Ezra Klein, journalist and editor-in-chief of the news site Vox, spoke at Shriver Hall on Wednesday as part of the Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS). Klein is also a noted political and economic columnist and has worked for the Washington Post, Bloomberg and various MSNBC programs.
During the talk, Klein discussed what he thought was novel about this year’s elections. Specifically, he talked about rise of Donald Trump as the Republican presidential frontrunner and the roles of political parties in the election.
Klein first clarified that he could not speak definitively on what can or cannot happen but could remark on the peculiarity of the election.
“I want to say this before I start: I come to you with humility. I did not predict any of this. I did not predict Donald Trump will be in a position he’s in today — nobody did, unless you are a lunatic or very smart,” Klein said. “And yet we come on TV every night, and we write on our websites or our print publications and confidently tell you what it all means. I do not know what it all means. What I have at this point are not confident pronouncements but hypotheses that are worth testing.”
Klein began by pointing out several of his observations of the election thus far, including the decline of the importance of the mainstream political elite of the Democratic and Republican parties.
“Party elites don’t matter and endorsements are a garbage predictor of political outcome,” Klein said. “Before, parties appeared to have a lot of control over party outcomes. This year, it has not really held true.
Donald Trump has about three or four serious political endorsements, but a couple of weeks ago he had zero. Ted Cruz has yet to have single endorsement from the Senate because everyone in the U.S. Senate hates him.”
Additionally, Klein also pointed out how there are ideological shifts occurring in the Democratic and Republican parties with both deviating farther from the political center.
“We are seeing the Democrats as a highly ideological party. And that is odd, actually. We have political studies showing that Democrats were more of a collection of interest groups as opposed to Republicans, which are seen as a more philosophical and ideological party,” Klein said. “As it has happened, the Democratic party has been running a primary in which the core fight is how liberal are the two candidates. Both of them are running over each other trying to show that they have a greater sense of progressivism.”
“We are seeing the Democrats as a highly ideological party. And that is odd, actually." —Ezra Klein, Editor-in-Chief of Vox
Republican voters, according to Klein, are not ideological at all.
“They could not give a s**t as to what their frontrunner [Trump] says. He can say anything,” Klein said. “I mean for a long time the view has been that the Republican Party has been seen as an ideologically conservative party.”
Klein also spoke of the diminishing importance of money and Super PACs in American politics.
“If you look at this primary so far, Super PACs have not been able to do anything... If anything, they’ve had an anti-effect. The most powerful, most moneyed, most feared Super PAC was Jeb Bush’s, and for every couple of millions of dollars that Super Pac spent, he appeared to lose three points in the polls,” Klein said. “We continue to believe these Super PACs, this money in American politics, continues to control politicians. The mechanism that is proposed here is that it controls voters and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are showing that it isn’t true.”
In addition to his talk, there was a lengthy question and answer portion during which members of the audience asked about Klein’s opinion of the current political and media landscape. He discussed the psychology of authoritarianism in voting behavior, whether this election year is an aberration or a new norm and the current Supreme Court vacancy crisis.
Klein said he is fearful of a Donald Trump presidency.
“What does a nuclear winter look like? So, the answer is nobody knows, and I think chief among the ‘nobody knows’ is Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump has the first idea as to what a Donald Trump presidency might look like. That guy won a bunch of primaries the other night and talked about his steaks. Like not the stakes in the election, but how he had a steak company,” Klein said.
Trump is a political anomaly for Klein.
“To be dead serious about this, I think Donald Trump is a candidate with a very high possibility of variance in both directions,” Klein said. “Maybe he comes in and turns out to be more moderate than a lot of the other Republicans. I think that is the sort of optimistic scenario. I think the pessimistic scenario is really dangerous. I think that he has the personality of a strongman. I think that he has a demagogue’s instinct for the worst voices in the crowd. I’ve written about this, but I think the really dangerous thing about Donald Trump is that I have never seen a politician before without a sense of shame.”
Freshman Emma Lee enjoyed Klein’s humor.
“I really liked him because he was super articulate, and I feel like he’s really well informed and practiced in journalism,” Lee said. “His humor made it a lot easier to connect to the information he was pulling.”
Sophomore Marisa Brand, secretary of the Hopkins College Republicans, said she enjoyed the talk despite her political differences with Klein.
“I liked him. He was a very engaging speaker,” Brand said. “I feel like he oversimplified a lot of the issues, but in general I really liked it. I was worried that it was going to be too liberal but a lot of his things were a lot more theoretical, so I thought it was very interesting.”
Sophomore Hansel Romero of FAS said he enjoyed having Klein’s journalistic expertise at Hopkins, and he saw the event as a success for FAS.
“I thought it was incredibly informative and incredibly relevant to have somebody such as him, an expert in the political field, to express his opinions,” Romero said. “It was a success. We expected a lower turnout than usual because we know it’s a very tough week for a lot of people, midterms and such, but we were very happy with the turnout that we received. We thought that the amount of questions that people had was testament to how people responded to his coming here and how interested people were in what he had to say.”
