Transcripts For CSPAN2 Ezra Klein Why Were Polarized 20240713

Hello. Good evening, everyone. Welcome again to sixth i. I do start to start by asking who is here at sixth i for the first time tonight . Hello. Whether you are a first timer or if repeat offender we have a bunch of programs you might want to check out from a conversation from dan pfeiffer two concert with the incredible songwriter josh ritter to a party where you can come and see all of them did just a few weeks into the new year and the new decade im sure the reality has set in for us all we are now undeniably in 2020 approaching what is the most anticipated and polarized american president ial election of all time. The 2016 elections results were shocking to many of us in this d we didnt know a country, communities or friends as well as we thought we did. The aftermath so people questioning each others values and stark divisions and already divisive twoparty political systems. Tonight we are thrilled to welcome ezra klein back to dc to help us make sense of it all and hear his perspective on how the playstation has been growing for decades. And why were polarized why the system isnt broken but is working how it was designed. He reveals how the system is polarized in us and our identities are polarizing it with disastrous results. The bonds that hold the country together. As i guessing you already know, ezra klein is the editor at large and cofounder of the hosted the ezra klein podcast and executive producer on the netflix show explained. Previously he was a columnist and editor of the washington post, policy analyst at msnbc and a contributor to bloomberg news. He is joined in conversation tonight by an opinion columnist for the new york times, political analyst for cbs news and former chief Political Correspondent for slate. Slate. Also a talented photographer you can pick out debate could check out his digital account. Thank you for coming ou out andi thought pleastonightnow please m welcome to ezra klein and jamelle bouie. [applause] before we start i want to say thank you. This is the first event of the book tour in a city that means a lot to me and any venue that means a lot to me and it means a lot to me that we are here working on a book as a solitary strange experience and to see there are human beings out there that care is a wonderful thing so thank you all for being here. [applause] i saw your book, got copy in the mail and then reading the title, why were polarized. When i see books with these kind of titles, my immediate thought is come on we are not that polarized. Its not that big of a deal. Things have been worse in the 50s, 1930s, even the 1960s. So, if we are uniquely polarized in the present moment, what makes it unique and youve acknowledged in the buck things have been worse but now its different in a way that maybe the trend is worse than it looks. Looks. What i didnt realize when we titled the book, i want to note when you use the word polarized when youre completely right. You get an immediate intuition in the audience decid audience t youre doing is lamenting how bitter everything is today and its much, much worse. The thing that is different today in the mid20 century politics is important to say that the baseline american politics that 20th century and theres a lot of people that run political publications but the political comingofage wa was a mid20th century an and when i o to dc it was like the 1980s and just constantly like why cant we have a reagan and tip oneill getting a drink and fixing social security, like that was the iconic way the system was supposed to work. And what i came to have to explore and think about is that seemed wrong, but why and what way is the information correct, and the way that its wrong mid20th century american politics is very unusual in that it wasnt polarized. Politics is usually polarized in most countries in most places at most times, but the second thing that i think is very unintuitive is that polarization is not necessarily a bad thing. And its not necessarily a synonym for disagreement or bitterness or extremism. If was a time of more foundational tractor then we are in right now. Theres National Guardsmen at kent state and urban riots and Richard Nixon and watergate and political assassination after political assassination. You have all of this and the country itself. And by the way, a much larger range of the ideological opinion, not democratic socialism like norway to the republicanism as we see it today, that communism, like actual stolen his right away to milton friedman. The recent memory of some of the people who had come of age in politics, it was a meaningful faction in politics. It was the real thing you had to deal with. What is different now is infection or fracture. Its the way that they are lying on top of each other, the way that we become polarized by party and that identity has linked to a lot of other identities and fractures in american politics. I always think a good example is intensely divisive piece of legislation that comes after a long hard fought political battle and in congres ended cone for it and then medicare which comes right around the same time gets i think 13 or 17 republican votes in the senate, to imagine the major pieces of the decision representing the political complexities of the era passing with very little Party Polarization its almost unthinkable today, so i think that is what im trying to illuminate the american politics and the way the parties function and the relationship is actively different than it was at other times that we have to build our understanding of how it works on that and not an overly nostalgic view in the past. In the book you begin talking about how american politics got polarized in the way it is now in the civil rights story is part of that story