#The Ezra Klein SHow

[maaarine]

The Ezra Klein Show: How to Discover Your Own Taste

"I think a lot about the difference between what in my head is the push internet and the pull internet, which is not perfect language.

But the internet where things are pushed at you and the internet where you have to do some work, day after day, go in and visit a home page or whatever, you have to pull it towards you.

And the problem with the push internet is it’s not really under your control, right? It’s about what the force pushing is doing.

But as that became bigger, people stopped doing the things that allowed the pull internet to exist.

There aren’t so many blogs anymore. Not none, but there are fewer.

People put their effort — because it’s the easier way to find audience and eventually to make a living — into the algorithmic spaces.

And so there’s simply less of this other thing there to explore."

[crackers4jenn]

"Trump is acting like a King, because he's too weak to govern like a President."

[panicinthestudio]

Best Of: A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe, March 31,2023

In last November's midterm elections, voters placed the Republican Party in charge of the House of Representatives. In 2024, it’s very possible that Republicans will take over the Senate as well and voters will elect Donald Trump — or someone like him — as president.  But the United States isn’t alone in this regard. Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots; a party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second-highest number of seats in Sweden’s Parliament; Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary won its fourth consecutive election by a landslide; Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the final round of France’s presidential elections; and Jair Bolsonaro came dangerously close to winning re-election in Brazil. Why are these populist uprisings happening simultaneously, in countries with such diverse cultures, economies and political systems? Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she has taught for three decades. In that time, she’s written dozens of books on topics ranging from comparative political institutions to right-wing parties and the decline of religion. And in 2019 she and Ronald Inglehart published “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/... which gives the best explanation of the far right’s rise that I’ve read. In this conversation, taped in November 2022, we discuss what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the best predictor of support for populist parties is the generation people were born into, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, how demographic and cultural “tipping points” have produced conservative backlashes across the globe, the difference between “demand-side” and “supply-side” theories of populist uprising, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fueling right-wing backlashes, why delivering economic benefits might not be enough for mainstream leaders to stave off populist challenges and more.

Mentioned:

Sacred and Secular (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...) by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart

“Exploring drivers of vote choice and policy positions among the American electorate (https://perryundem.com/wp-content/upl...

Book Recommendations:

Popular Dictatorships (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...) by Aleksandar Matovski

Spin Dictators (https://press.princeton.edu/books/har...) by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman

The Origins of Totalitarianism (https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-orig...) by Hannah Arendt

The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times Podcasts

[thewomanwhobloggedlikeaman]

My therapist: The new Ezra Klein Show podcast thumbnail isn't real and can't hurt you

The new Ezra Klein Show podcast thumbnail:

[deanmarywinchester]

reading this book called “everything for everyone: an oral history of the New York commune 2052-2072” (pause for someone to say “of course you, obsessed with new york and communal living, are reading something called that”) and I’m not very far in but conceptually it whips. it’s by these two academics and it’s a faux oral history of the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of a stateless society. and the introduction is so fun because it like imagines the future lives of the authors into this future that they’ve written about, talking about how they met in the 2010s, had careers as scholars and activists into the 2050s, and how they’re facing the end of their lives in the 2070s and this book is going to be their last big project. it’s one of those things that im having to read slowly because i have a lot of feelings about it but each chapter is an interview with a different person who lived through this rebuilding in the 2050s and it’s really cool.

[st-just]

Little I find stranger than the way that people who have made their entire careers and intellectual lives off of the internet treating 'screen time' like it's axiomatically a dead waste of soul-sucking entropy that everyone hates but is psychically dependent on.

Like I quite like being able to google trivia questions and type my random creative scribbling in a way that other people can read, personally.

[theweeklyshowwithjonstewart]

The Dangers to Democracy In A Digital World with Jon Stewart, Ezra Klein, & Tristan Harris

With the election just over a month away, Americans are caught between a flood of political promises and the reality that we live in a time of political dysfunction. Navigating a presidential election in a digital world has proved difficult due to the widespread misinformation and different realities we live in online. To get to the root of this issue and emphasize the threat to democracy, Jon Stewart sits down with New York Times columnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, Ezra Klein, and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and co-host of Your Undivided Attention podcast Tristan Harris. They explore how social media’s effective tactics of personalizing users’ newsfeeds or 'For You Page' alters public opinion on hot-button issues and what we need to do to close the gap between political spin and public need.

[yesornopolls]

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[maaarine]

The Ezra Klein Show: What I’m Thinking at the End of 2024

"I did really badly in school, and then I did really well as an adult. And I don’t think I was more or less responsible for either one.

The things that have made me successful, in some ways, were the same things that made me unsuccessful before: My monomania around things I’m interested in and difficulty with things I’m uninterested in.

My desire to be in a quiet room reading and writing by myself all the time.

I don’t think when I was 14 and couldn’t get it together, that was a moral failing. Some part of my mental software was different.

So, my own life, I just, I did not, on some level, deserve how badly I did when I was younger — and I don’t deserve how well I’ve done as I’ve been older.

I do my best with what I have, but the what I have — and frankly, even the doing my best — doesn’t even feel like something I chose. It feels compulsive.

There are many times when I’d frankly like to do a worse job, and it’s not in me. It’s more anxiety producing in me not to work than to work.

It won’t have come out yet, but I’m about to tape with Oliver Burkeman, the self-help author.

In his book, he’s quoting somebody saying: Most successful people are an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.

I don’t think that’s entirely wrong."

[machinecreature]

worddddd !!!!

[robynochs]

This Ezra Klein Show podcast titled "We Need Better Narratives About Gender," features a fascinating conversation between Masha Gessen and Lydia Polgreen.

After you listen to it, I would love to hear your thoughts.

[lenbryant]

Gender queer stuff

[theatrepup]

Trump is acting like a King, because he is too weak to govern as a President. :)

--The Ezra Klein Show, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8QLgLfqh6s