Left-wing political ideology explained by Ezra Klein | Lex Fridman Podcast

You are both firmly on the left of the US political spectrum. Azra, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. Uh you're often referred to at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left. Can you try to define can you define the ideals and the vision of the American left? Oh, good. We're starting small here. And maybe contrast them with the American right. Sure. Um so the thing I should say here is that you can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations, right? The the luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. Um we are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omin presence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out well, we don't deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard and we also had talent and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level that we are sitting here is unfair. And that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity, right? So people can have lives of flourishing. So I'd say that's one thing. The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and particularly unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I al think this is hard to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government. So I think in in a way you have both like markets are things that are enforced by government whether they are you know how you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left is tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich uh building coal fired power plants belching pollution into the air and you could get rich laying down solar panels and the market doesn't know the difference between the two. And so there's a set of goals about regulating the the unchecked uh potential of capitalism that also uh relates to sort of exploitation of workers. Um there's like very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to to the left. When you think about what the minimum wage is, I am a successful podcast host. When I go into a negotiation with the New York Times, I have a certain amount of market power in that negotiation because other firms want to hire me. When you are a minimum wage worker, um the reason we have a minimum wage is in part to rectify a power problem. A lot of workers do not have market power. They do not have a bunch of job opportunities. They are not working with firms. Um and by the way, without certain kinds of regulation, those firms would cartilize and make it so they can hold down wages anyway. So trying to rectify power imbalances is I think another thing folks on the left take more seriously. That would be a start of things that I think broadly unite the maybe let's call it the intuitions. Um I want to say that's a podcast answer not a book. I'm sure I left a million a million things out here but but I'll start there. I mean there's a lot of fascinating things there on on the unfairness of life. That could be the interperson unfairness. So, one person getting more money than another person, more skills or more natural abilities than another person. And then there's the just the general unfairness of the environment, the luck of the draw, the things that happen. All of a sudden, you cross a street and the car runs a red light and runs you over and you're in the hospital. So, that unfairness of life and in general, I guess the left sees there's some role or a lot of role for government to help you when that unfairness strikes. And then maybe there's also a general notion of u the size of government. I think the left is more comfortable with a larger government as long as it's effective and efficient at least in its that's certainly true in the last 100 years. Uh it was New Deal liberals who enlarged the government in the 1930s. It was Republicans who acquiesced to that larger government in the 1950s. And then starting the 1970s 1980s it's typically been conservatives who've tried to constrict governments. sometimes they failed um while liberals have typically tried to expand certainly taxing and spending. But one thing that I was thinking as Ezra was talking and I was just writing this down because I thought Ezra's answer was really lovely but like at a really high level I thought maybe disagree with this. I thought about distinguishing between liberals and conservatives based on three factors. What each side fears, what each side values, and what each side tolerates. I think liberals fear injustice and conservatives often fear cultural radicalism or the destruction of society and as a result they value different things. Liberals I think tend to value change and at the level of government that can mean change in terms of creating new programs that don't previously exist. It's typically been liberals for example who've been trying to expand health coverage while conservatives have tried to cut it back. Just in the last few years, it was Biden who tried to add a bunch of programs, whether it was infrastructure, the Chips and Science Act, the IRA, and then Trump comes into office and is unwinding it. And then I also think they tolerate different things. I think liberals are more likely to tolerate a little bit of overreach, a little bit of radicalism in terms of trying to push society into a world where it hasn't been. While I think conservatives are more likely to tolerate injustice. they're more likely to say there's a kind of natural inequality in the nature of the world and we're not going to try to overcorrect for it with our policies. And so I think that even at a layer above what Ezra was articulating with the um the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, there's almost like an an archetypal difference between what they fear and value and tolerate. um liberals fearing injustice, seeking change, tolerating sometimes a bit of what people might think of as as overreach, while conservatives fear that overreach, value tradition, and often tolerate injustice. The only thing I I I would say is that I do think this sort of the left likes big government, the right likes small government oversimplifies. The the left is pretty comfortable with an expansive government that is trying to correct for some of the the imbalances of power and injustices and imbalances of luck I talked about earlier. The right is very comfortable with a very powerful police and surveillance and national security state. Uh I always think about the uh sort of George W. Bush era although right now with ICE agents hassling all kinds of green card holders you can use you can think about this moment too. But the rights view that on the one hand the government is incompetent and on the other hand we could send our army across oceans invade Afghanistan and Iraq and then rebuild these societies we don't understand into fully functioning liberal democracies that will be our allies was an extraordinary level of trust in a very big government. I mean that was expensive. That took manpower. That was compared to we're going to set up you know the Affordable Care Act in America. That took a lot more faith in the US government being able to do something that was extraordinarily difficult. But the left has more confidence in the government of the check and the right has more confidence in the government of the gun. You're right. There's some degree to which what the right when the right speaks about the size of government is a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy because they seem to always grow the size of government anyway. They just kind of say small government, but they don't. It's, you know, in the surveillance state, in the in the foreign policy, in terms of military involvement abroad, and really in every every program, they're not very good at cutting either. They just kind of like to say it. Cutting is really hard. If you government spends trillions of dollars and if you cut billions of dollars, someone is going to feel that pain and they're going to scream. And so you look at defense spending under Reagan, you look at overall spending under Reagan. Reagan might be one of the most archetypally conservative presidents of the last 40, 50 years. He utterly failed in his attempt to shrink government. Government grew under Reagan. Defense grew. All sorts of programs grew. So I think that one thing we're sort of scrambling around in our answers is that at a really high level there are differences between liberalism and conservatism in American history. But often at the level of implementation it can be a little bit messy. Even Bush's foreign policy that Ezra was describing sort of from a big sense of American history is very like Wilsonian, right? This sense of like it's America's duty to go out and change the world or to use a current example McKinley or or McKinley, right? And a lot of people compare um Donald Trump's foreign policy to Andrew Jackson. This sense of we need to pull back from the world. America first. We need to care about what's inside of our borders and care much less about what's outside of our borders. Sometimes the differences between Republican and Democrat administrations don't fall cleanly into the lines of liberal versus conservative. Um because those definitions can be mushy.

Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/cv8617-sb See below for guest bio, links, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. *GUEST BIO:* Ezra Klein is one of the most influential voices representing the left-wing of American politics. He is a columnist for the NY Times and host of The Ezra Klein Show. Derek Thompson is a writer at The Atlantic and host of the Plain English podcast. Together they have written a new book titled Abundance that lays out a set of ideas for the future of the Democratic party. *CONTACT LEX:* *Feedback* - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey *AMA* - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama *Hiring* - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring *Other* - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact *EPISODE LINKS:* Abundance (new book): https://amzn.to/4iZ1S8J Ezra's X: https://x.com/ezraklein/ Ezra's Instagram: https://instagram.com/ezraklein Ezra's YouTube: https://youtube.com/EzraKleinShow The New York Times: https://nytimes.com/by/ezra-klein Derek's X: https://x.com/dkthomp Plain English (podcast): https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/plain-english-with-derek-thompson The Atlantic: https://theatlantic.com/author/derek-thompson/ *SPONSORS:* To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: *Call of Duty:* First-person shooter video game. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/call_of_duty-cv8617-sb *LMNT:* Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/lmnt-cv8617-sb *AG1:* All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/ag1-cv8617-sb *Shopify:* Sell stuff online. Go to https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-cv8617-sb *PODCAST LINKS:* - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips *SOCIAL LINKS:* - X: https://x.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://instagram.com/lexfridman - TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://facebook.com/lexfridman - Patreon: https://patreon.com/lexfridman - Telegram: https://t.me/lexfridman - Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman