ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt, and this is “The Argument.” This week, what is President Trump’s best remaining impeachment defense?

ross douthat

I think the strategic failure by the Trump White House is the unwillingness to effectively promise he won’t he won’t do it again.

david leonhardt

Then, can’t we all just get along? We’re joined by Ezra Klein, who argues that America is destined to be polarized.

ezra klein

Race was what kept us, for a period, from being polarized, and not in a good way.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

The sea was gray and steely, the waves were crashing, and it was kind of fantastic.

david leonhardt

Michelle is in Iowa this week reporting on the campaign, so Ross and I are on our own and we’re going to start by talking about impeachment. President Trump’s primary defense, that there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine, largely collapsed this week. News emerged that Trump had told John Bolton, a top former advisor, that Trump wanted to freeze aid to Ukraine unless that country investigated the Bidens. Trump now seems to be relying on little more than partisan loyalty in order to be acquitted in the Senate. But if Trump cared more about facts, he actually would have a defense available to him. You might not find a persuasive, [DOUTHAT LAUGHS] I might not find that persuasive, but Ross does. So tell us about this defense, Ross.

ross douthat

Well, let’s not let’s not go too far, David. I think it’s legitimate, let’s put it that way.

david leonhardt

OK.

ross douthat

But basically, what’s been happening in impeachment is this amusing reversal, where often conservatives are sort of originalists when it comes to the Constitution. They’re defending the intent of the founding fathers against sort of modern interpretations, living constitutionalism, and so on. And instead with impeachment, you have a lot of people who want Trump impeached and removed who are suddenly very focused on what Alexander Hamilton and James Madison thought about impeachment and how far high crimes and misdemeanors can extend, and what people use the impeachment power for in England at the time when the U.S. constitution was being debated. And I think there’s a very good case that the kind of things that Trump has done fall under the impeachment power as contemplated in the late 18th century. But the counter argument from legal scholars on the right and historians who aren’t so sure about impeachment is that that’s in theory, right. That’s sort of how the system was notionally set up. In practice, we’ve only impeach two presidents in all our history. We managed to sort of pressure one, Richard Nixon, to resign, but we’ve never actually removed a president. And there’s a pretty good reason for that, which Josh Blackman, who’s a law professor in Texas, wrote about for our pages last week, where he basically said, look, it’s — in fact the president, in the execution of his duties, all presidents are constantly thinking about their own political advantage. And so figuring out the point at which policymaking becomes an abuse of power with only your own political ends in mind is a challenge, right. And you can cite lots and lots of historical examples where presidents did things that push the envelope of their own powers in various ways that were also clearly aimed at helping their own re-election. And Trump is obviously cruder and more grotesque about it in various ways, but the fundamental reality is we have generally left this question to the voters in almost every presidential instance. There are plenty of cases of presidents who have done things as bad or worse than Trump in this sort of zone of abuse of power potentially things, and we have an election in nine months. And there is no reason not to stick with that pattern in this case and not say that Trump is innocent of the charges, but say this was a bad thing that, like many bad things presidents have done, does not justify removal.

david leonhardt

You’ve helped persuade me that it was right to impeach Bill Clinton.

ross douthat

Yes.

david leonhardt

That Bill Clinton lied under oath, that Bill Clinton did a bunch of things to obstruct justice, and sure, were there other presidents who did bad things over the centuries? Yes, there were other bad things that other presidents did —

ross douthat

In history, bad things, yes.

david leonhardt

—and so, I guess I don’t really see the argument that it was right to impeach Clinton but not Trump.

ross douthat

We might just have to accept, for reasons of the structure of American government, the polarization of the parties, something we’ll discuss in our next segment, that as a means of removing a president, the impeachment power just doesn’t work. You’re almost never going to get a scenario where it can work to remove a president from office unless he has literally torched the entire United States. But, you could but you could regard the impeachment power as a means of correcting, chastising, and highlighting the abuses of a president. And in that sense, you could argue — and I do sort of think this is right — that Republicans were right to impeach Clinton, even though it was clear almost from the get go that they weren’t going to remove him, and Democrats had no choice to impeach Trump because he was being sort of flagrant in his behavior. But it’s OK within our system that you have these impeachments and they don’t lead to removal, and it’s not the end of the American republic if they don’t. It’s just sort of an evolution of the system to be a check rather than a means of jettisoning a president.