that the Civil Rights Act essentially realigns the liberal and conservative factions in both parties briefly to the respective parties, liberal, republicans, they become democrats and become republicans and the political system in a way that its never been before has a Straight Line of ideological polarization. You describe it is not necessarily a bad thing and i want to talk about why it wasnt a bad thing even if the consequences hadnt been great for the political system. I think implicitly people often believe the alternative to polarization is agreement compromise, civility, comedy. When the alternative is often suppression and often times the political systems in particular the reason that you are not, quote on quote, polarized i polt is inthe disagreement could pold over or somehow or another being suppressed. If the american political system way they are suppressed is by a twoparty system collapsing into a four party system an system iy that make it coherent and its ability to service certain kinds of disagreement in particular piece disagreement over race. So there is a Democratic Party that has what they think o we ta Democratic Party that is less on economics and concerned with redistribution of poverty, based on the structural barriers to opportunity and then the party that is quite conservative are the members were quite conservative but there was a wide range of economic opinion. Most fundamentally conducting a Foreign Policy to the rest of the nation and wasnt one party at home and then ensuring the National Political system enforced White Supremacy in the south. Then as the liberal republicans, conservative republicans, and this was considered at the time a problem. I quote a lot of it here from a friend sam rosenfeld. What he shows it as there were people looking at this thing and theres something wrong with the system into the association released a report in 1950 and its become famous and infamous but what they say is a problem in american politics is that the parties are not politically responsible and what they mean is they are not putting forward a separate agendas. You have a democrat voting for Hubert Humphrey so you have this period where american politics in any way function on the thing that its functioned upon but the cost of that is this the poor and compromise. The Civil Rights Act doesnt end up at all at once and this is the part people underestimate. It does lead to some parts of the old confederacy for the First Time Ever but it takes a long time for the south to become solidly democratic well into the 90s i would put it. In terms of. I dont think you can look at those compromises and to say that they were moral or just so its a nice wine from our friend where he calls them im going to get it wrong that he talks about it as a false peace pressing the issues like this. One of the arguments made in the book is that its not polarization per se. It is often another word we have for disagreement we have coming to the service. The problem in the system is that it is built so that in conditions of polarization there isnt a way to resolve the disagreement. It is a gridlock in the forms of violence is her palace is a cont that the political system in the designed problem, not a polarization problem. We can go to Different Directions but the polarization direction first you talk about the party system but you also talk about the ways in which different identities are becoming polarized along the political winds. You walk through the different theories of polymerization. Can you sketch out in a little more detail what that process looks like and what exactly is happening such that in the present you can basically guess who someone is going to vote for off the proximity to us and those wonderful establishments. Henry is born a polish jew and moves to france in the 30s because he cant go to the university in portland because hes jewish and we are working on an optional Good International Holocaust Remembrance Day t debate he movs to france and endless surfing world war ii and is captured and becomes a prisoner of war. He survives because hes understood as a french prisoner of war and not a polish jew. When he comes back his whole family has been killed in the holocaust and she begins thinking, obsessing about the idea but in this context they only thing that mattered was an identity and deciding whether or not he lived and died and if so many people they loved had died. So he becomes fixated on this question of Group Identity, what is it and how does it work and he starts running a series of experiments called the Minimal Group paradigm and the idea basically as if hes going to call subjects into a lab and subject them to conditions that begin to create coherence and see at what point the Group Identity and discrimination begin to take hold so he has these kids from the same school and he has been look at these sheets of paper and screens. How man many docs do you think e are and then h they separate thm into two groups. The over estimators and under estimators and its totally random they do not care how many, but the over estimators and under estimators and the authors say you know what while we have you here we wanted one other experiment this isnt related to the first one but if you dont mind hanging out for a minute we are going to look at the different groups just give us a second here. They then put them into this new experiment allocating money to other kids and these are kids who know each other and are all from the same school and theyve been sorted into these completely random groups and immediately they began favoring the under or over estimators and this was not an expected outcome. It was the first meant to be below the level. He found first he couldnt create a test so subtle a meaningless characteristic that