After the elections, I started asking congressional Democrats the same question: If the elections had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, what would be their first big bill? In almost every case, they said they didn’t know. That’s a problem.Democrats are in the opposition now. That means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative. So one thing I’m going to do this year is talk to Democrats who are trying to find that alternative — an agenda that meets the challenges of the moment, not just one carried from the past.Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is the first up to bat. We spoke in January, so we don’t cover the latest Trump news. The conversation is really focused on his ideas, and he has a lot of interesting ones — about the abundance agenda, the attention economy and how Democrats should talk about policy during a second Trump term. I don’t necessarily agree with every idea he offers, but he’s definitely wrestling with that question I posed to other Democrats: What is your alternative?This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism” by Ezra KleinBook Recommendations:“How Mathematics Built the Modern World” by Bo Malmberg and Hannes MalmbergRadical Markets by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen WeylWhat Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker HoweThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. 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. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the main problem facing Democrats after the election?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. After the election, I started asking congressional Democrats I talked to the same question, one after the other. If it had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, what would their first big bill have been? What was going to be their priority? In almost every case, they said they didn't know. It's a problem.
Democrats are in the opposition now. That means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative, creating another center of gravity in American politics. So one thing I'm going to do on the show this year is talk to Democrats who sound like they are trying to find their way to that alternative.
Democrats who sound like they are crafting an agenda alive to this moment, not just one carried over from the past. One Democrat I found interesting here is Jake Auchincloss, a congressman from Massachusetts.
Among the Democrats talking about the abundance agenda, and my book on abundance comes out next month, so I will admit to being particularly interested here, he's been really pretty substantive. It's not that I agree with every idea he offers here. I don't. But when I hear him, I hear someone wrestling with a question I pose to other Democrats. What is your alternative?
What did people need to hear from you over these last few years that they didn't? What do they need to believe you will do if you get power? This conversation was recorded at the end of January, so you're not going to hear us discuss the latest Trump news. But it's also not the point here. The country needs a resistance, but it also needs an alternative.
As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Congressman Jake Alkencloss, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on, Ezra. So, after the election, a lot of Democrats have responded to Donald Trump's particular form of populism by offering what you call a Diet Coke version of it. Tell me about your Diet Coke theory of the Democratic Party.
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Chapter 2: What is the Diet Coke theory of the Democratic Party?
I'm concerned that bold-faced-named Democrats have been leaning into populism. They have said... Boy, Donald Trump has done what we dreamed of, which was building a multi-ethnic working class coalition. Biggest city in my district, Ezra Fall River, which is the exemplar of a multi-ethnic working class city, voted for a Republican in 2024 for the first time in 100 years.
And Democrats across the country have been looking at cities like Fall River and have said, well, if they're doing populism, we got to do populism too, whether that's immigration or trans issues or the culture wars. And my view on that is... Voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don't want a Diet Coke.
There's two different parties, and we have to start by understanding who our voters are not and then understand who our voters could be and go and try to win them over.
If you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is guns, if you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is immigration, if you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is trans participation in sports, you're probably not going to be a Democratic voter. That's okay. There's two parties.
Chapter 3: How can Democrats build a multiracial working-class coalition?
But if you are a voter who went Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is cost of living, boy, we'd better win you back.
You say that Trump did what Democrats have long dreamed of, which is have a multiracial working class coalition. Democrats used to have a multiracial working class coalition. They won voters making less than 50,000 by significant margins. They won non-white voters by significant margins. That was their coalition, right? What is your explanation of what broke it?
I think we were seen as taking our eye off the ball on both kitchen table and front porch issues. That the notorious ad, Kamala's for they, them, Trump's for you, was not just about... the particular salience of trans issues in this election, but as a broader cultural thesis that Democrats have taken their finger off the cultural mainstream.
Between the time when Bill Clinton played saxophone on live TV and peaking, I think, with Obama's election in 2008, but persisting all the way through 2018, Democrats broadly were winning the culture wars, I would argue. And MAGA's big idea was, maybe we can win the culture wars. And to a certain extent, they did.
