Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Ezra Klein:

Podcasting seems like a space where uncertainty can live more fully and a kind of hesitance and a figuring out of things in real time that has been lost elsewhere.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Ezra Klein. He’s a New York Times columnist and host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast. He was previously co-founder of vox.com and before that, an editor in columnist at the Washington Post, where while still in his 20s he founded the popular Wonk blog. Klein is known for his ability to distill academic research into clear and concise journalism. He’s especially interested in the causes of political and social polarization in the US, which was the focus of his 2020 book, Why We’re Polarized.

We discussed the ever evolving state of news journalism in the 21st century, why Klein believes Ron DeSantis presidential prospects may be overhyped and the qualities that make podcasting unique. That’s coming up. Stay Tuned.

Q&A

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from Twitter user at Devon Ian Stone, who asks the question, which part of the constitution says we can do away with the constitution? Now that’s a great clever question and I presume it arises from something the former President Donald Trump posted on social media in the last week that’s gotten a lot of attention, but I don’t think as much attention as it deserves because it’s kind of a radical and outrageous statement even judging by the standards of Donald Trump.

This is what he posted, “Still griping and complaining falsely and in bad faith about the election of 2020.” He wrote, “Do you throw the presidential election results of 2020 out and declare the rightful winner or do you have a new election? A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles.” And this is the key part, “Even those found in the constitution.” So Donald Trump in writing posts for millions of people to see his view that the rules in the constitution should be terminated because in his subjective view, without any evidence presented to any court convincingly, the 2020 election was rigged.

So to answer Devin, your rhetorical question about which part of the constitution says we can do away with the constitution? No part of it does. The other interesting thing about this statement by Trump that some people have focused on is that it may be admissible in a potential trial of him because it goes to a state of mind in connection with the January 6th attack on the capital because to the extent he’s admitting straightforwardly and openly that he believed that the constitution should be ignored or terminated to use his verb. That goes to his state of mind also potentially on January 6th. So it’s a bad statement, it’s an un-American statement, it’s a treacherous statement and it’s a stupid statement.

This next question comes in a tweet from Twitter user OS Beard who asks, “Are criminal suspect’s social media posts legally admissible in court?” So that’s that’s a good follow on question to the first question, and I presume you also are maybe referring to Donald Trump’s social media posts. There is a rule of evidence that admissions made by a defendant are admissible in court. They’re not hearsay. They come in so long as you can make the showing that the statement was made by the defendant in a criminal trial it comes in whether it’s a newspaper interview, whether it’s a diary entry, whether it’s a statement to authorities or whether it’s a social media post.

So good question and it is absolutely legally admissible against the person who made the statement. This question comes in an email from Phyllis who writes, “A question about Judge Cannon. I’ve been hearing an earful about this judge and the humiliating way in which she was overruled. How might recent events affect her career trajectory? What real effect does current damage to her reputation have in her work life?” Thank you in advance for sharing your perspective. And of course, Phyllis is referring to the federal judge in Florida who ruled in favor of the Trump motion for a special master in connection with the handling of the documents that were seized at Mar-a-Lago pursuant to a court authorized search warrant.

And as Joyce fans and I talked about at some length on the Cafe Cider Podcast in the last week, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled fairly stridently that all the bases on which Judge Cannon thought there was jurisdiction to appoint a special master and do all sorts of other things was without merit. And I don’t know if it’s humiliating, but it is in fact a strong opinion, pretty strident opinion by a panel of Republican appointees including two appointed by Donald Trump and the chief judge, Judge Pryor, who’s not known for being a bleeding heart liberal in any way, shape or form one part of the opinion by the 11th Circuit reversing Judge Cannon is kind of stinging.

They write, “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant, nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our case law limiting the federal court’s involvement in criminal investigation.” So here’s a panel of judges unanimously in the 11th circuit, basically saying that the district court judge was supportive of a radical reordering of our case law. So that’s not great, but there have been many occasions I’ve had had experience in a number of them where district court judges are overruled in fairly obnoxious manner by the appeals court.

Sometimes the appeals court is absolutely correct, sometimes the appeals court itself gets it wrong and that’s corrected by the Supreme Court sometimes, but not always. What effect does it have on a career trajectory? Well, federal judges in our country for good reason and to insulate them from political wins and from this kind of thing have life tenure. So she’s not going anywhere, she’s not getting impeached, she’s not getting removed from office, she’s not getting fined, she’s not going to the penalty box. And hopefully this experience is a learning experience for this judge who’s relatively new and relatively young. And she’ll do a better job of endearing to precedent in the future.

Life tenure is a long time and sometimes judges make bad decisions in certain cases and better decisions in other cases, sometimes it depends on their expertise, sometimes it depends on how they were thinking about a particular question in that moment. A judge who has a bad reputation and gets overruled a lot by the Circuit Court. Probably is not top of mind for a future Republican president to put on the court of appeals, but you never know. So this question comes actually not from Twitter, not from an email, not from a voicemail, but a short while ago today from my eye doctor, a regular eye doctor appointment, and the doctor told me that he had just seen a report.

This is Tuesday afternoon. He had just seen a report that the January 6th committee had made the decision to make criminal referrals to DOJ and he wanted to know, well, is this a big deal or is it not a big deal? It’s the first question I think I’ve answered from one of my medical professionals. So we went back and looked at what the report was and it appears that on Tuesday, late morning, early afternoon, chairman of the one six committee, Bennie Thompson, told reporters that the committee has decided to make at least one criminal referral. He did not elaborate on who the referral is for or how many more would be coming, but we can assume it’s likely to be a referral related to the former president of the United States, Donald Trump.

Now you’ll remember that this debate and controversy first started to arise some months ago when it was not exactly clear what the Department of Justices game plan was, how much investigation they had done, how serious they were being about pursuing Trump and others with respect to the attack on the capital on January 6th. Well, since that time, the department has gotten into gear, since that time we know the prosecutors have been added to the team, since that time also and more significantly, there has been the appointment of a special counsel, Jack Smith, whose remit includes not only the handling of the documents at Mar-a-Lago, but very specifically and concretely all the business relating to January 6th.

So you have a department that has an open investigation, an open grand jury investigation, and a special counsel who’s appointed to pursue all of this. In that context, I’m not sure what the value and meaning of a referral from the January 6th committee is. Remember, there’s no legal effect or triggering effect of a referral from Congress in this context that a problem of justice is free to ignore a referral, free to find a referral superfluous or can respond to a referral in some way. Here every sign is that they’re already doing what the referral would seem intended to get the Department of Justice to do. So is it significant for the committee?