was in it self true and he still got this so he did begi city thh paintings. You prefer again its false which paintings were preferred. The same thing happened and then just when he shows Group Discrimination and becomes powerful. People will choose to give everybody less money if it means their group gets more money compared to the other. Its the winning that is important. The point of that is we are very sensitive to the Group Identity with endless numbers of times in all kinds of subjects so if you do not believe what im saying think for a few seconds about sports, its all based on this. These are contests, im sorry with no states that people actually riot and burn the city as an aftermath. Identity is powerful and doesnt require that much to activate it or he is a thing that becomes very important is that they hold a lot of different identities. I am jewish, california, author, journalist, liberal. So on and so forth. I have a dog and not a cat. Some of these weak in me and some become very strong. What becomes important in politics is the way that your identities are linked to each other. So for a lot of history is in terms of the groups connected to them because they are so internally mixed in favor is. They have similar religious compositions and not even that dissimilar but once it becomes the conservative Party Accepted the period not just of ideological sorting but demographic and overwhelmingly christian party, the Democratic Party is the single large religious group with no affiliation at all and beyond thathat its a coalition of a lt of different religious groups and communities. Even within the ideology of the party is about half. So its not just ideology that race, religiosity, geography, psychological qualities and openness to experience the conscientiousness. Where you live and penalties downstream cultural things, do you watch that dynasty or madmen come amadmen, so they become the identities where we know a lot about you in general by who you vote for and theres a lot of things that can reinforce your political identity and three, the other party becomes much more ideologically different from you and more demographically different. I feel that they are not your group. Theres a study that shows to get a sense of how powerful this is in countries with the most stacked identities just like all of the identities aligning versus those with the most costcutting identities in the Different Directions, to the countries with most costcutting or 12 times as likely to have civil war these are big numbers that drives a lot of political behavior. It takes some work to feel the stakes of politics like should china be a currency manipulator, what should the policy become etc. But the Group Dynamics once you have a sense of the other party, it isnt going to be good for people like you, it is a very, very powerful thing. And the more of that you have come ahave,the more aggressivell react in favor of your side and against them. So far in this conversation, you have been talking about the path to polarization as essentially moving some events happened in the 60s, the parties began the realignment. There are other parties that of a kind of take their own path. You dont necessarily think that in all of this there are political factors making choices about how to best change advantage or win an election or how to do whatever i and the choices end up feeding into the polarization putting us on a certain path but it becomes more as we go on but we have to kind of move in addition to these groundlevel materials stages. I dont want to say the individual behavior has no effect on politics. That would be untrue, but i do want to say individual behavior has a lot less of a range of choice in politics than we think it does. Particularly american political journalism through individuals in a way that is unhelpful understanding whats happened here so theres definitely a l lot. If donald trump had undergone it would be different. If barack obama had in front of iit would just be different, but i dont think that the underlining trend would be all that different over the long run. Is that a matter of Newt Gingrich becomes the speaker of the house he is a powerful force in driving the party to the right but if they never escape georgia for some reason he is. A lot of people. [laughter] what someone like that have a period eventually that this is a disagreement i have in the polarization literature it is over Newt Gingrich like thereso much in the literature in my view and its not that he is himself truly a polarization innovator, he came up with stuff at every polarization book includes a long story about how Newt Gingrich gives speeches when the cspan cameras run and a few democrats are not cowards you will come up and answer like nobody was there because it is 2 00 in the morning. It is a good story and its true, the question is not what did Newt Gingrich come up with. Its why was the Republican Party for goals will in the first place, and now we have Mitch Mcconnell. We have very different personality and to get overly personalized to him as doing what so many what do he didnt invent new powers come he just didnt allow the vote on so many in thand if all of them had bron with Mitch Mcconnell he wouldnt have had the power to stop it so in general i think that you have to look for what it got taken out of th the box at one point i described it as american politics focuses on the flowers and not disloyal. This meeting and that person, the other walked out or its a great book i would highly recommend a. Its the history of modern republicanism as an actual distinct thing but if you take a step back from the book what you notice is the way that he describes what is going on is a moderate republicans are always this close to figuring it out and it collapsed because