And I think Democrats now have to make very clear that that has been a mask for an agenda that is not actually going to help people. What you've seen in Donald Trump's first week in office is that he's siding with cop beaters and tech oligarchs. He's not doing anything on housing, health care and taxes for the typical American family. And we've got to drive that cost of living message home.
Have you been surprised by the size of the post-election vibe shift? You're this very close election, and then what has felt since it, like a almost seismic cultural change following. How do you understand the difference between those two things?
If you had asked me a year ago, whose dance moves were going to become culturally mainstream, Kamala Harris's or Donald Trump's, I would have said Kamala Harris. She's a pretty good dancer. But no, it was NFL stars doing Trump's dance moves in the end zone. I have been surprised by that.
I think it's, and you have made this point, we have to be careful about over-reading the results of one election. Every single incumbent party throughout the developed world lost vote share, center-right, center-left. were no different. And in fact, House Democrats modestly outperformed what you might expect to have been the case.
So what I'm concerned about is that Democrats basically reach for economic and cultural populism in a way that is going to be
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Chapter 4: What is cost disease and how does it affect housing and healthcare?
That is our economic telos. And that requires treating cost disease where it afflicts sectors across the U.S. economy, most notably housing and health care. What is cost disease?
That's a specific term.
Cost disease, I think, is the most important economic concept that policymakers are unaware of. In sectors like housing and health care, they are afflicted by Bowman's cost disease, which says that because they are very labor intensive and low productivity, they are going to inflate faster than GDP. So haircuts are a good example of this. Haircuts are non-automatable, service intensive.
And yet the wage for a hairstylist has to be competitive with the wage for somebody in a sector that has higher productivity gains. And so you're going to see more and more share of wallet going towards these sectors. Imagine if you were going to build your car.
And instead of buying a car at a dealership, you stood in your driveway and you called up a general contractor and you had them subcontract out the various parts of the car and people came to your driveway and they built the car piece by piece. Imagine how much that car would cost. A lot more than the typical car, right?
Well, that's how we build houses, and it doesn't actually have to be that way. And in fact, it is tied to the abundance agenda that I know that you and Derek Thompson and others have been pushing to the front of the policy conversation. The abundance agenda...
makes the case that if you're trying to lower cost of living for the typical American family, you need to unlock supply rather than subsidize demand. You need to build more stuff. I agree with the abundance agenda and I agree with it across different sectors, but I think it's incomplete. You can't just unlock supply if it's a supply of a sector that has low productivity gains.
You first have to turn those services into products and then unlock supply. Yes, we need zoning reform to expand supply, but we also need to lean into offsite construction to basically turn housing production away from stick-built, where it's highly service-intensive, and towards modular construction, where it's more factory-intensive.
I was reporting a couple years back on this housing, affordable housing complex in San Francisco called Tehanan. And it was the first of these NSF done as modular housing. And this was a really excellent build. And when I was talking to the people behind it, and they were thinking about doing a second, at least at that time, they said, we probably won't do modular again. I said, why?
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Chapter 5: What innovative ideas exist for improving education?
One of the things I've been tracking very closely about AI, and I tend to be a bit of an AI skeptic, candidly, is that we have seen that Khan Academy and others have been able to deliver one-on-one tutoring using AI to students and are showing measurable and persistent gains in math and reading comprehension in particular.
What if we made the commitment that every single kid is going to get in-depth, one-on-one tutoring, both AI but also teacher-delivered? And we just flipped the script entirely on what it means to have education because we've got a factory model view of what education is really based on the 19th century of students listen to a teacher lecture.
We have technology now that can make that an entirely different paradigm. We're not talking about or delivering that.
When you just said you're an AI skeptic a minute ago and then moved into a very pro-AI case on education, I think that gets at attention in the Democratic Party, which is, I would say the Democratic Party used to be the much more pro-technology party. So you go back to Bill Clinton coming out of the Atari Democrats, the DLC Democrats. who seemed to have a lot of ideas about the information age.