People could argue that it looks political and it’s unnecessary and redundant. I suppose it sends a signal that at least members of the committee who looked at a lot of evidence and sifted through a lot of documents and interviewed a lot of witnesses in their estimation, there’s a belief for a feeling that there’s probable cause that one or more crimes were committed, but I think at this point, given the stage we’re at, it’s largely symbolic. We’ll be right back with my conversation with Ezra Klein. Bestselling author, New York Times columnist, podcaster, cutting edge journalist, just a few of the words that describe my guest this week. Ezra Klein, welcome to the show.

THE INTERVIEW:

Ezra Klein:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to talk about something that people say about you and your journalism, which is obviously excellent and worthy. People talk about how you have taken the explainer to a high art. That you are the paragon of explanatory journalism. First of all, what is explanatory journalism? Do you agree with that assessment? And shouldn’t all journalism be largely explanatory?

Ezra Klein:

Do I agree with the assessment that I’m great and have taken journalism to a high [inaudible 00:10:51].

Preet Bharara:

Being modest. Do that one first.

Ezra Klein:

Begin with the softballs here, Preet. Without getting into what other people say about me, I do think of myself as an explanatory journalist. And the way I’ve tended to define that is that it is a journalism focused on context. There is journalism focused on what is the piece of information or the whole block of information that we don’t know that we need to? And that is, I think in many ways the highest form of journalism. And I want to admit it is not mainly what I do. I’ve done it sometimes, but these are the people who go find that there was a massacre or the people who go unearth something on a government document that it wasn’t released showing that there was internal corruption.

So there’s things where we did not know something and now we know it. What that journalism can miss or what it can need as a compliment is journalism that takes that unit of information and puts the context around it necessary to understand it. Very little can be understood on its own and explanatory journalism, which I did not invent, but have been a practitioner of, and Vox is an organization that I helped build to do that work. Explanatory journalism is journalism and journalists focused on doing that, focused on figuring out how to put the context around information such that information fits into a framework in people’s mind such that they have what is needed to understand it. And yeah, I try hard to do it well and I’m happy when I succeed and frustrated when I don’t.

Preet Bharara:

But what I’m confused about is what you’ve described doesn’t seem to me to be something that should be rare or specialized. It seems at all information, particularly when you’re talking about long form, where there’s space to provide context. Why aren’t all journalists or most journalists focused on and obsessed with context and explanation also?

Ezra Klein:

Well, one thing I think is it’s worth remembering that we’re in a very, very, very new period in journalism where we’ve been freed from what was traditionally our fundamental constraint, which is space. There was only so many pages in the newspaper. There are only so many pages in the magazine, only so many minutes on your broadcast. And almost all of journalism as we understand it emerged in this period when space was the absolute constraint. Sometimes some of it actually people talk about this in reverse pyramid structure, which is an important structure for some kinds of news articles, was at least partially created to deal with the fact that you would sometimes lose whole pieces of a telegram because of the way telegrams worked.

So if it cut off, the story needed to be structured in a way that it could cut off at some point and it would still be publishable. So we evolved, I mean, as everything does within the context of the technology that we used. The world in which we have as much space as we want where we can publish the entirety of Moby-Dick in the morning and the entirety of Charles Dickens in the evening is new. And we are building out, I think still many more story formats. We are teaching journalists and learning as journalists how to use that. And explanatory journalism, one thing about it is that it’s simply long. To do that kind of work well. You actually need quite a lot of space.

I joke with my editor Erin at the New York Times, I don’t joke, it is a sardonic sad recollection that I used to know how to write articles that were under 1,800 words. I used to know how to do more traditional opinion columns, but the reason very few of my pieces come out at anything less than 1,800 words or 2,000 words now is because both they are fundamental is explanatory and explanatory takes a lot of room. So I’m of a pretty early generation of journalists who grew up primarily, almost entirely in digital journalism and never had to think about the space constraint. So that has allowed kinds of experimentation that are a bit different.

I also just think specialization is good. When you say why are not all journalists focused on exactly what I’m focused on? I wouldn’t want them to be. I think more could be, and Vox was designed to do that, and I think there’s a lot more good explanatory work being done all over, but you want people doing amazing narrative long form and you want people doing important breaking news and investigative. And what we should have is a lot more specialization. One of the shames of the internet digital journalism at this moment is I think a move towards specialization kind of ran a ground due to business model problems and other things, and we’re sort of again, in a period of homogenization, but what the internet should allow is lots of different institutions built to do lots of very different things very well.

Preet Bharara:

It always gets me when something happens in the world, some news event, it can be something having to do with the Middle East, it can be the protests in Iran, it can be the election in Brazil. And for people who are non-specialists, myself included, I know some stuff, but there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know. And we try to do some explanatory work quite a bit on this podcast and on the other podcasts, that you’ll pick up a traditional mainstream periodical.

And sometimes they’ll have sort of a sidebar explainer to let you know who the parties are and what the stakes are and what the history is, and as you say what the context is. But by and large, I’ve found that a lot of mainstream media, when some new event happens somewhere, they assume a lot of knowledge, and maybe they’ll be a parenthetical or two in the main news article. But if you haven’t been following the politics of Israel, you haven’t been following the politics of Brazil, you haven’t been following the regime in Iran, it becomes very difficult to leap in when an event happens. Is that fair or not?

Ezra Klein:

I certainly think that’s fair as a description of the experience for anybody reading the news. I mean, I’ll say one other reason I think it is hard for this kind of work to be done. And it’s not an accident that I’ve always at least worked more on the opinion side or at least been in places where I could deploy opinion more often, that a lot of the structure of journalism and the internal ethos of it, particularly on the news side is that you’re not supposed to be using your opinion, you’re supposed to be reporting the news.

And one thing about explanatory work, and I believe this to be fair almost about everything in journalism including hard news, but people disagree with me, but I don’t think it’s arguable in the explanatory space, is that when you explain something, you actually are giving an opinion. Now it isn’t an opinion in the sense of the guy at the end of the bar being like, “I got an opinion for you.” But it is an opinion in the sense that you are using your judgment, your knowledge of the situation, the frameworks that make sense to you to say, this is the information.

This is the explanatory model or structure that I think fits here. And one thing that was always a, I don’t want to say a mistake, but something I struggled with when I was editor of Vox and when I was explaining the Vox model to people is that explainers sounds singular, like here’s our explainer. And it’s not really meant to be. There are many possible explanations for something and many of them are true all at the same time. If I say, what is the explanation for Donald Trump? One person will tell you a story about changing racial dynamics in America and another person will tell you a story about social media and the sort of dynamics of attention and reality TV.

