Ezra Klein on “the Machine”
An Interview with Jill Lepore
The February 5, 2020 episode of the Ezra Klein Show, “Jill Lepore on what I get wrong,” consists of Jill Lepore’s interview of Klein concerning his just-released book, Why We’re Polarized. Lepore is a Harvard historian and New Yorker contributor. The interview includes the following exchange:
JL: In some big structural way in the book there’s a quite notable absence of villains. I wonder if you could talk about that as the explanation you came to, as a narrative choice. Why no villains?
EK: … I want to understand people and people in general as following incentives. And this is very deep in me. It is tempermental. It goes way beyond this book. I don’t trust people’s stories of why they do things almost at all.
I’m not a huge believer in individual agency. Not in a narrow sense. Obviously if Donald Trump had not run for President American history would have been different. If Barack Obama had not given a speech in 2004, American political history would have been different. But I don’t think that if Mitch McConnell was beaten in Kentucky a couple of years ago that the current Republican leadership would be dramatically different. I don’t think if Newt Gingrich hadn’t appeared…. I’m very skeptical about the Newt Gingrichification of polarization literature, which is like, this one guy came from Georgia and he came up with all these new…. Maybe it would have happened a couple of years after him, but people were playing out the incentives of the system in a reasonably clear way that I think was going to happen in one way or another.
So there are obviously people I think of as villains in the sense that even as they are following their incentives their values are values that I find toxic. They are racist or they are willing to abandon the poor to no health insurance and so on. So there are people whose values I find quite grotesque.
Even so what I wanted to try to do here, the kind of book I’m writing, and I say this at the beginning, is I’m trying to tell you how a machine works. I’m just trying to tell you what happens to almost everybody in it. So then you can run the model your own way…. I sort of think of it as I’ve been working for many, many years on a model of how to understand politics, a model that I filter new information through and I’m giving you that model. And again, that model, there are people in it, where they are and what they’re trying to do makes them villainous to me but I trust you to have your own values. What I want to tell you is how the thing is working.
JL: That makes a lot of sense. I wonder, though, if we could expand the notion of villainy not just to individuals, which is actually not what I had in mind, to institutions….
EK: I would say that the extent to which the book has institutional villains, and I think it does a little bit more than that, is the book takes the structure of our government as somewhat villainous, or at least not well suited for the age that we’re actually in. The other thing that I find tricky is that I wanted to call some players and institutions in this villains and I had trouble figuring out a chain of causality.
So I’ll give you an example here. I got really caught, and I’m still not quite out of this question, is Fox News the problem, or is Fox News a symptom of a problem, in this way? It is hard for me to tell. And I’ve really tried to figure it out. And I think the answer is, it’s both…. Fox News obviously is in many ways driving and deranging the Republican Party. But when I think Fox News wanted to drive things in a different direction. In 2013 Fox News along with other elite Republicans wants to embrace the idea that immigration reform would be good for the Republican Party. So Sean Hannity has Marco Rubio on his program to brag about the immigration bill he’s negotiating with the Democrats and Sean Hannity endorses it. And there’s a huge backlash among Hannity’s people.
Or, Donald Trump goes into that first Republican primary debate and Fox News, which had been inflating the Trump bubble, says, hey it’s fun, it’s not going to go anywhere. They clearly decide this has gone too far and they’re going to try to take him out. So Meghan Kelly and Chris Wallace and Bret Bair, they really lay into him. Things he’s said before about how Canadian health care is great. And heterodoxies from conservatism and all the terrible things he’s said about women and he gets into a fight with Fox News and wins. Fox News basically submits to him and a year later Meghan Kelly is gone and Tucker Carlson is channeling Trump News on the 8 pm hour.
And so I think one of the reasons I had a little bit of trouble finding a clear villain, and this goes a little bit to psychological stuff that I couldn’t prove but I felt was there, is that I think all of these institutions are in a relationship with their audience. Why is it that Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell survive and thrive in the Republican Party, whereas House Democrats are led by the same leadership team they had in ‘06? There is something different happening in the relationships between the bases and the party institutions. And I do try to explain why the Democratic structure is different than the Republican structure, but I think that one of the things that was hard for me is not that I am certain that these institutional players don’t have more autonomy, but every time I tried to trace it down to the place that I could prove it, I would fail.
Even with Donald Trump, right? Donald Trump is one of many options Republicans had in 2016 and since then there have been a number of Republicans who’ve tried to challenge him with another approach. Think of Justin Amash and Mark Sanford or Bob Corker and Jeff Flake. They just lose. They just get destroyed. As did the sixteen Republicans that he ran against. So on the one hand Donald Trump clearly as an individual is an agent in this who made decisions that really changed the structure of American politics. But it also wasn’t just him. He had figured out what was true about the audience. So I’m trying in some ways to trace that, but also I have trouble assigning the causality or even figuring out where it begins. All these things seem to be in a dynamic relationship with each other that is hard to figure out how if you replaced a player or even the institution how different of a result you would get.
JL: I can see how that pulls you away from the individual villain. And I can also see where that attracts you to explanations that are systems-based. You refer to “a machine” whose parts you are trying to identify which you think about as a system as well. But it is more typical instead of taking an inventory of work in social psychology, political science, media studies, cultural history, to choose one as having an explanatory force. Or economic change. Which I don’t think is a big part of the argument that you are making here. I work with academics, I’m an academic. You have to pick your lane. Your place on the Dewey decimal system.
EK: Why do I have to choose?
JL: You don’t have to, but I’m wondering whether there’s a consequence for not doing that. It’s a smorgasbord. It’s an intellectual feast of different assessments, different realms of knowledge, recent research that tries to understand why we are polarized. It’s a public service to offer all that up. But you still are sort of giving your reader a menu. I want to know what you would order.
EK: The book to me is a synthesis, not a menu. It’s not that these things all operate on their own and you should choose one. It’s that the thing I’m trying to build an idea of is of a machine with different pieces all working together. So, it’s funny, in my process it feels, I can 100% understand how the book comes out that way, but what’s running through my head is all the stuff I rejected. All the things and arguments and ideas that I rejected because they didn’t hold true in my political reporting. I didn’t think the study was strong enough. The way I do my work is not actually is that I just go reload a DVR every Monday and see what happened. I do do a little bit of that. I don’t want to totally deny it. But I work backwards from a problem and call a bunch of people and try to understand what is the best information I can get on it and try to come up with some answer that seems to me to be rigorous and likely to be right [for now]. So in my head I don’t think there is “an answer” to this.