they made the wrong strategic move. They are getting blown out in the elections and have totally crazy people who make these decisions and they win. I think that in a way the service like almost all of the e british industriepartisanship ha little bit too little to understand why the players who win did win because they didnt makmake a ton of mistakes. Newt gingrich is sometimes a political operator but sometimes a complete fool. The fact of the matter is the other people didnt win. It wasnt good for them and on the democratic side it could be different. Its a weird thing about the democrats but it also speaks to the dynamics so it is the reason im skeptical its not that i dont think that they cant make different decisions tha decisiod end up benefiting. Its because the. In a straightforward way the way that he won the primary as he gave a voice to what they wanted a voice given to which is a backlash nativism and he understood that in the way that others did an do them so you cak at trump but you also have to look at where the party was receptive when it probably wouldnt have been at another time. This gets to another part of the story that it isnt just the origin point, but its very much driving presentday polarization in part because a lot of the stack of identities that his windup its also racial identity if youre an evangelical christian, if you live in the south, if you live in the midwest it is probably republican, and not just, but the other side appears to be growing and political dominance as evidenced by the previous president seems to be so it may in your mind fundamentally threaten the world in which they lived. This is important in understanding why theyve reacted the way they have because if you look at the country with a very different kind of Republican Party, it could be a Republican Party that nominated marco rubio for instance who is very conservative and we would still be talking about polarization but it wouldnt be a party that had adopted this view of politics with attorney general william barr saying for instance there is an organized assault to destroy christianity is the one of the things going on is that we are in a period of rapid demographic change on track to become the majority minority country racially by 2043 or Something Like that and we are on track for a similar thing to happen. If the projections are correct you will see the unaffiliated past protestants the Single Largest Group is a remarkable thing in history. We are on track to be a record person pitch to about 14. 5 now. So the country is changing and not only that but its changing the way that it creates power in something they talk about in the book and i got this idea from robert jones who is the head of the Research Institut institutea very smart guy on these issues but he makes the point that its like a time machine and the power of the White Christians demographic which he studies very closely is about ten years behind where they are demographically so older, whit whiter. If you look at where we are as a percentage they are bigger than they are. Meanwhile culture comes out of urban centers and its focused on getting people to buy products to watch television shows. Ive done a lot of cable news and the interesting fact dont care about ratings, they care about the demo, they care about people between 24 to 45. Culture, television, product placement, its moving very fast and so there is a feeling on the right that they are losing the one thing that matters which is the soul of the country. This is true for people on the left and the right. Its happening even faster thann theyre actually happening so that is the kind of panic on the right even though they hold a lot of political power and the amount of political power creates panic on the left and so in addition to Everything Else going on you have these two coalitions that both feel threatened, one feels in some ways like it should be but isnt quite a. It has been dominant and it represents the true america but its pushed out and made into the thickets and they need to fight to keep the country they grew up in and it creates a very high political space into that kind of political conflict can become very anything that goes because the states do wha statet witthat youcant with the othern because if they do that might be the end of you. That might be the end of christian america. You said that many times. Roger eyre wrote a book about the community is to wait out the storm. Its not just polarization that marco rubio have taken the same kind of strategies and perhaps move away from this kind of polarization is compounded in the political system. I think that its a tough question to ask how much running room if you look at the way fox news hosts talk about america it is an extraordinary sense of threat and it didnt just start with tucker carlson. Going back to 2012 bill oreilly gets on and says we are seeing the end of the white majority business and the country we grew up in and if you listen to Rush Limbaugh she says how do you get ahead in the Obama White House is by hating white people. I remember watching glenn beck talking about how obama was an antiwhite president and this would begin antiwhite america. You have to wonder why you like what is happening there and why arent other people on the shows, meghan kelly understands the more moderate force. So there is on the one hand a diversity of the people that are more or less fear mongering about this and then its clear who win and it isnt clear if murdoch cares very much about creating this kind of panic but it is very clear that they want to win. At some point fox ends up in conflict and i think this is a Pivotal Moment in american politics. Fox has been inflating the bubble. For the first primary of the cycle is on fox news they read the terrible