david leonhardt

Small thing, I do think you could have a president removed if the party making the case drove his or her approval ratings down so low.

ross douthat

Yes.

david leonhardt

I actually think Bill Clinton would have been removed if his approval ratings had tanked.

ross douthat

No, I agree, but that’s what I meant when I said torch the country. I meant do something to drive your approval ratings down far enough.

david leonhardt

So — I guess let me make the non-originalist argument for impeaching Trump, right? Which is that over the last close to 50 years, we have developed a sense of post-Watergate norms. Right?

ross douthat

Yep.

david leonhardt

And I actually think they’re very important, which is we’ve said a bunch of the stuff that in the past we allowed, the FBI doing all these investigations of all kinds of people, really to ruin their lives and create political advantages for the president or the director of the FBI, we’re not going to allow that anymore, right. We’re not going to allow the president to use the Justice Department just to sort of an arm of political thuggery. And maybe no president’s been perfect with that stuff, but no president has been close to Donald Trump. And so when you stack up everything that he has done — Ukraine, talking about investigating his rivals, actually having some of them investigated, violating his oath of office in all kinds of ways, the lying, the corruption, Trump isn’t like any president that we’ve had in the last 50 years. And to me, saying that over time we try to develop higher standards and a president who flagrantly fails to meet those standards in a way that no modern president has, I think that’s just legitimate grounds for impeachment and removal, although I acknowledge it’s not going to lead to remove.

ross douthat

Yeah, and I think that’s — you know, I have been making a devil’s advocate case, in the sense that I also came around to a version of the argument you just made, right, which is that, in fact, Trump is or aspires to imitate conduct that was normal for mid-century presidents. I mean, normal might be the wrong word, but you know, Lyndon Johnson used the C.I.A. to spy on Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. President after president, as you said, used J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. in all kinds of ways or was used by Hoover in various ways. And so in that sense, that makes a case that Trump is normal, but, as you say, post Watergate, we set up a new system of norms. And that system of norms, I think you can make the case that it’s partially held. But I also think it’s partially held with the threat of impeachment or sort of the exposure and critique of scandal being the mechanism more than the removal. I think the failure, the strategic failure by the Trump White House, which was totally predictable given the personality of Donald Trump, is the unwillingness to effectively promise you won’t do it again. You won’t do it again, right? I think part of the reason — one of the many reasons that Clinton was able to escape being removed was that after a period of denial he expressed a kind of contrition, and you could make a case, as the Democrats did, that this was wrong but it’s not going to happen again in the duration of Clinton’s presidency. He’s expressed contrition, now it’s a matter for his family and so on. And I’m not sure what quite the version of that would be with Trump, because there obviously isn’t a sexual affair here to sort of express that kind of contrition for, but one of the features of the Trump White House has been he’s always trying to do things, right, and then his staff won’t let him. He’s always asking to do things that would be impeachable that are talked about but then don’t happen. And that’s how some of his Republican defenders in the Senate are framing this, butI think that, to go back to your original question, that’s the best defense, right. That, again, as I said, bad didn’t fully come to fruition, was blocked ultimately. It got further than many of Trump’s crazy schemes, but it ultimately wasn’t blocked. The aid went through. Republicans in Congress sort of told him he had to once it started to be exposed, and you would just make a version of that argument and say, look, this ultimately didn’t happen. Hunter Biden is corrupt but I pushed too far and I won’t do it again.

david leonhardt

We’re recording this on Tuesday afternoon, and it actually seems like there’s a chance that four Republicans will vote to have John Bolton testify, which means we could hear from Bolton. So let’s just spend a minute on what do you think that’s going to be like? I mean, John Bolton, this guy who for years was this conservative hero and liberals hated him and he wanted to bomb Iran, and —

ross douthat

Still does.

