The Ezra Klein Show19 Mar 2021

Andrew Cuomo and the Performance of Power

Six months ago, Andrew Cuomo was on top of the world. He was touted as the anti-Donald Trump — the calm, fact-driven coronavirus leader the country needed. Now, amid allegations of hiding the true number of Covid-19 deaths in New York nursing homes and of workplace sexual harassment and abusive behavior, most of the state’s major Democratic politicians are calling for Cuomo’s resignation.

Rebecca Traister is a writer at large at New York magazine and the author of “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.” Last week, Traister published an extraordinary piece on the allegations against Cuomo. For her, the Andrew Cuomo story is a lot bigger than just Andrew Cuomo; it’s about the nature of toxic workplaces and the desire — even among Democrats — for strongmen leaders. And more than that, it’s about what we’ve been taught leadership looks like, and how the aesthetic of the tough, domineering male leader covers up, or contributes to, poor leadership.

So I wanted to bring Traister on the show to discuss the details of the Cuomo story and its broader implications. We discuss what Cuomo has actually been accused of (including Traister’s own in-depth reporting), why we often mistake bullying for leadership, what blind spots the Cuomo story reveals among liberals, the trade-offs between projecting an aesthetic of power and actually governing, why white male rage is so accepted and even admired, the parallels between Cuomo and Trump, how this story recasts reporting on Hillary Clinton and Amy Klobuchar, the double bind faced by female politicians, and much more.

Mentioned in this episode:

"Abuse and Power" by Rebecca Traister, New York magazine

Recommendations:

"The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith

"Another Brooklyn" by Jacqueline Woodson

"My Ántonia" by Willa Cather

"Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris

"All the King’s Men" by Robert Penn Warren

"Unbought and Unbossed" by Shirley Chisholm

"The Elephant and the Bad Baby" by Elfrida Vipont

"The Church Mouse" by Graham Oakley

"Tar Beach" by Faith Ringgold

"The Highway Rat" by Julia Donaldson

"The Complete 8-Book Ramona Collection" by Beverly Cleary

"When You Reach Me" by Rebecca Stead

"The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963" by Christopher Paul Curtis

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(513)

Chris Rufo Thinks the Right Can Control This. I Don’t.

Christopher Rufo is arguably the most successful activist of the MAGA era. He rose to prominence fighting D.E.I. initiatives and critical race theory. In President Trump’s second term, he’s had a huge...

30 Jun 2h 4min

I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel

A hypervisual, looks-obsessed, wellness-crazed, postliterate society where we’re constantly staring at screens and evaluating one another based on metrics, as the country around us feels like it’s fal...

19 Jun 1h 18min

Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and the New Rules of Political Attention

Attention is working in really unusual ways this election cycle. Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, ended up dominating his Senate primary against Maine’s sitting governor – even as his c...

16 Jun 1h 18min

What’s the Left’s Vision for Foreign Policy After Trump?

The Democratic Party is in the middle of a rupture over foreign policy – with Israel and Palestine at the center. In recent weeks, the Democratic senators Brian Schatz and Chris Van Hollen both called...

9 Jun 1h 33min

The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men

A new masculinist movement has gone mainstream on the right. The prominent voices in this movement yearn for an earlier time, when men were men and women were women. Sometimes that time seems to be th...

5 Jun 1h 43min

Ian Bremmer on the Risks America Poses to the World

Over the past month, there have been two dominant stories in American foreign policy. One, of course, is the war with Iran. The other is the much-anticipated summit between President Trump and Xi Jinp...

2 Jun 1h 31min

Does Trump Want to Lose the Midterms?

President Trump doesn’t seem to care that much about winning the midterms. He’s more unpopular at this point in his second term than basically any of his modern predecessors. Democrats seem poised to ...

29 Mai 1h 14min

Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion

What are the conditions that enable a country to become great — or great again? The Trump administration — and other right-wing movements in other countries — offers a vision of greatness based on pow...

26 Mai 1h 53min