Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…In Praise of Stodginess — is that your next book? [laughter] I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and I’ve been thinking about it in a sense of understanding temperament as a separate axis in politics from ideology, this being something that is particularly hard for us to keep an eye on because we use the same words to describe different things. We use the word conservative to describe both an ideology in terms of lower taxes, smaller government, etc., and this conservative temperament that you’re discussing, with Michael Oakeshott, some phases of Andrew Sullivan: “Let’s just move slowly here. Let’s think about what we’ve built, and let’s be careful about what we’re tearing down.” We are often talking about people of a conservative ideology, but not a conservative temperament, in a confusing way. Paul Ryan, I would say, is somebody with, in many ways, what we would understand as a conservative ideology, but if anything, he has a very progressive temperament. He wants to make big changes, reconstruct the budget, go in a whole different direction. Medicare is working fine — let’s change it entirely. So, he’s somebody who, I think, you would understand as conservative in ideology, progressive, if anything, in temperament. Paul Ryan, I would say, is somebody with, in many ways, what we would understand as a conservative ideology, but if anything, he has a very progressive temperament. He wants to make big changes, reconstruct the budget, go in a whole different direction. Medicare is working fine — let’s change it entirely. So, he’s somebody who, I think, you would understand as conservative in ideology, progressive, if anything, in temperament. Someone like Joe Biden is almost the reverse. I think he’s between moderate and progressive in his ideology. I think he’s somewhat conservative in temperament. Then there are people who don’t have much ideology but are almost reactionary in temperament, where I’d put, say, a Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders, I think, is confusing on this, too. He’s obviously relatively socialist, or at least democratic socialist, in ideology. He is not that revolutionary in temperament. I’ve covered him as a legislator for a very long time. He’s not one of the people who’s always trying to blow up the chamber. There are people like that. He’s not calling general strikes. He’s not using every parliamentary maneuver he can to stop anything he doesn’t like. So, it is worthwhile to think very hard about the temperament people bring to politics. I think that the number of people who end up having strong ideologies and hewing to a genuinely conservative temperament is quite small. If you could engineer your own political temperament, would you change it from how it is? Mostly, we’re stuck with what we’ve got, I would say, but if you could press the button — more passionate, less passionate, something else? Goldilocks?…

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