david leonhardt

— still does, and now he’s like somehow supposed to be the Democratic savior? What’s that going to be like?

ross douthat

Well, one, I mean our colleagues at The Times clearly have inside access to his book and nobody has really disputed their reporting. But we don’t have the book yet, right. We haven’t seen the book. And I wouldn’t — I think people assuming that Bolton will necessarily just sit down in the witness chair and say yes, Trump did exactly what you thought he was going to do, that might be wrong. I mean, Bolton is a political animal. It might be that when you actually parse the wording in his book it’s more ambiguous than some of — even some of our own reporting has suggested. So that’s one caution, but then it will also just be a delightful circus. And you know, I know that we don’t have Michelle here to be horrified at me enjoying the Trump era as a carnival, but sometimes that’s worth doing.

david leonhardt

Well, we will welcome Michelle back next week, and she can react then. Let’s leave it there and take a quick break. [MUSIC PLAYING] Americans are increasingly polarized. We tend to live near people who have the same opinions as we do, we consume the same news sources, and even drive the same kinds of vehicles as people who agree with us. If you know one political opinion that someone has, on abortion, say, or taxes, or immigration, there’s a good chance that you can guess that person’s other opinions as well. And the people we don’t agree with we have less and less in common with them. It didn’t used to be this way, and many people lament the change. But our guest, Ezra Klein, argues that the change probably couldn’t have been avoided. He says the only way to cope with American polarization is to be realistic about it. Ezra is the founding editor of vox.com, the host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast, and he has a new book out, “Why We’re Polarized.” He joins me and Ross here in New York at The Times studio. Ezra, welcome to “The Argument.”

ezra klein

Thrilled to be here.

david leonhardt

We’re excited about this, Ross, Ezra and I have all been reading each other’s work and debating it for years.

ezra klein

Arguing, even.

david leonhardt

Even arguing, exactly. So let’s start off with your main idea. You seem to think that polarization was inevitable in the U.S. Can you explain why?

ezra klein

I can. So to go through this, I think, we have to actually go backwards to what was happening in the US during its depolarized period, which is not all of American history, by the way. We had a lot of polarization, say, before the Civil War. Polarization is not new. What we had in the middle of the 20th century was a period where the political parties were very mixed in terms of what they believed and who belonged to them. And it’s worth saying that that’s actually quite unusual for political parties. If you look at what is happening in American politics at that time, one thing you see there is that polarization is not a synonym for fracture, it is not a synonym for division, it is not a synonym for extremism. The kinds of arguments we’re having in the country during that period are over civil rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, the Vietnam War, protesters getting killed at Kent State. There are political assassinations, urban riots, it’s a period of incredible fracture in American life. But what is not happening in that period is that that fracture is well lined up with the two political parties, and a good example this is the Civil Rights Act itself, which passes Congress with a higher proportion of Republicans voting for it than Democrats in Congress.

ross douthat

A point that Republicans sometimes like to make to claim that actually it was their bill.

ezra klein

Absolutely. And so what happens after that is that Barry Goldwater runs against the bill, picks up some of the states in the old Confederacy, and that begins a long — it is not an immediate process of rupture, in what had become a very strange system, a four party system, functionally, where Democrats had this very large, quite conservative southern Dixiecrat wing. Republicans had this liberal Republican wing. And as those wings begin to dissolve, as Democrats become the party of liberals, Republicans become the party of conservatives, they also begin to sort demographically. Democrats become a much more diverse party. The Republican Party is about 90 percent white. The single largest religious group, to speak to some of Ross’s concerns, are the religiously unaffiliated, where the Republican Party is overwhelmingly Christian. Geographically, the parties begin to sort by density. There’s no city that is denser than 900 people per square mile that is actually Republican in the country at this point, and you keep going on down the lists like that. So what happens is the parties begin to represent very different ideas and very different coalitions, and that is a condition under which a lot of the fractures that are there and were there in either condition in American life begin to map onto party. That is what political scientists mean, what I mean, when we talk about polarization. Not just an argument, but an argument that splits Americans by party.

