From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Ezra Klein is a political commentator and a self-described policy wonk who's very much willing to get into the weeds of how government actually

works. He hosts a political podcast aptly called The Ezra Klein Show. Klein's first book is just out,

and it aims to tackle a huge question. The book is called simply Why We're Polarized. And one of

Klein's major themes here is that policies are now far less important to who we

elect than who we identify with. In other words, that partisanship has become a kind of identity

politics and it's very hard to change someone's mind about their identity. Ezra Klein talked about

his book with Isaac Chotner, who writes the Q&A column for the New Yorker.

Well, I want to ask you about the democratic race in the context of this book a little bit, because you've essentially written this book and you're saying that things like health care, that's not how our political system is where it is because of the debate over health care.

There are much larger issues of identity. And if you want to understand American politics, you have to

understand these much larger forces that are going on. And yet, if you look at the Democratic

debate, there is a lot of very intricate policy debate about bills or, you know, issues that are probably not going to pass the Senate,

no matter what happens. You know, it's certainly a contrast to the Republican primary of four

years ago where there was racism on the stage and people were yelling at each other and it was

crazy in many ways. But in some ways, it feels like a more accurate reflection of where American politics is. And I'm

wondering if you think the Democratic debate, as good as it is to talk about policy and as important

as it is, is actually sort of different from the main conversation about what's really going on

in politics now. I don't think so. I don't think that Democrats are debating policy. That's actually

goes very deep in part because it's a party of very different groups. You have to sort of win people over through transactional policy. But the bigger point I would make here, and I say this is somebody whose whole career is covering policy. It's a mistake to think that policy is not a way people express identity. And in particular, Bernie Sanders is

genius at this. When Bernie Sanders talks about Medicare for all and the way he talks about

Medicare for all, he's not just making a policy argument. He's making an argument about values and

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