Chris Hayes on escaping the “doom loop” of Trump’s presidency

Cable news is not a reservoir of deep thinking or serious discourse. The incentives on television, a visual medium, are toward partisan hackery and spectacle. Fox News pioneered this approach in the 1990s, and, more recently, CNN has reduced politics to pure theater.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is an exception, however. He’s one of the sharpest minds on TV, and his nightly show, All In, is consistently smart and probing.

Hayes, the author of A Colony in a Nation, recently sat down with Vox’s Ezra Klein for a wide-ranging conversation about damn near everything — the failure of elites, declining social trust, the crisis of authority in American life, the roots of the criminal justice system, the opioid epidemic, and how he escapes the “doom loop” that is the Trump presidency.

Below, I pulled some of the more interesting parts of Hayes’s exchange with Klein. The topics are varied, but they’re all intriguing in their own right, and provide a snapshot of how Hayes thinks about politics as such.

To listen to the entire conversation with Hayes, subscribe to Klein’s podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your fine audio programming, or stream it off SoundCloud.

Why no one has any idea what the term “elites” means

In the book, I actually take some time with this. In fact, I even say that this term has been stretched past the point of meaning. Partly because it’s been a term tossed around forever, particularly in right-wing populism, in both global right-wing populism and American right-wing populism. So the term gets overdeployed.

The other problem is that it’s such a relative term. Gary Cohn, who’s in the administration and is a former Goldman banker, is unquestionably an elite, right? You run Vox — you’re an elite. I host a cable news show — I’m an elite. But there’s also a lot of differences and distinctions between Gary Cohn and us. Like, that dude rolls at a completely different level of power and influence.

Is a tenured professor at Amherst College an elite as well? The problem with defining this term is that when you’re talking about someone who has power and advantage in a society, there’s a necessary relativity to it. So you can kind of slice the cake where you want it.

How issues of social justice have been understood by large parts of the populace as essentially elite manners

If you watch a farce, and it’s the person at the dinner party who doesn’t know which fork to use, that’s the person you root for. In our politics, a huge part of the population has understood what I think are genuine struggles for social justice and equality as essentially elite manners.

Michelle Goldberg makes this great point about Trump supporters, and it was my experience as well. She’s like, “A lot of people told me about political correctness, and almost no one told me about NAFTA when I would go to rallies.” It was the violations of the taboos that people liked, at least the hardcore supporters who came to the rallies, more than it was trade.

The guardians of culture that cluster in these urban centers have a set of social values and set of social taboos that I think are informed by genuine commitments toward justice, but also have this sort of aspect of elite manners that are understood by huge parts of the society as elite manners.

The power of humiliation as a motivating force in human affairs

I got really obsessed about this idea. I think it’s a really underappreciated and under-interrogated experience. Part of the reason I found my way to it was reading about the American founders, who felt humiliated by the crown. Like, we think about the revolution in these kind of airy philosophical terms — self-representation, democracy, no taxation without representation. But on the front lines, when there’s a mob beating up a customs official, they’re doing that because they feel humiliated by the crown.

There was a long section of the book about the Arab Spring and Mohamed Bouazizi, who was the fruit vendor in Tunisia who lit himself on fire. The reason he lit himself on fire was there was a cop that would come every day and harass him about the fruit he was selling without a license. It was a woman cop, which I think was part of the humiliation. He went to the government office to complain about this cop, and they said, “Get out of here.” He went home and he lit himself on fire.

That humiliation, it turned out, was felt across the entire region. It erupted in revolution from country to country to country because, like you said, that emotion is so dangerous because it cannot go anywhere by definition. Rage is explosive. Sadness sort of comes out of us in certain ways. Humiliation just has to be bottled up because the powerful don’t let you actually express yourself ... and it can lead to this kind of backlash politics.

How the impulse to punish in America produced our perverse criminal justice system

One of the central arguments of the book, and the central things it wrestles with, is there’s no special interest to pin this on when you talk about what we built in criminal justice. There’s no bank lobby, right? It’s not the health insurance companies. We built this. There was democratic, popular traction with this set of policies. There are interest groups, police unions, prison guard unions, upstate towns that employ lots of people in prisons, private prison industries that make it hard to dismantle absolutely.

It wasn’t built by special interest groups. It was built through small-d democracy. People really did vote for this. Now, the way that got transmuted is a complicated story, and whose vote mattered and whose voice mattered is a really complicated story. But by and large, this is a phenomenon of democratic will.

There was an amazing moment at an event I did last night. I was talking about the opioid epidemic and this idea that there’s more empathy in the rhetoric toward addicts in the sort of large swaths of white America, but that I wasn’t yet convinced that was going to transfer into a more empathetic policy, because the sort of impulse toward wrath is so strong. People listened to that. Then someone got up and she said that the drug companies that ship those pain pills to this town in West Virginia, 9 million pills into this town of 400, they should all be in jail.

