Josherich's Blog

A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics

From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Back in 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, there was this book. It was self-published by a former CIA media analyst named Martin Gurry that became a kind of phenomenon in Silicon Valley. The book was called The Revolt of the Public. And what it did was describe these informational dynamics. It described the way that politics was changing because media was changing. Because media and information got from scarce to abundant. And that had created constant recurrent crises for whoever was in power. The ability to control a narrative was gone.

And in this world of fractured media, there was always an incentive and always an ability to show what was wrong with whoever was ruling. And this was, Gurry argued, fundamentally unstable. It knew how to destroy. It did not know how to build. Gurry has, in his own politics, evolved. He didn’t vote in 2016 or 2020. But he voted for Trump in 2024, and he’s become much more positive about Trump this time than the first time.

He’s a visiting scholar at Mercatus, and he writes for the Free Press and Discourse and City Journal, among others. I’ve watched him come to the view that actually maybe Trump is building something more stable. Maybe this revolt of the public is not merely negation, but that what Trump and Musk represent and are doing is actually the creation of a positive agenda that might endure. So I also thought his argument was worth hearing out.

As always, my email, Ezra Klein Show at nytimes.com. Martin Gurry, welcome to the show. Great to be here. So in 2014, you published this book, The Revolt of the Public. Lay out the basic argument you were making about attention and media and publics.

Well, the argument of the book goes back to my days at CIA, where I was one of the least sexy jobs you could have. I was an analyst of global media, and it was a relatively straightforward job. I mean, you could, if the president asked you, how are my policies playing in France, you went to two newspapers that were considered those sources authoritative. That’s what we called them, right?

Around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake generated this tsunami of information that was essentially unparalleled in human history, all right? And there’s numbers backing that up. And we just got swamped. The first response, of course, of somebody who deals with authoritative information is, what’s authoritative in this infinite mass of stuff? The second part was, what’s the effect of it, all right? What is the effect of going from a world where information is extremely valuable to one that is so abundant that you don’t know what it’s worth?

And there was a tsunami of information, and we could track it as different countries digitize, and right behind it, we could see ever-increasing levels of social and political turbulence, okay? So the book is trying to explain that. What became very clear was that our entire 21st-century set of institutions that hold up modern life—the government, the media, business, academia—were shaped to the 20th century, very top-down, very hierarchical, very I talk, you listen.

So what the internet did, what the digital revolution did, was essentially create the possibility of this gigantic information sphere that was outside of the institutions, all right? And it turned to the institutions, and the first one that it turned to was your business, media, right? It was this big fight between the blogs and the mainstream media that was the enemy, right? And sure enough, when that happens, you can find many errors, many mistakes, and some bad faith in the institutions, and I think it’s institutional failure and elite failure that sets the information agenda on the web.

I mean, that’s pretty clear. It can be any number of things, but the total effect of that is a gigantic erosion of trust in the institutions, which then builds up this digital world that is non-institutional even stronger. So it’s kind of an inversion of what had gone on before. Before, you had the Walter Cronkites of the world, very respected, most trusted man in America. Think of a journalist such as yourself being voted the most trusted man in America today. It’s not even a joke.

Give me time. Okay, Walter. One thing that I took from your book, and it’s held with me for a long time, is that you have to understand media and attention as a separate causal stream into politics. And I don’t think we like to do that. We like to think about politics as a relentlessly rational response to mostly material conditions, maybe cultural conditions, maybe the quality of elites, maybe the quality of governance, maybe inflation.

And I understood what you were saying then. You can tell me if this is wrong. That there was, no, this other dynamic happening, which is that the nature of the information flow now just creates a constant pressure for distrust. That fractured media will always point out the problems in governance, creating very fast backlashes to whatever the status quo is, such that the status quo gets overturned and overturned. The populist right comes in over the establishment, then they become unpopular, the establishment comes back, that it’s this endless ricocheting. But that’s not necessarily just about material conditions. It’s about the dynamics of information having a momentum of their own.

Yeah. I mean, I believe that the information structure is one of the most determinative factors in any society, right? It shapes the landscape. It’s an ecological force. So if you’re dealing with a mass media 20th-century style, it’s top-down again, and you need to have a printing press or a TV station, and that takes a certain kind of overhead and money, and you can’t talk back to it. So the mood of information, that’s slightly Marshall McLuhan-ish, is, I think—

Make my heartbeat faster, yeah. Yeah. I’m sort of like a semi-McLuhan-ish. I think he was right on about a lot of things. And I think one of the things he was right about is that the primary aspect, as we talk about everything else, everything else is downstream for how we exchange information, right? So politics is downstream. Even culture is downstream, okay? Because it gets exchanged in certain media.

Now, I would say, in part, you’re right that the rise of digital media just crashed into a world constructed around analog media and broke it to pieces. And there’s the question that digital media, in and of itself, stimulates controversy, stimulates hostility, political hostility. If not political, some kind of hostility. But I think also it uncovered a lot of, let’s say, negativity, a lot of negation towards the institutions that were almost certainly already there, that was masked by that former system, top-down.

You know, the New York Times is talking down at you. You don’t get to pick up your comment section and say, “New York Times, you’re wrong,” or go to X in the New York Times, “you’re wrong.” No, you’re just going to either throw it away or write a letter to the editor or something along those lines. So I think a lot of the hostility, a lot of the negation, a lot of what’s happened with the public, which is now a global phenomenon. By no means, we Americans are very provincial. By no means, an American monopoly. This rise was there. It was just masked by the previous information system.

And this information system stimulates it, but also releases it. Here’s a question that I think about a fair amount. Do you think the institutions of today, the elites of today, across different domains—media, military, government, economics, business—do you think they’re worse than they were? Or do we have access to so much more contrary information and critique of them that we think they’re worse than they were? Or does access to all that information make them worse than they were because they have less room to move and to act and to correct mistakes?

