriotism. Now, when you govern, that's not what you govern over. But that's what his politics were about. They were about speaking to the anger and disappointment people had and how politics felt. And they were about reclaiming a fundamental narrative of America and patriotism for a rising, multi-ethnic, multicultural political tendency that did not have the numbers to win elections in 1988, but did by 2008 and does now.
12:55 Speaker 03 Obama actually directly spoke to that idea in a speech, that this is a tendency that can win.
13:01 Barack Obama? Our politics have become so polarized these days that all of us, across the political spectrum, seem so quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue. We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out yell the other side. And after a while, regular folks just tune out. Or they don't bother to vote.
13:31 Barack Obama? Now that approach may work for the politicians who just want attention and thrive on division. But it won't work for us to make progress on the things we care about. The things that really affect people's lives. We, we need to remember that we've all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices. And that if we want to win over those who aren't yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns. And maybe learn something in the process. After all,
14:16 Barack Obama? if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we, we don't automatically assume they're bad people. We recognize that the world is moving fast. That they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they'll extend to us.
14:52 Barack Obama? That's how we can build a true democratic majority.
14:56 Speaker 03 The idea that if we just listen to each other, that if our politics was less divisive, that this could build a true democratic majority. Is that his pitch? Do you think he really believes that?
15:08 Ezra Klein? Obama, like every other politician, is not so naive as to think his politics are an 80-20 or 90-10 proposition. Even in 2008, I think he's got something like a seven-point popular vote margin. What Obama does believe is that there's a big middle in American politics and that you can win elections and even win governing majorities. Remember, he got 60 seats in the Senate. You can win big majorities and you can win elections by reaching out to the people who are there to be reached out to. And by the way, those are not all people who believe in and vote for Donald Trump. They're not MAGA supporters necessarily, right? Republican opposition to Barack Obama was intense during Obama's presidency.
15:52 Ezra Klein? What they are, the people Obama is reaching out to there, are people who just don't like the whole tone of politics, right? They don't like the bitterness, they don't like the division, they don't like the polarization. The people they know who are into politics are unbelievably annoying. They don't like them. But I want to pull something else out of that because that clip you played, that was the core of Barack Obama's speech. That was, and he would go on to do this very explicitly a few paragraphs later, that was Barack Obama calling back directly to his 2004 speech, to his original concerns about polarization, about pluralism, about our ability to speak to each other. There was just a big piece in New York Magazine about Obama Corps, which was the sort of liberal cultural interpretation
16:36 Ezra Klein? of Obamaism. I sort of disagree with this interpretation, but this is the way they framed it. It's Hamilton, it's Parks and Rec, it's a bunch of culture, you know, it's fight song, although I really associate that with Hillary Clinton. Obama Corps, though, is not Obamaism. Obama Corps is this thing liberals took out of Obamaism and made their own. And they sort of took this teleological, rising, multi-ethnic majority idea, turned it into a political theory and into culture, and made it into something about how they were on this unstoppable march to a form of dominance in America. You're sort of on
17:19 Ezra Klein? the train, or you were retrograde and being left behind. And Obama-ism, in the speech Obama gives at the 2004 DNC that makes him into a national figure in his 2008 campaign, it wasn't about how liberals were right, at least not exclusively. It was about how you talk to people in politics and how you frame a politics. It is about people who don't agree with you. In a way, the most contradictory political move from Obama-ism was Hillary Clinton's deplorables comment. It's also for people who don't remember this, why when Obama was caught at fundraiser talking about how people, after their manufacturing talents get hollowed out, become bitter and cling to guns and religion, that this was
18:02 Ezra Klein? such a big problem for him, because that was also in real contradiction to the way he talked about talking to people. And what Obama was sort of reprising here, look, you're not going to convince Donald Trump, but there is a way of talking to your neighbors and a way of talking to people in politics who disagree with you and who are never going to agree with you and who are never going to be a down-the-line hardcore liberal on every issue. That is about making politics work and making this country feel like a place we can all live in. And one mistake I think Democrats made at many different times was he sort of dropped that part of it. They took the winning, but they didn't take that part about how do you talk to people who feel like they're losing? How do you
18:45 Ezra Klein? include people who don't feel included? And he was sort of a genius at this. One thing that was different in his speech from Michelle Obama's, I think, is he was actually making an argument to the party and to Kamala Harris about how he thinks they should campaign and how he thinks they should campaign and talk to people who don't agree with them. And he's basically saying that he wants to see them bring back parts of what made his early politics work. In many ways, the Democratic Party has dropped. I mean, that part about scolding people and reading them out of your movement, that's a critique not of the right, it's a critique of the left.