And behind him Al Gore, who wasn't incredibly, as much as he got mocked for saying he invented the internet, Gore was one of the most prescient politicians and elected officials of that entire era, way, way, way ahead of the curve on a lot of these questions.
Barack Obama running against John McCain, running against Mitt Romney, also I think the information age candidate, the candidate with a lot more ties to Silicon Valley. And then I think starting the 2016 election, there's been a breakup between Democrats and big tech, which is fine, right?
They became very disillusioned with disinformation and misinformation on Facebook, disillusioned with where a lot of the tech billionaires had moved and how they were acting. But it does seem to me that the skepticism of the companies has become a skepticism of technological solutions. And so now you see the big futurists like Andreessen and Musk have sort of lined up on the Republican side.
I'm curious how you think about this culturally, because I think before you even think about policy, policy is downstream from party culture. And I don't get the sense running through the Democratic and liberal circles that I run through that people are just fundamentally comfortable with technology. I think they sort of understand it is downstream of big corporations and of tech bro culture. Yeah.
I take a position sector by sector. I am very pro-biotech. I want to see us develop the larger small molecules that cure Duchenne's muscular dystrophy or Alzheimer's disease. As we talked about with housing, I'm very pro-off-site construction and innovations in delivering housing as a commodity.
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Chapter 6: How is technology reshaping political and cultural landscapes?
So here's, I think, the difficult political economy Trump has created for Democrats. Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, X, the social media companies generally. are more popular than the Democrats are. So you're standing up here and saying that Democrats should take these companies on more frontally, right? They should force the TikTok sale or force it to be shuttered if they won't sell it.
You're talking about getting rid of or somehow reforming Section 230. So that means you're not only taking on now Donald Trump and the Republican Party, you're taking on all these technology companies which have their own levers of influence, their own constituencies.
Tell me a bit about how you see that fight and why you think that fight, even if it is a good fight to have, why you think it is winnable given what we've just seen with TikTok and given just how much money and power and attention is tied up in this consortium we see emerging.
Because it's part of the vibe shift that you've been raising. You are right that by revealed preference, by how much time people spend scrolling, they like this stuff, right? I mean, four to six hours of online or video content on average for a person under 40. But when I stand in a living room in my district, particularly with fellow parents, and I talk about...
These corporations stealing from family time to create more screen time. When I talk about the fact that since 2012, when smartphones became ubiquitous with the front-facing camera, and John Haidt has spoken about this eloquently, we have seen a spike in mental health challenges for young women and antisocial behavior for young men. Every head is nodding.
People are able to hold two competing ideas in their head at the same time. One, we're not going backwards, right? We're not getting rid of the television or the radio. We're not getting rid of social media. But this web 2.0 version of social media where these Leviathans are just attention fracking us, this is not sustainable and this isn't really what I signed up for. I feel that.
I hosted an app challenge basically where young middle schoolers and high schoolers can build their own apps. What was striking to me is even in the last four years that I've been doing this, the apps that they were building were about in real life community. The winning app created environmental cleanups in a way for people to sign up online, to go clean up locally. Gen Z gets it.
They understand that this is not good for them. And their parents look at their kids and say, I don't think it's fair that they are growing up, that their adolescence is being warped by the bottom line of these companies. And I can't fight Mark Zuckerberg one-on-one, right? I got a full-time job and he's out there. You haven't been doing the UFC training.
And I think they like the idea that Congress will pick that fight for them. Section 230 was passed in the 1990s. It immunizes the social media corporations from any liability for what they host. The social media corporations will act as though it's some kind of sacrosanct First Amendment protection. It's not.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of social media's influence on attention?
But so then you have this piece of your theory, which I'm a little skeptical of in terms of its workability, but I'd like to hear you make the case for it, which is this tax on attention. When you describe that, what are you describing? How would you do that?
