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The Ezra Klein Show

Nov. 7, 2025

The Blue Wave Cometh?

Ezra Klein and Aaron Retica discuss whether affordability is the Democrats’ winning message, Trump’s politics of cruelty and how liberalism can win right now.

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

Democrats had a big night on Tuesday. They won in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani has been the big story of the political year. They won in Virginia, where Abigail Spanberger became the first woman to become Governor of Virginia in that state’s history. They won in New Jersey, a state where the polling had shown it was unnervingly close for Democrats, but it turned out not to be close at all, and Mikie Sherrill won by double digits.

They won in California, where Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50, his midcycle redistricting to counter Texas, passed with, last I saw, 63.9 percent of the vote. But it’s California — we’ll be counting votes there forever. They won in Pennsylvania, where there were Supreme Court seats up for election. They won in Georgia in these little-noticed statewide utility board seats.

They just won everywhere. Every kind of voter moved toward Democrats. And where the polling had made it look like this was still a pretty mixed political moment, these results looked much more like the prelude to a wave election in 2026.

Now the counterargument is that these were mostly in states that Kamala Harris had won: New Jersey, Virginia, New York, California. These were not the places where Democrats have been really struggling. But both sides are going to be looking at this election for some big lessons for 2026 and even for 2028.

So to help me parse hope from hopium and fact from fiction, I’m joined by my esteemed editor Aaron Retica.

Aaron Retica: Hello.

Ezra Klein: Aaron, welcome back to the show.

Retica: Thanks, Ezra. Let’s start where you left off there. If you are a progressive, there was much to be delighted by. If you are a moderate, there was much to be delighted by. If you are a Democrat, there was much to be delighted by.

But already people are starting to say: No, no, no. This shows that moderation is the way to go. No, no, no. This shows that an aggressive left-wing, populist agenda will do it.

It seems, though, to show that simultaneously pushing both in different places works.

**Klein: **Are you saying the Democratic Party needs to be more things in more places, Aaron?

[Klein and Retica laugh.]

Retica: Yes, our colleague Jamelle Bouie makes a different version of this argument: The party has to be what it needs to be in each of its places, but the overall coalition has to be pushing one way or the other. So what do you draw out of what happened?

**Klein: **I wrote a piece about how Democrats can beat Trump and Trumpism. People can go back and listen to it if they haven’t yet. The core point of that essay is that the problem Democrats have is that they’re not competitive in enough places right now.

Nationally, they are pretty competitive. The presidential popular vote is quite close from election to election. But there are 24 states that Donald Trump won by 10 points or more.

If Democrats want power in the Senate in any significant numbers ever again, they’re going to need to be competitive in places where they used to be able to win elections. Places like Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Alaska. But they’ve not really been competitive there for some time.

So I don’t know how much I think this was a positive test of that. I know everybody is saying: Well, look, Abigail Spanberger is a moderate in Virginia and Zohran Mamdani is a democratic socialist in New York City.

My view is: That is great. But also by any historical measure of politics, they’re actually just not that far apart. Abigail Spanberger is a moderate within the current Democratic Party, but she is not a moderate from the perspective of 1998.

I like Spanberger’s politics and her focus on affordability. I like Mikie Sherrill and her focus on affordability. I like Zohran Mamdani and his focus on affordability.

The thing about all three of these figures is that none of them challenge Democrats in any significant way, except maybe Mamdani, from the left. I know some Democrats who are genuinely uncomfortable with him.

I don’t think the question of what you would need to do to win an election in Ohio, Florida and Iowa is answered yet. Matt Yglesias made this point where he says: If you look at how Sherrill and Spanberger ran and how Harris ran, they both ran about five points ahead of her.

And if you just say: OK, what that tells us is that the off-cycle electorate right now — and this would be a big extrapolation, but just for the sake of argument — is plus-five Democratic compared to 2024. That is almost certainly enough to win you the House, but it is only maybe enough to win you Ohio. And it is not enough to win you Iowa, Alaska and places like that.

Retica: Right, the 10 percent states.

Klein: The 10 percent states. Donald Trump is unpopular. He has been going down in popularity. Some more recent polls I’ve seen take him out of the low 40s and into the high 30s. Things are actually looking fairly bad for him.

Retica: Thirty-seven percent when I looked this morning.

Klein: So in terms of the situation nationally, the mood is anti-Trump. But in terms of: Have Democrats solved the set of problems they will ultimately need to solve in order to become a durable coalition capable of sidelining MAGA? I don’t think that is answered.

