Ezra Klein is a national journalist and blogger for The Washington Post and Bloomberg View, as well as a frequent commentator on MSNBC. Klein’s blog, WonkBlog, won The Week’s “Blog of the Year” in 2010.
Brown Political Review: How has blogging changed the delivery of news?
Ezra Klein: Blogging has now become part of the news. It used to be sort of an amateur thing, outsiders who were pissed off. And it had that style of writing. That still remains, but now we have people in newspapers and longtime reporters who have begun blogging. So the blog has become just another form of writing, and the blog medium can accept all kinds of different writing — amateur, professional, short, long-form. So in that way, it changed things but also has been changed itself. Now it’s one of many tools writers have to carry their work, and that’s as it should be.
BPR: You’ve written about the polarization now gripping Washington–including a storied presentation you give titled “Why Washington Is Horrible (in charts).” What explains the decline?
Klein: I’m somebody who doesn’t think polarization is the problem per say. It’s regrettable, but you can have a political system that works with polarization. The problem right now is that our system doesn’t work in the context of polarization, and we’re not doing anything to make it work better. So essentially, you have polarization gumming up the works, particularly in Congress.
BPR: So what could we do to make our system work within polarization, as you say?
Klein: As a broad point, I think that a basic rule of American thought is that majorities are able to effectively govern. That makes sense for a basic mode of accountability. We elect these people because they told us they were going to do something, and two, four or six years later we judge them on whether they have done that. In a world where we elect parties into power that can’t do anything because minorities have control of the Senate or for whatever reason–that basic mode of accountability breaks down. We’re not giving ourselves what we were promised, and not because the majorities aren’t delivering, but because they have been blocked by the minority.
BPR: Where would you start first?
If I were to start anywhere, I would just get rid of the filibuster tomorrow. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having majority rule in the Senate. I would much rather a world in which, if Americans didn’t like what was being done by a political party, they voted them out. This as opposed to a world where political parties can’t do anything, which is more or less the world we are in now. As a general rule, I don’t think it’s a good thing that a typical majority cannot effectively govern.
BPR: You created your own blog straight out of college and built your own notoriety. Rachel Maddow called it a victory for all nerd-dom. What kind of advice do you have for students who want for themselves what you do?
Klein: It’s not the easiest time in the world to be graduating. But the fact is for college-educated folk, the unemployment rate is only 4 or 3 percent, and Brown is even lower than that. So first, don’t walk out of there too depressed.
Second, the key thing young people have over old people is the willingness to work really hard. Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote an article about competitiveness. His point is that the cycle of life in the world is one where people achieve these exalted positions and they kind of stop working as hard. And that’s evolutionarily important for the system, because it’s that failure that allows young people to establish themselves and rise up.
BPR: But before you had the opportunity to work hard, you felt you were drawn to working in journalism or blogging, right?
Right. You have to figure out what you like to do, and then do it better than other people. That can be a lot of fun, but it can also be tough. So the one thing I would really advise people is to follow work as opposed to prestige. Try as hard as you can to find the thing you want to be doing and want to do the best job at — as opposed to jobs that at the outset have the most money or security.
In my life, in general, and from the people I know, people who worked very hard at things they liked tended to work out, while people who took jobs for money or prestige that they didn’t really want have not always worked out. Because generally speaking, people aren’t very good at jobs they don’t like doing.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.