Between the World and Ezra
His
Interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates Explains It All
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.