david leonhardt

And you think that race is the central cause of the change.

ezra klein

I actually — I would almost put it the opposite way. Race was what kept us, for a period, from being polarized, and not in a good way. The alternative to polarization in the pundit class discussion of it sometimes seems like it’s comity, civility, compromise, everybody getting along. Oftentimes the alternative to polarization is suppression. We are not polarized because we are suppressing a very divisive argument from coming to the fore. That is what was happening with race for much of the 20th century. Because of the power Dixiecrats had in the Democratic Party, they had tremendous control over central committees, they had effective veto power over anybody the Democratic Party nominated. As their power to do that wanes, and so the racial divisions burst forward that you begin to have the polarization. But I wouldn’t say race is the only thing happening, but I don’t think there’s much doubt in the literature here that the reason our system became so unusual and in some ways deformed in the 20th century was because the post Civil War party system was deformed by race.

ross douthat

I want to get into some of these historical narratives, but before I do that, I want you to talk a little bit about the psychological arguments that you make in the book. Because one of the striking things that you say, that I think is very plausible, is that it’s not just that sort of ideological differences normally lead to polarized parties. You also argue that the human mind wants to polarize. Can you talk a little about that?

ezra klein

Yeah. The human mind is very sensitive to groups and group division, outgroup and in group dynamics. And I talk a lot about the work of a guy named Henri Tajfel, who is a Polish Jew. He emigrates to France because not able to go to university in Poland — this is in the ‘30s. He enlists in World War II, he’s captured by Germans, he becomes a French prisoner of war in a German prisoner of war camp. For that reason, because they think he’s a French prisoner of war and not a Polish Jew, he is not killed. When he is eventually released from prison and comes back to France, his entire family is dead. They were all killed in the Holocaust, and he becomes obsessed with this question of group difference and what makes people identify as a group, what makes them discriminate against people they see as another group. So he begins creating a series of experiments that become very famous in social psychology called the minimum group paradigm experiments. What he does here is he brings in a bunch of kids all from the same school, a bunch of boys, and he puts them in a room and he says, you know, can you estimate how many dots are on this screen? And then they do, and they kind of— he’s got some people scoring their work. And then the researchers say actually, while we have you here, can we try one more experiment? Not related to the last experiment, but just for the ease of this, we’re going to separate you into two groups: the people who overestimated the number of dots and the people underestimated the number of dots.

david leonhardt

They’re just randomly separated?

ezra klein

They’re randomly separated on top of a division that, even if it was not random, is meaningless. How many dots you estimated. And then the next experiment is about money allocation. And immediately, people begin giving more money to their co-over dot estimaters or under-dot estimaters. He does a bunch more like this. It replicates. Many others have replicated this in all kinds of different circumstances. Group identity takes hold very fast, and once it takes hold, the ability to sense it and then feel yourself in competition with the outgroup, no matter how meaningless the divisions are, is very easy. So then think about that when the divisions become very meaningful.

david leonhardt

And you talk a whole bunch about sports in the book, and so to any of our listeners who are saying, well, do these lab experiments really transfer into real life? I actually talked about this on last week’s episode. When you think about how much people end up hating people who root for a bunch of athletes who are changing year to year but wear different colored shirts, I think that’s a version of those experiments.

ezra klein

It’s 100 percent a version of those experiments. What you see there — people will burn cities in the aftermath of those games, which is only to say that once group identity takes hold it doesn’t need a lot to make it very, very, very powerful.

ross douthat

So now let’s talk a little bit about the role that choice and agency plays in all this, right. Because one of the implications of a lot of the research that you marshal about how identities are formed is that sort of tribes then form around collections of issues that don’t necessarily have that much in common with each other, right? But the idea is that once a particular issue brings you into a coalition, you gradually tribally align your views with your — you join the side you’re on, right?

ezra klein

Yes.

ross douthat

In effect, right? But then at some place in this process, someone does have agency, right?