What I will say, though, because I do think it’s relevant to this: You are seeing the way MAGA is beginning to crack under its own extremely bad political habits and culture. The fact that the right over the last week and a half has been consumed by a debate of what level of white supremacy to welcome into their coalition, of whether or not Tucker Carlson is a hero for having a friendly conversation with Nick Fuentes or he should be ejected for it.

Let me put it this way: This doesn’t look to me like a coalition spending a lot of its time thinking about how to appeal to the median voter.

**Retica: **Definitely not about affordability.

**Klein: **And JD Vance, the successor to Trump, who does not have Trump’s personal charisma or control of the coalition, has been quiet on this. He has been cowardly on this.

And so is Trump, by the way. It’s not like Trump has come out and denounced Fuentes, but to the extent Vance has said anything —

**Retica: **He had dinner with Fuentes.

**Klein: **Yes. He says he didn’t really know who he was, but yes. It would have been very easy for Donald Trump, as president, to come out and say: This is ridiculous.

When Tucker Carlson attacked Donald Trump for the Iran bombings, Trump put out a Truth Social post calling Carlson crazy. Trump has said nothing as of now on Carlson and Fuentes, and Vance’s statement was along the lines of: Can’t we all just get along?

And so you see ways in which the right is opening up some really profound vulnerabilities for itself. So the Democratic Party can expand its tent and be normal and competent and sane and welcoming.

We may not be at the terminus of how anti-Trump this electorate can get. If we go into a recession, if there is significant acceleration of the “Groyperification” of the right, we might go from a Democratic plus-five to a Democratic plus-eight. If Democrats make some good strategic moves, maybe it becomes plus-nine, plus-10 — and all of a sudden politics looks very different.

So if I were the Democrats, what I would say is not: Hey, look, we got no more work to do here. It’s: Hey, look, we have an opportunity here. How do we maximize it?

Retica: So the really happy chart — can a chart be happy?

Klein: Aaron, you know I think a chart can be happy. Out of everyone you could ask that question, you ask me? Come on, man.

[Klein and Retica laugh.]

Retica: The one that was really making liberal hearts beat faster was the chart of counties in New Jersey that have 60 percent or more Hispanic residents. Because those swung hard toward Sherrill. So why is that?

Let’s focus first on affordability, which is the thing that unites all of these people, whether it’s Zohran Mamdani or Mikie Sherrill or Abigail Spanberger. Affordability was an albatross for Democrats in 2024. It is very possibly why they lost. And here we are with affordability being their key issue. How much do you see affordability as the ticket to success in 2026 and maybe even 2028?

Klein: One way of thinking about the 2025 election is that in the 2024 election, you had the Biden-Harris incumbency on the ballot. And the Biden-Harris incumbency was blamed for the very high cost of living.

Then in the 2025 election, you have the Trump administration as the incumbent political force. In addition to other things people may not like about them, they are being blamed for the high cost of living. Trump has lost his high polling on that. He’s used the tariffs to increase prices in a way that people understand. In New Jersey, electricity prices were a huge part of the campaign. Sherrill is very focused there.

So in a period where people are just angry about the cost of living, you could see sustained political ricochet against the national incumbent party that gets blamed for it. Particularly when that party is doing things that are as highly public as the tariffs are.

Right now, the Supreme Court is trying to decide if Trump has this tariff power. You have to imagine that every Republican House member and Senate member is just praying that the five members of the Supreme Court take the tariff power away from Trump —

Retica: They were cheering Gorsuch on as he went off yesterday.

Klein: Because they don’t want to take it away, but it’s their job — the House and the Senate — to take the tariff power away from Trump, who is misusing an authority that is not meant to, say, punish Brazil for prosecuting Bolsonaro. It’s not meant for the way he’s using tariff power at all.

But Republican House and Senate members don’t want to challenge Trump. They won’t challenge Trump. So they’re hoping the Supreme Court takes his power away from him, which would bring prices down functionally, immediately. And that would be good for Republicans.

So within that, Democrats have moves they can make, too. And the question is then: How do you persuade voters that you — the party that just a couple of years ago failed to bring down prices — will now bring down prices?

One answer is Mamdani in New York City. The thing Mamdani had was — and I know you hate it when I use this term — but a memetic policy agenda on affordability. What I mean by that is that he had functionally four policy ideas that fit on an index card. If you were getting Mamdani mailers and door hangers, as I was, they were always there. And they contained the whole of his idea.

Retica: Let’s rattle them off because I’m thinking of three. So fast and free buses.

**Klein: **Fast and free buses.

**Retica: **Fast is important.

Klein: Uh-huh.

