Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…What about the role of shame in our culture, and also as it relates to media? Right now, I think I read estimates 40 percent of children are born into single-parent families. Some of those the father is actually around, but a lot of cases it’s not. A lot of social conservatives, they somehow want to shame this arrangement, but from a media point of view, it’s very hard to shame those who are your readers. There’s maybe a tendency for stories to evolve into a language without shame. Does that ever worry you about media, and what is the role of shame in politics, and what should we be shaming more often? I do think there’s a lot of shaming in media. I don’t think it’s there, nor would I want it to be there, but I think an interesting thing about Trumpism and the particular way in which I think the media really has been — we can argue about whether the media has done a good job with Trump, but the media’s clearly very anti-Trump. The particular ideology he has, there are these long things, debates about whether the media is liberal or it’s conservative, and I tend to think they miss a lot of nuance on it, but what the media really is, is not committed to single-payer, but committed to diversity, to pluralism, to tolerance, to things that I think of as more cosmopolitan values than particularly liberal values, or at least liberal in the contemporary political sense of values. Trumpism is a lot less conservative than it is traditionalist, restrictionist; it collides with that set of cosmopolitan, urban values. One place where I think people have a lot of upset about this — there is a lot of shaming in the media. We talked about it a couple minutes ago, around racial resentment. Say Trump voters.…

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