There is no question that we think that they’re worse because we know so much more about them, right? I mean, how many sex scandals that we know about today would never have come up in the 20th century? I also think, however, that they are particularly bad. And they’re particularly bad because they haven’t made the leap to the new information system. In other words, in the 20th century, we had people like Kennedy and Reagan, who were masters of television. You know, they knew the information systems that they were conveying their message on.

Today, the elites, as a rule, number one, because they’re old. But number two, because even the young people tend to have old heads. And number three, because it’s a very uncomfortable medium, right? Because you do get talked back a lot. So I think what we need and what we haven’t gotten yet, although this crowd with Trump, that may be the beginning, is people who are just totally comfortable with this crazy information system.

Trump, for example, on Twitter, he was like the Beethoven of Twitter in his first term. Basically, he is the guy who said, “No, I did everything wrong.” You know, whatever scandal you’ve, he’s got this gigantic bullseal with a hide so thick that no matter what you stab that thing with, it just kind of doesn’t even touch him, right? He’s full of scars, but that’s his magic. That is the guy’s magic, is that he’s already done all the things. You can’t find any skeletons in my closet because all the skeletons are right here in my living room, and you can see them, and I don’t care, right?

Okay. Am I for that? No. But it gives you some idea of how you need a kind of elite that deals with the fact that whatever you do, if you project an image that is false, you’re going to crash. You’re going to burn and crash. Here’s my revolt of the public informed model of the past, you know, decade or so in American politics. You have this almost hydraulic informational process by which high engagement movements—right, people or ideas that create a lot of energy—rise. But you then have this counter process by which their opposite then begins to rise as soon as they gain power.

So you have Barack Obama, who’s followed by really his opposite in a striking way in Donald Trump. But then as Donald Trump rises in power, you get this counter vibe to Donald Trump: the resistance, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, wokeness, right? We now call it. I think Biden’s complicated here because he’s Barack Obama’s vice president, but he’s so not of this era that in some ways I think he’s informationally almost a pause. But then Trumpism comes roaring back with even more force.

And what fascinates me about this period is not that it doesn’t seem to be selecting for one thing. It is selecting almost endlessly for the strongest thing and then the opposite of the strongest thing. And it’s this like crazy ricochet process. How much do you buy that explanation of what’s been going on? What I can say is what you said is true at the descriptive level. Back, forth, back, forth, back, forth, right? What I think is happening is trial, error, trial, error, trial. The electorate is searching for somebody to make sense politically out of this moment.

And so far, everybody has failed. You know, Obama did okay. He got reelected. But in the end, he did not set the standard for how we deal with politics at the presidential level in the digital age. Trump came, out. Biden came, out. Now you have Trump. Who knows what’s going to happen? If Trump succeeds, it may be that that’s the model. The odds are massively against it, just massively against it.

Well, let’s talk a bit about the Biden era. One thing that you emphasized a lot in that, and you’re pretty critical of Joe Biden, is that the form of the elite that he led, the Democratic Party in that era, became defined around what you call the politics of control. What’s the politics of control? Well, first of all, I want to apologize to Joe Biden. If I had known, I mean, you could sort of see that the guy wasn’t there, all right? But if I had known the degree to which he really was not in charge of anything.

I’ve read you on this. I think you’re wrong on this. I know. I mean, that’s pretty clear to me. Whoever was running the White House during that time, I think, had that, you know, that impulse to go back to the 20th century. And, you know, the ideal internet for people like that would be the New York Times circa, you know, 1958 or something, you know, front page of the New York Times, 1958. That’s the way information should be.

And they have converted this into some sort of almost, this is a fairly recent development, an almost ideological construct where they now seem to be promoting what you might call a guided society, you know, where the ordinary people like me and others, you know, need Sherpas to make sure we don’t fall off the cliffs and keep going upwards and onwards, you know, so we’re protected against disinformation, and we’re protected against hate, and we’re protected against all these other things.

An attempt to erect a censorship apparatus that would de-emphasize people or silence people, silence certain voices, silence certain opinions, get experts and bureaucrats to basically proclaim that certain truths were false. And it was a futile attempt. I mean, it was completely futile as it was happening. And of course, it led, I think, it paved the way to Trump. You know, I come from Cuba, where censorship…

I didn’t know you came from Cuba. Oh, yes. I was, by the time I was 10, I had experienced a pretty stern right-wing censorship and a left-wing dictatorship that basically killed the media. I mean, there was no media left. So I’m pretty touchy about that sort of thing. And I guess I have like antennae that can feel things coming. And thank God for the First Amendment. They can’t do it here.

Well, let me pick up on something there because this feels to me like it is completely fundamental right now to the right’s self-definition. J.D. Vance goes to the Munich conference, tells the Europeans they’re doing too much to restrict speech and expression and political expression in their countries. And then I look at what people do. I look at, say, Elon Musk has made cis or cisgender—He has tagged that as hate speech on X. I’m watching the Trump administration tell all the agencies they have to go through and look for words that are now out of favor, diversity and DEI and things like that.

And it all has to be erased. They’ve ended up knocking out things they didn’t mean to knock out because like the word just happened to be there in another context. So I kind of see this world of people who I think understand themselves as free expression warriors. And then as soon as they get into power, whether it’s running X or running the government, they certainly seem to me to be on a campaign of censorship. What do you think I’m missing?

I mean, you’re missing dimension, I think. The dimension of censorship under Biden, he basically told the platforms, you have to adhere to European standards of good behavior online. Well, the Europeans don’t have a First Amendment, right? And the Europeans, honestly, we tend to think of as being just like us. When it comes to speech, and this has always been the case, and it is more the case every day, there’s not like halfway between us and China.

So I think the difference is that, okay? Do you, as an ordinary person, feel like you can say whatever you want, all right? If you don’t like X, you can go to, you know, Blue Sky or something, right? That’s true then, too. You could go to Rumble, you could go to Gab, you could go to Truth Social. The thing I want to push you on a little bit here, because I’m not saying there was no—I think your point, as I take it, is interesting that partially what you’re seeing people like the Biden administration respond to is an effort to try to get control of an information space that they no longer know how to control and even no longer know how to operate in.