And another person will tell you a story about the ways the primary systems changed and you had to used to win party conventions. And I can keep going down and they’re all true, or at least they all have a piece of the truth. But in traditional journalism where you are taught to be very skeptical of making those judgements and you’re supposed to be focused on the things that can be the what, where, when, and why’s and frankly not as much on the how’s, I think that cuts against a lot of people’s intuitions or in some cases cuts against what their editors are comfortable publishing. So that that’s also been a challenge.

Preet Bharara:

It seems to me that it depends on what we mean by opinion. So for example, I was going to ask you about this later in the interview, but I might as well ask you about it now. When a regular journalist, if you want to call him a regular journalist, covers the reelection of Ron DeSantis in Florida and an explanatory journalist if you want to use that term, covers the same thing, one way of talking about being opinionated or having an opinion versus not having an opinion is to either indulge an interest in discussing whether or not Ron DeSantis is good for Florida or good for the country or is a good person or is a good politician in the moral sense or not.

And obviously mainstream journalists are going to stay away from that explanatory journalists, maybe, maybe not, but some opinion has to creep in into all the articles to the extent you’re addressing the question of what the meaning of his reelection is for his 2024 prospects? That’s not opinion in terms of good or bad or normative, but it’s an opinion about the consequences for 2024 given the degree to which he came in first place in Florida. And you have a contrary view of that that I want to get to in a moment. But does that make sense? Isn’t it true that all kinds of journalism, mainstream or otherwise that considers itself to be non-op opinion has to take advantage of some opinions in some ways, as with the example with Ron DeSantis?

Ezra Klein:

I think so. I think the more useful terms here are objectivity and subjectivity. So there’s this old line about objective journalism, right? You’re supposed to be an objective journalist and I’ve always just believed the metaphysical and ontological foundations of that are trash. The most fundamental space that subjectivity operates in journalism happens before the moment of whether or not you’re writing a news piece and opinion piece and news analysis, piece of narrative piece, whatever. It’s a decision of which piece to write.

And even the decision to say constantly cover Ron DeSantis, the decision to treat Ron DeSantis victory in Florida as much more important than Mike DeWine larger victory in Ohio, or Governor Jared Polis’s quite significant victory in Colorado is a form of subjectivity, a form of journalists acting upon what the news is in a way that will change what becomes the news tomorrow and what the country is in potentially four years or three years or two years.

That is such an important choice and we so refuse to treat it as a choice and have any kind of visible framework for how we’re making the decisions that I think that the whole question has just gotten away from us. We are very, very focused I think on the tone in which an article’s written. I used to say, and this is true in my view, that I could write the same article for the opinion section, for the news analysis and for news. I could write an article, let’s say it’s a piece about whether we should raise a social security retirement age. And I have a strong view and have for a long time that we.

That is not a good thing to do, but I could write concerns raised about raising social security retirement age and quote a bunch of people and the order in which I quote them and so on will leave you with the strong impression, which again, that is my view that you shouldn’t do that. Then I could write a news analysis piece that’s sort of like Democrats wary of raising social security age and in a kind of cool headed way walk through why Democrats have become more wary of that than they were 15 years ago. And then opinion, don’t raise a retirement age by Ezra Klein in which I just sort of like slash my way through the argument. They’re the same piece.

Preet Bharara:

So what’s the upshot of that observation? That we make too much of a semantic distinction between opinion and news writing?

Ezra Klein:

I think the upshot of the observation is that it complicates some of these lines we draw. The other side of this is that, look, these lines are not perfect. And I believe this more than I did say 10 years ago. Certain important things do get thrown out when it all becomes a festival of opinion. So I think one way of hearing some of what I’m saying is that I just think everything is equal. And I don’t. I have a old mine that I used to have at the Washington Post that the problem with the divide we’ve created is that it’s too hard for the news side to tell the truth and it’s too easy for the opinion side to lie.

That we would make it too hard for somebody who is doing a great job reporting the news to tell you, “I’ve done all this work and here is what I have actually come to. Here’s a conclusion of all this work I’ve done on your behalf.” And we made it too easy for the opinion side, for anybody on the opinion side to do no work, to just fire off a take about something grounded in nothing. It’s like, “Well, that’s my opinion.” Can’t question somebody’s opinion.

Preet Bharara:

Or just asking questions.

Ezra Klein:

So credibility needs to be earned is sort of what I’m getting at here. And I think the much more fundamental question is not whether something is news or opinion, but whether the work has been done, whether the reporting has been done.

Preet Bharara:

Since I mentioned Ron DeSantis and we’ll come back to some of this other stuff in a moment. Could you opine further on why you think, and I think this is what you think, that people are overreacting to his victory? I think you said in a recent interview quote, “I think the narrative is so interested in attune to Ron DeSantis that we are taking a victory that is quite well within established boundaries of how incumbent governors run in a state that leans in their direction in a year that leans in their direction as some kind of cataclysmic political performance when it just looks like a strong win.” End quote.

Ezra Klein:

So let me think about the way to phrase this. The media runs on narratives. Those narratives to everything I’ve been saying up until here are often not quite articulated, but at some point over the past year, year and a half, and not based on nothing, it’s been based on Ron DeSantis having very strong poll numbers in 2024, Republican polling there being a lot of energy around his candidacy, strong fundraising, et cetera. There’s become a view that Ron DeSantis is an important figure in Republican party politics, that he is either the successor to Donald Trump or now it has become that he is the challenger to Donald Trump.

So things about Ron DeSantis are getting a very high level of interest. And so one thing that happened on election night is Florida reports early. So the first kind of evidence we had of anything was Ron DeSantis having a strong win. Although I would note not running ahead really by very much of Marco Rubio, which I’ll come back to why I think that’s important in a second. Then as the night goes on, Republicans don’t perform that well, but they did perform very well in Florida. So it’s like it’s Ron DeSantis night that Trump people have done. It’s all a narrative.

You just kind of back up into the numbers. It’s like is anything that unusual in what happened in Florida? Well, part of the way you might answer that depends on what you think has happened to Florida compositionally. And I think it’s pretty clear Florida’s become a very red state, not a very red state in relation to say Wyoming, but a reliably red state. People moved in, people moved out, et cetera. But was DeSantis victory bigger than that of a bunch of other Republicans? I mean, he’s bigger than some, but as I mentioned Mike DeWine over in Ohio, one by an even larger margin than DeSantis did. Now Mike DeWine isn’t considered a top prospect for 2024, but maybe if he was getting wall to wall coverage all the time, maybe he would be or Gretchen.