things and talk about the way he is to be a democrat. Fox news goes into that in a any primary way and they decided they were going to go to war with him and he wins a. Theres also the question of of what happened to them. One of the most libertarian conservative members of the party, when people like this challenge trump they get run out of the party and realize they are not going to have a future hearsay bufuturehere so that i e not moves available to people, but if you look at the people that tried to, meghan kelly is out of talks to he ear after she comes into conflict with trump. They are out of office because they thought they were going to lose so again there is movement but there were individuals that tried and the reason they didnt when mike 16 others ran and said he was a cancer on conservatism and he became the Energy Secretary and the one that said a speck of dirt should be president than him, he became really positive, Lindsey Graham said horrible things about donald trump and his sluggish towards him so people tried to make decisions and they lost and i think its important to analyze the ecosystem that led to them losing. Ive want to go to another direction which is the destruction of the American Government because part of you make this case in the book if we had a different political system, the polarization we are experiencing it doesnt necessarily lead to gridlock. It doesnt produce the kind of dysfunctional. Think about this in the uk. Boris johnson just one. Hes not going to be able to do anything. Something distinct is that it doesnt mean that you can govern. It is very plausible and its going to be a strange outcome Bernie Sanders would be president and Mitch Mcconnell for majority leader and medicare for all, like if that is the collection of political power nor joe biden is president and majority leader so you have a idiosyncratic political system that requires high levels of compromise to function and in those conditions polarized parties break the system ungovernable and its not just in the sense of paralysis but also the potential crisis so i have an argument in the book that i think a lot of the readers will find it tough to read which is it is hard to pinpoint what he did wrong with Merrick Garland he used power unconstitutionally to not have a vote on someone he and his party didnt want on the Supreme Court and it was without a doubt the single most important ideologically important vote anybody in the senate would take that cycle a swing seat on the Supreme Court with a lifetime appointment so she didnt get polluters in the streets cant,e just said no and he had the power to say no and his team won the next election. It isnt to say what he did was good. Its to say that in a perfectly straightforward following the incentive rules in the power structure of politics he set up a precedent to destroy the Supreme Court. The its nothing that ensures they can fill vacancies and then they dont have the highest court in the land t to cultivate in eight credible fashion or in the reverse situation where democrats stop believing the willingness they are credible. Imagine what happened if you had to a democratic president if you have the senate in that condition if they keep doing the rulings against what the democratic president wants to do they would say okay who is going to stop us and that is how in other systems and other in othes or political system breaks down because it creates the potential for the crisis. There are competing for the legitimacy here in the one electorate congress elected and in those kind of conditions it isnt clear who ought to have legitimacy. In 2014. Not only is the power out. They called a democracy when kids go to school they learn we are democracy. Right now the white house is occupied by a candidate that won fewer votes. Three out of the four main Power Centers in american politics are occupied by the party that didnt have a popular majority to implement their agenda. Its a weird one to run a railroad and you get the legitimacy crisis because it isnt just Mitch Mcconnell can say it is true that in 2014 you get a better claim to the majority, they did when the election quite substantially over time is not able to legitimacy in the republican rule it is reliant on people accepting the norms of american politics as being credible but if it continues to diverge a majority continue accepting not being able to convert that, maybe but maybe not. So you dont just have to divide in the system, you also have the geographic dimension of the system which at this point is playing up sharply in one partys favor and that compounds the internal stresses the structure. This gets to what we said at the beginning of the conversation. What makes the current polarization particularly bad is exactly the combination of the stack identity and deep organization and the kind of old system that means they are heading towards a legitimacy crisis either now or later when they hand full of states can only send aid senators by representing 60 of the population. Your book doesnt have any solutions for this crisis. What kind of things, what can we do to think about things i would advise the one not to take them seriously because they wont have been. The argument in the book when people think about the fundamental equation of politics, or their condition thf polarization the system breaks down. Its possible that something will happen tha happen but toldt polarization in the next 30 years that i cant predict or maybe we can go to war with china. Things like that do happen. We are not going to put the polarization back in the bottle. The media with how the elections are run and how we are governed and they take the polarization which burst i think that we should focus again in the world where we could on the other part of it