I am struck by seeing very, very aggressive movements from the Trump administration immediately to impose control on what, say, civil servants can say. So is that a dynamic of the left that you’re describing, or is it just now in this era of information overload, actually both sides are fighting for control of it and whatever their professed values, as soon as they get into power, the thing they really want to do is decide what the boundaries are and what you can say and, you know, how you can say it.

Well, let’s give it time. I mean, you may be right. All I have to say is, I find it remarkable—you can look at me, I am not a young man, all right—that free speech is a right-wing cause, all right? When did that happen, okay? I mean, you have several—all of them left people, John Kerry most recently, bemoaning the existence of the First Amendment. I have never seen that in my entire life. Everybody always pretended, at least, they were for free speech, you know, even when secretly they wanted to control it, even when secretly they were trying to control it, they always talked the talk.

And now, only on the left, you find people saying, “No, we need boundaries, we need this, we need that, we have protection against…” So that’s my take on that. You may be right. Maybe that this crowd ends up being even worse. So we got to watch that. I don’t really—they’re not—you know, I am not a—I am an independent politically and have no dogs in the political fight. But in the free speech fight, I’m all in, okay?

Well, tell me about your movement on this. So 2016, you don’t vote. 2020, you don’t vote. 2024, you vote for Donald Trump. What moved you towards him in that period? In large part, it was that. It was that. It was free speech. It was normalizing the censorship of things that in the olden days, me as a 60s guy, okay, very, very aging hippie, okay, felt like, this is crazy. This is crazy. This is what we fought for in the 60s was to be able to say whatever we wanted to and to expand that to whatever the limit is that doesn’t break down social peace, right?

So that was my number one thing. Now, the number two thing was I just felt like the world was becoming more and more dangerous. And I knew, regardless of what you say, that this was an empty skin suit in the White House and that we were just like an airplane on automatic pilot, circling and circling, waiting to run on gas. And I do not love Donald Trump. I never have. But I felt like he was for free speech and he’s a live brain in the White House. Hopefully, he will be more than that.

You also say something else that I have found a lot of people felt this time. I think it is underestimated how much the meaning of Donald Trump changed from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. And you write that Trump this time had become a kind of mythical figure, that he has been, quote, transformed into a living symbol of the progressive elite’s abuse of power and contempt for the principle of equality. I’ve heard something like that from a lot of people, and particularly the mythic dimension of Trump.

Tell me what you mean by that and how you felt that change in your own perspective. Well, I can tell you the moment it happened, where I saw that went, geez, okay, it was that near assassination episode where, I don’t know how lucky you’ve been, but if you’ve been lucky, you have never been in a place where bullets are flying. I come from Cuba. I can tell you, when bullets start flying, you think you’re a hero until that moment, and then you hit the ground and you make like a pancake, okay?

And here’s a man who not only was being shot at, but had been hit, and he probably had no idea how badly, all right? And stood up and told the Secret Service agents, I mean, just presence of mind, you people have knocked my shoes off. I’m going to put on my shoes. I’m going to turn to the crowd. I’m going to say fight, okay? I thought, number one, that took a lot of courage, just basically physical courage. Number two, presence of mind, all right?

But there’s a third element, and I don’t even know what to do with that one. I mean, you can call it the providential interpretation of Trump. You know, he thinks that God saved him to make America great again. Or you can give a mathematical explanation. He’s kind of like a strange attractor, you know? And these incredible coincidences keep happening all around him that completely defy the laws of probability. The fact that the bullet missed him. That image where he’s standing there shaking his fist at destiny.

And he’s got those Secret Service agents reprotectively running. And there’s a flag in the background. What are the odds of that thing happening spontaneously? No wonder people think it was acted, right? But if you look at the last, oh, 80 years, this one series of bizarre questions: how did he beat Hillary Clinton? How did his popularity resurrect from January 6th, 2021? How did he just kind of dispose of a pretty good field of Republican aspirants, including proven winners like DeSantis, you know? I mean, endless numbers of questions.

Every event tends to skew in his direction. You know, you can say that what he did, being exiled and coming back, was kind of a hero’s journey. You know, that’s not necessarily a moral quality. And he could do many bad things with all those qualities. But part of what I think the mythic side of Trump is the fact that the world around him is not the world around the rest of us. I think there are seasons to the way we understand the world. And I think certainly in the Obama era, we were in a season of empirics, technocracy. And I don’t just mean that in terms of literally the reports people produced and the way they argued. I also mean it in terms of the aesthetic. Right. Oh, yeah.

And this is a point my colleague Ross Douthat has made, but it’s also something that I’ve been thinking about, that it has felt to me for some time like we’re reentering a slightly more mystic, mythic turn of the wheel. I think you see it in the popularity of Catholicism, right, with its pomp and its circumstance and its strangeness of Greek orthodoxy, you know, the return of astrology as a major force. And something about Trump ended up fitting that, for a lot of people at least, right? I’m not saying that I have this particular interpretation of him, but the degree to which, you know, I think even within his own movement, he is treated as, I’ve said this many times before, that he’s almost like the Grand Ayatollah of national conservatism, that even the people who like him don’t view him as this precise technical policy thinker. They view him as somebody with a kind of intuitive, almost spiritual connection to the country that they see him leading, the people they see him representing.

And then the revolving around him of all these other powerful figures like Musk and so on, it made him more like this. It wasn’t just his show anymore. He became like this, you know, quasi-Debby God-like or Pope-like figure presiding over a moment. Yeah, no, I think you’re 100% right. That’s actually a pretty deep observation. And I, having lived through the 60s, which is kind of like that, you know, astrology brought it to mind. But there was that sense of mysticism almost, of connection to something beyond just everyday life. There must be something more to it than this. I think there’s a huge hunger for that right now. I think a lot of our politics sublimate that, honestly.

