Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE | Lex Fridman Podcast #462

Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that's a huge difference between the two sides right now.

I think this deal, man, is very easy to make here. Department of Government Efficiency, that sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be. Not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail, adding affordable housing units when it wants to afford, add affordable housing units. You know, I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about, you know, deregulating the market, we need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it's trying to achieve. This is a world in which a Department of Government Efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we're going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place.

In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has never been as internally fragmented and weak, leaderless, rudderless as it is right now. Now, it won't stay that way. You cannot change American politics, you can't change the Democratic Party if you're not willing to upset people. Donald Trump reformed the Republican Party by willingly being able to fight Republicans. He ran against George W. Bush, against Jeb Bush, against Mitt Romney, against the trade deals, against a bunch of things that were understood to be sacred cows. Somehow this guy ran, like, right after Mitt Romney and John McCain while attacking Mitt Romney and John McCain, right? If you are not... Like, the Democratic Party does need to change. It needs to obtain a different form 'cause the Obama coalition is exhausted. It's done. It's not gonna be able to do that if it doesn't have standard-bearers who are willing to say, "We were wrong about some things. We have to change our views on some things. We have to act differently and speak differently."

When Elon takes over Tesla, when Elon is at SpaceX, when Elon's at X, I would imagine, and you know this better than me because you know him and, maybe most importantly for the purposes of this part of the conversation, you know the people who work for him. I'll bet if you ask the people who work under Elon at X, Tesla, SpaceX, they say, "I know exactly what Elon wants. This is his goal for the super heavy rocket. This is his goal in terms of humanoid robots. This is his goal in terms of profitability of Twitter and the growth of our subscription business and how we're gonna integrate new features." There's a, probably a really clear mind-meld. Right now, I have no sense that there's a mind-meld. And, in fact, I have the exact opposite sense, that rather than an example of creative destruction, which would be a mitzvah of entrepreneurship, we have an active destruction destruction. We have destruction for the sake of destruction. It's much cleaner to me from an interpretive standpoint to describe Doge as an ideological purge of progressivism, performing an act of, or performing the job of efficiency, rather than a department of actual efficiency itself.