ezra klein

Absolutely. People have agency who are organizing the political coalitions, right? I mean, it seems like your book leaves less room for the agency of individual voters but still a fair amount of room for the choices that elites make and have made in our country over the last 50 years. Yes, but I do want to say that my book is pushing against the amount of agency we assign individuals in political journalism. So let me say a couple of things on this. One, I do cite a fair amount of evidence in the book, and this comes from political scientist like Liliana Mason, among others, that identity tends to be a more central driver of polarization than policy. You’re making the very good point, Ross, that the way we structure our ideologies puts a lot of things that don’t seem to necessarily go together together, right? Why do capital gains tax cuts not go with believing in global warming, for instance? Most people actually are not that ideologically consistent. This is a way in which political elites really tend to misunderstand most voters. Elites are very ideologically consistent. They believe sort of everything their party believes down the line. Not everybody, but a lot of them. But as you go into actual voters, they tend to have an affiliation with the group. They are a Democrat or a Republican or sometimes they just hate the Democrats or hate the Republicans, and they may have a couple of issues they feel very strongly about, but they’re much more mixed ideologically than elites are, but they tend to very strong identity preferences around this. They’re from a group and they believe that one party or the other likes their group and will help them and the other party poses a threat to them. And there’s great research showing that if you look at, say, Republicans whose policy views should make them Democrats, that policy difference does less to restrain outgroup hostility than if you look at Republicans who have a lot of identity dimensions that would make them Democrats. Like they’re African-American and live in an urban center, things like that, and vice versa for Democrats. Now, that said, it is clearly the case there is contingency in American politics, and you could imagine the political parties compositions going different ways. Like for instance, I think it’s very plausible that Republicans could have become the party of civil rights, if it had been a Republican president who decided to really push the Civil Rights Act instead of Lyndon Johnson. Either you could have seen the parties aligning in a different way. There was already at least some possibility the Democrats could lean into their Dixiecrat dimension and become much more the party of white identity —

david leonhardt

And obviously, that was the case in the 19th century.

ezra klein

And that was the case in the 19th century, of course. That said, the thing where I really disagree with a lot of the way we tell the stories of American politics is that we overly individualize them in an effort to narrativize them. So it’s all about this president, or like that meeting, and I mean, this is a sort of game change why —

david leonhardt

Obama didn’t like having drinks with John Boehner.

ezra klein

Exactly, that kind of thing. Donald Trump in 2016 is another good example. There are a lot of Republicans in that primary making different choices rhetorically, ideologically, strategically than he did. And he won. So on the one hand, we can tell the story of the 2016 primary through the choices Donald Trump made, but on the other hand, in some ways, the bigger question is why those choices were rewarded by the Republican base.

david leonhardt

You obviously — identity is in many ways, the central theme of the book. And I find it overwhelmingly persuasive. So now I want to ask you about one little part that I didn’t —

ezra klein

No, I was going to stop this on “overly persuasive.” I’m out.

david leonhardt

[LAUGHING] Fair enough. So you put relatively little stock in the economic stagnation of the last 50 years in driving the political decisions of the white working class. And there are a couple of reasons why I think it plays a bigger role than you do, and I’ll just tick them off and I’d be interested in your response. So one, you cite the research by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, two fantastic political scientists —

ezra klein

And Michael Tessler.

david leonhardt

— and Michael Tessler, three fantastic political scientists, who point out this sort of sharp break of voters, white working class voters to Republicans, after Obama. During and after Obama. It seems like a reaction to the first black president. Of course, there was also something else going on in 2008, which where we were stuck in this horrible financial crisis and going through the worst recession in living memory. And so when I look at that, I think it’s probably more complicated than just the first black president. I think it’s the interaction of that with this recession, and I see a lot of other evidence that way as well. The drift of the white, working class to the right predates Obama. Many people in the white working class actually voted for Obama in ‘08 before flipping to Trump, and I see much more of an interaction between race and economic stagnation than you and Tessler and Vavreck and Sides do. And I’m interested in why you think the story I just pulled out is wrong.

ezra klein

So why do you have to keep saying white working class there? If it’s economic anxiety why can’t you just say working class?