It’s impossible to measure empirically. I don’t know how you do that. But I profoundly believe that. I think we have been living through a period of, yeah, I think the Obama era was cool, calm, collected. You know, there’s the rule of technocracy. And that was very flavorless, I think, for a lot of people. People want red meat. And I mean, what is Trump, right? So I think we’re beginning this era. I think there’s more down the road. So let’s keep our eyes open because it can manifest itself in a number of good or bad ways.

Well, it’s also cooperation versus dominance, I think. That the promise of the Obama era, of Obama himself in a way, was you could cooperate your way to this future, right? You could talk your way, think your way through the conflicts. And Trump, and I think something I see people responding to, but I’ve been in D.C. this week talking to people sort of from different factions of the right. And something they all say is that America is strong and we stopped throwing around that strength. That we have the ability to shape events in our image and to our desires and to our interests. And we bound ourselves in ways that we didn’t have to, right? We have this huge economy, but we didn’t use things like tariffs to make others bend to our will. We let ourselves get taken advantage of by China.

We don’t do any territorial expansion anymore, right? Things in the 19th century, early 20th century, more common in terms of American policy have become like morally uncommon. Not just a thing we don’t do, but a thing we don’t even consider doing. And Trump is a bringing back of this old spirit, a kind of more domineering frontier-like, you use your strength to reshape the world energy. Yeah. I think there’s some truth in that. I would say that a lot of people that I know who are pro-Trump feel that he’s not their dominator. He’s their liberator.

In other words, he’s the guy who’s breaking up this very dominating system of elite institutional governance and allowing the normies, as they call themselves, to sort of do what they wish. I think the word frontier that you used is critical. And I mean, this is a great country. I mean, I am, I’m an immigrant, right? So I kind of feel like the frontier spirit is part of my spirit. I think Americans, basically, that’s who they are. They have this craving for some far frontier-like thing that they must, you know, master or conquer or populate or coordinate. It doesn’t really matter. The modality doesn’t matter. It’s the challenge that matters.

And I think, honestly, under Obama, there was no real challenge. Where were we headed towards? You know, it was unclear. And I think, for the moment, and we’ll see with Trump, for the moment, the clarity is in negation, in undoing that controlling apparatus that the Biden administration had set up. The best AI assistant isn’t one that knows the whole world. It’s one that knows your world. A custom assistant built on Watson X with IBM’s granite models can leverage your trusted data, be easily trained on your workflows, and integrate with your apps. It can be tuned to do just what you need.

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I think if you are a normie liberal, let’s call it, the way you are experiencing Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Doge, broadly, the sort of Russell vote, the sort of war on what now gets called the administrative state, is as this incredible assertion of powers, maybe even a constitutional crisis, right? They went in, they just destroyed USAID in a day, right? That wasn’t something that people thought you could do. They fired huge numbers of federal workers, saying it was for cause, even though it had nothing to do with their individual job performance, knocked out all these probationary workers, right? They’ve tried to break huge amounts of the federal government, reshape it to their will.

The way that has been experienced by liberals is as an extraordinary assertion of control, of power that the executive is not supposed to have. The way you’ve described it, the way I’ve seen other people describe it, is as an act of breaking up control. I’d like you to try to describe how it looks from that perspective, thinking about an audience who’s experiencing it in the opposite way. Well, I was probably de-amplified by Facebook at some point. I don’t even know why I said it. But when my wife would send out my articles, they got a lot more response than when I sent out my articles on Facebook.

And I think when Mark Zuckerberg saw the light, suddenly realized, I don’t like censorship anymore, strangely, after Donald Trump got elected. I think that is the way that the people on this side, and I’m not a Trumpist, like I said, I believe in free speech. And I thought the idea that you were supposed to say certain words, I mean, the right has never had this power, okay? The power to impose certain words, the power to basically come up with entirely new definitions about things that were pretty settled, like who’s a man and who’s a woman, you know, been settled since Adam and Eve.

And all these constantly changing new permutations of ideas that were not intuitive, let’s put it that way, but mandatory from the moment they get proclaimed and by whom I don’t even know. I had a friend who was a professor, and this was like years ago, about five or six years ago, and I asked him, what’s it like? He says, it’s like a mind-clearing operation, being in college, you know, a college professor. Sooner or later, something’s going to blow up on you, you know? So it’s not just the elites being controlling. It’s a kind of a culture of control or an ideology of control.

There is, I think, an element of revolt to the public in it. So I understand the culture you’re reacting to here. I see where you’re coming from on that. But I do want to keep focused a little bit on the actual acts of the president here, because I’ll note that, so I’ve asked you about the dismantling USAID, which you’ve written columns on, the actions of Doge, which you’ve written pieces on. You sort of moved to whether or not Facebook shadowbanned you. I don’t know if Facebook shadowbanned you, if they did, they shouldn’t have. But the actions of the administration have been, your guy from Cuba, have been the assertion of an extraordinary amount of executive control over the administrative state.

Things that the, I can tell you, the Biden administration did not think they were allowed to do, right? The Obama administration did not think they were allowed to do. The amount of stories I have heard about how difficult it is to work through the privacy regulations of the IRS in order to make social insurance programs be smoother. And in the end, they just weren’t that smooth because, like, everybody was so concerned about privacy and you just couldn’t get access to the systems. They just come in and they, like, bust their way to the systems.

So, again, when you see them doing this and you see this not as the taking of control but the breaking of a controlling apparatus, try to describe that perspective on it for someone who doesn’t share it. I mean, you must know enough liberals to know that they are experiencing this era of Trump and Musk and Doge as, like, the dawning of authoritarianism. Like, how do you tell them to see it from the way you’re seeing it? Yeah, I mean, what is authoritarianism? That one, I do know that most of my friends are liberals. They don’t think he’s an authoritarian, though. What is he doing to the government?

Okay, what I see is being done is the very earliest moment in which AI collides with the analog world. That IRS thing you were describing. I mean, I was a bureaucrat for many, many years at CIA, all right? So, I know perfectly well how that works. And, yeah, so, first of all, there’s all these controlling mandates. In the end, they all checkmate each other, right? So, you have this paralysis. And it’s all, take this sheet of paper, write the memo, take it here, take it there. In the end, it gets lost and nothing happens, right? What you have is Elon Musk applying AI to all those rules and regulations.

