Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 480

 

Here are a few excerpts from a transcript of a podcast I recently watched, "Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE," on the Lex Fridman Podcast.

Derek Thompson: We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television on steroids. It’s a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live wire authenticity. They’re good at performing authenticity, as paradoxical as that sounds. Trump is an absolute marvel at performing authenticity even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He’s just an amazing performer for this age. And it speaks to the fact that he seems to be, to borrow Ezra’s term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft these message to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age.

  

Ezra Klein: Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that’s a huge difference between the two sides right now. So, what did Kamala Harris come in and do? She came in and raised a shit ton of money, like a billion dollars in record time, basically. She had more money than Donald Trump did, and used it to try to buy attention. What it meant for Democrats to be good at social media, is to have a good social media team. People in your office somewhere in your campaign headquarters who put out cool things on social media, good memes, and good advertisements and so on. What it means on the right to be good at social media is to be you personally good at social media, your Vivek Ramaswamy, you’re JD Vance, your Donald Trump, your Elon Musk, and what you understand is you are the product. What it means to be good at attention is you are good at attention.

 

Now, Harris, I think was actually better at some dimensions of this. They were just slightly older dimensions and people always gave her credit for, hell of a performer on the stump. She was way better on the stump than people realized she would be, and a good debater, she’d always been a good debater. She trashed Donald Trump in that debate, but she does not do social media herself at any level because she’s not going to take risks.

 

Most Democrats still live in a world where the thing that they’re optimizing for and attention is to not get negative attention. And what the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party understands, and this is truer for them than it probably would be for Democrats because for them the media is the enemy, or at least the mainstream media is etcetera, but is that attention. A volume of attention is itself good and you can only get a critical mass of it if you’re willing to accept negative attention. Agenda control doesn’t come from positive attention. It comes from conflict. You get agenda control by doing things the other side disagrees with, so they enter into functioning agreement with you to keep the thing you’re doing at the front.

 

 If you look at any family’s budget, the biggest part of their budget in any given year is the part that goes to rent or mortgage. It’s housing, housing, housing, and housing connects to everything else. It connects to innovation. You want cities to agglomerate, to bring smart people together. Housing relates to all sorts of other affordability. Like if you care about the cost of eldercare, you want to make it cheaper to house institutions, buildings that can care for children, which means you want to bring those rents down.

 

And so I thought as I’m zooming out on this concept of scarcity in the 21st century, we have chosen to make housing scarce. In some of the most productive cities and states, often run by Democrats, we have rules, zoning rules, historic preservation rules, permitting processes, environmental reviews, laws that we created that have gotten in the way of making abundant the most important material good there is, which is housing.

  

Thompson: So the problem is when the reputation of a tax and spend liberal makes contact with the fact that people don’t see the results in the physical world, like where’s my money going? I have in my head something like this idea of what I call Equinox liberalism, which is to say there’s some forms of liberalism where it’s very expensive, but you see what you’re getting. Like when you spend $270 to go to Equinox for the month, right? It’s a really expensive gym bill, but people who go there seem to love it. They’re like, “The equipment is always free, everything is clean. I go into the locker room, there’s a bunch of Kiehl’s lotions to put on my face after I shower. I am getting exactly what I’m paying for. Yes, I’ll pay out the nose for a gym because I love seeing that money going to work.” And in places like Sweden, Denmark, citizens seem very happy. They’re paying much higher taxes than people are in America, but they’re seeing where the money’s going to work.

 

The problem with the liberalism that blocks rather than builds is that people don’t see the money going to work. All they see are the dollar signs being spent by government, and then they walk out of their house and they see collapsing infrastructure and they see crime and they see housing prices going to the moon. And so they think, “Wait, this social contract is broken down. You’re asking for Equinox prices, but you’re giving me a shit-ass gym and that’s unfair.” 

 

Klein: The cities are the frontier. The cities have always been the frontier, not of the land, but of the economy because the frontier of the economy is where ideas are produced and ideas, even now, even the age of remote work are produced in the big cities where people live together and they compete with each other and they cooperate with each other. And so if you gate the cities, if you make it impossible for someone making 50,000 bucks with two kids to live in the city, then what you’ve done is you’ve actually closed the American frontier. You have forced them into lower productivity places. Their children are less likely to grow up around the inventors in the cities.

 

Klein: There’s a theory here, I think that was never about efficiency. It was about deletion. He’s not trying to make things run a little bit better. He’s not trying to lower the overhead cost of government. That the theory is that in the first term, the bureaucracy impeded Donald Trump. It didn’t listen to him. Bureaucracy is supposed to be limbs of the President. The only way to make the federal government a neural link of Donald Trump himself, is to destroy the federal government. And then, rebuild it as that thing.