Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…You don’t think we’ll end up with one party that’s the pro-NIMBY party? No. This is an effort to do two things compared to the other book. Derek obviously will have his own versions of this. One is, at the end of my last book, my beloved wife, Annie Lowrey, said to me, “You don’t really do any chin stroking in this book. It’s all descriptive. You don’t say much about what you think the world should be.” That rang in my head. Then the other was that I was watching, in my own view, polarization just get more dysfunctional. I don’t think polarization about the system itself is a healthy form of polarization. To the extent these two things have a relationship, it’s a relationship to describe a different cross-cutting cleavage than what we have. I would like to see fights between people who believe in what I would call different forms of abundance politics, as I say in the introduction. I think you have a version of this, let’s say, state capacity libertarianism. You can see Jim Pethokoukis on the right with his Conservative Futurist. There are different people I feel more allied with on the right, even if we don’t have all the same views, as opposed to, I think, what we are actually having, which is over legitimacy, which I think is a pretty toxic form of division. Is the abundance agenda primarily a view of elites? And insofar as it succeeds, it will succeed to the extent that politics is not directly ruled by democratic forces?…

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