And you can identify exactly where you can go. Perfectly legal, right? It’s not clear that it’s perfectly legal. Well, it is not unclear to me. I mean, they’re moving so fast that there’s probably a lot I don’t know. But, for example, USAID was set up by executive order. So, you can crash that down by executive order. There was no act of Congress. No, it was set up by Congress. That’s not what I understand. In 1998, it was set up by, like, its current structure was created through Congress. I mean, it is USAID’s statute.

Well, all I can tell you is I see this as the application of the human AI mind to the analog world. And let’s put the legality aside. It allows for the identification of things that can be cut way faster than the analog minds can follow. And I have to ask you, if you want to be an authoritarian, are you going to cut back the government? I mean, let me tell you, I have lived under authoritarians. Cutting back the government is not what they do. See, but I don’t think that they’re cutting back the government. I think they are trying to take control of it.

I have heard this AI thing from a couple of people. And I follow it closely. And I am open to the idea that one thing Elon Musk wants to do is bring AI into the federal government. I am not super open to the idea that that’s what Doge is doing now. For one thing, like with the word efficiency, it’s always efficiency for what? AI for what? Every AI system has some kind of value function, some kind of prompt you have to be giving it. The question of the prompt is really then the important question.

Like, yes, you could, in theory, unleash AI on the entire range of treasury payment data. What are you trying to get it defined? If you’re trying to get it to find fraud, fine. How is fraud defined? Like, what do you say is fraud? I don’t even think really, to be honest with you, that’s what you think they’re doing. Like, you wrote a good piece, I think, just not from my perspective, about why you thought it was good that they were getting rid of USAID. What was that argument?

My take on USAID is that, what was the point of it? What was the point of it? And you look at a lot of the programs that were doing, there clearly was no point. They were trying to find some point of it. We give aid. What do we give aid for? Well, in the old days, yeah, it was, you know, we fought the commies. And if we could bribe some government or some movement or something to fight the commies along with us, we didn’t care how corrupt that was. It was good. Now they’re on our side. But now we’re not in that kind of a world anymore.

So these people are not sophisticated thinkers of what to do with government mission. And what you were saying, which is to what end, is the ultimate key, all right? So I am with them so far, but because the government is just such a monstrous bloat that, honestly, what they’re doing is fingernail pairings. But to what end? Do any of these people in the Trump administration have an image in their minds of once we’ve taken the government and we squeezed it and we broke it and we reshaped it and now it’s going to do what? And I am not sure. I have not seen that anywhere.

Some maybe marginal people to the Musk minions. There’s this sub-sec person, mysterious, called Eko. I don’t know if you’ve read his stuff, E-K-O. He’s sort of like as close to an ideologist, and maybe this is a fantasy world, but he persuades you that with AI, the president has basically the entirety of the government becomes intelligible. And it becomes intelligible horizontally, so you can follow every agency that is trying to find little cutouts and rabbit holes to hide, you know, waste in or whatever. But it’s also intelligible vertically. So if you’re allocating money for a bridge repair, it can show you the bridge repair, the actual bridge, and what’s actually being repaired.

But, I mean, that’s utopian stuff. It’s very utopian stuff about where do we get to this bottom-up world or whatever. They themselves have not said anything. They are not very articulate about this, and should we be paying attention? Yeah. Should we think that it’s authoritarianism that are doing it? I don’t think so. I haven’t read Eko. I have seen these sort of like let’s put all government on the blockchain kind of ideas before. And both, I think they tend to reflect people who are not trying to follow where the government spends its money because actually we know quite a lot about that, and people just don’t like doing the spade work.

But here’s one argument. It’s sort of an argument that I think you agree with, but I’ve heard it from other people. So let me try to state it as generously as I can, which is that the administrative state is a unelected fourth branch of government. That in this era of the revolt of the public, that it is not just frustration about information. It is frustration about unresponsiveness. Government doesn’t work. It doesn’t do what you tell it to. You don’t feel it in your life. And when you do feel it, it’s often not felt in a good way.

And particularly for the right, because the government is staffed by liberals because liberals like the government better than the right does. You come in as an anti-government disruptor like Donald Trump was in 2017. And you find you’re stymied left and right by these procedures, by these processes, by these bureaucrats, by these civil servants. And so what you’re trying to do is, like, break this power center that stands between the people and the government they elect. And I think a thing that I am personally surprised by a little bit is how much the right has adopted this view that the executive is the will of the people.

And the idea is that you need to give Donald Trump this power because he is the accountable one. And it should just do what he says in a pretty much unquestioned way. And that is responsiveness. You break the administrative state. So these populist leaders getting elected atop public dissatisfaction can control it and make whatever it is they think the people want. What really matters, honestly, is the restoration of trust. I think today, trust has just evaporated. And I think we can discuss the justice of that. I think there is some justice to it. I think some of it is utopian expectations versus just the way the world actually runs, you know.

But there it is. It has evaporated. What is done, honestly, as long as there is no, you know, law breaking or anything like that, whatever gets done, whatever gets broken, if you can restore the trust of the public and democratic institutions, then you will have done a good thing. Whether these people can do it, that’s a serious question. I think this creates an interesting question about whether or not there is a corollary theory to yours. That it’s not what we are living through repeatedly right now is not revolts of the public, but revolts of elites.

Let me try to make this argument to you and see what you think. So, you look at the public. It’s moving by a couple points in each election. The movable public is narrow. But if you look at the elites who are all on Twitter talking to each other or X or Facebook or whatever, they’re swinging unbelievably far election to election, right? They get elected. You know, Joe Biden gets elected in a fairly narrow election by historical standards. And they come in certain, even though they have a 50-50 Senate majority, that what the public wants is an FDR-sized presidency. The Trump people are all talking to each other on X on Twitter.