in the way the system works into the primary thing that i think would help and i really do think it would help but it wouldnt bring down the polarization that would just make it governable is the democratization. They should be able to turn the popular vote majority into popular power to govern and then i think the country should judge them on whether or not it is good or bad and when you save hisaythis people are like its. We are a democracy, not a republic. We are not a republic in that way. It annoys me because it doesnt mean what people think it means. The way in which the republic isnt supposed to be isnt that we get one Political Party and outside another popular with our like the way its different. Its just a weird argument people make. You would have an incentive to compete for the majority is. I think a bad thing about the party right now is a very negative incentive structure is that its begun to see that it wants to continue rolling through the minority rule and it sees democracy as itself a threat to the interest to the structure to construct the franchise to fight over who and how much weight their vote holds you see that in gerrymandering. Around the publicsector unions and Campaign Finance and voter id laws and so on and so forth, so making the fight over the rules of who gets to vote is a very damaging and dangerous thing for the country. So i think it would be better if the Republican Party were competing for the whole country for the majority. Its not the filibuster when we are in the majority that they are often in the minority for blocking things they dont like. If your agenda is good and the other is bad then you should be positive getting things like the majority to rule. I just dont think its a coherent position to say healthcare is important in peoples lives and it would be meaningless to peoples politics of republicans give 25 Million People off of Health Insurance i dont think it works that way. The way the system should work is that the public should vote in a party to govern that party should be able to pass an agenda and they should be able to say that i like what has happened to the country but instead what happens is the public votes in someone to govern other person in the party doesnt pass the agenda, the public feels theres been a lot of fighting but nothing has changed and then they kind of swing back to the other side and its a weird way to run a political system if you implement if i want to be very clear we would enter an era of politics with no bitter divisions like unending peace and idea like life and puppies and so on. With the governable. [applause] im going to encourage you to ask a question what is the political culture that is a plaa smaller role . A term that is functionally about the way the conservative side of the spectrum has included is often a Smaller Group of Media Outlets who do democrats trust its fox news and there was a study 22 of 30 outlets that remain, republicans trusted seven and four of them were brought forwar breitbart, y or Something Like that. How do you get out of that . I dont know. Its hard because its also about peoples individual choices. The media has its own dynamics and the argument is the book is that it has a lot to do with the culture of a lot of choice and a lot of competition but what has kept the left side of the divide in the mainstream institutions than some of the worst instincts in aspects is the sociological question of how you would rebuild it is much harder. I actually dont like to think fake answers to questions so i will say its bad but i dont think there is a pass or anything to do to end it. I think thats the best i can say is the way to make good information matter is to make Good Governance possible and matter and then if you are governing based on that information people will be able to see it and react but to the extent you have this plus paralyzed governance, it becomes harder for people to see the outcomes of that and find blame so i would say no more than ever what i said before is what we should do. You talked about the difference of how our identities are stacking more instead of crosscutting but then something you talked about in your podcast a lot is the big difference between engaged voters and no one engaged voters so how is it affecting the country so vastly when i think you talked about most are not engaged or paying attention to everything going on. Its a great question with two answers to it. It is polarizing in a soft way disengaged voters supposedly study i talk about and h he hasa couple of great findings there are fewer persuadable voters. Low information voters today have a clear understanding of the difference between the two parties than the high information voters did in the 70s and the reason for that is the difference between the two parties are clear. The wine i have for the book is between the donkey and elephant and a donkey and a mule so if you go back to these other periods the parties are quite similar 1976 the Party Convention platform had a plank on abortion and it said the party is divided on abortion there are people inside think wk we should have abortion on demand and those who think it should be illegal in all circumstances and we respect the difference of opinion. 