Preet Bharara:

But maybe he’s not getting wall to wall coverage. I’m just wondering what comes first. The chicken of the egg is part of the reason for the disproportionate coverage that Ron DeSantis rhetorically and otherwise is putting himself out there as a challenger to Trump and that the dominant political figure for good or ill in the country is Trump. So the narratives develop in relation, Kevin McCarthy is covered often as a foil to Trump, Liz Cheney the same, Joe Biden the same. And if you’re not sort in that landscape of being oppositional to or supportive of Trump like DeWine is, you don’t get a lot of attention.

Ezra Klein:

I think that’s right. I just think that’s a choice we’ve made. That we don’t want to say is a choice that we’ve made.

Preet Bharara:

Who’s we?

Ezra Klein:

The media, but the media not in a sense of a organism that makes decisions, but a kind of emergent complex system where people are reading signals around each other and having a kind of sense of the gestalt and moving in a more her direction than you would think. I mean, I can say as a member of the media, a high media priest maybe, that if we actually did get in a room and plan things out, then I think our coverage would be more distinguished from each other that you wouldn’t have because you’d be conscious about it, but instead everybody’s in this sort of weird follow a leader dynamic.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So I’m curious about that. So you have mentioned, it is no doubt true that we’re living in a time where space is no constraint and we have a tremendous proliferation of outlets, lots and lots of writers, both opinion and news. Does the proliferation of news outlets make it easier for narratives to change and diverge or harder?

Ezra Klein:

Harder.

Preet Bharara:

That’s counterintuitive, right?

Ezra Klein:

I wouldn’t have expected this. It’s very counterintuitive. I think that the media is more homogenous with more competition when you would think it would become more differentiated with more competition. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that, but I actually think one of the biggest, which is something I talk about at some length in my book, Why We’re Polarized, where the media chapter of that book has not gotten as much attention, but I think it’s one of the best chapters, but as somebody who’s been a media executive now has been at a bunch of different newspapers and has run an organization and started, one thing that’s important to understand is that everybody running a media organization actually has access to the same analytics to some degree.

You have a sense of what’s popping on social media. There are different tools people use for that at different times, but the audience teams always have those tools. You know what is moving on on your site. You know what is doing well on Chartbeat or Parsley or whatever your analytics platform is. You have a sense on just intuitively what the other people are doing. You see what’s leading elsewhere and what’s on the top lists and what’s getting passed around everywhere. So it’s going viral and so it creates a lot of pressure to do the things everybody seems to be doing.

And partially, this gets to something I was talking about earlier, because we don’t have a strong articulated framework at most news organizations for what it is that we are covering, what it is that we think is important, what it is that we will choose to decide is news. Well then the absolute easiest, least biased in a way of making that choice is well it’s news because everybody’s already covering it as news, and that creates a sort of momentum dynamic for ongoing stories. So anything with DeSantis is news because DeSantis is already considered news.

It’s topological in a way. Whereas what the other ones are doing, Nikki Haley is probably going to run in 2024 too. Does anybody really care what she’s doing? It’s not been decided as important news. And so there’s something that happens where these storylines take hold and then everybody is operating with them as a framework because to go the other way, it’s not impossible and people do it all the time, but there is so much pressure to be on the news as the term goes that just by nature once you’ve covered all the things that were on the news, you only have so much staff resources and mental energy and so on to do the things that you think are news and that other people have not decided are news.

Preet Bharara:

It’s so interesting that you use the verb decided and you also can see that no one’s actually making a decision.

Ezra Klein:

Well, individual editors and writers making decisions.

Preet Bharara:

But that results in a collective decision that has no variety to it.

Ezra Klein:

Again, I don’t want to say none. If you read The Atlantic and you read Time, they’re covering different things.

Preet Bharara:

Less than you would imagine.

Ezra Klein:

But yeah, less than you would imagine.

Preet Bharara:

I want to turn to an article that you wrote just after the mid-terms that I found super interesting in the New York Times. And it’s entitled Three Theories that Explain This Strange Moment. And you talk about three concepts that you believe explain not just one election but multiple elections. And you say, I think very wisely that those are more interesting things to look at, things that can explain patterns and trends in politics. And you’re a very deep thinker about politics and there are three words that you talked about and I want to go through them and have you explain what they mean and how they apply to the basic political system that we’re in with all these narratives that you say are intertwined and roiling about. One is calcification, another is parody, and the third is cultural backlash. What is calcification?

Ezra Klein:

So calcification, and I should say this true for both calcification and parody, it comes from a new book by John Side’s, Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch called The Bitter End, I believe. They were on my podcast, it’s a great conversation a couple months back, but just right before the 2022 election they released there are three political scientists and they released a book that is built on just a tremendous amount of data collection and analysis of the 2020 election.

And they end up validating the 2020 election something we’ve been seeing for a while now. It’s actually again something sort of eye tracked in my first book, which is first calcification. People are not changing their minds election to election basically at all. That is not to say literally nobody does, but the number of people shifting their voting preference is extremely small given how dramatic the events have been. I mean, say what you owe about the Trump residency, it was dramatic to say.

And he was dramatic. There was the COVID and the COVID response. I mean by the time of the election, hundreds of thousands of people had died in this country. Now, well over a million. We had had pretty big and significant economic changes, big policy had pass rate. You can go through it, something should have changed somebody’s mind and it really didn’t. The 2020 election looks almost exactly like the 2016 election.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, you write in the articles. It’s a very short pity sentence. So much happened and so few minds changed. And that was kind of an arresting statement because I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Ezra Klein:

So that’s calcification. And the point of calcification is that as the parties have become much more different over time. In 1950, roughly when you asked voters do they see a big difference between the two parties? About 50% said yes, only 50%. One out of two said, yeah, big difference between Republicans and Democrats. You remember 2000 Bush Gore, Ralph Nader runs against him is tweedle dee and tweedle dum. No real difference between the parties.

I think that judgment did not look so great in the long history, but by modernity, by 2020, 90% of people see a very big difference between the parties. And when the parties become very different, when they represent very different ideas, very different coalitions, very different groups, switching between them becomes much rarer because you’re not jumping over a crack, you’re jumping over a chasm. So that’s calcification. People stop making that jump.

Preet Bharara:

Pause on that for a second. Do you accept that the parties are so much more different than they were in 1950 or is it a perception that arises from some other factors?