And they’re in these intense communicational dynamics with each other. They have, I think, by any measure, a very narrow victory. And they believe that it’s time to remake the entire state. What’s really swinging here is not normies. What’s really swinging here are elites. They’re the ones most exposed to the communication dynamics you’re describing because they are really intensely on these platforms talking to each other. Like, nobody comes in and says, that was a pretty small win. We should kind of be careful here. There’s no welfare reforms anymore, right? There’s no child left behind. There’s no big sops to the other side.

It’s all, we won by a bit, and now the revolution. Yeah, there’s an element of truth in that. I would say that I think you have the public wrong because the public is not two-sided. The public is fractured into many, many, many pieces, all right? And those pieces tend to coalesce. Sometimes they do it spontaneously in protests, for example, you know, and they don’t need an elite to tell them to go to Tahrir Square or, you know, Blas del Sol or whatever. And they mobilize entirely by being against.

You take the crowd in Tahrir Square. You know, you had socialists. You had the youth of the Muslim Brotherhood. You had just everyday Egyptians. You had all kinds of people that if you ask them, what do we do next, they would start fighting with each other. But they were all against Mubarak, right? They were all against Mubarak. And the public is against. And I think against is a very mobilizing emotion. And the thing we have to watch out, and I’ve been saying this for years, is, okay, taken to a logical conclusion, you become a nihilist, right? You basically believe that destruction is a form of progress. Now, that’s my flag for the Trump guys, all right? Are they tearing this out to a purpose? They’re going to a purpose? I’m willing to put up with a lot of noise, a lot of mistakes. This is the way this gets done tidily, all right? If there’s a purpose and I approve of the purpose, I don’t see a purpose, right? But are you doing it just because you can? But I do think it’s good talking about the public because I take your point about Tahrir Square.

But here in America, what’s amazing in some ways is the stability. We have not had an election decided by more than five points in the popular vote since 2008. And that was during a financial, like a once-in-a-generation financial crisis. We keep talking about the public, probably after elections, as if it’s been these overwhelming things. And the truth is, most people vote the way they did before. Right, because I think the two-party system is a completely artificial construct. The two parties don’t really hold too much allegiance anymore. They’re among the institutions that have lost a great deal. If you look at the numbers, the number of independents keeps growing.

And what is an independent? Well, that’s a hundred different things, all right? So I think part of the difficulty of this political moment is that we look at it in very old-fashioned ways, a Democrat, Republican, and I look at the ground level and I see this fermenting mosaic of different passions. I think it’s very fluid. I do think it’s very fluid. Maybe the total numbers, overall numbers, not so. And as long as we are given this choice of Republican and Democrat, maybe I won’t change. But I’m wondering how long that’s going to last. I mean, I wonder that too, or at least what the nature of being a Republican and Democrat is.

Yeah. I mean, it used to be very different, right? Democrats were the much more racist party in America for a very, very long time. I know. I landed in Virginia when there’s still Jim Crow. There were no Republicans. Things change. There’s been this argument that the parties are in this weird transition. The Republican Party, to be a Republican in good standing, you need to believe the institutions are fundamentally broken. That is what Trump represents. That’s why RFK Jr. can fit in the coalition now, despite being a pro-choice Democrat a couple of years ago. Because he fundamentally believes the institutions are corrupt, are broken, do not represent the people, etc.

And that the Democratic Party, and I think it is intention over this with itself, but certainly under Biden and Harris, was a very, very pro-system party. It’s not really about liberal and conservative. The reason Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney were clearly in coalition with Kamala Harris, while RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard were in coalition with Donald Trump, is because what politics is fundamentally about is changing. And neither side has fully known how to express that change. It’s still nascent. It’s a transition from one kind of system and one kind of polarization to another.

No, I mean, you’re 100% right in that we’re still speaking in words that make no sense when you attach them to what’s actually happening. And I would point out that not that long ago, Barack Obama was elected, and he was going to be a transformational figure. He was not elected to be lord over the institutions, and he had a style of governance and a rhetoric that allowed him, while still being president and in charge of everything, to distance himself from the institutions. So, you know, he could say all these, criticize even the government very sharply, you know, as being racist or anti-feminist or whatever.

And yet, you know, there he was. He was the president, right? That would have been a moment where the Democrats could have seized that high ground, I guess. So even what you’re saying, what you’re describing is just of now. At the time of the first Obama election, 2008, I guess, the Democrats were the ones who were trying to storm the institutions and change them.

Yeah, I think that the movement for the Democrats to become the pro-institutions party, they have lost something pretty important. And I think that the really talented politicians could keep that in balance, like Obama. Yeah. And Biden, who is very much a creature of Washington and was just, by the time he was governing, too old to make a balancing act like this work, couldn’t. And if you lose the mantle of reform, I think it’s very hard to win in American politics. Today, for a fact, and I think that’s true on both sides, I think there is a core of people who have, because just of the accident of fate that the Democrats, or even more, the Democrats, the anti-Trumpism has been identified with pro-institutionalism.

There’s a core of people who then will stand up. I mean, there was a woman, as I Ubered here, there was a woman standing in a street corner here in Washington with a sign that said, God bless the federal workforce, you know, just standing there with that sign, right? So, you know, God bless her. I was one of them. But, honestly, the vast majority of Americans, at the level of the publics, all the various mosaics, want reform, want change, want against, right? They are not for the institutions. They have no faith in them.

So, I would say that for the Democratic Party to regain its mojo, I mean, what they need is, what is it that they would like to change to bring government, this enormous construct, modern government, this enormous, towering, daunting construct, down to the level of a human being. How do you humanize that thing, right? In some bizarre way, that’s what Trump is trying to do, without thinking about it very much. But, the Democrats aren’t even thinking. The Democrats aren’t even thinking. The Democrats aren’t even thinking. But, the Democrats aren’t even thinking. The Democrats aren’t even thinking. The Democrats aren’t even thinking.