Retica: This is your disabled friend here, saying that fast is very important.

Klein: Uh-huh. Freeze the rent.

Retica: Freeze the rent.

Klein: Free grocery stores.

Retica: Oh, the grocery stores. And then the universal child care.

Klein: Free child care.

Retica: Right. Which is the understated part.

**Klein: **You could say the grocery stores. But again —

Retica: I don’t usually count them.

**Klein: **This is why, to me, the grocery stores mattered. It’s not a big policy. It’s a pilot program of five grocery stores, one in each borough, run by the government.

It was Mamdani saying: I will experiment in ways that at least you feel others haven’t to try to bring down your prices. I will do anything, and I’ll do things other people have not been doing.

So of these four elections — Proposition 50 in California, Spanberger, Sherrill, Mamdani — when you look at exit polling, the Mamdani election is the only one where a majority of voters said that Trump was not the driving force behind their vote. This was not a Trump resistance election in New York City — it was a Mamdani/anti-Mamdani election. And Mamdani just absolutely dominated on cost of living.

Now the question of whether he can deliver on that is going to be very important for both the future of that form of politics and his political future, personally. Child care, in particular, is going to be very expensive and very difficult.

But what he did was he had a set of policies that he repeated relentlessly so that people could imagine what life might feel like if they were in force. And they came to define him.

Sherrill tried to do something similar to this, but in a more complicated way around utilities and electricity and rate setting in New Jersey. Electricity is going to become a growing issue across the country. It already is because a variety of things are converging — one of the big ones being A.I. and data-center demand, which is driving electricity prices up very rapidly.

By the way, we’re in a shutdown as we speak over health insurance premiums. My sense is this shutdown is probably — I don’t want to predict it, but the reporting is that the moderate Democrats in the Senate do not really feel this is worth pushing for all that much longer. The Trump administration does not want a deal. They have not come to the table. But quietly, a lot of Democrats are like: Is that the worst thing? If Donald Trump wants to have health insurance premiums spike for millions and millions and millions of Americans on his watch and be blamed for it in the next election, should the Democrats take this much ongoing risk in order to protect him from that outcome?

So I think the question Democrats have nationally is if they want to make their affordability pitch legible to voters, if Democrats are going to come up with something like a “Six for ’26,” their version of the Contract with America, or their “Six for ’06” that worked —

Retica: A six-pack for America.

Klein: What’s on there? What are the three or four or five or six policies the Democrats want everybody to be able to rattle off as the coherent core of the Democratic agenda? And probably in that world, you want four of them to be affordability and two of them to be anti-Trumpist corruption or authoritarianism.

Retica: We’re going to have to take some of this slowly here because there are a lot of different elements in what you just said. But let me just say that as someone whose younger daughter is about to turn 26 — the question of the subsidies: It’s intruding into our lives.

Klein: Yes. It’s very real.

**Retica: **It’s very real. One thing that’s so interesting to me is that people want to portray the Mamdani coalition as a bunch of kids in Astoria and Bushwick and elsewhere in New York who are A.O.C. fans, and they’re precarious, as some people like to put it. They’re high-education, low-income voters who think they should have a different life.

But the truth is, if you’re winning half of the vote in the largest electorate since 1969, you are reaching a much broader group of people. And one thing that really fascinated me about all of this is that there are Trump-Mamdani voters. There are voters, as I mentioned earlier, who switched from Trump to Sherrill and Trump to Spanberger.

But there are also Mamdani-Trump voters. They’re concentrated in immigrant communities in New York City. So the affordability agenda has the ability to cut across that whole problem of: Oh, you can’t win over the center with someone like Mamdani because the policies will be too out there, etc. But actually, he does seem to have won some people over.

Klein: I think it’s really important to say this about Mamdani: His policies were not too out there for this electorate at all. And I mean that not just in the sense that he won the election. I think you could look at Mamdani’s win in a number of ways.

On the one hand, it’s an incredibly impressive political victory for somebody who was a political unknown two years ago. On the other hand, he won, last time I looked, with 50.4 percent of the vote. In the end, it was a Mamdani/anti-Mamdani election: He both brought out a lot of voters for him and brought out a lot of voters against him.

But if you talked to the voters or paid any attention to the ads or watched what the anti-Mamdani coalition’s fears were, none of them were about fast and free buses. The anti-Mamdani energy was about Israel. It was to some degree about crime and safety. And to some degree, a general vibe of socialism.

Retica: And that he was young and couldn’t actually do it all.

Klein: I don’t think that’s what brought people out, though.

Retica: OK. Fair.

