Ta-Nehisi Coates vs Ezra Klein and the Future of Left Politics in America

The public murder of Charlie Kirk rattled the American political establishment, and was met with a variety of responses from its pundits, journalists, and elected officials. For many in the Republican Party and on the right of American politics more broadly, Kirk’s death was the pretence required to pursue an official clampdown on freedom of speech, as opposed to the less systematic, yet no less brazen, attacks the White House had been carrying out up to that point. Citizens across the country would lose their jobs if they were found to be vocally unsympathetic to the man who had just been shot, a policy that was actively pursued by the Trump administration in the days and weeks following Kirk’s murder.

On the left however, the response to the death of Charlie Kirk was mixed. Many saw him for who he was; a hatemonger who had built his career off demonising marginalised communities. Others in the Democratic party and the centre of American politics took a different approach. Both Gavin Newsom, State Governor of California and frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, and Ezra Klein, columnist for the NY Times, responded to Kirk’s death in the spirit of ‘I did not agree with his views, but I agreed with his way of doing politics.’ 

In an op-ed for the NY Times, Klein stated plainly that Kirk was ‘doing politics the right way’ in reference to his willingness to debate those ideologically opposed to him in an attempt to bring his opponents, or those watching on social media, to his side. Newsom showered Kirk with similar praise, celebrating his ability to engage with young men, a demographic that, in his view, Democrats have neglected.

Both Newsom and Klein’s comments were widely criticised for their whitewashing of Kirk’s legacy, including by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer and public intellectual who took particular issue with Klein's comments for not mentioning any of Kirk’s beliefs in his piece. In omitting the reality of Kirk's political positions and what he stood for Ta-Nehisi Coates argued, in a rebuttal piece for the Atlantic, that Klein risked seriously misjudging not only Kirk’s character, but also the lessons the Democrats could learn from his political project.

In light of their public disagreement, Klein invited Coates onto his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, to settle their differences. The pair discussed Charlie Kirk, their diagnoses of the American left’s recent electoral failures, and each of their answers to the fundamental question: “how can we win?” The conversation that took place between the two men was fascinating to watch, for it perfectly articulated the choice ahead for a Democratic party which desperately needs to reassert its relevance in US Politics.

In many ways, Klein and Coates’ disagreement over the appropriate response to Kirk’s death encapsulates their broader disagreement over the future of the Democratic Party. Klein was steadfast in his commitment to reach across the political aisle and ‘come together to try and see other people in their grief.’ This is a slightly disingenuous self-assessment given that Klein did not only disavow political violence and share his condolences over Kirk’s death, but instead went one step further and valorised his political legacy. 

Regardless of the op-ed’s contents, it is symbolic of Klein’s broader approach to political disagreement, one that seeks to reconcile with his ideological opponents and compromise with them on key issues to ‘convince people outside the tent to come in.’ For Klein, the Democratic party over the past decade has done all it can to exclude people from its political project, branding Republican supporters ‘deplorables’ as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and refusing to build the coalitions required to win elections.

Klein’s proposed solution for his view of the Democrats’ inefficient and self-destructive culture is to meet people where they are ideologically. ‘How do we win senate seats in places like Kansas and Missouri? I would like to see us running pro-life candidates’, he suggested, pointing out that at some point you have to play politics with the electorate you are given in order to affect greater change down the line.

Coates, on the other hand, is hesitant to grant certain sectors of the Republican party base the sympathy Klein suggests Democrats should. While he acknowledges that calling people ‘deplorable’ for their political views is unhelpful, he is unequivocal in his distinction between reaching across party lines, and sanitising the hatred of minority groups for electoral gain. In Coates’ own words, Klein is at risk of not ‘taking seriously the people who are in the tent and who are vulnerable and afraid’, to which he adds, ‘I think you owe them a little more.’

Ultimately, Coates’ answer to the question ‘why are we losing?’ is ‘because there are always moments when we lose.’ Speaking from a broad understanding of US history centred around black people and their struggle for freedom, a topic often featured in Coates’ writing, Coates analyses the current rise of the populist right as a resurrection of the same forces that have always played a part in the country’s history. As Coates himself put it, ‘we are not happy, but we are not surprised.’

It is important to highlight that this is intended as a fatalistic position. As a writer, Coates understands himself as ‘being a part of something larger’. In Coates’ view, his role in the struggle for social justice is to ‘do whatever I do with the time that I have in my life, whatever time I’m gifted with…and leave the struggle where I leave it.’ He goes on to say that ‘the privilege I draw out of this, the honour that I draw out of this is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.’