1996 you can read the Democratic Party platform it doesnt sound like the Democratic Party. So it was a lot harder for the disengaged voters to tell the difference between the parties they were not as difference of one is that the choice becomes a more polarized the disengaged voters become because it is clear to see which side it should ultimately be on the bute other is the elites are polarizing that the reason these things matter is they are the ones most attuned to these hyper polarized media spaces. A good example of this is the reason we are having the impeachment trial today is donald trump, the president , watch is able to fox news and fox news spent a lot of time promoting this Conspiracy Theory about joe biden and hunter biden and burisma and ukraine and trump were people like trump got so invested in this thing that it was bubbling up in the rightwing swamp that they invested it with the power goes the executive branch and investigated in the downstream consequence is incredibly imposing impeachment that we are now living through and having to respond to this would create a system everybody else has to respond to if they are in these hyper polarized spaces and creating a hyper polarized system of reaction to it everybody else has to live in the wreckage of what they constructed. Do you see a problem with the majority . I dont think we should have a system without the minority protection we should have procedural protections. I dont think we should have a filibuster that is an invincible 60 vote blockade on anything but should it be easier to bring a bills to the floor, absolutely. I dont think majority rule in politics is necessarily. Theres a lot of other things we do in countries that are not understood having the majority like canada or britain separate from making politics impossible to govern. So in my view you should have minority protection and for both politically and beyond politically they should be embedded in the fabric of how the political conflict is structured but i think that its been a somewhat opportunistic move that simply is equated to the tyranny of the majority. Its been governed and you can do that without having tierney. Its ordered to deal with the negro problem so we know people vote against their own best interest when it comes to race politics. Theres a couple of things here and one thing i want to key in on is i dont think theres s a line on the left people understand is the grou growth gg to remain dominant and i think it ends up based on the sea peoples interest boiled down to too much about resources in terms of getting these larger cross Party Coalition we need to start with a sense of interest is much larger. One of the things im trying to do in the book is to get a rigorous account of how identity affects politics so people acting in the politics can build a more inclusive. One of the things that i think tends to narrow politics and confuse people they understood something wil only the marginald groups have it so theres a kind of constant tussle between politics and voting trying to get people to both the material interest. If you want people to vote on the politics instead, you have to do a better job of building an identity around class. People have to understand that Health Care Policy so you have to build things more around the identities and we see this happening in the rising left. Part of putting a rose next to your twitter account is a signal to the world the way of collecting the results into a group and so to the extent of what is expected just the politics and more Research Distribution to carry them through, i think one of the reasons it hasnt it is how people vote explicitly to vote their identity and they understand the identity as the group is rising in the status and falling in status. This debate for [inaudible] [laughter] have yo have you ever seen an actual celebrity . [laughter] you are an actual celebrity. Im seeing one right now. Now i have a question. [laughter] so recently the headlines have been dominated with action taken or not taken by google, facebook, twitter on political acts so im curious from your perspective how do you view micro targeting and other technological advances as a method of accelerating . Spinet id really caught on this one. I dont believe it works. I dont believe Cambridge Analytic had any influence whatsoever and i dont in general believe the control in the network i think that the hacking but im not convinced the social Media Operations which influenced the elections was a tiny dump in the bucket of what people were seeing for the micro targeting. I just dont know. I cant tell you for sure but it allows us to be more specific and it does put people to identity groups. Most of the Political Science research on advertising says that it matters a little and it became superfast. What will happen is even if you really nail people down with advertisements that do them like three weeks later it, sort of everything ive been saying before now in the discussion suggests to me that it is hard to make peoples identity around for that is wha what youre dois reinforcing what they already have, so the other thing that i will say is theres a lot of research now on who is polarized both here and internationally at the people that are the most polarized or the older voters who are the least exposed in the online micro targeting campaigns. Its entirely plausible as the micro targeting gets better so that it will develop a capability to influence actions but have you ever seen online advertising, it is beautiful and super highquality and thats great, but if you are anywhere else, anywhere else on the internet, its like ive seen recently you bought a bike. Would you like to buy another bike . And the more fundamental divide it is reasonably easily that to run the simulation in my mind. And the real answer is that there is an argument that to accountability and the political system primarily based in the system. And if recession hits but in the oval office but something that wasnt just partisanship. To be voting more and another interesting study now that this jogs my memory from the previous questioners that people that are not that engaged or one and politics what do these policies do for me and then people are even more invested into politics is that they tend to vote in a different way and to use more costcutting