**Klein: **I don’t think that was where the energy was.

Retica: That’s the eye rolling. It’s not the voting.

Klein: Right. If you imagine a Mamdani who just — for whatever reason, his past politics, who he was — I think there was a lot of Islamophobia in the election and the attacks against him.

I don’t think that’s arguable. But if you just imagine a Mamdani who is the same in every way, but Israel never becomes an issue around him, that actually drains the anti-Mamdani coalition of a fair amount of its energy. Crime and safety — it probably would have remained there.

The reason I’m saying this is not to say anything, one way or the other, about Mamdani. But it was amazing to me how little his opponents ran against his policy agenda.

There is pooh-poohing — that, say, free day care is not plausible or likely given the complexity of that policy and the cost of it, and the fact that Mamdani doesn’t control tax increases. That’s a totally fair critique, but it’s actually a very different critique than free day care would be bad. You actually don’t see a lot of people running against free day care. Taxing the rich is understood to be a popular policy that is maybe not good for New York City in the critique of it because New York and New York City taxes on the rich are fairly high, and you don’t want to create capital flight because then you have to raise taxes more on the middle class.

People can argue these different ways. I’m not myself that concerned about taxing the rich a little bit more, but —

Retica: Can I just say: Nor am I worried that multinational capitalism is going to be slain by the election of Zohran Mamdani.

Klein: There has always been this shimmering quality of what’s going on around Mamdani. It was an incredibly exciting election and a collision of things within American politics, like democratic socialism or Zionism or words like “globalize the intifada,” that at other times in American politics would have been red lines that, if a candidate crossed them, that candidate was understood to have no chance. And the fact that Mamdani could cross them and still win shows you things are changing.

And on the other hand, the actual policy agenda Mamdani ran on was neither that activating to his opponents — and by the way — is not that Socialist. Build Back Better had a big effort to expand child care very dramatically.

Retica: Bloomberg had proposed free buses.

Klein: So the actual affordability agenda he was running on was not that activating to his opposition and is highly popular. He’s going to struggle to deliver parts of it. I think fast and free buses are completely doable. Running a couple of pilot grocery stores is completely doable.

Retica: You know what’s interesting about the buses? I am on the buses constantly, and they have a sign across the front. One of the lit-up parts says, “Fare required.” And I was looking at it last night thinking: What would it be like if it says, “No fare required”?

It’s an interesting thing to think about. First of all, as native New Yorkers know, like 30 to 40 percent of people have already decided that the buses are free. [Retica chuckles.] They’re not fast, but they don’t pay as it is now. So it will be interesting to see how that goes.

Klein: The places where I am really interested to see what he does are: One, crime and safety — because that’s going to be a complex place for him. Two, child care — because that’s just a maniacally hard policy to get right. Child care is just really expensive. Infant level child care is really, really expensive, even though we really should figure out a way to do it.

And then freezing the rent is a tricky policy. I don’t particularly have a problem with it for a limited amount of time. But what you’re doing is what is functionally saying: We are going to limit the future income of building affordable housing. Running affordable housing just became dramatically less profitable for anybody doing it.

So you then need to say: OK, that is in a mechanical way going to reduce the future construction of affordable housing. And if you talk to people in the affordable housing world, they will tell you this. These are not people who are generally making a ton of money. Many of these are nonprofit developers. But if you say that we’re just going to have extended rent freezes, already there are a lot of worries about whether or not there will be enough upkeep of the affordable housing stock we have. But it is definitely going to reduce how much is built.

Mamdani has a plan where he wants to build a lot more public housing. In order to do that quickly, he’s going to have to change the way New York City builds public housing. Will he do that? He has not been nearly as focused as some of the other Democrats, like Lander, were on just accelerating the construction of market-rate housing. He has been generally positive when he talks about it and talks about how Tokyo builds and other things. But it isn’t something where he has focused a lot.

It’s very easy to freeze the rent. It is much harder — and much harder within his coalition — to build homes.

Retica: We could have an entire discussion about rent. I won’t — except to say that, again, as with multinational capitalism, you hear a lot of complaining from developers. I understand that. First of all, the rent has been frozen a couple of times before. And what we’re talking about, to be specific, is the percentage increase that the rent stabilization board allows.

Klein: Yes. This is for affordable housing.

Retica: You’re saying “affordable housing,” but it’s rent-stabilized housing, which is a slightly different thing.

Klein: That’s fair.

