ESSAY: Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates' false choice on political persuasion

A path between a big tent at any cost and civic pessimism without any hope

In a time rife with political violence and visions of purging enemies, it’s worth celebrating the lost art of arguing with your friends. Lately the writers Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates have been practicing it. The vegetarian beef began after Klein wrote a column provocatively titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way,” right after Kirk’s assassination. It was followed by an essay from Coates accusing Klein of being part of a political class that was “sanitizing his legacy.” Then the two friends got together on Klein’s podcast and surveyed every fissure of their rift. Now, that is practicing politics the right way.

I listened with interest, having tried for some years now to sound the alarm about the left’s persuasion problem, “the great American write-off” that falsely assumes too many voters to be unreachable, and the need for a reckoning about why pro-democracy values are losing ground. But I also listened with frustration, because much of what I heard was an outdated binary, a false choice, between a big tent at any cost and civic pessimism without any hope.

The false binary was captured in the headline of the conversation: “Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines.” You can bridge gaps, in this view, or you can draw lines. You can either, to cite an idea Klein has talked about, run pro-life candidates on the Democratic Party line to expand the map, which is very much not drawing a line; or, as Coates says, you can set clear boundaries, such as that “if you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible,” which is very much not bridging gaps.

While I have great respect for both of these fellow writers, I think we are in even bigger trouble than we realize as a country if we are caught between the idea that the only way to win is to have no standards and the idea that one should treat much of the country as an uncontactable tribe.

There is a path in between a big tent at any cost and civic pessimism without any hope. It’s one I highlighted in my book The Persuaders, which was in large part about organizers blazing that narrow but vital path. Many were women of color sympathetic to the realities that make Coates pessimistic — but who, as working organizers, didn’t feel the luxury of simply describing immovable realities; they are the kind of people who set about to move them anyway, one door knock at a time. And the people I wrote about tended to share Klein’s deeply felt and mathematically unassailable sense that the only way to safeguard democracy and our neighbors is to increase the number of people who agree with you — but they have suffered all too intimately the dilutions and erasures and back-of-the-bus prioritizing that can happen when, in the name of growing the coalition, foxes suddenly find themselves in charge of henhouse security.

One point of contention in the Klein-Coates argument was about the writing off — or, alternatively, the engagement of — people with toxic views. Klein invoked Hillary Clinton’s famous “deplorables” comment in talking about a broader habit he saw on the left of dismissing much of the country as “irredeemable,” to cite another word from the Clinton remarks. He wants the left to go into those spaces and engage everyone. And Coates made his point, cited earlier, that “conversation between you and me is probably not possible” if you believe it’s acceptable to “dehumanize people.”

What Klein seemed to me to skip over entirely is just how degrading it is to have to argue for one’s own humanity. Talk to any organizer or activist who does this work day to day. To have to justify your existence every day, to have to insist that you are a real kind of person, is meaningfully different from not having to do that. And it will be more than many people can bear. But what Coates seemed to me to miss is that if we pause every time dehumanization appears, we would have to suspend politics altogether. With apologies to the founders, there are no self-evident truths, only social ones. Politics has always been about people making arguments about their humanity. And the endlessly hopeful truth is that those arguments are routinely won. In many of our own lifetimes, the status of women, Black people, immigrants, disabled folks, LGBTQ people, and others has improved dramatically because such arguments were won. Coates himself is one of the finest practitioners we have of this kind of arguing. His writing has made so many people rethink the boundaries of humanity they thought they knew. Coates is right that, morally, no one should have to argue for their own humanity. But human history is nothing if not a long argument between those who would dehumanize and those who would humanize, and it’s not a conversation we can afford the humanizers to sit out while waiting for the dehumanizers to come correct. If they are ever to come correct, it will be because of amazing humanizers.

Klein and Coates also argued about who gets into the tent. Klein talked up the idea of allowing a broader array of Democrats into the party — pro-life ones, perhaps (he seemed to be suggesting) even ones who stray from the party orthodoxy on trans rights. “For a lot of us — to twist a line about capitalism — it has become easier to imagine the end of the country than winning a Senate seat in Missouri or Arkansas. And I think that’s a problem,” he said. Coates in turn raised concerns about who gets abandoned and thrown under the bus whenever that kind of political calculation is made. After all, is fighting fascism by becoming neutral on whether women should control their bodies really fighting fascism, or meeting it halfway?

Klein is right to think you need more people in your tent if trans people and women and a whole lot of others are to be safe, but Coates is right to be wary of the costs of that bargain. A more integrated way to think about it, I believe, is that the left must be far more ravenous for converts than it currently is — and far more vigilant about what inevitably happens next. As the Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told me for The Persuaders, the true sign that a movement is winning is when the wrong people start coming in, when people who say and think all kinds of terrible things are banging on the door because, for all those disagreements, there is something you are offering that they can’t help but want in on. But there is a long history of this big-tent openheartedness being exploited to harm those already in the tent. There is a difference between letting people into the tent and letting them own the tent. There is a difference between running pro-business Democrats in some places and having such interests turn the party centrist. An expansionary attitude that is blind to the costs certain people bear from expansion will be doomed to irrelevance and failure.

Klein and Coates also sparred over the context of this moment of rising authoritarianism. Klein suggested that it was because of specific failures and shortcomings of Democrats and pro-democracy actors more generally, which tends toward the optimistic point that strategies and messages and policy offerings could be changed and losses could be turned into wins. Coates brought more of an historical pessimism to the question. “Any sort of sober examination of the history of this country says that those of us who believe in equality, those of us who believe in respecting the humanity of our neighbors — and of everyone — that we’re up against some really, really powerful forces of history and powerful narratives,” he said. Sometimes, in his telling, the arc bends toward justice, and sometimes it doesn’t. Contrary to Klein’s story of failed strategy, Coates said, “We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.”

To me, here, Coates is telling the truth about overwhelming forces of regression in American life that are real — but he is talking about them as though no human can move them, when in fact we move them all the time. And Klein is right that Democrats are good at making bad choices, but he underplays the magnitude of the backlash Coates speaks of. Here is a way to integrate these stories: There was extraordinary social progress in recent decades, the fitful building of a bigger “we”; backlash has ensued, as it often does after such periods; but this backlash is not a force of nature like the wind or the rain; it is a result of people not yet being organized into a new reality, people who have lost their moorings in the old hierarchy and structure and culture and who have yet to find a new sense of themselves. This is the central organizing project for the left now, and it is much bigger than messaging tweaks and running pro-life candidates and centering affordability. Coates is right that the backlash is big and fierce right now, but he is wrong to speak of it as a storm you just have to wait out, part of the cycles of history. And Klein is right that strategy matters, but the strategy that is needed is both bigger and deeper than he contemplates. It is about helping millions of people adrift between old and new ways of life, old and new senses of themselves, old and new pecking orders, old and new mores, find a new sense of who they are and cease to feel mocked by the future. This is the organizing project of a generation.

I believe there is a politics waiting to be practiced that is fiercer than throw-your-neighbor-under-the-bus coalitionism, and more inviting and inspiring than blood-at-the-root fatalism. It pursues persuasion without dilution. It seeks to reach out while still standing for something. It is clear about painful history and unfinished business, but it conveys an infectious sense of hope that things can change because people can.

For more on this subject, read The Persuaders:

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