Zohran Mamdani created a new anti-establishment playbook — in his use of social video, his focus on affordability and his position on Israel.
His assumed victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, trouncing the former governor Andrew Cuomo, was one of the biggest political upsets in years. And while the electorate in this case is pretty specific, I think it still points to some tectonic changes in Democratic politics.
My friend Chris Hayes, the host of MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes,” came on the show earlier this year to talk about his book “The Sirens’ Call,” which is all about how social media and the new attention economy are shaping politics. So I wanted to bring him back for a sequel, to get “The Sirens’ Call” take on Mamdani’s victory, and Hayes’s insights as a born-and-raised New Yorker, with a deep feel for both the city’s politics and the broader Democratic Party.
This episode contains strong language.
Book Recommendations:
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find the transcript 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.html
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director 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.
Плейлист
The Ezra Klein Show
Biden passed the most ambitious climate legislation in American history. Trump just shredded it. What does that mean for the future of renewable energy in America? Where does the climate movement go f...
The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down. That consensus, roughly, was this: What is good for Israel is good for the Jews; anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitis...
MAGA has been infighting over the Jeffrey Epstein files. And that’s because the conspiracy theories around Epstein hit at the very core of MAGA’s whole worldview.Today’s episode looks closer at that w...
I have had a meditation practice for about 15 years now. I started hoping it would calm me down, and it has. But it’s also made me more aware of the strangeness of my mind. Certain thoughts emerge see...
Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are both proof of how the ability to capture attention is power. And the attention economy isn’t reshaping just politics; it’s also reshaping the actual economy: the cr...
President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a bad piece of legislation. It includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts that are very much tilted toward the rich, along with savage cuts to Medicaid, nutri...
Zohran Mamdani created a new anti-establishment playbook — in his use of social video, his focus on affordability and his position on Israel. His assumed victory in New York City’s Democratic mayora...
For decades, Israel has wanted American support to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. But U.S. presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have resisted — until President Trump. So, what changed? And what are...
Kevin Roberts, Kellyanne Conway, Ben Rhodes and I battled it out a few weeks ago on a stage in Toronto. This was for a Munk Debate on the motion: “Be it resolved, this is America’s Golden Age.” It mig...
President Trump’s actions against transgender Americans have been stunningly wide-ranging. They’ve also been popular.Trump has sought new restrictions on trans people in sports, schools, the military,...
It is impossible to overstate how hellish life in Gaza has been for the past 20 months.The death count is above 50,000 people — more than 15,000 of whom are children — and at least 1.9 million of Gaza...
This is one of my favorite episodes of the show in recent memory. It’s a conversation with the author Salman Rushdie about the experience of losing control of your identity in the world. This happened...
Trump has been making some foreign policy moves I didn’t entirely expect. He seems determined to get a nuclear deal with Iran. He’s been public about his disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu. He call...
This is a bit of a strange episode. It’s an attempt to explore the difficulty of everything we’re supposed to feel in a day. We’re in a time when to open the news is to expose yourself to horrors — on...
Steve Bannon famously talked about using “muzzle velocity” as a strategy: doing so much so quickly that you overwhelm the ability of the media to cover it. I think what the Trump family is doing with...
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the cruelest and most irresponsible piece of domestic legislation to be seriously proposed in my lifetime.When you think about this bill, you should think about risk....
This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up?Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book argues there was. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and...
Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a funct...
I honestly don’t know how I should be educating my kids. A.I. has raised a lot of questions for schools. Teachers have had to adapt to the most ingenious cheating technology ever devised. But for me,...
A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s soci...
Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is one of just 13 Democrats to represent a district that Donald Trump won. Her distinctive economic message, and a willingness to buck her own party, helped her...
The U.S. dollar is the lingua franca of the global financial system. The fact that so much of the world relies on our currency has long been understood as our exorbitant privilege — the reason we have...
“Abundance,” the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, hit bookstore shelves a little over a month ago, and the response has been beyond anything I could have imagined. And it’s generated a lot of inte...
I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally.My guest and I come from very different persp...
After last week’s episode, “The Emergency Is Here,” we got a lot of emails. And the most common reply was: You really think we’ll have midterm elections in 2026? Isn’t that naïve?I think we will have...
The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists: a prison built for disappearance, a prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, a...
My colleague Tom Friedman thinks we’re screwed.That’s the first thing he told me when recounting his recent trip to China. It’s not just because of the trade war that President Trump is escalating rig...
After a week of market chaos, President Trump pulled back from the brink. But he didn’t pull that far back. He left a 10 percent tariff on most of the world and launched a trade war with China. It’s u...
The tariffs President Trump unveiled this week were both bigger than most people expected and a lot more confusing. These aren’t the flat tariffs he proposed during the campaign. And they aren’t recip...
There’s something of a policy revolution afoot: As of March, more than a dozen states — including California, Florida and Ohio — have passed bills or adopted policies that aim to limit cellphone usage...