david leonhardt

Well, you actually make this case in the book, which is the Republican Party has so turned off voters of color, that to them the Republican Party is not an option. So they’re staying in the Democratic Party, or maybe they’re not voting. But whereas white voters, I think, see two options, and for a combination of race and frustration about it, end up switching.

ezra klein

I think that’s one place to start, because I do think what you say there is true at some level. But also if it really was just a reaction to economics, if you have to add in a new variable to explain what’s happening, why economics is not the central driver. Because if first if you just look at a cut, you’re going to get a Democratic vote. Like, straightforwardly, and in fact, the most economically anxious voters go for Democrats because a lot of them are non-white. So that’s one thing. Second, I think that you’re underselling the Sides, Vavreck, Tassler research. So what they find, what a number of players have found in this, is that the people in the country with the highest levels of racial resentment become the most economically anxious. And you see this very sharply when Donald Trump wins, the most racially resentful voters become immediately the most economically optimistic. So I don’t at all want to tell you economics plays no role in politics. It obviously does, right? It obviously is one of the key determinants of how the electorate as a whole votes. But the idea that Trump himself won because of economic anxiety just doesn’t end up fitting the data very well. In fact, a key argument of the book is that Donald Trump did not win primarily because of race, he won primarily because he was a Republican and that party polarization, identity polarization was able to overwhelm a lot of other differences that you might have expected to fracture that coalition. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton make race and immigration very salient political fights in the debate, where Obama and Romney fought over are you a baker, are you a worker, or are you an entrepreneur, or are you a screwed over you know would-be union member. Trump and Clinton basically fight this election out over how do you feel about immigration. The other thing I’ll say is that the other reason I’m skeptical of this connection between a populist right candidate winning an election and it all being about economic anxiety is we didn’t invent populist right candidates in America in the year of our Lord 2016. They’re all over Europe, they have been for a very long time, and their rises simply do not correlate. They do not correlate with economics, they correlate with immigration and fears over changing countries.

ross douthat

Except that the racial landscape and the nature of immigration debates in Europe are considerably different from our own. They have some overlap and some similarities, but also some substantial differences. And in fact, historically, the rise of the far right in Western Europe has correlated with the aftermath of the great recession and the era of austerity in Europe over the last 10 years. I think you’re underselling the kind of holistic regional argument here, right? Like, there is no question that the kind of person overall predisposed to vote for a Republican or a conservative is often more economically prosperous than the kind of person who is more likely to vote for a Democrat or a left wing candidate. But at the same time within regions, there is a clear correlation between right wing populist votes and indicators ranging from the effects of China’s trade, to the hangover of communism in East Germany, to the opioid epidemic in the United States, and there is a clear shift in who votes for right wing parties as right wing politicians move to the left on economics. This is true of Boris Johnson winning Labor constituencies in the U.K., and it’s true of Trump. And I think there’s this confidence — and I don’t want to be — I am in a sense manifesting one of the tendencies you talk about in your book, where reasonably smart people of which I at least pretend to be can parse the data in order to confirm their priors. But I look at the broad data trend and I say, you know, I believe my eyes. I say who are we kidding here, right? Of course racism has something to do with this. But the fact that you have conservative parties moving to the left on economics in the aftermath of a huge economic disaster, in a period of social decay for the working class, and winning working class votes, it seems to me silly to just sort of bracket economic policy as a factor here.

ezra klein

So, just to be clear, this is like six paragraphs in the book. [LEONHARDT LAUGHS] And so to pivot the book —

ross douthat

We’re here to argue, man. We’re not just here to tell you how —

ezra klein

[LAUGH] So to pivot the book on the economic anxiety verse race dimension of Trump, I think it would be a bit wrong.

ross douthat

So let’s say a Democrat reads this book and says yeah, you totally persuaded me. What are we supposed to do about it? What’s your answer? What should the Democratic Party do over these next 20 years to win more often than it has been?