We use a phrase that I think hints at what this might look like. When you're scrolling on your phone and when you're looking at content, you are, quote, paying attention, right? You pay attention. And if you're paying attention, they are buying attention. In the real world, that could be subject to a sales tax, a value-added tax.
In the digital world, it's non-monetized and thereby is not taxable. And the degradation of attention and the greed for our attention spans that these corporations exhibit suggests that we need to update our tax code to reflect not an industrial economy but an attention economy. And these companies will come back and say, if you try to do a value-added tax, it's going to be unworkable.
And here's 55 reasons why it's unworkable. And is it going to be challenging to implement that? Yeah. It's also challenging, by the way, to do capital gains taxes on private equity. Right. Our tax code and our tax enforcers update themselves. But I think the core thesis is very well grounded, that when you are paying attention and they are buying attention, that has value.
And we know it has value because they go turn around and bundle it for a price to advertisers. And we simply say, you're paying a VAT based on that. And the VAT is not going to go to the general fund. The VAT is going to go to a separate chartered entity that disperses funds for local journalism.
Are you saying that every website I visit... They're going to be paying a little bit of money based on how long I spent on the site. Are you saying that we are just going to add a tax onto the money they are making from advertising? Right. That would be a way to do it. What literally? Because attention isn't what you are taxing here, or the paying attention.
You're taxing some kind of exchange somewhere. What is that exchange?
The exchange is not the paying of attention, it's the buying of attention. So the advertising revenue that you're describing ultimately gets taxed as corporate income for Facebook and the other social media corporations. They pay tax on that. What I'm talking about is... the value that they accrue by your time spent on screen, which is quote unquote free, right?
You're not paying and they're not paying. And yet there is an exchange there. You are paying attention and they are calculating every single impression of that entire scroll. They then bucket up that data and they do a number of things with it. One, they sell it to advertisers. Two, they sell it to large language models and they try to figure out how we can monetize it.
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Chapter 8: How can a tax on attention improve public good?
Nothing. It's all exactly what you thought it would be? I didn't have the play-by-play laid out. But he campaigned on what he's doing. He said he was going to use the impoundment clause to freeze federal funds. He said he was going to save TikTok, quote unquote, save TikTok. He said he was going to pardon the January 6th rioters. He said he was going to rip out DEI.
He said he was going to take us out of Paris. In the Marine Corps, there's an expression, a commander can be forgiven for being defeated, but never for being surprised. I'm not surprised. This is what he said he was going to do.
I don't disagree with that. But certainly to me, Democrats have felt surprised. They have felt overwhelmed. And he is overwhelming the system. I mean, every day there's something that should be a two-week, a three-week, a three-month news cycle happening. Now, maybe a lot of it doesn't end up mattering that much, right? The birthright citizenship move might just get thrown out in the courts.
The impoundment does not seem constitutional, given what we know of how the spending power works. fury signifying future court cases, or are we seeing a more fundamental shift in how America is governed and how power is wielded? I think we're seeing a two-step process.
Number one, going into the midterms, discipline. And Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, is embodying this. We are not going to play the outrage Olympics. Americans know that this guy is morally bankrupt. They don't want him sitting at their kitchen table with their kids. They get that he's not a good dude and he's a bore.
Americans understand, I think, broadly speaking, he's probably captured by a lot of different interests, as we've discussed, between meme coin and Christian nationalism. We are not going to chase every single ball that he throws. We're not going to play fetch.
We are going to constantly, with discipline, be drawn in contrast between who is he helping and who is he working for, and who are we helping and who are we working for.
I get it. I get the theory that you want to fight Trump on pocketbook issues. The pardons, the impoundment, where does that become a kind of willing yourself into a blindness and about the system itself being so fundamentally challenged?
It's not that we are, and I talked about this earlier, we shouldn't give on immigration, we shouldn't give on the rule of law, we shouldn't give on climate action and gun violence prevention. I've been very clear about this. In fact, I've rejected this idea that we need to move radically to their side of the court on these issues. It's that we can call it for what it is. This is illegal.
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