19:24 Speaker 03 So I wanted to move now to Michelle Obama's speech. She talked a lot about values and the meaning of America, but in a way that felt pretty different from her husband's speech.
19:34 Speaker 02 You see, those values have been passed on through family farms and factory towns, through tree-lined streets and crowded tenements, through prayer groups and National Guard units and social studies classrooms. Those were the values my mother poured into me until her very last breath.
20:00 Speaker 02 Kamala Harris and I built our lives on those same foundational values. Even though our mothers grew up an ocean apart, they shared the same belief in the promise of this country.
20:16 Speaker 02 That's why her mother moved here from India at 19. It's why she taught Kamala about justice, about the obligation to lift others up, about our responsibility to give more than we take. She'd often tell her daughter, "Don't sit around and complain about things. Do something."
20:43 Speaker 03 So what do you hear there in terms of Michelle Obama's vision of Obamaism?
20:48 Ezra Klein? One of the striking things about Michelle Obama's speech was that, even more so than at past conventions, and this had been a dynamic that emerged over, I would say, a series of Democratic conventions. Michelle Obama represents a related but different political lineage now and tradition to Barack Obama. Barack Obama is of the Obamas, the one who has this expansive, optimistic vision of America. Michelle Obama is the harder-edged version of their politics. Very famously, she said, when he was winning the nomination the first time,
21:32 Ezra Klein? that this was the first time she'd been proud of her country. Michelle Obama is the part of this that does not believe America always does the right thing. That believes there is quite a lot of racism in America, quite a lot of class war in America. That it sees America not as an arc of history bending towards justice, but as a fight that you might lose at any minute. And that was very much what the speech was about, the do something refrain. That was very much her argument towards the end of the speech where she began telling people, there are going to be bad polls and you cannot fall apart. They are going to try to destroy Kamala Harris and you cannot let them. You cannot wait to be asked to participate in this campaign.
22:17 Ezra Klein? Very much separately from Obama, Barack Obama, who is all about the better angels of American nature. Michelle Obama is one of the two who tends to focus on the darker angels, demons of American nature. And in a way, she was passing her torch somewhat separately from her husband's torch to Kamala Harris. She was saying that Kamala Harris is like her. That Kamala Harris comes from a family like Michelle Obama's, which is a different kind of family than Barack Obama came from. That Kamala Harris has Michelle Obama's political history of fighting forward in a country that was very likely not going to recognize her, of developing the toughness and even this
23:02 Ezra Klein? cynicism at times of being a warrior. And so for the part of the party that actually in a way sort of believes what Michelle Obama believes about America, rather than what Barack Obama believes about America, that was the part of the party that was being spoken to here. I think after the Trump years, that part of the party is bigger. In a way, Michelle Obama's view of this feels less anachronistic to a lot of people than Barack Obama's sonnier view. Trump, in many ways, was a refutation of parts of the Barack Obama view, right? I don't think it robs it of its power, but it robs it of its almost teleological force. And here's Michelle Obama saying, yeah, the person who can win this fight, because it
23:45 Ezra Klein? is actually a fight, is Kamala Harris, because she comes from the lineage, like I do, in this case, like a matriarchal lineage, of people who've been in this fight and climbing this mountain and were never given anything, and now understand what it's going to take to win.
24:02 Speaker 03 So have we come a long way from when they go low, we go high? Or is there more continuity here?
24:07 Ezra Klein? These were not when they go low, we go high speeches. There was a moment in Michelle Obama's speech where she seemed to actually update that formula, where she began to talk not about high and low, but small and big.
24:21 Speaker 02 And let me tell you this, going small is never the answer. Going small is the opposite of what we teach our kids. Going small is petty, it's unhealthy, and quite frankly, it's un-presidential.
24:40 Ezra Klein? Trump is small. There's a smallness to him. His smallness is un-presidential. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they're big. They're big-hearted. But it wasn't when they go low, we go high. Both Michelle Obama and Barack Obama went low. There were real elbows thrown at Donald Trump. Lowest maybe was in Barack Obama's speech where he talked about Donald Trump's obsession with crowd sizes. And then he made a series of sort of measuring motions with his hands that suggested, I would say, and certainly this is how it was received in the arena, that what Donald Trump was fundamentally worried about was not actually the size of his crowds.
25:22 Ezra Klein? Both Obamas were much more in the slipstream of where the party is now, of mocking Donald Trump, of treating him as dangerous, yes, but comic and ridiculous and old. I mean, Barack Obama had a line that his act is getting stale. Michelle Obama talked about the presidency being one of those black jobs that Donald Trump talks about.
25:47 Speaker 02 Who's gonna tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs?
25:57 Speaker 03 So you said a moment ago that Michelle Obama was passing the torch to Kamala Harris in this specific way. But what about Barack Obama? How does Harris fit into his vision of Obama-ism?
