An “uncomfortable” conversation with Cory Booker

There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed. But beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he gets credit for.

I think there’s a reason for that. When Booker turns his politics turn outward, they lose clarity. He shies away from drawing bright lines, his answers double back to blur out potential offense. As a result, his arguments for a politics of radical love end up emphasizing his love in ways that obscure his radicalism. As admiring as I am of what Booker demands of himself, I often can’t tell what he’s asking of me.

In this conversation, I wanted Booker to risk my discomfort, not just his own. And in his answers, I think you can hear both the remarkable promise and power of Booker’s politics, and some of the challenges that ultimately led him to suspend his campaign.

References/Book recommendations:

Tightrope by Nicholas Kristof 

“Who Killed the Knapp Family” by Nicholas Kristof 

The Violence Inside Us by Chris Murphy 

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra’s new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor – Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher – Roge Karma

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The conservative mind of Yuval Levin

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the way we often conflate two very distinct things when we assign political labels. The first is ideology, which describes our vision of a just society. The second is something less discussed but equally important: temperament. It describes how we approach social problems, how fast we think society can change, and how we understand the constraints upon us. 

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the editor-in-chief of the public policy journal National Affairs, and the author of the upcoming book A Time to Build. Levin is one of the most thoughtful articulators of both conservative temperament and ideology. And, perhaps for that reason, his is one of the most important criticisms of what the conservative movement has become today.

There’s a lot in this conversation, in part because Levin’s book speaks to mine in interesting ways, but among the topics we discuss are: 

• The conservative view of human nature
• Why the conservative temperament is increasingly diverging from the conservative movement
• What theories of American politics get wrong about the reality of American life
• The case Levin makes to socialists
• How economic debates are often moral debates in disguise
• Levin’s rebuttal to my book 
• The crucial difference between “formative” and “performative” social institutions
• Why the most fundamental problems in American life are cultural, not economic
• Why Levin thinks the New York Times should not allow its journalists to be on Twitter
• Whether we can restore trust in our institutions without changing the incentives and systems that surround them

There’s a lot Levin and I disagree on, but there are few people I learn as much from in disagreement as I learn from him.

Book recommendations:

Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville 

The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet 

Statecraft as Soulcraft by George Will 

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:

David French on “The Great White Culture War”

George Will makes the conservative case against democracy

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra’s new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor – Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher – Roge Karma

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How an epidemic begins and ends

Introducing season 3 of The Impact!

The 2020 candidates have some bold ideas to tackle some of our country’s biggest problems, like climate change, the opioid crisis, and unaffordable health care. A lot of their proposals have been tried before, so, in a sense, the results are in. 

This season, The Impact has those stories: how the big ideas from 2020 candidates succeeded — or failed — in other places, or at other times. What can Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to fight the opioid crisis learn from what the US did to fight the AIDS epidemic? How did Germany — an industrial powerhouse that invented the automobile — manage to implement a Green New Deal? How did public health insurance change Taiwan?

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

On this special preview:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is running for president with a plan to fight the opioid epidemic. Her legislation would dramatically expand access to addiction treatment and overdose prevention, and it would cost $100 billion over 10 years. Addiction experts agree that this is the kind of money the United States needs to fight the opioid crisis. But it’s a really expensive idea, to help a deeply stigmatized population. How would a President Warren get this through Congress? 

It’s been done before, with the legislation Warren is using as a blueprint for her proposal. In 1990, Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act, the first national coordinated response to the AIDS crisis. In the decades since, the federal government has dedicated billions of dollars to the fight against AIDS, and it’s revolutionized care for people with this once-deadly disease. 

But by the time President George H.W. Bush signed the bill into law, hundreds of thousands of people in the US already had HIV/AIDS, and tens of thousands had died. 

In this episode, Vox’s Jillian Weinberger explores how an epidemic begins, and how it ends. We look at what it took to get the federal government to finally act on AIDS, and what that means for Warren’s plan to fight the opioid crisis, today. 

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Nathan Robinson’s case for socialism

“Socialism” is simultaneously one of the most commonly used and most confusing terms in American politics. Does being a socialist mean advocating for the complete abolition of capitalism, markets, and private property? Does it mean supporting a higher tax rate, Medicare-for-all, and Sen. Bernie Sanders? Or does it simply mean a deep hatred of systemic injustice and the institutions that perpetuate it? 

In his new book Why You Should be a Socialist Nathan J Robinson, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Current Affairs magazine, attempts to shed light on these questions. In his writing, Robinson distinguishes between a “socialist economy” (think collective ownership, worker cooperatives, single-payer health care) and what he calls a “socialist ethic”: a deep sense of moral outrage that animates agents of radical change. This distinction may sound like a dodge, but I think Robinson gets at something here that — while hard to understand from the outside — is crucial to understanding today’s left politics. We also discuss: 

– The central role of democracy to the socialist worldview

– What it means to be a “libertarian socialist”

– What Robinson’s socialist utopia would look like 

– Why so many socialists have turned on Sen. Elizabeth Warren in favor of Sen. Bernie Sanders 

– Robinson’s special loathing for South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg

– What he believes Sanders’s “political revolution” would look like

– The lessons of Jeremy Corbyn

– Whether the deep difference between liberals and socialists is temperament 

– Why “public vs. private” is often a false choice

– The challenge of economic growth 

And much more. 

Book recommendations:

Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

The Anarchist FAQ by Ian McKay 

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

 If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:

Leftists vs. Liberals with Elizabeth Bruenig

Matt Bruenig’s case for single-payer health care

Why my politics are bad with Bhaskar Sunkara

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide.

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra’s new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor – Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher – Roge Karma

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How to topple dictators and transform society (with Erica Chenoweth)

The 2010s witnessed a sharp uptick in nonviolent resistance movements all across the globe. Over the course of the last decade we’ve seen record numbers of popular protests, grassroots campaigns, and civic demonstrations advancing causes that range from toppling dictatorial regimes to ending factory farming to advancing a Green New Deal.  

So, I thought it would be fitting to kick off 2020 by bringing on Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard specializing in nonviolent resistance. At the beginning of this decade Chenoweth co-authored Why Civil Resistance Works, a landmark study showing that nonviolent movements are twice as effective as violent ones. Since then, she has written dozens of papers on what factors make successful movements successful, why global protests are becoming more and more common, how social media has affected resistance movements and much more. 

But Chenoweth doesn’t only study nonviolent movements from an academic perspective; she also advises nonviolent movement leaders around the world (including former EK Show guests Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement and Wayne Hsiung of Direct Action Everywhere) to help them be as effective and strategic as possible in carrying out their goals. This on-the-ground experience combined with a big-picture, academic view of nonviolent resistance makes her perspective essential for understanding one of the most important phenomena of the last decade — and, in all likelihood, the next one.

References:

“How social media helps dictators” by Erica Chenoweth

“Drop Your Weapons: When and Why Civil Resistance Works” by Erica Chenoweth

Book recommendations:

These Truths by Jill Lepore

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also like:

Varshini Prakash on the Sunrise Movement’s plan to save humanity

When doing the right thing makes you a criminal (with Wayne Hsiung)

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra’s new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor – Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher – Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices