Ideal Discourse? Some thoughts on the Ezra Klein and Ben Shapiro interview

More of a comment #2

I’ve been listening to a lot of Ezra Klein recently. It’s the first podcast I’ve found in a while that I've become enchanted by. Since the Decoding the Gurus spell wore off in the middle of last year, I've not really had any podcaster/s that I resonated with. But Klein's podcast is it for me right now. I’ve had problems with him in the past¹ and disagree with him on a few things still, there's something in his sensibility that I am overwhelmingly onboard with.

He's had some compelling episodes recently about the Trump administration — the Supreme Court's validation of increasing concentration of power in the executive and ICE as Trump's militia, and about MAHA — which have changed my perspective on what is going on.

What I really like though, is the lack of dogmatism. He's comfortable disagreeing with a lot of leftist nonsense. It's a leftism in touch with grass, and I'm all about that.

If you've been following the news cycle around the Charlie Kirk killing this past week, you might have seen Klein in some hot water. He called Kirk's politics "the right way to do politics". This triggered all the ire of the left (while the right were onboard). I don't agree with him either, but I can see his point: we need to have conversations and interact with those who disagree with us. I don't know much about Kirk. I never followed him or interacted with his content, but from what I've seen the past week, his oeuvre is less about good faith interaction than DESTROYING stoopid Wokies. I like good faith. He doesn't seem to be it.

Anyway, I was looking forward to Klein's podcast this week to see how he would address it. The response in his intro did not disappoint. Doubly so when this week's guest was Ben Shapiro (curiously, this was shot before the Kirk murder).

Ben Shapiro I have encountered before. Back in my days on the IDW/right-wing side of the 2016 culture wars, I watched a few interviews with Shapiro and got the impression of his content matching my above impression of Kirk: rage baiting, far-right populism.

I'm not sure if he changed somewhere along the way, but listening to today's interview, my opinion shifted. I delighted in this podcast. As I said, I don't agree with Klein on everything, but I thought for sure I would be 100% on his side in this interview.

I was wrong.

Instead of finding a moderate left vs. far-right, I found a moderate left vs. moderate right.

I don't know how representative this interview is of Shapiro and whether he was playing to the audience; I suspect not, but I found myself nodding along and agreeing with much of what he was saying.

I'm with Shapiro when it comes to localising government. Earlier this week, I wrote the following in the latest instalment of the book club:

"Meadows is of the opinion that democracy’s demise is due to a lack of transparency. I couldn’t disagree more. I think the limits of the Hamiltonian model of democracy have been revealed. In a small nation like 18th-century America, perhaps the people could have informed takes on the state of the nation. But things have gotten far too complex. The intricacies of a globalised world are beyond any generalist citizenry. We need specialisation, and with that we get a byzantine labyrinth of red tape and nomenclature. Perhaps a system with more fractal distributions of power rather than a delegation to an elite class? Again, a line of enquiry calling for exploration."

As for Shapiro's dichotomy between lions and scavengers in his book, I couldn't agree more. I've talked before about Nietzsche's ressentiment as the beating heart of radical political movements. That is what Shapiro means by scavengers — resentment-ful, grievance-mongering victim movements. That is what radical politics is, and that is what has come to dominate politics since 2016 on both sides of the aisle. Centre-right conservatism has lost ground to radical right populism²; meanwhile, the Old Left has lost all ground to the Woke/New Left. Once again, the words of Yeats' The Second Coming spring to mind:

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,"

I also found Shapiro's portrayal of Trump as the one holding back the horrors that are to come rather compelling. Trump is not an ideologue; he's a pragmatist. But those coming up behind him in the MAGA camp are very much ideologues. Giving them power is much scarier. This point is still tumbling into my mind, so I don't have much to say except that it registered strongly in my mind.

In the end, I found Shapiro to be more of a conservative than a populist, and so I was surprised to find this chat a conversation between two moderates.

I still found Shapiro a bit slippery on some points and found the both-siderisming a bit tedious (even though he admitted awareness of this fact), but on the whole I revelled in it. This is the kind of discourse I enjoy. Two individuals who to my mind, were polar opposites in the 2016 culture wars, moving towards the centre and capable of admitting where their side was wrong and conceding where the other side has a point. It was refreshing, and it left me wanting more.

When Klein talked about Kirk's style as the right type of politics being the ability to sit down with our antagonists and converse civilly with them, I disagreed. Without the correct context, interaction between adversaries is only liable to make things worse. That's what I understand Kirk to be doing. When the work is about humiliating the other side and editing your videos to score points against the other team (correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems to have been Kirk's shtick) then this is decidedly not the way to do politics. But this conversation between Klein and Shapiro is.

There are a few important things that go into this: a proper container, for one. The grandstand politicising makes it challenging for someone to disagree. The debate context sets things up for a "gotcha" moment. There's no incentive to be thoughtful and admit you are wrong. That's a way to lose points.

But here we have two intellectual equals meeting each other in good faith in a 1:1 interaction. These are the ingredients of a healthy politics. It's not about theatre, it's about truth. Each were willing to concede points to the other; it never descended into a chaotic shouting past each other. It was…refreshing.

Maybe that's because there are two (relative) centrists, and Moderates don't need to make the devil out of the other side. The maturation of their relationship with the public eye has led to greater nuance and understanding (though admittedly it can often go the other way as well), and that's a beautiful thing. I got the impression of two peers rather than projections of good and evil floating about. I love that, and I think it's more of that we need in the world: archetypal sobriety. Adults in the room.

But that leaves me with some questions: could I have had Shapiro so wrong? Or was he on his best behaviour here? If my impression from this interview is wrong and he's still a raging culture warrior, then that strengthens another conviction in me: the medium is the message, and Klein has done a great job of crafting a culture (or, to use alchemical language: creating a container) with this podcast that can make the right type of interaction possible.

1. immigration for example, as I talked about in the recent piece on that

2. this dates back further than 2016 of course. See this piece on John McCain's move "starkly and often awkwardly to the right" to appeal to the fish-hooked Republican base written in 2010