I watched all 71 minutes of Ezra Klein’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coming on the heels of their dueling op-eds: Klein extolling Charlie Kirk as ‘practicing politics the right way’ and Coates responding to Ezra, accusing him of sanitizing the man, the conversation wasn’t as surprising as it was illuminating. In just over an hour, Klein demonstrated why the liberal establishment’s hold on the country, the economy, and the culture, has failed.
The Ezra-Centric Worldview
To say Klein is disconnected from America is to say Neptune is far away from Earth. The concept is obvious, the distance breathtaking. His perch provides him with an audience of millions, a paycheck of millions more, and a perspective that is at least three Astronomical Units from the reality of everyday Americans.
I give Coates credit. He has a perspective and lived experience that provides more of a legitimate foundation for his role as a writer and public intellectual. Klein, in this regard, is the anti-Coates. He holds his opinions so lightly they slip through his fingers like so many grains of sand.
Like his New York Times stablemate David Brooks, Klein finds his strength in not taking anything too seriously. Changing his mind doesn’t make him a windsock for public opinion. Instead, he’s credited with ‘thoughtful’ reconsideration when the breeze freshens.
If Fox News and Donald Trump provide their followers with daily dopamine rushes, Klein delivers serotonin on demand: His just-dulcet-enough tones deliver common sense and a desire for a return to comity in culture. Klein provides a sense of safety, superiority, and contentment for his listeners. He asks nothing of them and they love him for it.
Klein Declines to Draw “The Line”
Coates serves as an excellent foil to Klein due to the strength of his beliefs. Klein sees himself as a simple purveyor and shaper of liberal technocratic political opinion. A kindly farmer-cum- performative male. He expresses a desire for people to ‘find meaning in my’ work. To what end? Coates again takes him to task for his remarks about Charlie Kirk, noting that at some point a thinker, or an individual must ‘draw a line.’
Klein rejects this notion out of hand, and in the process yet again reveals himself. “I don’t get to draw the line.” Of course he doesn’t. To have a line would require a set of beliefs that are sacrosanct: Personal tenets that transcend podcasts and politics and dictate how one sees the world, lives their life, and imparts their values to those around them.
Klein is vaporware in human form. As he asks nothing of his fans, he expects the world to ask nothing of him, other than acceptance that he belongs in the position in which he’s found himself. It may be that Ezra lives in a gilded cage: Wanting to offer more than he does, but hemmed in by the strictures of a neo-liberal worldview that disallows straying from orthodoxy.
Politics and Culture
At one point, Klein proclaims, “Political strategy is downstream of political culture.” I’m not sure he knows what he’s saying when he says that, but I assume he knows he’s cribbing Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart’s exact quote was, “Politics is downstream of culture.” This small change in language represents a massive gulf in Klein’s understanding of the world.
Last month, I was in Florida attending events with former Congressman David Jolly as he campaigns for Florida governor. One of our stops was to a University of Florida tailgate as guests of the UF College Democrats. Their tent (and many others) were set up across the street from fraternity row. As kids streamed in and out of the Sig Ep house I asked one of our hosts where the Greek system stood on politics. His answer stuck with me: “They’re apolitical but they’re pro-Trump.”
Voter turnout among Florida’s panhellenic crowd is probably low. But they’re not Trump fans because of policy, but his eff you attitude, his transgressive nature, and the anti-woke bombast with which he, in their eyes, affirms frat bros’ worst jokes. Klein cannot see this because he cannot separate culture from politics. To live in Ezra’s Manhattan is to exist in the above New Yorker cartoon. For him, a southern college football tailgate might as well be a bazaar in Turkey. He wouldn’t understand the culture or the language in either. Perhaps this is Klein’s biggest miss: The people he wants to win back aren’t looking for candidates with conservative social stances. They’re looking for recognition.
Strategery
A recent Puck article stated Ezra Klein has ‘become something of a spiritual advisor’ to the Democratic Party. Truer words have rarely been written, as is clear from the party’s generalized incompetence and inability to perform the most basic political tasks. In the wake of his latest book, Abundance, he was invited to speak to the Senate Democratic Caucus.
During his interview with Coates, Klein relishes the idea that he can sit at the table and gameplan politics with his allies and benefactors. The reality is closer to play-acting. His self-confidence reminds me of the cause of Brian Cox’s wonderfully cynical rejoinder in the Bourne Supremacy, “You talk about this stuff like you read it in a book.”
I have read historian B.H. Liddell Hart’s seminal work, Strategy. I’ve also read The Art of War. Neither of them qualifies me to take command of a field army and maneuver thousands of soldiers in combat. Klein suffers from no such lack of self-awareness. He leans over the sand table, moving tank battalions and infantry regiments.
While noting that the Democratic Party has hemorrhaged support, he suggests that Democrats should run pro-life candidates in conservative states such as Arkansas and Missouri. Coates notes that left-of-center issues like abortion and minimum wage have passed via ballot measure in these same places. What Klein cannot comprehend is that Democrats didn’t lose those states because of abortion, but because as a party, their candidates and leaders refused to talk about anything that affected voters’ day-to-day lives.
At no point does it occur to Klein that perhaps the rise of Trumpism isn’t due to just the radical, nativist, nationalist, racist right. American politics doesn’t operate in a vacuum. To absolve the Democratic Party of any responsibility for its current miserable state of affairs is to give a pass to those that have guided its policy, candidates, and campaigns for the past 30 years. Hemmed in by what he sees as an ugly aesthetic, Klein wants to win because he believes he and his cohort are smarter and better. Coincidentally, that belief seems to be the animating factor of many Democratic leaders I’ve met over the past five-plus years.