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Here’s what I worry about with Trump. I mean, among many things, I have many worries about Donald Trump. But one is that the way he’s humanizing it is through himself. And you were saying earlier this question of for what? What is at the end of all this breakage? What steady state are they trying to achieve? I found the Eric Adams thing extremely, extremely alarming and telling. Because here’s a guy who is under investigation for what appear to be pretty clear acts of corruption. He’s a Democratic mayor, right? He’s not somebody who Donald Trump needs to be loyal to.

And it seems like what they saw was the ability, and frankly, what Eric Adams saw was the possibility that if he would signal to Trump that he would pledge allegiance, he would be in Trump’s pocket, Trump would take the heat off of him. When I look internationally, I see a sort of similar thing. You know, the countries that are willing to tell Trump he’s great and show they’re on his side, be that Russia or anybody else, they can get the deal. And if you’re not willing to do that, you can’t get the deal. The thing on the other side of this is patronage is a personalist regime where what you do doesn’t matter. What matters is who you pledge fealty to.

I won’t touch the Adams case because I already know the details of whether that case was good or not. But I think what the sensation is of the people on his side is here are all these bureaucrats, these deep states, and these Democrats and so forth who have been lording it over us. And now they realize they’re just like me. They’re crying out just like we’ve been crying out, but they weren’t listening when we cried. And now he’s making them, you know, cry out. So I think it’s a case of the high being brought down as much as, and I’m not going to deny that it’s a huge personalistic aspect to Trump, starting with Trump himself. But I think as much of that as he is perceived as the hero who’s bringing the high down low, all right?

And that is very humanizing and it’s very democratizing if you believe that that’s what’s happening. So then if you don’t think that’s what it is, it’s not just personalism. It’s not just a government that Trump and Musk can control for whatever purposes they want to control it. What’s your positive vision of this? Like you sort of said that it’s sort of what made me think it’d be interesting to have you on the show for this, that this was the first time you saw a revolt like this moving beyond negation. You saw it moving to some kind of positive agenda.

When you’re feeling hopeful, what do you think they are trying to do and what do you think they might try to do with this system if they can grasp it in their fist? If you tell me what I would hope it would all end up as, it would be a much leaner, far more responsive, far less politicized, far more AI friendly, far more digitized, and therefore the levels of hierarchy much lower than what we had in the 20th century. And trusted by the people, trusted by the people. So if you have a government that is, say, the equivalent of, in many cases, when you talk about services of Amazon, right? Amazon is this thing you trust it, you push a button, and it’s there on your doorstep, okay?

The government, you go with a paper and you have to go, you know, please, can you do this? And they say, no, you have to change, you have to do it, do it, do it, do it, do it. So my ideal vision of where a democratic, small d democratic government in Washington would be, federal government, would be one that is very flat, very responsive, very interactive, very AI driven, very digitized, and trusted by the people. Two things, or a couple things come up for me when you offer that vision. And I’m not saying you’re saying it’s their vision.

But one is that providing what, responsive to what? I mean, this is a group that is about to do cuts to food stamps, or SNAP as it’s called now, cuts to Medicaid. This question of what is this leaner government providing and what is it not providing seems like a much more fundamental question. And then also there’s this question of whether or not responsiveness is, in the way you’re talking about it, and in the way you want people to react to it, is possible under the informational conditions you describe. So, like, as an example, they’re doing pretty indiscriminate cuts across the government right now.

I think the thing, you have to have a pretty low opinion of the government, and they do, but I don’t, to think that’s not going to end up with problems emerging, right? They are cutting all kinds of employees, not really knowing where they’re cutting from, cutting out probationary employees. Things are going to break. I think they might break, at least. And then people are going to be upset about that breaking. This is why government reform is hard, as you know, as a bureaucrat. I mean, people wanted to modernize the IRS master file systems for decades.

And the problem is they’re very old and very easy to break. And if you break them, you break the entire tax filing system, right? And it’s just a huge, intense mess. And so, does the kind of failures that getting from here to there require, the breakings, the glitches, the fights, mobilize too much of the public against you, create too much of these constant informational backlashes to do it? Like, what is the optimal strategy under informational revolt conditions? What we have is a revolution. And thank goodness, it’s an American-style revolution. FDR had one. Reagan had one. Guillotines were not brought out. Nobody died, okay?

But you have a revolution. FDR and Reagan and this one are messy, all right? They’re just messy. And mistakes will be made. I think if you want to have a pessimistic view, this is a remarkably unself-reflected bunch, all right? There are a bunch of action people. I mean, Musk and even RFK Jr. and certainly Trump, these are people who want to do things. That’s not a bad thing, but you need somebody to explain what the hell you’re doing, you know? You need to explain, as we were talking about before, what’s the end state?

Why did you take this step here? Are you doing it because the next step is going to be over there and this is a logical place to be? Or are you just kind of like ramming through and tearing up things as you go along? It is unclear to me, by the way, which of those cases it is. It’s clear that Elon Musk has a plan, that it’s all AI, but where he’s headed with that, I have no idea. I want to go back to a question sort of as we close and ask you at the beginning, because I think this maybe puts a point on it.

But I had asked you, are elites today worse than they were? Do we think they’re worse than they were? Or have modern conditions led to them? Us thinking they’re worse than they are made them worse than they are. And when we were having that conversation, I was thinking about something Julian Assange wrote, who was the founder of WikiLeaks. And he basically said that the point of WikiLeaks was that if you can pull all the internal information out of the system, make it public, you make it impossible for large systems to function. Because they need to have the ability to communicate privately.

They need to be able to speak in secrecy. His view is that WikiLeaks was actually a way of destroying the capacity of these bureaucracies to operate. And he thought they were bad, and that was a good thing. What I see Elon Musk doing right now is pulling in these informational databases and using things that either he is sometimes lying about or things that he is pulling out to make look bad, right? You know, we are funding a scientific research study that just sounds weird when you hear it. Because frankly, a lot of them do, and a lot of important findings come out of weird research.

