Ezra Klein

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If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you.

I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of The Ezra Klein Show.

And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it.

There is going to be plenty to talk about.

You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts.

So we live in this moment when illiberalism is winning, when illiberalism is in power.

I don't think anybody really argues that.

What has surprised me about it is how weak liberalism has felt in response.

I'm a liberal.

I'm like a professional liberal, one involved in liberal politics.

And I don't think at this moment I could tell you what liberalism's vision is, who its leaders are.

In some way, I feel liberalism never really recovered from the Obama era, when it had this grand victory in electing America's first Black president, when it had this thoughtful, deliberate, and frankly, quite popular liberal leader, and then it ended in Donald Trump.

And not only Donald Trump once, Donald Trump twice.

But here's the thing, Donald Trump is not working out.

He is not making people want more of what he is.

But if he's going to be beaten, if illiberal political forces are going to turn back, I think you're going to need a liberalism that is aspirational again.

A liberalism that has moral imagination, again.

A liberalism that stands for more than not this.

And so I've been on this sort of esoteric personal quest, reading all these books in the liberal canon, reading all these histories of liberalism, trying to think through, like, what in this very, very long tradition...