#462 – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE
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The following is a conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Ezra is one of the most influential voices representing the left wing of American politics. He is a columnist for The New York Times, author of Why We're Polarized, and host of the Ezra Klein Show. Derek is a writer at The Atlantic, author of Hitmakers and On Work, and host of the Plain English podcast. Together, they've written a new book simply titled Abundance that lays out a kind of manifesto for the left. It is already a controversial, widely debated book, but I think it puts forward a powerful vision for what the Democra
good.
We're starting small here. And maybe contrast them with the American right. Sure. So
the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations, right? The the luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. We are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out well, we don't deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard and we also had talent and we also
start there. I mean, there's a lot of fascinating things there on on on the unfairness of life. That could be the interperson unfairness. So one person getting more money than another person, more skills or more natural abilities than another person. And then there's the just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden, you cross a street and the car runs a red light and runs you over and you're in the hospital, so that unfairness of life. Mhmm. And in general, I guess the left sees there's some role or a lot of role for government t
true in the last one hundred years. It was New Deal Liberals who enlarged the government in the nineteen thirties. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the nineteen fifties. And then starting in the nineteen seventies, '19 eighties, it's typically been conservatives who tried to constrict government. Sometimes they failed, while liberals have typically tried to expand, certainly, taxing and spending. But one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra's answer was really lovely. But, like, at a really high leve
only thing I I I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right likes small government oversimplifies. The the left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance and national security state. I always think about the, sort of George W Bush era. Although right now with ICE agents hassling all kinds of green card holders, you can use you can think about thi
You're right. There's some degree to which what the right when the right speaks about the size of government, it's a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy because they seem to always grow the size of government anyway. They just kinda say small government, but they don't it's you know, in the surveillance state, in the in the foreign policy, in terms of military involvement abroad. And, really, in every every program, they're not very good at cutting either. They just kinda like to say it.
Cutting is re
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