Ezra Klein:

No, they’re dramatically different. I mean, this is a very core story of my book, Why We’re Polarized. But one thing particularly that they are is polarized. And what I mean by that is that the disagreements that used to exist within parties are now sorted between parties. So I’ll use this as an example, abortion. So Joe Biden is sort of a useful tracker here because he’s just been in politics for so long. Joe Biden as a young moderate Catholic democrat, he opposes Roe v. Wade decision, he is on the margin of pro-life politician, he’s uncomfortable with it. Talks a lot about his ambivalence here.

But he’s somebody who’s a Catholic Democrat, believe in Catholic, opposes opposes Roe v. Wade and is uncomfortable and skeptical. At this point of course Biden is a full throated forthrightly pro-choice politician who will absolutely opposes the overturning of Roe v. Wade through Dobbs and will absolutely have given any Supreme Court nominees, put people on the court who will either restore Roe or go further than that. Obviously you could tell a similar story in the Republican party. Nelson Rockefeller had passed actually a liberalization of abortion laws. He becomes a vice presidential candidate at some point.

We can kind of go on now of course to both Republican party is. Immigration looks a lot like this. The parties were very mixed on immigration. Now Democrats are very clearly the party of a more liberalized immigration system. Republicans a party of a more restrictionist one. So the parties, it’s not just that they’ve become different, it’s that what they stand for has become distinctive. They were just much more muddled internally in the mid 19, say 50s. This has become a kind of generic story that polarization nerds like [inaudible 00:35:51]. But in that era you have the American Political Science Association come out with this paper or this big recommendation set.

It’s called Toward a Responsible Two-Party System. And the idea is that a big problem in American politics is that the parties are not polarized enough. And so when people make a choice between them, they’re not being able to make a clear enough choice or they’re making a choice in one state, but because the parties in another state are so different nationally, that choice isn’t being honored. So it’s like there’s an actual view in mid 20th century America that our problem is not enough polarization, not distinctive enough parties. By now that is clearly not our problem. And so yeah, the parties are very different.

Preet Bharara:

So on calcification you say, was a great piece that I urge people to read, because politics is so calcified, virtually nothing matters, but because elections are so close, virtually everything matters. So explain what parody is.

Ezra Klein:

Yes, this is really fascinating. So for most of American politics, we’ve had what get called the sun and moon parties. After the Civil War, the Republican parties dominant for a long time. After the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Democratic party is dominant for many decades. The period we’re in now is the closest American politics has been between the parties ever. So the fact that we keep seeing the house change hands, I mean there were 40 years there where the house didn’t change hands back in the day when Democrats just held it and held it and held it until in 1994 Republicans finally took it back. The fact that we really don’t have landslide presidential elections. I mean, you look at the numbers by which Richard Nixon won or Lyndon Johnson won or Ronald Reagan won. You just don’t see things like that.

Preet Bharara:

No more 49 states. And you can’t imagine the 49 state victory for anybody in the foreseeable future.

Ezra Klein:

No, completely ridiculous. So we’re now at this place where not just because of how close things are in the popular vote, where they’re close but not so close, but because of the way the electoral college has kind of shook out, where in the last couple of elections shifting functionally between, depending on how you want to count, 30 and 80,000 votes would’ve swung either election in other direction in 2016. It was so unbelievably close in the key states that as I say, I think in my book, that anything could have tipped it and probably everything did. Looking for the culprit of why 2016 went the way it did when you’re only explaining a couple tens of thousands of votes is ridiculous.

Preet Bharara:

Everything, all the things mattered.

Ezra Klein:

And so parody is this kind of interesting counterforce to calcification because on the one hand, calcification means almost nobody is changing their mind. But on the other hand, parody means that almost nobody changing their mind can repeatedly flip American politics in one direction or another. So you have a very small pool of persuadable voters and they’re very weird voters. What is changing their minds is very unclear. They’re often not very interested in American politics that’s why they’ve not already chosen a side. They’re not highly attached to the system, but the parties are very, very, very different. And small shifts put one or the other in charge, which sends American politics rocketing down a completely different path.

The counterfactual of 2016 where, let’s just pick one factor and say, Comey does not come out with a laptop thing and that’s enough. And I think the evidence is pretty good. That would’ve been enough to hand Hillary Clinton the election because she wins a popular vote fairly comfortably and she only needed a couple tens of thousands of key states. So that’s a world now whereas clear Hillary Clinton was beatable. Donald Trump has lost. His loss will be recorded more as a popular vote loss in the electoral college loss because that’s typically how we think of it. His faction of the Republican party is discredited for having lost a winnable election.

Very likely Clinton is able to replace the seat that Scalia has vacated. So now Democrats have the Supreme Court in a much more fundamental way. And you have this wholly different move in American politics I suspect, where there’s this fury at the Trumpist faction of the Republican party that blew this winnable election, gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton and gave the Supreme Court to the Democrats. And American politics ends up on a whole different path. Maybe the Republican party moderates, maybe it does something else, who knows? But you don’t have probably the branch of history we’re on. And the fact that it is only a couple tens of thousands of votes that made that difference is kind of maddening. It’s too much is turning on too little.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Ezra Klein after this. Is there something in our history or in the natural arc of democracies that would suggest that over time you get to this condition where the parties are very different and the tribes are set and people change their minds less?

Ezra Klein:

Let me say this, so let me start with parody because one interesting thing is there’s no particular reason we should have parody. Political scientists don’t have a good explanation for it. We haven’t had it at a bunch of other times, other systems often don’t have it. So the kind of competitive knifes edge balance we’re in is a little bit weird and we’re not really sure why this is happening. And it doesn’t look like what’s happening is both parties are choosing optimal strategies.

I think if you just sort of look at how the parties act, particularly though not only the Republican party, you can’t possibly look at that and say both parties are ruthlessly vote maximizing organizations. So something very strange is happening there and how much of it is chance and how much of it is structure? I’m really not sure. But then you’re asking this other question which is calcification, sort of the end point? Is that the democracy version of late capitalism? I don’t know. I mean, it is the case that the muddled parties of mid 20th century America are aberrational. Most other countries in multi-party or two-party systems have quite differentiated parties.

And the reason we didn’t had to do with functionally the legacy of the Civil War, the Democratic Party had this very conservative Dixie crowd block, which didn’t agree with kind of national Democrats on a lot of different things, but the south was not going to be a Republican. The Republican party had invaded the south. And you had a lot of Republicans, liberal northeastern Republicans who are Republican having to do with the sort of more liberal legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party, but were increasingly out of step with the conservative party that was emergent in that period and that has now come to be dominant. So we had this sort of weird thing where you had a four party system posing as a two party system and historical legacies were acting really as a blocking mechanism.

