Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…But if it’s age, you would think the younger eras would be more left wing, whereas now, we have an older America, and there’s a claim — it could be a false claim — that institutions are becoming less right wing, more — I see it more as a kind of historical, not arc in the sense of it being deterministic. But I don’t think it would be the case that the way you would rate this is that, if a society had an average age of 32, it would be more left wing than a society with an average age of 46. I think things like economic growth and average wealth and so forth have a very big impact here. But the thing I wanted to say on this — because I’ve been thinking about it since we were chatting about it the other day — is it seems to me that we rate how left or right an institution is by where it is on some of these cultural questions, like how do you feel about gay marriage? I’d almost call it a cosmopolitan divide, like how cosmopolitan are you on your fundamental orientation? But then, a lot of these institutions that people think of as left wing are also growing at the same time, as they get older, more conservative on other dimensions. So, they become more conservative in how things work. There tends to be, with Bernie Sanders being an interesting counterexample of this — although, given how he feels about the filibuster and so on, maybe not, actually — there tends to be a conservatism that emerges on how things get done in complicated systems, be they legislatures or bureaucracies, that happen after people have been in those systems a very long time. They begin to be very used to how the thing works, and it’d [be] hard for them to imagine it working another way. My colleague Matt Yglesias sometimes makes a point that everybody calls Hollywood very left wing, but if you actually think about Hollywood’s veneration of soldiers, police, other kinds of government authority figures, there are dimensions where it’s actually quite right wing. Economics — I’m more used to this one from being in newsrooms, but newsrooms don’t, in my experience — they are left wing in the sense of some of their cosmopolitan orientations, but they have a sort of Morning Joe approach on economics. They tend to be quite biased towards deficit reduction, towards a Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget view of the world. I think there is something very interesting and important — I actually tried to talk about it in the book — in the way we actually key left or right increasingly to this cultural dimension. But it is very far from the only dimension operating, and I think that one of the destabilizing tensions of American politics right now is that the Right feels like they are losing on culture, which is what they care about most, and the Left feels like it is losing on economics, which is what it cares about most. So, everybody simultaneously, both in this and some other respects, feels like they are losing power, even as the other side sees an endlessly winning power, and that feeling of nobody being quite sure who is winning and who is losing is quite disorienting. It’s time for a round of overrated versus underrated. Are you game?…

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