26:08 Ezra Klein? I think this is really interesting. And I mean, we're going to see because she is still shaping who she is going to be on the national stage. But while part of Harris's own story is she's a very early supporter of Barack Obama, she endorses him as a California politician, when many people don't, she goes to Iowa over New Year's in 2008 to, you know, be out there campaigning for him in the snow. Harris's politics are quite different than his. And when she is out there on the campaign trail right now, she does not sound like Barack Obama in 2008 or 2004. The applause lines for Harris, when she says, "I am a prosecutor. I put bad people behind bars and I know Donald Trump's type," that is not Obama-ism.
26:52 Ezra Klein? That's something else. What's interesting to me is that of the two of them, Tim Walz is the one that has a very Obama-like take. Tim Walz is the one who is actually playing with his own stereotypes in an interesting way. When Obama used to be like, "Look, my name's Barack Hussein Obama and I'm skinny and I got funny ears and all these things that might make you mistrust me." In a funny way, well, that was aimed outward. Walz has been doing the same thing aimed inward at the Democratic coalition. Like, "I'm a military man. I'm a football coach. I, you know, come from a small rural community. You know, I'm like a white guy who wears flannel and fixes your car. And where I come from, we believe in neighborliness.
27:37 Ezra Klein? And where I come from, we believe in helping each other. And I helped found the, you know, the LGBT Alliance at a small, fairly rural school when that was not a thing many people were doing, right? Walz with his, "These other people are weird and politics doesn't have to feel like this. It shouldn't feel like this. We can just take care of each other and be nice to each other and listen to each other and we don't need to be pulled in by these weirdos over here." This sort of mix of telling a story about yourself that defies what people would think of you and using that defiance to then make an argument that American politics doesn't actually fit into the boxes people put it into, that's Obama-ism. And Obama's moment on the stage last night where he said-
28:17 Barack Obama? Let me tell you something. I love this guy.
28:24 Barack Obama? Tim is the kind of person who should be in politics.
28:28 Ezra Klein? It sounded very genuine, not him saying Tim Walz is a great public servant who's, you know, passed a lot of great policy in Minnesota, but Tim Walz, like, that dude's great. So Harris is different than Obama, which I think is important, you know, it's a different era. But there's a strain of Obamaism in her, there's a very potent strain of it in her running mate. And then again, I think Harris is in the lineage of Michelle Obama right now more than she is in Barack Obama. And I don't think it's an accident that Michelle Obama's speech, which just was extraordinary, was the one that connected so powerfully last night. It wasn't just because of how good the speech was, but it was because it felt very real to the moment, right? That feeling, the articulated feelings
29:13 Ezra Klein? of fear and despair and anger and the need to actually have a fight that vanquishes Donald Trump and the forces he represents, whether or not you believe that is possible, that is authentic to the way Kamala Harris talks about politics and people feel about her. So it is funny, right? You know, I think Barack Obama's natural relationship here is not the top of the ticket, but the bottom of it. And Michelle Obama, who in many ways has risen to represent a huge part of the Democratic coalition in a way that would not have been anticipated in maybe 2008, she's the one who did the direct passing of the torch to the top of the ticket.
29:51 Speaker 03 So in terms of Harris and the future of this movement, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about a very different part of Barack Obama's speech, because it hits on something that is near and dear to your heart.
30:02 Barack Obama? And in doing that, we can't just point to what we've already accomplished. We can't just rely on the ideas of the past. We need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today. And Kamala understands this. She knows, for example, that if we want to make it easier for more young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country. That is a priority, and she's put out a bold new plan to do just that.
30:40 Ezra Klein? I love it. Welcome to the abundance agenda, Barack Obama. So I noted this in yesterday's DNC dispatch, which is that it was very striking to me that when you looked at the Kamala Harris fact sheet for her economic policy announcements, increasing housing supply came first. How she was going to do that wasn't, I think, 100% clear. How much power the federal government has to do that is not always 100% clear, but that was what came first. The problem is housing. The problem in housing is supply. She also has subsidy ideas, but that was not what she front-loaded. And here, it was so notable to me that the first policy argument Obama makes is about
31:24 Ezra Klein? increasing housing supply. The Democratic Party is becoming more a yimby. I mean, there's no other way of putting that. And by the way, it's not like Democrats are the only ones to have made housing a major part of their convention. If you go back to J.D. Vance's speech, he also talks about housing. But what he ends up saying is the answer for housing is getting rid of immigrants. And if you look at Project 2025, they're really making arguments about why you want to maintain control of housing stock at the local level. Donald Trump himself has been a very big backer and defender of single-family zoning. And meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which if you look at the places it governs, has been terrible on housing, is intellectually moving into the other position, where it
32:07 Ezra Klein? is saying the problem in housing is supply. There was something that went out on the Joe Biden White House Twitter feed that said the problem in housing is that we need to build, build, build. It takes time for policy to catch up to intellectual consensus and rhetorical currents. And so I think it will take time for this to express itself. But I see this as genuinely huge. Both that Democrats have decided housing is this central of a problem, that it is coming first for them, and that they have correctly, I want to say this, correctly come to the view that the problem is supply. The problem is we're not building enough housing. And that is something that, in part, Democrats are responsible for with too much red tape
32:50 Ezra Klein? and too much outdated process and too much regulation. And this is a place where the government doesn't just need to help, it needs to, in many cases, get out of the way. You could see it in Harris's policies and you heard it from Barack Obama in this passing of the torch to the future, right? This is what a new idea is. And in fact, it actually is a new idea for the Democratic Party. This is not where the Democratic Party was even in the Obama era, at least not at this level of centrality. So from a policy perspective, I was thrilled.