And that ended as the Civil Rights Act passed. The Democratic party became both a party of economic redistribution and racial equality. The Republican party became the party, if not exactly those things. And so you have differentiation. Calcification is a little harder. I don’t know enough about other systems to know if they are as calcified as ours is. Our run up and polarization has been really quite intense and extreme. And we have distinctive dynamics around racial polarization and racial equality and to some degree around religion that I think is making some of the kind of fixed in placeness dynamics quite a bit worse here than they are in other places. But I’d want to do a little bit more comparative looking before I answered that too confidently.

Preet Bharara:

So we talked about calcification, we talked about parody, talk about the third theory, cultural backlash.

Ezra Klein:

So cultural backlash comes from Pippa Norris and the late Ron Inglehart. And cultural backlash I think is important. But unlike calcification and parody, it is importantly an international theory. It is something that is explaining many, many political systems at once right now and is being validated by cross-national data. And so the quick version of this story is that Inglehart sometimes with Norris and other co-authors is known for recognizing that in roughly the 70s in a lot of different countries that are becoming richer, you begin to see what gets called the post materialist shift.

And people’s politics and their opinions become less responsive to their direct economic condition and their views on economics and more responsive to a kind of complex basket of issues that revolve around individual freedom, autonomy, personal expression, that kind of thing. So in America this gets talked about around things like the Port Huron statement, the new left, this kind of free to be me movement, but this is sort of the move towards that at this point you I think would understand is sexual identity and fluidity there being a pretty central demand for many, much more voice in a political system becoming very important, environmental issues coming to be much more dominant.

What kind of relationship man should have with nature becoming very important. So that’s post materialism. One thing that Pippa Norris now says that that sort of was not well appreciated by the founders of that theory was, and I think she’s right, is what this post material shift, this very rapid shift in cultural values was going to feel like to those who didn’t share it? People who are more traditionalist, people who were connected to more orthodox versions of religions, people who are older. Have a lot of older people in my life who one of their, I think most central political feelings is disorientation.

The sense that there was a country they understood and knew and they knew their place in and now things have changed and they don’t understand it, they don’t know it. And that fundamental unsettledness is absolutely bedrock to their politics. More than any policy, they want things to be comprehensible to them. And politicians who seem to share that feeling are very attractive to them and those who seem too bought into to change or not. And so cultural backlash is basically what I would call like a post materialist emerging. A right wing, that it’s fundamental argument is that this shift has gone too far, our culture is changing too much, we don’t recognize this place anymore.

We’re losing values and institutions and dynamics that made our countries great. And so they’re politicians who know how to channel that. And sort of in country after country, after country after country, they’ve led to the rise of what Norris and Inglehart called populist authoritarians of which Trump is won, but you can look at people like Bolsonaro or Lappen and so on Orban in Hungary, and they both kind of speak the language of the people, but with a very sort authoritarian flavor. And they are all becoming successful based on fairly similar appeals.

Trump is in many ways less unique than we like to think of him as, all at the same time in countries that are experiencing say different rates of GDP growth and per capita income and so on. And the argument is that this reflects a kind of maturation of post materialism into the ground on which politics is fought. And cultural backlash is in many ways the predictable backlash to this long march of the post materialist now coming to flower in different political systems simultaneously.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m confused about that because I understand the point that certain countries, societies, economies mature and generally speaking per capita income is higher and there’s a savings rate, et cetera, but within any particular society or democracy, there are pockets of folks who haven’t sort of risen up and have a lot of economic insecurity, not to mention food insecurity and various other things. How is it the case that those groups get sucked along on this cultural backlash train when they themselves may not be getting the benefits of the richness of the country in which they live?

Ezra Klein:

I always think this is a tricky spot and I’ll say a couple things on it. So one is that, and this differs country to country, it’s important to note for instance, in a place like Brazil, which is a lot poorer. If you look at the voting composition of the election, it looks very different than here. Though Bolsonaro looks a lot like Trump. Lula wins more of the kind of people that we would think of as Trump winning sort of more rural, more poor than Bolsonaro does. Bolsonaro wins places like San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro he’s more urban. So the dynamics of these figures in different countries actually change and that might have to do with levels of material wealth in them.

But to focus here so one issue might be that even though there are a lot of people who have not been buoyed along by American prosperity in the way they should have been or the way we would hope they’d be, there is still enough in general affluence and material comfort here that people have the space to consider these other issues. Another is that this has always been true, it’s very true now, the left just has two narrow definition of what self-interest should be. This thing where liberals ask, why are people voting against their self-interest or their material? Well because non-material expression and values and identities and beliefs are very, very important to people.

Religion is very, very important to people. The way a country should be is very, very important to people. And of course folks are good. And so when they agree with people in terms of their morals, in terms of their orientation, they also will tend to tell themselves a story in which their policies are better for them. Then a third thing, which I also think is important is that people look at politicians. I mean, most people are not sitting around as policy analysts. People look at politicians and they ask questions that are quite visceral of them, is this person like me? A related question, which I always think is very important is, does this person seem to like me?

One mistake I think we always make is asking about whether or not voters like a politician. I think voters are much more concerned with whether or not they think a politician likes them, whether or not a politician looks at them and sees worth and wants to raise them up in society. And so even situations where say a politician like let’s call say Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama has policies that would be so very good for let’s say rural low income whites.

The sense maybe some of those voters had, those politicians would not actually like them if they met them is really important and is upstream of any kind of policy concerns or analysis. So I think self-interest is a very, very, very complicated force in people. And I think policy is most people’s politics are related to, but not, I think built around a very, very deep analysis of whether or not they think a cut in the capital gains tax rate will eventually lead to enough innovation that the entire pile will grow bigger and so they will have a better job. It’s just a very messy space.

Preet Bharara:

You might say that in some ways self-interest is not properly understood to borrow from [inaudible 00:51:02].

Ezra Klein:

I think that’s right.

Preet Bharara:

So we’ve talked about these three theories, which I find fascinating. I think the analysis is very, very smart. And they sort of explain, as you have said, 2016, 2020, 2022. What does all of this analysis tell us about or what can it predict about 2024 if anything?