ezra klein

I think that’s a very hard question. One thing I’ll say about the book, and you see it when you read it, is I think the book’s value is in trying to describe how the system is working. And it’s a system that is working upon Democrats, a system working upon Republicans, upon — there’s a lot about the media and the role we’re playing in polarization, how elections are changing. But one of things polarization does, and this is very important in the argument that polarization itself is not the problem, a lot of countries have party polarization and they work more or less just fine — polarization interacts with our system in a particularly destructive way, which is that our system was not built to have party polarization, was not even originally built have political parties. And you need very high levels of consensus or at least compromise to do anything. What ends up happening at periods of high polarization is bipartisanship becomes functionally irrational for anybody to offer, and that means you can’t get big things done. So I can give you my fantasy football list of how I would reform American politics, and — Ross and I, we were chatting before, have some disagreements on this, but I think it be good to democratize. I think a problem in American politics right now is that the Republican Party has found a path to minority rule which is a very bad incentive structure for any party to have. But I don’t think that there’s going to be a bunch of bills passing to add in proportional representation or redo campaign finance or get rid of the filibuster or make D.C. and Puerto Rico states or so on and so forth, because for the very same reason you can’t pass anything small, it’s very hard to pass anything big. So one of the effects of polarization is to lock us endlessly in the conflict portion of American politics. Arguments don’t get resolved. What ends up happening is that it’s very hard for anybody to govern, which means it’s very hard then for the American public to see how anybody governs and decide if they liked what happened and they want those people back in office or not. Instead it’s a lot of debate over why things didn’t happen, who obstructed whom, who didn’t get a drink with Mitch McConnell, right? All this kind of thing. And it makes it very hard for the system to be held accountable. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

The book is called “Why We’re Polarized.” It is on sale now. Ezra Klein, thank you for joining us.

ezra klein

Thank you for having me.

ross douthat

Thanks, Ezra.

david leonhardt

Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation, when we make a suggestion meant to take your mind off of the news of the day. It’s just Ross and me this week, and Ross, it is your turn. What you have for me?

ross douthat

So in a way, this is like my hamster story. Another story of parental failure and disaster. But my wife and I attempted to go away last weekend to an oceanside resort in Rhode Island for a night and a day of sort of relaxation to belatedly celebrate my birthday, and —

david leonhardt

Happy birthday.

ross douthat

It was a long time ago — and celebrate ourselves before we have another child. And it only half worked because overnight one of our kids got the flu, and so we had to hustle back. And instead of 36 hours of relaxation we only got 20. But I could see even in that 20 hours the pleasantness of being at what I’m going to recommend, which is a resort in the off-season. This was a place in Watch Hill, a very fancy resort, I think called Ocean House. And the boardwalk was deserted, the sea was a gray and steely, the waves were crashing. And it was kind of fantastic, and also much cheaper than going to such a resort in the high season. And I think, you know, there’s something not just for the price but also for the sort of fascinating emptiness of vacation towns when nobody’s there. That’s actually really fun in a certain way, especially if you like or love the person that you’re with. So that’s my recommendation. Oceanside resorts when the temperature is below 45 degrees.

david leonhardt

Well, I endorse that recommendation. This is going to be a much less romantic story, but when I was a kid and I had a bunch of big exams coming up I would sometimes go to my grandparents’ house on the Jersey Shore and study for them there when no one else was there. So I couldn’t be distracted by my sister and my friends back home, and I still remember that feeling of walking on that empty beach. Right? The beach that was just cheek by jowl in the summer, and walking all that empty beach. And it felt like a great privilege. So I endorse your recommendation, although I’m sorry you got only 20 hours away.

ross douthat

This is the life we’ve chosen, David.

david leonhardt

Ross, what’s the recommendation again?

ross douthat

Resorts in the off season.

david leonhardt

Excellent. [MUSIC PLAYING] That’s our show this week, thanks so much for listening. If you have ideas or questions, please leave us a voicemail at (347) 915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, you can leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. Thanks again to Ezra Klein for joining us. This week’s show is produced by Maddy Foley and James T. Greene for Transmitter Media, and edited by Sara Nic. Our Executive Producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, and Ian Prasad Philbrick. Our theme was composed by Alison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here with Michelle next week.

ezra klein