That’s the impulse. The impulse is to punish. It’s not like a crazy impulse or wrong or even unjust in the circumstance. I do think the drug companies in this instance committed probably criminal felonies, but we want to see people punished. It’s particular to America, in some ways, but it’s also just broadly true.

Why democratic politics is essentially tribal politics

I’ve thought about the way we would cover Iraqi politics in the nascent Iraqi state, post-Saddam. Basically, the way we would cover them from abroad was we would say, “There’s a Kurdish party. There’s a Sunni party. There’s a Shia party. They’re vying for supremacy.” Now, if you were in Iraq, there were all sorts of policy debates about the proper role of government and how large it should be. But we’re just like, no, there’s a fixed pie that these three groups are warring over, and their political parties are just the means by which they’re doing that.

If you covered American politics with enough perspective, it would look a lot like that; it would look like this battle between warring identity groups with tribal affiliations. The great discovery of Donald Trump was to simply lean into that. I do think it is the case that a lot of democracy is like that.

On Trump’s view that life is defined by zero-sum transactions

The only belief I feel like he has, which forms the deepest core of his worldview, is this incredible belief in zero sumness in every domain at all times. Every single interaction is a pie that’s going to be cut between him and someone else. He’s going to win or lose. He’s going to fuck them or they’re going to fuck him. Like, it is unbelievable how he applies that to everything and how appealing it is to think in those terms.

Avoiding the “doom loop” even though the world is on fire and nothing is true anymore

I tend to think of it in terms of my own behavior. Like, what am I going to do? How am I going to avoid the doom loop? My whole approach to the Trump era is to act as if reality matters, facts matter, the basic political gravity of whether you make people’s lives better or worse matters, rigorous thinking, nonconspiratorial thinking, logical skepticism — all of these things, these principles I hold as a journalist, as a thinker, as a writer, as a citizen, they all matter. Act as if that’s the case, even with the knowledge they may not.

I don’t know if in the end they will matter, but I can’t figure out how to conduct myself in my life or in my work if they don’t. I don’t have an alternative to that. I don’t know how to live in some sort of Hobbesian world of a war of all against all in which there are no rules and nothing matters and you can say whatever you want, whether it’s true or not, and be this sort of vengeful and petty person. I don’t know how to conduct myself in that world. The world I know how to conduct myself in is the world in which the values I believe in and hold and try to live by and work by win out in the end.

On whether or not the media has been unfair to Trump

I think there has been some sloppiness in response to Trump’s sloppiness. I think part of that has to do with the fact that because almost any story you hear about Trump is facially plausible, there’s an impulse to run with things before you can confirm them. You could tell me anything he said or did right now, and I would think to myself, “Yeah, that totally could have happened.” This wasn’t the case with Obama.

How the Trump administration encourages and benefits from media sloppiness

I think they luxuriate in our sloppiness. They are constantly laying land mines to blow up the press so that the press gets it wrong, so they could call them on it, as opposed to attempting to get their message out as accurately as possible, which is bizarre. It’s the inverse of what White Houses usually do. Usually White Houses will try to work with you to be like, “I just want to call you ahead of time. We’re putting up this executive order. Here are the things it does and doesn’t do.” But Trump just throws the executive order at you, waits for you to go on air and get it wrong, then says you got it wrong and calls it “fake news.”

Part of what he has done, which is both brilliant and loathsome, is turn the press into an adversary, a mirror of the polarized existence we live in, which is a way of discrediting them to half the country, which is obviously a very old trick, but he has taken it to this incredible performative extreme. Sometimes it feels like you are being cast as the heel to his face, or the face to his heel, in a wrestling match that you’re performing even as you’re trying to do your job.

The center-of-right ideas the left ought to engage

The entirety of the corpus of Hayek, Friedman, and neoclassical economics. I think it’s an incredibly powerful intellectual tradition and a really important one to understand, these basic frameworks of neoclassical economics, the sort of ideas about market clearing prices, about the functioning of supply and demand, about thinking in marginal terms.

I think the tradition of economic thinking has been really influential. I think it’s actually a thing that people on the left really should do — take the time to understand all of that. There is a tremendous amount of incredible insight into some of the things we’re talking about, like non-zero-sum settings, and the way in which human exchange can be generative in this sort of amazing way. Understanding how capitalism works has been really, really important for me, and has been something that I feel like I’m a better thinker and an analyst because of the time and reading I put into a lot of conservative authors on that topic.

For much, much more from Hayes and Klein, listen to their whole conversation.