Ezra Klein:

I think one thing it predicts about 2024 is that the changes are likely to be on the margin. I mean, that’s calcification. The thing that is mostly going to happen in 2024 is that people who voted for Democrats in 2020 are going to vote for them again and people voted for Republicans in 2020 are going to do that again. Obviously parody and just looking at the 2016 and 2020 elections will tell you that the election will nevertheless be close enough, that if something happens, it changes of minds of 2.5 percentage points of the population that could change everything.

And then cultural backlash I think is interesting because I think one of the core questions about elections is what are they about? What is an election about? And I think that Democrats have moved compared to where they were in 2020, although there were somewhere here in 2020, much more back to the view that the best thing for them to do is to make the election about economics. Economics is where the other side is. Most divided Republicans are most divided and Democrats are most united. Now, in order to do that, they need the economy to be quite strong in 2024.

Preet Bharara:

To be good, right?

Ezra Klein:

Yeah. So the inflation has been an issue there for them, but that is what they want. And Ron DeSantis is a very good example of a post materialist right. What does Ron DeSantis think about healthcare, the economy growth, et cetera? It’s not very clear. He doesn’t have very many signature policies in those areas. What does he think about sexual identity, about religion, about immigration? Much clearer. So DeSantis I think shows the way Trump is in some ways, right about this. Now, one place where I think DeSantis might actually be being overestimated and Trump a little bit underestimated, is it one of Trump’s advantages in 2016 specifically was that he was able to run as this businessman candidate.

And a lot of people who didn’t know quite what to make of him did after seeing him on TV for years as America’s greatest boss. Think this guy knows how the economy works, he knows how to build things, et cetera. I don’t think Donald Trump was a particularly good manager of the economy, but I think he was president during a fairly good period in the economy. And unlike some of the other Republicans, if predict the economy isn’t great in 2024, Trump is going to be able to run, saying is good under me and you put me back in and it’ll be like that again. And a lot of the other ones I think don’t have a message or much credibility. I mean, DeSantis is functionally a career politician.

Preet Bharara:

But I thought we were post material.

Ezra Klein:

Right. So that’s the question. How post material are we? How post material is a Republican party? And if the economy’s in bad shape, if the economy becomes more salient, either because it is really good, in which case the Democrats are going to win or because it’s quite bad, in which case it’s going to be a more central space of debate and discussion that might shift who has a good case to make in that election.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think at this moment, notwithstanding his age, that Joe Biden is the safest bet for Democrats in 2024?

Ezra Klein:

I don’t know. I have trouble with the question of Joe Biden’s age, to be honest and I’m-

Preet Bharara:

You’re not alone.

Ezra Klein:

I feel like people are a little too reticent to talk about this, but I like Joe Biden. I think he’s done a quite good job in his first term. I think there’s a real just question about whether or not you should have somebody serving in the presidency, plausibly until they’re 86. We have not seen Joe Biden out on the trail a lot. He doesn’t give a lot of interviews. He does go stumping. I don’t think Joe Biden is seen now or there’s any issue like that.

But I do think that how Joe Biden will fare under the rigors of a campaign, you’d want to know that before the general election. It’s one reason I’ll be interested to see if Democrats have a primary, because I think there’s on the one hand a lot of pressure if Joe Biden is running again, not to primary an incumbent president, there’s a kind of view in American politics that is something that makes presidents lose. Whether or not that’s kind of the right way to draw that causal arrow I think is an open question, but that is a view.

Preet Bharara:

It probably would be disastrous.

Ezra Klein:

On the other hand, primaries are information about how people run and where they are at that moment in time, which I think would be good to have about Biden. So I don’t know. If not for age I think Biden is obviously the safest bet Democrats have and I think it’s just a little bit hard to know how the electorate will react to Biden’s age, particularly if Biden is running, not against Donald Trump, but as against another Republican. I will say, if you think Trump will be the nominee of the Republican party, then I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Biden is a democratic party’s safest play.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think, if you have a view on this, I mean this is an unfair question that Joe Biden is maybe not vigorous enough to campaign. Do you think he’s vigorous enough to govern?

Ezra Klein:

I do think he’s vigorous enough to govern, but I mean, that’s a complicated question because nobody governs alone. The problem with Donald Trump was not that he was not vigorous, all of his vigor was throwing things at the television. He wasn’t really governing, but it wasn’t an issue of vigor there. Biden, from everything I can tell reporting on the White House like Biden is there. He is constantly working. He’s engaged in meetings. I do think that there are things it would be or would have been in some ways different if you’re dealing with a Joe Biden 25 years ago, having covered him, well, not 25 years ago, but having covered a younger Joe Biden too, I think there are ways in which his level of engagement with Congress might be different.

I think that there are ways in which the sort of, control isn’t quite the word I’m looking for, but I think his leadership of the boundary drawing would’ve been more active, engaged. You could argue that these differences are actually for the best, that Joe Biden would’ve gotten into more trouble than this Joe Biden has. I think that’s actually entirely possible, but I don’t know. The presidency it is a very, very tough, very demanding job. I think he’s doing a good job at it, but I also think age comes on fast in your 80s. That has been my observation watching people and I think it’s a reasonable thing to be concerned about and at the very least it is going to be the central thing Biden will have to a comfort people, particularly in his own party on.

Preet Bharara:

Can we spend the final few minutes talking about you?

Ezra Klein:

I love talking about myself.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s interesting having another podcaster on. And I don’t really talk about podcasting that much even though some of our guests have their own podcasts. And so let me ask you, and I’m just curious, if we were sitting in a bar having a drink, I would be asking you these questions. Why do you podcasting?

Ezra Klein:

Oh, a bunch of good reasons here, but I think the one that is the most fundamental for me is that podcasting seems like a space where uncertainty can live more fully and a kind of hesitance and a figuring out of things in real time that has been lost elsewhere. I mean, I come into journalism through blogging. And I mean, when I’m an early blog, I’m a college student, so nobody really cares what I think. And the blogs here is also this very amateurish, just people writing things and block quoting each other and writing about the block quotes of each other and you could go on and be like, “I don’t know anything about the French healthcare system, can somebody tell me about it?”

And that whole sense of just people were out there talking and figuring things out was there. And now I don’t think there’s all the space for that. I mean, particularly maybe it also has to do of course with where I am in my own career, but you’re not going to do that on Twitter unless you’re really asking for trouble and you don’t do that for a newspaper column. And so this space where you can talk about things and a lot of different ideas can live simultaneously and there’s a lot of generosity in how people take these musings and these explorations. It just feels very healthy and in many ways podcasting feels like the healthiest of the various mediums I participate in or for some time have participated in.