Retica: I live in an apartment that is rent stabilized. And all I can tell you about it is that when we were much younger and we were an elementary schoolteacher and a writer and editor, it made it possible for us to stay in New York — which helps create a stable middle class. There are a lot of arguments for rent stabilization that have nothing to do with the housing supply and have to do with why New York is better than a lot of other cities.

Klein: To be clear, I believe in rent-stabilized housing.

**Retica: **I know you do.

Klein: But I want to push you on this because —

Retica: The distinction between affordable housing and rent stabilization, because they’re two different things —

Klein: But you need to build more of it.

Retica: Yes. I know someone who wrote a whole book about that.[Laughs.]

Klein: I want more people to be able to have your living situation.

Retica: So do I.

Klein: One of the things you really learn when you report on rent-stabilized housing is that developers — nonprofit developers, developers of market-rate housing, developers of affordable housing, developers of rent-stabilized housing — they’re all trying to make developments pencil out. They actually do have to make the money that is coming into their company and the money that is going out of their company match up.

The number of developments that you watch fall apart because the cost of construction is high, the cost of land is high — it’s just harder to get these things off the ground. And it’s much harder than people think in the non-market-rate area because you have a lot more rules and regulations you have to abide by.

The worry I have is not that it’s a bad thing to do a rent freeze. I think we could do a rent freeze for a while. But it is easy to do a rent freeze. Whereas what it requires to set off a building boom of nonmarket-rate housing, such that the people who are not currently in those units can get into them in the future, is a lot harder. And I worry that they will get the easy thing done but not get the hard thing done.

Retica: I don’t know about the exact numbers, but a lot of the affordable housing that has been built in New York City over the last 10 or so years has been built alongside market-rate housing, right?

**Klein: **Yes. As a deal to get the market-rate housing built.

Retica: There’s a specific program we won’t get into. So people do it, and then, of course, that creates its own controversies. Because then you have people who are living in these places who are going through the “poor door,” as people sometimes say. They’re not full participants in the housing.

Klein: But I will say, I am a big supporter of that general idea. What I think you want to do is tie the fortunes of the rich and the poor together in any city or in any country.

In the area I live, around Gowanus, which has had a huge building boom, they’ve really been able to do that. They have been able to put up huge amounts of new housing, and a lot of it is affordable housing. There are units set aside for artists, and there are a lot of different things. And what you’re basically creating is a tie-up between: You are making it easier to build. But if you’re going to build, you have to build more of this, too.

Retica: Let’s go East Coast-West Coast for a second. Since you will not cop to being from the East —

**Klein: **I’m not from the East. [Laughs.]

**Retica: **I know you’re not. Fair, fair. I lived in California for a while, and I really loved it.

Gavin Newsom. There is someone who makes eyes roll everywhere, and yet he’s the leading contender right now for the 2028 nomination, in part because of what he’s been doing.

So how do you, as a Southern California — Southland — native, see what’s happening with him?

**Klein: **So Newsom has put himself in a stronger position than I would have thought at all plausible a year ago. And I think there’s a lesson in what he’s doing for other Democrats. Which is you can make decisions to try new things and see if they work.

So what are the fourish big ways that Newsom has acted since the 2024 election? Remember Newsom was a very, very, very prominent Biden surrogate in that election. Very, very close to Joe Biden personally. So not an obvious candidate for a big rethinking. But right after the election, he launches this podcast where his first guest is Charlie Kirk.

And Newsom sort of ends up agreeing with Kirk on trans kids in sports, making a lot of Democrats very, very angry. He goes on to have Steve Bannon on that podcast. He goes on to have Dr. Phil on that podcast. He goes on to have a lot of figures on the right — Michael Savage — on that podcast. So on the one hand, you see Newsom doing one thing, which is seemingly to choose the lane of reaching out to MAGA, trying to hear them out and learn from them.

At the same time, he begins to do a few other things, too, which is to first shift his own policy positioning in a way that somewhat delights me. Because he moves very far toward abundance and signs of very, very big housing bills — much more ambitious than any of the housing bills he had signed at any other point in his governorship. He sort of accepts the critique that the way California has been working is not good enough, that the Democrats really do need to figure out how to build again. He also steps into this role as an attention-grabbing resistance leader, having this all-caps trolling on social media of Donald Trump.

But he actually found a fight that he could pick. There was an unusual fight to pick a ballot initiative for a midcycle redistricting —

Retica: That he could deliver on.

Klein: That he could deliver on. And by the way, initially the polling on it was bad because people in California don’t like redistricting. We are partisan redistricting. We created nonpartisan redistricting under Schwarzenegger for a reason.