groups. And as a National Political journal with those political identities and i have a lot of evidence about this in the book but i urge people ready worse highly engaged or not to move that Political Action and one is cross cutting boise or des moines or new york or major cities is just different but also the different set of information is more nourishing and a lot less frustrating than to be on twitter or what you think of me. [laughter] so getting involved at the state and local level is good for everybody. I interpret the article as the geographic advantage so i shouldnt elected Democrats Campaign for a system. I think they should campaign to the point it is illegitimate because the house and the institution and what is would be proportional representation and Everything Else is a legitimate. Thats not likely to help the people the democrats need to help. Simultaneously politics is a game where the two sides collide for advantage it really is life or death but its not the only thing of politics but nevertheless the fact that we do have this constitutional continuity civil wars happen here and in other countries i think taking for granted that there is some power people want to see continuity and is something i urge people to do to distinguish between levels of trend the trend right now i think it is bad in terms of search for justice and equality right now theres not many times we were not more democratic or much less 100 years ago so to say right now it has turned against democrats i think throws too much out in a bid for short term advantage. I think in a plausible way this shakes out we were in a demographic and pretty quickly texas became blue. Because you have a majority capable of governing i dont have that crystal ball but the consequences of tearing down a system. And whether we were muddling through it was a very orderly at the moment it but i agree what we need what does it take to get the parties had we know of our democracy is broken. I do think we are still muddling through. And he definitely could if he has more of an attention span. [laughter] that is very scary so he jumps from thing to thing. They are muddling. Its not pretty or fun. I dont think the parties will do it they dont campaign against the legitimacy but they take it seriously enough and what that would mean in my mind and then getting into a bill they cant pass then they eliminate and then have a completely value base legitimate lot to make the system work better. [applause] thank you for the easy clap but that is a passable lot into a large extent democrats do not prioritize it because it would be a power grab if they chose to elect democrats. Its such a crazy situation i dont know what to say. You can get rid of the filibuster but one thing is that we will not get to a majority is a little less of the minority and that just means democrats coming into power and say we think this is the right thing to do. But in 2015 and then to be reinstated things do go back and forth a lot of this. Of the sixties up through 75 it was a two thirds majority. That they have to prioritize them. There is a very big difference from a party that comes into power 2021. We will do medicare for all without doing anything about the filibuster or anything then they will lose. Versus we try to make them governable before we govern. You can do that. But in the end. People prefer the outcome is taking as a nonpartisan political analyst they showed. [laughter] i dont want to let you off the hook you have a great thread through your content. And social media and access. There are others but do you see as the intent of technology crack. We are a and a half inning people are thinking oh my gosh there will be traffic so take a photo of the room i would like to have this recollection that once i did a book event here. s of you could just hang out for a second. [laughter] hold on. Panoramic. Thank you for bearing with me. That technology seems to be the aggressive accelerant. The data does not fully backed me up. That cable news has an impact on the system is not at all clear all technology does and i am pretty sure it is polarizing and that makes every bed he hates each other for the politician that was donald trump i believe that polarization is clearly identity oriented. So by the book full price from your local bookseller. [laughter] and that was the identity based content. So the internet is an accelerant. And i dont thank you can look at politics on social media and thats one reason i am very pessimistic. You cannot look at where this conversation you could get banned from twitter. I am curious about your reaction how much of the Current Situation is our structure versus demographic. If you took the exact thing but the demographics were the same how different would that be . So number one, i dont know for sure. But if we were on the 2016 election donald trump is a republican nominee and they fight it out and as a reasonably weak candidate i dont know her email security is extremely lax. [laughter] but even so she manages to pull it out by the popular vote and she wins. And whether john k sikora rubio. You could see that the whole time but instead they elected a lunatic and lost. That the faction becomes increasingly discredited. It with that democratization with that exposure to the demographics of the era is a healthy discipline for campaigns and parties. Because then you have to change the message so i cant say for sure it isnt all political conflict to look internationally but the specific ungovernable system the legitimacy question and would be a healthier place if they werent. Thank you. [applause] ezra will be selling and signing books here. Thank you for joining us. Have extra copies of the book for sale in the lobby. [inaudible conversations] senator jeff late karl rove along with