Top 30 Ezra Klein Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We’re actually just moving one type of deficit to another. But, the problem with this second type of deficit is that you drive on it and then it falls down.”

— Ezra Klein

2. “I think we are, or we can be. But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.”

— Ezra Klein

3. “A government shutdown, it isn’t the end of the world. It’s a bad thing. The government stops working for a few days. We cover it a lot. Polls turn against who ever made it stop working.”

— Ezra Klein

4. “Everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.”

— Ezra Klein

5. “Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.”

— Ezra Klein

6. “When we participate in politics to solve a problem, we’re participating transactionally. But when we participate in politics to express who we are, that’s a signal that politics has become an identity.”

— Ezra Klein

7. “As Kahan’s term suggests, our reasoning is most vulnerable when our identities are most threatened. And for many, this is an era of profound threat.”

— Ezra Klein

8. “If it’s cynical, risky politics that brings a lighted match and a can of gas near the Democratic coalition, it should be named as such, and its consequences understood, and it should become part of the complex calculus we’re all building to help us understand these campaigns.”

— Ezra Klein

9. “Political identity is fair game for hatred,” he says. “Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not. You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them.”27.”

— Ezra Klein

10. “The American political system is not good at trading sacrifice now to prevent crises later.”

— Ezra Klein

11. “Someone wisely told me once: the world always makes sense. When it doesn’t make sense, it just means we don’t have all the information yet.”

— Ezra Klein

12. “Even Trump’s team didn’t believe he was going to win. Plans were afoot for him to start a television channel in the aftermath of his loss. And then came election.”

— Ezra Klein

13. “To put it simply, in a media driven by identity and passion, identitarian candidates who arouse the strongest passions have an advantage. You can arouse that passion through inspiration, as Obama did, or through conflict, as Trump did. What you can’t do is be boring.”

— Ezra Klein

14. “So here, then, is the last fifty years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more – indeed, we’ve come to like the parties we vote for less – but because we came to dislike the opposing party more. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed.”

— Ezra Klein

15. “We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism.”

— Ezra Klein

16. “If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.”

— Ezra Klein

17. “Do not respond to people being upset by confidently giving them advice on how to solve their problems.”

— Ezra Klein

18. “White voters who feel they are losing a historical hold on power are reacting to something real. For the bulk of American history, you couldn’t win the presidency without winning a majority – usually an overwhelming majority – of white vote. Though this changed before Obama – Bill Clinton won slightly less of the white vote than his Republican challengers – the election of an African American president leading a young, multiracial coalition made the transition stark and threatening.”

— Ezra Klein

19. “In stories of drift into failure, organizations fail precisely because they are doing well – on a narrow range of performance criteria, that is – the ones that they get rewarded on in their current political or economic or commercial configuration. In the drift into failure, accidents can happen without anything breaking, without anybody erring, without anybody violating the rules they consider relevant.”

— Ezra Klein

20. “Once a political party has decided the path to governing is retaking the majority, not working with the existing majority, the incentives transform. Instead of cultivating a good relationship with your colleagues across the aisle, you need to destroy them, because you need to convince the voters to destroy them, too.”

— Ezra Klein

21. “For both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one.”

— Ezra Klein

22. “America’s modern run of polarization has its roots in the civil rights era, in the Democratic Party choosing to embrace racial equality and the Republican Party providing a home to white backlash.”

— Ezra Klein

23. “As the parties become more racially, religiously, ideologically, and geographically different, the signals that tell us if a place is our kind of place, if a community is our kind of community, heighten our political divisions. The more sorted we are in our differences, the more different we grow in our preferences.”

— Ezra Klein

24. “It is disastrous that democracy has become a partisan issue, with Republicans viewing efforts to expand the franchise as conspiracies to weaken their party.”

— Ezra Klein

25. “In forming an opinion, the question for the unengaged citizen is: what will this policy do for me? Among the engaged, however, reactions to economic issues are better understood as expressively motivated signals of identity. The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me?”

— Ezra Klein

26. “Politics is, first and foremost, driven by the people who pay the most attention and wield the most power – and those people opt in to extraordinarily politicized media. They then create the political system they perceive. The rest of the country then has to choose from more polarized options, and that in turn polarizes them – remember, the larger the difference between the parties, the more compelling it becomes for even the uninterested to choose a side.”

— Ezra Klein

27. “We give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more. The time spent spraying outrage over Trump’s latest tweet – which is, to be clear, what he wants you to do; the point is to suck up all the media oxygen so he retains control of the conversation – is better spent checking in with what’s happening in your own neighborhood.”

— Ezra Klein

28. “The media has become tribal leaders,” he says. “They’re telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along.”

— Ezra Klein

29. “There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence, and such experts are never very far away.”

— Ezra Klein

30. “This is what Trump understood about conservatives that so many of his critics missed: they were an identity group under threat, and so long as you promised them protection and victories, they would follow you to hell and back.”

— Ezra Klein

31. “We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.”

— Ezra Klein

32. “The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities.”

— Ezra Klein

33. “For that reason, Haidt told me, “once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.” Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning.”

— Ezra Klein

34. “The point is to obscure the fact that the decisions being made are decisions at all. It’s best if newsworthiness feels like a quality external to journalistic judgment, as if it were a weight attached to each story and measurable with proper instrumentation. Because of that, judgments of newsworthiness are often contagious; nothing obscures the fact that a decision is being made quite like everyone else making it, too.”

— Ezra Klein