And so what I’d say is interesting about Newsom is that you might have said before the election: Well, there are two obvious pathways for Democrats. You can try to reach out to MAGA and listen. Or you can retreat into resistance. And Newsom’s answer to that was: Yes, there are. And he’s going to do both.

In many ways, he is a very tricky profile for Democrats nationally. He has done a lot of things in California that would be very unpopular if they became national ad campaigns. California actually does give, in some contexts, health care to illegal immigrants. California did get pretty far along the way of phasing out, in the future, gas-combustion engine cars.

There’s a lot that makes Newsom a very difficult contender if what you want to do is win back states for Democrats to become sort of uncompetitive. But just talking about his political positioning right now, what is interesting to me is: Newsom does things that are high risk — and he does not seem afraid.

And in particular, he does not seem afraid of making people mad on his own side in order to try out new things. Some things he’s done have made people happy on his own side. Like trolling Trump on social media. Democrats enjoyed that. But other things —

**Retica: **I don’t enjoy the all caps.

**Klein: **Other things like the podcasting and some of his policy movements. I think one of the really damaging things for Democrats and national Democrats is that they seem afraid.

**Retica: **Timidity.

**Klein: **Timidity. That’s not true for all of them. Bernie Sanders, famously, not exactly a Democrat, but nevertheless, a Democratic leader who does not seem afraid. A.O.C. largely does not seem afraid. But a lot of the others seem afraid.

It radiates off them. You can feel them checking what they’re about to say to make sure nobody on their side is going to get mad at them. Not seeming afraid is actually quite powerful in politics — because not being afraid allows you to try new things politically and to see how they work out. And if they don’t work, you could do something else —

Retica: See what sticks.

Klein: Yes. But it’s a politics of experimentation.

Retica: A politics of throwing spaghetti against the wall. But it’s a real issue.

**Klein: **I mean, that was F.D.R., right?

**Retica: **Absolutely. And Johnson. All the high points of left liberal Democratic governance were spaghetti that sticks policies. [Laughs.] And not all of them worked, but some did. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. These are all things that emerged from throwing spaghetti against the wall.

Klein: Well, there’s that, but there’s also just the way some of them did their politics in their moment. F.D.R. moved all around. Sometimes he was worried about budget deficits. Everybody knows his famous “I welcome your hatred” speech. But at other times, he was much more solicitous of business interests. He made all kinds of weird compromises.

My point is not that Gavin Newsom is an F.D.R. or that he’s a Lyndon Johnson. My point is that, in a way that relatively few of his contemporaries are, he seems like a politician, and this is the flip side of what people don’t like about him. To your point about eyes rolling, Newsom reads to many people as a politician, and that’s always been a big weakness for him. He has a slick affect.

But you’re seeing right now the positive side of that, which is Newsom is acting like a politician who is looking at the landscape and making moves to put himself in a stronger political position, even when those moves are a little bit difficult.

And by the way, he was doing this before, too. I remember him going on Fox News to debate Ron DeSantis with Sean Hannity moderating.

**Retica: The **seventh circle of hell embodied. [Laughs.]

**Klein: **What a politician is supposed to do is try to figure out the way to put together a winning coalition so they can wield political power in a way that accords with their values. And a lot of people want to wield political power in a way that accords with their values, but not that many people seem to want to do what it takes to put together a winning political coalition.

So in a way, I guess what I’m praising in Newsom right now is the flip side of the coin of the thing that some people read on him and they don’t like. Which is: I think Newsom is practicing politics. And man, are the other Democrats in 2028 going to give him an open lane if they’re too afraid to do the same thing.

Retica: This gives me an opportunity to talk about something that’s — I don’t know if it’s bigger or smaller, but it’s definitely harder.

Part of the point of the essay that we were working on over the past few weeks was to talk about politics as an activity that improves lives, but also politics as an activity that improves everything.

So I want to read you two things and have you react to them.

One is a famous line of Henry Adams, from “The Education of Henry Adams”: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

Then I want to quote from Bernard Crick, who was a linchpin of the essay that you wrote. This is something that we did not put in the essay:

Political activity is a type of moral activity. It does not claim to settle every problem or to make every sad heart glad, but it can help in some way in nearly everything. And where it is strong, it can prevent the vast cruelties and deceits of ideological rule.

So where do you see political activity and politics now? How should we be participating in it? What is it? What is acting in politics now? Is it participating in the system of organized hatred and cruelty — which we’ve certainly seen plenty of?

Between the election and now, there was an arrest in Chicago where ICE went into a preschool. The kids are inside of school. Really crazy, cruel stuff. It’s a theater of cruelty as well as actually cruel. They love to make those videos. It’s nuts.