That those conditions of informational transparency, many people make this argument that Congress has not been improved by the addition of C-SPAN cameras. Hearings are not better because things should be clipped out of them, right? It just makes it harder for people to negotiate and deal. There’s all kinds of things where, I don’t know, like as an ideology, transparency and putting it all on the chain seems great and putting a camera on everything. You know, Barack Obama used to say that the negotiations over healthcare reform would all be on C-SPAN. They weren’t. People got mad, but they would have been worse if they were all on C-SPAN. You can’t negotiate everything in public.

I’m curious how you think about that because this seems to me like the informational world we’re in creates a constant pressure for transparency. It’s typically either bad for the way systems work or is weaponized against systems by people who don’t like the way they’re working or what they’re trying to do. The system gets worse, and so we demand more transparency. Large, complex institutions need to have places where things happen in whispers that nobody hears to get anything done. Having said that, forget it. It ain’t going to happen. We are now in an entirely different world.

So what we need is elites, people in charge of things, let’s just call them that, who can deal in this world where you’re under the spotlight at all times in a way that is, number one, functional. You can get things done. But number two, look trustworthy to the millions of people who are going to be watching you either online or through some system or another. I mean, C-SPAN is a joke. I can’t believe that Congress having a camera in front of it doesn’t provide a show. There’s anything more disruptive, bizarre, and almost like theater of the absurd than watching those committees work, right?

But they have the opportunities. It’s not the camera’s fault. It’s their fault, all right? So, yeah. But it’s also not better when they try to provide a show. I mean, I will just say this, that I think the move towards members of Congress who what they’re trying to do is provide a show does not make hearings better. It incentivizes for grandstanders and performers. But that’s not a show. That’s just, that’s grandstanding, right? There has to be a way in which the piece of the show is there’s a story and somebody’s controlling it.

There’s a director and then there’s opposition and kind of like a trial. It’s kind of like a show. That’s not what happens. So, I actually think it’s possible to do. I think with the digital, with AI in particular, it’s possible to get some version of that. But we need people in charge, people at the top of the institutions who are comfortable and believable in that role. You made this point that we’re now seeing the rise of these leaders who are genuinely comfortable in this information sphere, right?

Donald Trump is native to Twitter. You called him the Beethoven of Twitter. Elon Musk liked Twitter so much he bought it and then renamed it X. And I think it’s true for a lot of people in that administration. Some of them are very native to podcasting as well. You are sort of suggesting this is a good thing. One thing that I worry about is that I sometimes think these systems select for a very unusual personality type. A personality type that is absorptive of huge amounts of negative feedback and uses that as a kind of fuel.

A personality type that can be very – what it wants is engagement. What it wants is attention. It doesn’t have the reaction most normal human beings have to a lot of attention, which is like to shrink back from it a little bit, to be upset if people are upset with you. It’s a little bit attentionally sociopathic. And so this idea that what we’re going to get now and that this is positive is ruled by people who are really, really well adapted to Twitter. Like, are you comfortable with that?

That’s a great idea. It’s ruled by sociopaths, you know, digital sociopaths. I think you’re right. My take, though, is, okay, I said it before. There is this colossal transformation going on. We’re moving from the industrial age to something that doesn’t even have a name yet, okay? And we’re a very early stage of this. And maybe the rule of the digital sociopath, hopefully, will be an early stage that we transcend. I would say, want to be present to the United States. You’re not a normal human being, all right? That’s fair. Already, you are some kind of freak.

And also, if I may give my 30 years war metaphor. Am I allowed to do that? Please. Okay. I was hoping you would do a 30 years war metaphor. Well, there you go. It’s not even mine. It’s originally from a fellow Cuban who said, suppose you take a time machine and go to the 30 years war. Now, you know that’s the bloodiest war that was ever fought in Europe, right? People were being slaughtered. And suppose you went there and you asked the man on the street, what do you think of the printing press?

And the man was going to say, it’s the most horrific, conflict-inducing thing that has ever been invented. Look, over there, there’s this little church. And over there, there’s another little church. And they’re coming out with their books, their printed books. And the printed books have almost exactly the same words. But like eight words are different. And they have to kill each other over that. If we didn’t have a printing press, we’d be safe, right? Well, today we know that the printing press was the most liberating invention that ever happened in the human race. We had to get past that.

And let’s be thankful, I always say, building on Antonio’s metaphor, we’re not at a 30 years war level here. We’re not anywhere near that. So I think we will get past that. I think information systems, they cycle through moments of adjustments. My concern always has been that when we get to the end, I won’t see it, by the way, but when we get to the end, we have liberal democracy still there, maybe even more democratic, because there are many things about the digital systems and AI that empower people far more than the old analog world did.

So that’s my answer. Then always our final question. What are three books you’d recommend to the audience? Anything by Andrei Mir. He is the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. But if I had to pick one, I would pick Post-Journalism and the Death of Newspapers, which is basically a history of the art form, a very detailed history of the art form, kind of explaining, and your newspaper is kind of front and center, explaining how the business model has changed from selling eyeballs to advertisers to sort of commodifying polarization, right? Beautiful book.

Second one, a British economist, Paul Ormerod, has got a book called Why Most Things Fail. And you should read it, first of all, because it’s a great title. Number two, because as an economist, he’s gone through the data, mostly British and American data that goes back 150 years, economic data, to show how governments have tried to solve issues like unemployment, ethnically segregated households. And it’s an all hypothesis. Nothing has changed. So it’s a fascinating book.

Third, Hugo Mercier. It’s not born yesterday. And it’s about what we talk about right now is, can somebody like Donald Trump talk to you, a fairly liberal human being, and through the magic of his disinformation, suddenly you walk away thinking, I will vote for that man, whatever he goes, right? Can he persuade you through this manipulative process? And he has a lot of psychological data in there that pretty clearly explains, no, not really. People tend not to be persuaded by oratory rhetoric and tend to believe what they believe. So, Hugo Mercier, those are my three books.

Martin Gurry, thank you very much. Hey, this is fun. Thank you. This episode of The It’s Our Clown Show is produced by Jack McCordick, fact-checking by Michelle Harris, mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Amun Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristen Lynn. We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. The It’s Our Clown Show.