The Blue Wave Cometh?; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, November 7, 2025

Ezra Klein

Produced by Annie Galvin and Claire Gordon

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; The Blue Wave Cometh?

"Klein: [Laughs.] So this Judith Shklar essay that you’re mentioning — I want to read another part that you had sent me because I think it gets at this conversation we’re having in an interesting way, as well as at something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult but worthwhile act.

Virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. If they were easy, they wouldn’t be virtues.

So Shklar writes:

Courage is to be prized since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats both physical and moral. This is to be sure not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set and still before us is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence but between cruel military and moral repression and violence and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, Black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is in fact extremely difficult and constraining. Far too much so for those of us who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity and the risks of freedom.

I do find something very inspiring in that.

Retica: I hoped you would. [Laughs.]

Klein: Not just that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear, about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening — a muscle you are strengthening.

There’s something Obama has been saying as he’s been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks that I found interesting. He said it, too, in his interview with Marc Maron: that for a lot of us, none of what we believed has been hard. We didn’t grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any of it — not really. There have been at other times in our history — Jim Crow, the Red Scare, World War II.

He said: It has not asked that much of us to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism. And all of a sudden it does. And right now we’re seeing who is willing to have that asked of them — who’s willing to believe some of these things when it’s hard.

And his point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They’ve bent the knee — particularly compared with the first era of Trumpism.

Now they go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House. They are very much willing to pay to play. And not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people’s freedoms. Pay out in terms of other people’s safety. Pay out in the kind of society that, if you had explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that."

‘Indecency has become a new hallmark’: writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump’s America; The Guardian, October 18, 2025

David Smith, The Guardian; ‘Indecency has become a new hallmark’: writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump’s America

"It is now fashionable on the left to bemoan the rise of US authoritarianism as a novel concept, a betrayal of constitutional ideals envied by the world. Cobb has a more complex take, suggesting that the US’s claim to moral primacy, rooted in the idea of exceptionalism, is based on a false premise.

He argues: “America has been autocratic previously. We just don’t think about it. It’s never been useful … to actually grapple with what America was, and America had no interest in grappling with these questions itself. Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?”

Cobb’s book maps an arc of the moral universe that is crooked and uneven, pointing out that, between the end of reconstruction and 1965, 11 states in the south effectively nullified the protections of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, imposing Jim Crow laws, voter suppression and violence to disenfranchise Black citizens...

It is therefore hardly unexpected that business leaders and institutions would capitulate, as they have in the past, he says: “We might hope that they would react differently but it’s not a shock when they don’t. Go back to the McCarthy era. We see that in more instances than not, McCarthy and other similar kinds of red-baiting forces were able to exert their will on American institutions.”...

He is unwavering, however, in his critique of Trump’s attack on the university sector: “What’s happening is people emulating Viktor Orbán [the leader of Hungary] to try to crush any independent centres of dissent and to utilise the full weight of the government to do it, and also to do it in hypocritical fashion...

Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered whether this was the end of a dark chapter of US history – or the beginning. What does Cobb think? “There’s a strong possibility that it will get worse before it gets better,” he says frankly.

“We’re at a point where we navigated the volatile moment of the 1950s, the 1960s, because we were able to build a social consensus around what we thought was decent and what we thought was right, and we’re now seeing that undone. Indecency has become a new hallmark.

“But we should take some solace in the fact that people have done the thing that we need to do now previously. The situation we’re in I don’t think is impossible.”"

YouTube Bends the Knee; The Atlantic, October 1, 2025

Charlie Warzel , The Atlantic; YouTube Bends the Knee

"This is just the latest example of major tech companies bowing to Trump."

UVA President James Ryan Caved to MAGA—and They Forced Him Out Anyway; The New Republic, June 27, 2025

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The New Republic ; UVA President James Ryan Caved to MAGA—and They Forced Him Out Anyway

[Kip Currier: Capitulation to Trump almost never gives people and organizations what they think or hope it will. For examples, just look to the craven law firms that have debased themselves and are paying the price for submission.

The forcing out of UVA President James Ryan is just another step in what Trump et al have planned for higher education.]

[Excerpt]

"Thomas Jefferson’s vision for a noble and educated republic has been dealt a firm blow. The enemies of free and open inquiry, of science, and of informed, democratic citizenship have chopped off the head of the very university Jefferson founded to make his vision real. 

On Friday, the Trump administration, aided by a board appointed entirely by Republican Governor Glenn Younkin, forced University of Virginia President James Ryan to resign. The Justice Department had threatened to block all federal funds to the second-oldest public university in the country if Ryan remained in office.   

Ryan and the board had eliminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in March, even though the specious executive order commanding such changes was already under challenge by the courts. The university chose to comply rather than fight.   

But, in a turn that Franz Kafka would appreciate (and perhaps inspired), the Trump administration declared that capitulation insufficient. In a clumsily worded letter to the university sent in April, the Department of Justice claimed that it had “received complaints that [Ryan’s] office and the University may have failed to implement these directives and further that you have refused to produce the report on the matter.”...

To this day, no one at the university has a clear idea what the university could or should have done. The New York Times reported Thursday that the only specific move the Justice Department demanded in recent weeks was Ryan’s resignation. 

Laying the attack on the University of Virginia on DEI was brilliant and maddening. What, exactly, is DEI? Those of us who work in universities have a good idea. It is the collection of efforts and programs that allow students who have served in the military, do not come from homes that have had college students before, graduated from high schools deep in the coal fields of Appalachia, arrived on student visas from Nigeria, have endured sexual violence or harassment, or occupy segments of society that are constantly under attack from the majority to succeed and graduate. They are not zero-sum programs. They do not deny anyone else an opportunity to attend a university or thrive at one.   

DEI programs recognize that society and the world are complex, diverse places."

The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America; Vanity Fair, March 31, 2025

 KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America

"Jason Stanley has spent the last two decades writing about power, language, and the ways both are corruptible. He is an expert on authoritarian regimes and the author of seven books, including 2018’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and last year’s Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, and has been a member of the Yale University faculty since 2013.

Last week, in what he calls an “impulsive” decision prompted by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump administration demands, he decided to leave—not just Yale, but the country altogether. This fall he’ll decamp to the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where he was offered the position of Bissell Hyatt Chair in American Studies.

“Educational authoritarianism is frequently accompanied by more general restrictions on knowledge,” he writes in Erasing History, “and by attempts to push mythic representations in place of that knowledge.” In the book he likens conservative activist groups seeking book bans to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels keeping lists of books to be censored, and outlines attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ people by various fascist regimes throughout history (among which he counts the Trump administration). When I ask whether he sees warning signs in sectors outside of education, he responds, “Are you fucking with me?”"...

[Vanity Fair] I think an anxiety for many people is, will we only really realize how bad things are once it becomes too late to do anything about it? How would you counsel people who are wondering how you know that it’s time to try to get out?

[Jason Stanley] Not my business. My business is to describe what’s happening. And you can read what I write and decide for yourself, but I’m not going to make other people’s decisions for them. I’m not into moralizing or lecturing; that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free. A lot of Americans don’t care about freedom. If you look at the polls, they say that Americans don’t value democracy at all. I have a different set of values. Democracy comes before the price of eggs. But what I think is particularly foolish and naive and stupid is to give up democracy and raise the price of eggs."