So what is politics for now?

Klein: Yes, it is those things. Politics is a wide field of human endeavor.

I do believe Donald Trump uses politics as an organizing of hatreds. I do believe Donald Trump is a master at creating us and them, and summoning people’s fury and their resentment against a them.

And I think one reason he’s a master at that — and this has always been true — is because it is authentic to him. Because that is how he is. He’s able to do it for you because he’s able to do it for him.

In contrast, Barack Obama did not try to engage in politics as an organizing of hatreds. I think he sought to use it as a bridging of divides, going all the way back to his red and blue speech in Boston in 2004.

And it doesn’t mean that it calmed every hatred — it didn’t mean. Just like it doesn’t mean that what Donald Trump does destroys every bond between us. But you can use politics to destroy, and you can use it to build. Similar to Trump, the reason I think that was true for Obama’s politics is that it was authentic to who Obama is.

And I think one argument I am making on politics in that essay — and in using that beautiful line from Bernard Crick: “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.”

When I talk about that and about liberalism’s old virtue of liberality, this emphasis on the virtues of the citizen, the ethic of mutual connectedness, is that one thing I would like to see the Democratic Party do in this era when the Trump administration is organizing hatreds — and is getting consumed in some ways by its own organization of hatreds —

Retica: Bizarre debates about how much hatred is OK.

Klein: They wanted to do it in this way, but now Nick Fuentes says: No, no, no, we need more hatred. And it’s like: Well, we did say we need some hatred. So who are we to tell Nick Fuentes what is too much hatred? Now you have Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson going to war with each other.

I don’t think the organizing of hatreds is a strong politics in the long run, but it has to be beaten by its opposite — not by something mirroring it. So one of the things I’m saying in that piece is that I think that the Democratic Party needs people who are genuine — where it is authentic to them that politics for them is an act of love and fellowship — including when it includes critique and disagreement and opposition.

There are many people in my life, in my family, with whom I disagree profoundly on political issues. And our conversations are still part of our connectedness. That seems obvious to me.

I actually find it appalling: the idea that you would cut off members of your family for their politics. Maybe for their treatment of you — that’s something different. But just for their politics? I really disagree with that.

Something that I thought a lot about with the election in New York City, to go back to that, is that Mamdani spent so much of it reaching out to people who were unnerved by him. He went to synagogues, he went to business leaders. Mamdani didn’t say: You don’t like me — I welcome your hatred.

Mamdani is a left pluralist. Anand Giridharadas, in his newsletter, The Ink, has a really great essay on Mamdani’s smile as an act of rhetoric. He was always smiling at you. For Mamdani, the politics of friendliness were so fundamental in a way I thought was very powerful.

Cuomo, for all that he was supposed to be the “real politician” in the race, often seemed very powered by resentment. Mamdani seemed like he liked you. Cuomo didn’t seem like he liked you. You can go back and listen to Cuomo’s interview with Bari Weiss, which is fairly early in the campaign. I found it very telling. Cuomo felt like he was running to get revenge on the Democratic Party that had rejected him and forced him to resign. Is it really such a surprise that the man running for revenge on the Democratic Party did not win the Democratic primary?

And then it seemed like Cuomo was running just not to be humiliated and beaten. But Cuomo was not running as a pluralist. It did not feel that way to me. He did not feel like he liked you.

Sliwa was a whole different situation. [Laughs.] He ran because he liked cats.

I really think these dynamics are important, as you say. There is a tremendous amount of cruelty emanating and being organized from the Trump administration. You look at Stephen Miller give an interview, and it radiates off him. He’s a person for whom the function has become the form in a very strange way. He really seems like he hates people. Or when Trump was with Erika Kirk at the Charlie Kirk memorial, and said, “I hate my opponent.”

I think there’s a lot of political power in — as weak as it sounds to people — a politics of love. But I remember when Cory Booker ran on a politics of love in 2020, and I did an interview with him right around the time he dropped out. And we were talking about how it was very hard to make clear what a politics of love meant.

But one thing it means is: Love is only politically interesting when it’s difficult. Pluralism is only politically interesting when it’s difficult. And I think one way that you can sideline Trumpism is that, yes, that Henry Adams quote does describe them. When you hear it, your stomach tenses up. I don’t want to be part of an organization of hatred. That’s not what I want my work in civic life to be. If this is all about organizing our hatreds, count me out.

So running people for whom that does not feel like what they are doing — and it doesn’t feel like what they’re doing because it is not who they are — I actually think is a very big part of candidate recruitment for the Democratic Party right now.