Elitism
Actual Americans’ welfare makes only fleeting appearances in this conversation, and only then when introduced by Coates or as a campaign tactic. Klein doesn’t claim to represent them, because he doesn’t, and his only connection to them is “reading focus group reports, survey data, and talking to the people that do that kind of work.” His perspective reminds me of many national reporters going to Iowa for the first time as Caucus season is kicking off. They treat going to the Midwest as an anthropological experiment; shocked to find that Iowans don’t walk around with pork chops in their pockets and serve deep-fried Oreos with every meal.
Klein muses that who he is ‘willing to accept’ as political leaders has shrunk. Who he’s willing to accept. Why do political leaders have to be acceptable to him? Ah, because he continues, “it’s good for intellectuals to criticize politicians.” I’d like to ask if he believes those that aren’t public intellectuals have the right to criticize their leaders, or is that just the preserve of the well-heeled.
Ezra Klein isn’t the ‘spirit’ of the elite left. He’s its avatar.
Extremism
While Klein professes little love for ideologues of any stripe, he ignores the glacial extremism he himself is a part of. The establishment left (liberals, etc…) are locked into an environment no longer of their making. Unable to transform to present circumstances, the coalition slowly shrinks and occasionally calves off huge icebergs of support, incapable of fusing the lost appendage with the host. The host shrinks steadily and becomes more susceptible to outside forces, worse off for it. They continue to hope, though, that their shear size and potential energy will keep them around.
Once the Democratic establishment abandoned organized labor, their reason for being steadily shrunk: Featuring little-to-no practical difference on economics, the liberal party was left with mostly social and cultural issues that fitted in well with the ‘fiscally responsible, socially liberal’ mindset of Smart America.
This unwillingness to evolve is an extremism of a different sort: Not firebreathing, perhaps, but unmoving and immovable just the same.
A Cold Civil War For Thee…
Neither Klein nor Coates believes America is on the precipice of another civil war. After the predicate decrying of political violence, their consensus appeared to be that our current state, while ugly and unpleasant, is a passing era. If so, why is the Democratic Party animated by little else than being the ‘opposition’ to Donald Trump? They’re firmly in the grip of Carville-ism: Wait for the other side to be bad enough that voters (stuck in a system they hate) pull the lever for your side instead.
You either believe Trump is existential to the Republic or you don’t. If you do, you’d act accordingly. If you don’t, you’d act as many Democrats do: Using Trump as the boogeyman for everyone’s problems (he has indeed created plenty) in place of coming up with new (or even recycled) ideas that voters can judge.
I don’t believe we’re headed for a North vs. South civil war, either. However, I do believe everyday we fail to present a forceful alternative to what MAGA, is selling is a day closer to the Trump Era becoming the Trump Order. The wealthiest Americans will be fine. Those well below the line long ago adapted to survival mode. It will be the (shrinking) middle that will suffer the biggest shock in this new world. They don’t want the Democrats, either, by the way.
Power and Belief
The greatest distance between Coates and Klein appears when it comes to the art and practice of politics. As noted above, Coates has a well-defined belief system that he believes is crucial to bringing about political and societal change. Alternatively, Klein is much more of the triangulation school: Politics is only about power.
They’re both right. Power without belief in the greater good gets you Trumpism. Belief without power is impotent. Until and unless an alternative to the Republican Party can first convince Americans to join up to something bigger than themselves, electoral success will continue to be incidental, lucky, or as a result of being only one of two market entrants.
Wanting to be in power for its own sake isn’t a good enough reason for voters to pull the lever. Voters are not obligated to do anything for anyone. That’s their right, and too many of them, especially Democratically-aligned electors, choose the couch over the polling place. To give Democrats power again simply because they want it has led to too few positive outcomes for working and middle class Americans. Their absence is going to kill this great experiment.
Political Peacetime
Coates asks Klein what he’d like to do. His response illustrates all: He’d like to be “curiously pursuing interests in political peacetime…I’m in the business of political persuasion…We’ve failed in a really consequential way.” If you’ve read a statement more borne of the privilege of a world that works for Ezra Klein (both literally and figuratively) please send it my way.
Individual Americans don’t have the luxury of pursuing their interests in political peacetime or any other time, for that matter. The country is screaming for change. The country is demanding a new direction, a new social contract, and a new operating system. For Klein, these shouts are drowned out by the sirens of New York City and the huzzahs of his adoring audience. His voice could reach those Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck but that would require a lot more work and self-reflection.
We don’t have time for Ezra to do either of those things. The world won’t wait.
I highly recommend watching Ta-Nehisi Coates’ interview with Joy-Ann Reid in New Orleans earlier this year.
Your idea that Klein demands nothing of himself and nothing of his listeners should be the warning label attached to his podcast. Democratic politicians who have, if Puck is accurate, chosen him as a spiritual advisor of sorts, are absolutely doomed to fail us.
Klein personifies the “salon” crowd of yester-century. He talks in a melodic monotone way about other people’s troubles with a “curious” dispassion reserved for discussing a species of insect or coral reefs. It’s all a “pondering” exercise he gets paid for. The Coates interview drew such a stark contrast in ideas and conviction between the two men. One, an advocate for humane societal evolution, the other in charge of a storefront window dressing which changes weekly with each episode, all with the goal of anodyne “persuasion.” No wonder the next week’s episode was something Blah like Brian Eno. Klein realized he had been shellacked and needed to regroup. Folks, ya wanna listen to voices with a pulse on the current American experience from a progressive perspective? Danielle Moodie, Joy Ann Reid and Waj Ali. None of this namby-pamby Ezra Klein bullshit.