I include these quotes in full because it is important to understand the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of Coates’ worldview in order to comprehend why he is adamant in rejecting Klein’s strategy for the Democratic party. It is not that Coates disagrees with the prospect of changing people’s minds in an effort to win elections. What Coates is unwilling to entertain is the neglect of marginalised communities for the sake of political compromise and short-term political strategy. He holds plainly that ‘Hatred is a powerful force’, and Democrats should not seek to shift their moral foundations when there is perhaps nothing that can be done at this particular historic juncture to turn the political tide in their favour.

While I do not think that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s view is entirely correct, for example on the good that shifting strategy and position can have for winning elections, I think his overarching insight is correct on a number of levels. 

Shifting right on important issues in an effort to swing voters has had a very disappointing success rate in both the US and in Europe over the last couple of years. The effects of this strategy have been to make ideologies mainstream that 10 years ago would have been unacceptable, and make those being attacked by the far-right feel that their rights hang in the balance of what is most electorally beneficial for the incumbent party. 

Despite this, I do sympathise with Klein’s view. The Democratic party does need to be more willing to get out of its comfort zone and talk to people where they are, or risk reinforcing the idea that they exclusively represent the out-of-touch coastal elites. The manner in which Klein proposes Democrats accomplish this, however, not only risks being perceived as inauthentic, bolstering instead the camp that always held such views, but risks the livelihoods of communities currently under attack by the Trump administration.

Given the combative and brash approach to politics the American right has adopted since the election of Trump in 2016, it is not useful to kid ourselves about what the outcomes of Klein’s ‘good-faith debates’ would be. For the most part, right wing commentators and politicians, much like Charlie Kirk in the time he was alive, are not interested in civil debate or even telling the truth. To debate the right in the way Klein intends, avoiding direct confrontation to uphold the image of productive conversation as opposed to a shouting match, allows the right to pass off their ideas as legitimate and intellectually sound. It is simply a waste of time to debate someone who defends a man that proudly proclaims ‘I hate my opponents.’

What I thought was most interesting about the conversation between Coates and Klein, besides analysing the respective philosophies on the fight for civil rights, was the fact that neither mentioned Zohran Mamdani and the lessons we can draw from his meteoric rise to political stardom.

Klein briefly mentions the ‘economic populism, which some people are trying’, curiously omitting the mention of Mamdani specifically, but does not elaborate on the idea of harnessing economic populism as a way to gain support in traditionally red sections of the country.

What Zohran Mamdani’s Mayoral campaign in New York City symbolised, is that a candidate need not spend time strategically disavowing the rights of marginalised groups in order to win over Republican voters. Instead, he showed that the approach required to win elections against all odds is to make affordability the central promise of a campaign.

This is not to say that Mamdani was silent on the threats faced by minority groups, he has been an outspoken supporter of trans rights and civil liberties since he launched his bid for city hall, but this has not been his primary focus. I will not elaborate on the virtues of his campaign here, as I have done that at length in some of my other articles, but I want to emphasise that a political platform built on economic populism is the piece that both Klein and Coates both miss. 

Zohran Mamdani did not have to compromise on his position regarding the Gaza Genocide despite the large proportion of Jewish voters in New York which tend to be pro-Israel and even directly oppose Mamdani’s stance on the issue. The reason being that Mamdani’s campaign centres the material wellbeing of New Yorkers regardless of who they are. Even if Jewish voters do not support Mamdani’s position on the Middle East, the promise of an easier life is too alluring to risk voting for someone else, a point that is reinforced by the polling data.

I can only conjecture as to why Mamdani’s campaign, and the lessons that can be drawn from it, were left out of Coates and Klein’s conversation on the future of the Democratic party. One explanation might be that Mamdani’s left-wing economic policies scare more centrist liberals like Klein who are well aware of the influence corporate lobbyists have over Democrats. Another might be that both men remain unconvinced that Mamdani’s approach to politics would be successful in parts of the country where being outwardly pro-queer is not taken lightly, an argument I took issue with in a previous piece.

I am not naive enough to believe that clawing back political power from the most electorally successful Republican platform in nearly 40 years will be easy. What I think is clear, however, is that negotiating the rights of marginalised communities with a party wholly unconcerned with their dignity is not only futile, but threatens those communities already under attack by the Trump administration. A political strategy that embraces economic populism cuts through these uncomfortable constraints, and meets people at their most fundamental concern, living standards. The opportunity is there, it only requires a generation of Democrats to seize it.

Image: Flickr/Cory Doctorow

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