**Retica: **The Democratic Party has to be the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Humans. It has to be that. And you can’t talk about anti-cruelty without bringing in Judith Shklar — whose name I can never say — a great political philosopher. Here’s what she said. It’s better to just listen to her:

It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vice, put cruelty first, intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do.

Klein: Anti-cruelty is the politics, and affordability is a policy.

**Retica: **I don’t know that love is going to be the way you reconcile those two things.

Klein: It might be respect.

Retica: “Dignity” is a boring word, but I think it’s also that. Captured in the Bernard Crick quote is the idea that other people are actually humans. They’re actually other people.

Klein: I just don’t believe it is an accident or a coincidence, as the Democratic Party has become the party of the institutions, the party of the educated, the party increasingly of wealthier people, that the people who have been most open to Donald Trump’s burn-it-all-down approach are the people who are being failed by this country: people who are poor, people who don’t have college educations, people who live in areas of the country that don’t have as much economic opportunity. And also people who are not acculturated into saying all the right things and having all the right opinions by going to college. They have felt culturally alienated from the Democratic Party, and also they have not been well served by the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has felt rejected by them and feels endangered by them in some ways right now.

I really think you have to see an absolutely central part of this moment in politics as not leaning into that divide and trying to eke out the percentage point or two that will allow you to just win the election in 2028 but beginning to erode that divide.

You’re not going to get rid of all of it — not everybody in MAGA is a plausible political recruit for liberalism.

Retica: Understatement of the year.

**Klein: **But you have to act like more of them are. You need to reknit people’s connection to liberal democracy — for the people who felt failed by it.

**Retica: **For the people who don’t think that a renewed liberalism is necessary for a renewed Democratic Party, I always go back to the very famous Heinrich Heine quote, where he says: “Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder.”

Klein: I think that’s true, obviously. And for anybody listening, you can hear how much Aaron’s depth of political philosophy influences my work these days.

**Retica: **Too bad for you.

Klein: [Laughs.] So this Judith Shklar essay that you’re mentioning — I want to read another part that you had sent me because I think it gets at this conversation we’re having in an interesting way, as well as at something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult but worthwhile act.

Virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. If they were easy, they wouldn’t be virtues.

So Shklar writes:

Courage is to be prized since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats both physical and moral. This is to be sure not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set and still before us is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence but between cruel military and moral repression and violence and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, Black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is in fact extremely difficult and constraining. Far too much so for those of us who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity and the risks of freedom.

I do find something very inspiring in that.

**Retica: **I hoped you would. [Laughs.]

**Klein: **Not just that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear, about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening — a muscle you are strengthening.

There’s something Obama has been saying as he’s been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks that I found interesting. He said it, too, in his interview with Marc Maron: that for a lot of us, none of what we believed has been hard. We didn’t grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any of it — not really. There have been at other times in our history — Jim Crow, the Red Scare, World War II.

He said: It has not asked that much of us to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism. And all of a sudden it does. And right now we’re seeing who is willing to have that asked of them — who’s willing to believe some of these things when it’s hard.

And his point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They’ve bent the knee — particularly compared with the first era of Trumpism.

Now they go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House. They are very much willing to pay to play. And not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people’s freedoms. Pay out in terms of other people’s safety. Pay out in the kind of society that, if you had explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that.

They’ve not wanted to stand in the way. Universities that have been more worried about federal funding in the near-term and are not willing to use their endowments in ways that they probably could. Law firms like Paul, Weiss.

At the beginning of this Trump era, we watched a tremendous amount of cowardice taking hold in civil society. And it’s true: When you are dealing with an illiberalism operating at the highest levels of political power, it takes some amount of courage. Not as much courage as it would take to do the same thing in other countries right now, like Russia, but some amount of courage. To tape the masked ICE agents. To stand with the immigrants. To make yourself a target for Stephen Miller and his Blue Scare. All of it. And yet that’s what’s asked of us.

Retica: You actually have to have the Crick idea, the Shklar idea. The obvious example from American life is the Whitman idea: What is the world? The world is something I am open to. I’m going to walk around in it. I’m going to take it in. I’m going to see it. I’m going to be “large,” “contain multitudes” — all that stuff that is critical to a conception of liberalism that is, by the way, enriched by the radicalism to its left. I think that’s important to mention: The liberal democracies that defeated fascism were very much enriched by the left. That brought policies, or gave suggestions that became policies, that made those worlds better.

Same thing for the liberal democracies that defeated Communism. The left radicals pushed right for a world that people then wanted to defe