And then I just hearing what people think. When I’m writing on some level, I have to be the expert. Now I can muddy that by quoting other people who operate as the experts in my pieces, but it is ultimately me there with my byline on the thing. When I’m interviewing somebody it really is about what they think. Now it’s about what they think maybe in relationship to what I think or through engagement with me, but I can sit back. I mean I’m going to be doing after this, a podcast with a neuroscientist of time and I don’t have to pretend to be an expert on how time works. That’s his job. And-

Preet Bharara:

I just had a neuroscientist on and yeah, you can just have margaritas throughout the interview.

Ezra Klein:

Exactly. So it’s a real joy in that space just to be able to indulge curiosity.

Preet Bharara:

Final question for you, also about you. What I had not known, and I’m raising this because I knew you’ve talked about it and I’m just curious how this has affected you. To hear you talk about as articulate person as there is in media, quite smart. You talk sometimes like an academic, you consume academic materials like people consume grape nuts for breakfast, but you have revealed that when you were in high school, not a great student, very low grade point average. Is something about that experience in your past, does that tell you something about how we’re educating kids or does it give you any insights about our educational system or anything else?

Ezra Klein:

I don’t know that gives me so many insights about our educational system. I don’t really think I’m somebody who has failed by schools. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to puzzle out this part of my life, and I think the truest answer to it is that I have a little bit of a learning issue where I have a lot of trouble sitting and listening to anybody just lecture. And it’s still true today. I don’t call into teleconference calls for this reason. I can have a conversation, no problem. I love conversations. I’m extremely focused as a reader, but just watching something doesn’t work for me.

Podcasts actually work for me because it can be the second thing I’m doing, but I can’t sit and listen to a podcast is the only thing I do, but I can fold laundry or take the dogs for a walk or whatever. So I think there are distinctive reasons. I had a lot of trouble in school, but at the time I didn’t understand that I thought everybody had the same trouble I did and everybody was zoned out all the time the way I was. And so I didn’t know enough to realize that there was something that there was something I was struggling with. I will say it isn’t just that I did poorly in school.

I was for much of that functionally friendless or had only one friend. I was very badly bullied when I was younger. School was just tough for me the whole way through. I was very heavy for a long time. Up until really ’17 or ’18 the kind of my own narrative of myself was functionally failure after failure, after failure after failure. And then I hit this other point in my life where it reversed this and I feel like the same person, but all of a sudden I’m seeing a lot of success. I find a social world where I’m accepted and have wonderful friends and partners. All of a sudden I’m seen as an incredibly hard worker.

The same kind of dynamic where I couldn’t really pay attention in school but could read endlessly. All of a sudden shifts to my job is to read endlessly and then write about things I’m interested in. And so it’s very much informed my own politics that because I’ve watched myself fail and watched myself succeed and seen a lot of continuity between those sides of my myself, what wasn’t continuous was the context in which I operated. I think one, I tend to be skeptical of how much blame people deserve for their own or for that matter of credit, they deserve for their own life outcomes. A lot of it is about whether or not in the moment we are born into, we are able to have or find a match between who we are and what society wants from us.

And if we were not allowed that match or that was not there for us, our lives would not go the way they do. And then the other piece is that to everything we talked about at the beginning of this conversation, I think it wouldn’t take an overly intense psychoanalysis to suggest that my obsession with and interested in context and frameworks comes from living a life where I feel like the deciding factors are context and frameworks. And so I think there’s probably a pretty straight line to draw from that side of my politics to that side of my journalism.

Preet Bharara:

Ezra Klein, I know you’re busy. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It was real delight.

Ezra Klein:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Ezra Kline continues from members of the Cafe Insider community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to Cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s Cafe.com/insider. I want to end the show this week by highlighting a story that caught my eye. A story of resilience and community. On Sunday, a first time author named Chelsea Banning posted on Twitter quote, “Only two people came to my author signing yesterday, so I was pretty bummed about it, especially as 37 people responded, going to the event, kind of upset honestly, and a little embarrassed.” End quote.

Banning lives in Ohio, and she had just published her first book, a fantasy novel called Of Crowns and Legends. She isn’t famous, at least not yet. So what happened next took her by surprise authors began replying one by one to share their own disappointing experiences at book signings. Soon some of literature’s biggest names chimed in the great Margaret Atwood wrote, “Join the Club. I did a signing to which nobody came except a guy who wanted to buy some scotch tape and thought I was the help.” Jin Lee who wrote Pachinko and joined me earlier this year on Stay Tuned wrote, “I did a book reading where only my husband’s cousin showed up. One person. I’ll never forget that reading.”

Another former Stay Tuned guest, Andrea Dadas, wrote, “Two, please enlighten me on how you do a hundred percent more people than my event on Martha’s Vineyard once.” Scott Simon of NPRs weekend edition had some advice in the art of positive self-talk. He wrote, “The weather was harsh or there was a transit strike or a road blockage because of a tractor trailer filled with tomatoes overturned. It is never the writer signing the books helps and cements goodwill. You will laugh about this someday soon.” As of this taping, more than 50,000 people have liked or replied to Banning’s post.

And among that group are luminaries like Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Rebecca Solnit, and Annette Gordon-Reed. For her part, Banning has been trying to respond to people individually, which I imagine is not so easy now that literally thousands of people have offered their support. But among all the legends who shared kind words, who did Banning reserve, special thanks for none other than Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz, and a friend of our show. After Winkler tweeted a link to Banning’s new book, banning Screenshotted the Tweet and wrote, “I’ve been sitting here, jaw dropped, just staring. OMG.”

That’s OMG with five Ms and five Gs. To me, this whole episode is a good reminder that all of us, no matter how famous or successful, have moments of rejection and self-doubt, have felt embarrassed or ashamed. And it’s also a reminder that there’s nothing like the support of other people, some of whom we may not even know to pick us back up. It also strikes me that there has been a lot of hand rigging and concern about Twitter lately, and for good reason, much of it is well placed. But it’s also worth noting that without Twitter, the vulnerable words of a first time author and librarian in Ohio would not have caught the attention of some of the world’s greatest living writers.

And that’s a pretty amazing thing. Banning herself wrote, “I am overwhelmed by all the love and encouragement from these replies. I thought I’d just vent into the void, but heck you all, you’re wonderful.” So as we add into the holidays, let’s keep up the love and encouragement, the friendship and the support on Twitter in person everywhere. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Ezra Klein. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice.

Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #askpreet or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24 Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@Cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The Cafe team is David Carlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noah Azalai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Namrata Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.