33:19 Speaker 03 As a last question, I wanted to ask you about a moment of Barack Obama's speech that really struck me. It's when he's describing a kind of spiritual emptiness that he sees afflicting people.
33:30 Barack Obama? We live in a time of such confusion and rancor with a culture that puts a premium on things that don't last. Money, fame, status, likes. We chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves and then we wonder why we feel so alone. We don't trust each other as much because we don't take the time to know each other. And in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other.
34:14 Speaker 03 It's an argument that I've heard more often from figures like J.D. Vance and the post-liberals. Why do you think he wanted to go there?
34:21 Ezra Klein? I think the post-liberals, as they now get called, have talked themselves into believing that they were the first people to worry about spiritual emptiness in America, and they just weren't. Look, I'm a pretty unabashed defender of Obama and Obama-ism. And I think that a lot of the narrative that has taken hold about what his politics were, what he did, what his political movement represented, just wrong. This idea that what was happening in the Obama era and in the Obama elections was his unrelenting technocracy, it's just not accurate.
35:04 Ezra Klein? It is hard to solve the problems and even correctly talk about the problems of modernity. It always has been. The Obamas didn't invent this either. We have been worrying about this, talking about this for decades now. Loneliness, atomization, the breakdown of the American family, the decline of organized religion, the decline of communities. You know, going back to sort of like Robert Putnam's bowling alone, like modernity is not well oriented towards community. People move around all across the country. Not all people, but many people live further from families or families are smaller. They are not as connected to civic institutions, to religious institutions. We stare at our phones.
35:49 Ezra Klein? Social media is a simulacrum of human connection. It is one of the only things you can do in which you are in constant communication with others and end up feeling so much lonelier and so much less understood. And what I see happening in a lot of corners right now is a belief that this is all somehow newly discovered. And not just newly discovered, but that it has these simple answers, right? That, oh, the problem is just manufacturing jobs that went to China. And if you just change trade policy, maybe you reverse these problems. And you don't, and you can't, and it's a multi-headed Hydra. And Obama, but not only Obama, has always spoken to this.
36:31 Ezra Klein? Great politicians, great, I think, political figures speak to the character of the country at any given moment. They don't just speak to policy. They speak to who Americans are and what they're worried about at that moment in America. And Barack Obama's presidency did not have any traction on this. What you have tools to do as president is try to expand health insurance, work on trade policy. But Joe Biden's presidency didn't have an answer. Donald Trump's presidency didn't have an answer. And to be honest, Kamala Harris's presidency, if she gets it, will not have an answer, and nor does J.D. Vance have an answer.
37:12 Ezra Klein? The spiritual and communal condition of the country is something politicians can speak to, but I don't really believe it is something they can solve. But it is something they need to speak to. Human beings do not understand their lives as fundamentally about policy. And so if you're trying to speak to their aspirations and their concerns, you have to identify what they really are. One of my favorite lines at the Democratic Convention so far was from Raphael Warnock on the first night.
37:44 Speaker 06 A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children. And our prayers are stronger when we pray together.
37:54 Ezra Klein? And there's a lot to that. And the problem is that it is a prayer that will always end up being unfulfilled. Because you're voting for a president who is to pass legislation to the House and Senate. It's not God. But that doesn't mean it's not the job of political leaders to speak to what those prayers actually are, rather than what can actually be answered.
38:17 Speaker 03 I think that's a fitting place to end. So, thank you, Ezra.
38:20 Ezra Klein? Thank you, Elias.
38:36 Ezra Klein? This episode of the Ezra Klein Show is produced and hosted by Elias Isfath. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, and Kristin Lin. Original music by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Anya Rostrosier.
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