(2025-09-28) Klein Ta-Nehisi Coates On Bridging Gaps Vs Drawing Lines

Ezra Klein interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines. For me, one of the central questions animating the show this year — and that has been animating it since the election — is: How did we get here? How did we let these people get back into power? What went wrong in our approach to politics that we ended up here?

This has been a conversation I’ve been engaged in since Charlie Kirk’s murder. And I wanted to have it with somebody who has maybe not liked how I’ve been approaching it. (2025-09-11) Klein Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics The Right Way

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer I admire. In the days after Kirk’s murder, he published a piece in Vanity Fair that was pretty harshly critical of what I had written and what he saw as a whitewashing of this man’s legacy and role in politics. Coates compared what I was doing there to the whitewashing of the Southern cause after the Civil War.

I'm going to cut this up into pieces, because neither one was honest/coherent, so I just want to keep a few of their points.

Klein: my instinct then is to just sit with them in their grief. To say: I can for this moment find some way to grieve with you, to see your friend in some version of the way you saw him.
Coates: I think all of that is understandable. But was silence not an option?
Klein: Silence to me was not grieving with people.

Coates: The fact of the matter is, as horrifying as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, and as horrifying as the feeling is in this moment, that we are in an era of political violence — and I don’t want to sound flip here. Political violence is the norm for the Black experience in this country.

Klein

• Then in 2024, we really got our [expletive] handed to us, and we let a much more dangerous form of politics fully erupt. And I think that reflects strategic decisions they made. I think it reflects decisions we made.
• in many ways, we’ve stopped doing politics. We’ve written a lot of people off, and in writing them off, we are losing, and we are unable to protect ourselves, unable to protect them and just unable to make good change in the world.
• But when I say we began writing people off, I think that something that happened, and something I saw — in this debate, but also underneath it — is that the work of politics, of bridging over a lot of profound, fundamental, moral disagreements, became somewhat demeaned, diminished.
• It began to seem like, in many cases, a betrayal to people. The tent shrank. The people I feel more comfortable with wielding power shrank.*

Klein

• (reference to Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" comment (2016-09-10) Hillary Clinton Half Of Donald Trump Supporters Fall Into Basket Of Deplorables )
• I think of the huge backlash to Bernie Sanders for going on Joe Rogan’s show because Rogan was transphobic
• And to Elizabeth Warren for going on Bill Maher’s show — Bill Maher is Islamophobic.
• There were protests at Netflix when they brought on Dave Chappelle. That's ridiculously different from the other 2 cases.
• They (Trump voters) feel like we were against them, and if so, they were going to be against us. And I think that’s, in the end, doing politics badly.
• The worse the other side gets, the more people want their reaction and their strategy to be emotionally constant with how they’re feeling about it. Because these people are so bad, there can be no quarter.
• I have a feeling right now that we are closer to genuine national rupture, certainly, than we’ve been in my lifetime.

Coates

• there’s a respect that has to be had for people with whom I disagree.
  At the same time, I recognize that part of my audience — and I would say an important part of my audience — is people who have never enjoyed that respect. People who, in fact, are subjects of the kind of hate that Charlie Kirk was harvesting.
  And I can’t ever a) contribute to making them feel like they’ve been abandoned, and b) I can’t ever stand by and watch somebody do that and in the name of unity or whatever, act like that’s not happening

Klein:

• I had Sarah McBride, the first trans member of Congress, on the show, and we were talking about how every single survey you can offer on trans rights has gone in the wrong direction in the past couple of years. We’ve just begun to lose that argument terribly — and that has put people in real danger.
• But the place I’m trying to push toward is that there is a diminishment of the political coalition-building that we now need to do because we have come to the view that a pretty wide variety of people are in some ways deplorables.

Coates

• I don’t even focus on people. I am at war with certain ideologies and ideas, and I want them expunged.
• Klein: For whatever the definition of the line is, what does it mean for you for somebody to be on the other side of it? Not somebody who just died. But somebody who is still living.
• Coates: *If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.
• Klein: And so what do you do with the fact that so many people think that is OK?

Klein:

• But the thing that I am struggling with is that for most people, or a lot of people, the plurality of the voters in the last election: He is somehow not way over the line. That means there are a lot of people who are willing to accept things that I thought we would have found unacceptable.
  I would have thought that the way he acts in public is unacceptable. And it’s not.
• What I see is any line that existed at all collapsing. I’m watching, like, Holocaust revisionism on the biggest right-wing podcasts. I’m watching Tucker Carlson turn into what I would describe as a white nationalist
• That’s where this question of line drawing — I have lines that I think should and should not be acceptable, but those lines clearly have no relationship to my country and its politics.

Klein: How do you deal with Trump substantially increasing his share of the Black vote?

• Coates: Actually, I think where he is right now is about where Republicans tended to be before Barack Obama. There’s a conservative portion of our community that has always voted Republican. And I think sexism is a very, very real force.
  I don’t think it’s completely explanatory, but the idea that there are 20 percent of Black men who are fundamentally conservative — that doesn’t really surprise me too much.

Klein: what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong.
And what politically — not in a column or something, but politically — should our relationship with those people be? Do we win them over? Do we compromise with them?

Klein: many people believe we are already in a cold civil war. That we are in a time that we are dealing with divisions and questions.

• Coates: I mean, that could happen. But I guess the broader thing I am thinking about is how much does this era stand out in the long sweep of American history? It’s bad — but it wouldn’t make my list for the worst.

Klein: I’ve been reading a lot about McCarthyism, so I’ve been thinking about that whole period. And you just brought up World War II as a generator of the politics that allows us to have the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, etc.
McCarthy, who is an unbelievably dominant force for a period.
He’s eventually boxed out and beaten by Dwight Eisenhower, a center-right, very anti-Communist politician
But then, what happens next? Nixon, who is the genteel redbaiter to McCarthy’s nongenteel redbaiter, runs in the next election. He’s beaten by J.F.K., who’s a very center-left, very anti-Communist — sort of runs to Nixon’s right on Communism
It’s a very, checkered series of moves that are accepting huge amounts of McCarthyism at that time. Yet it does sort of lead to political power that is then wielded in a very different way, within fairly short order.

Coates: I take something that we’ve currently been circling for this entire conversation, which is that the role of politicians and the role of writers and intellectuals, etc., is very, very different.
Politicians do things that I wouldn’t do. For instance, I don’t hold up J.F.K. or R.F.K. as the people —
Let me give you an instance that often also comes up that’s not the Civil War and that’s the New Deal. It’s pretty clear that the New Deal did quite a bit to create the social safety net, expand and create an American middle class, right? That’s true.
Did F.D.R. want to, in his heart, exclude Black folks in the way that they were excluded from it? No. That was the price of getting the thing done. I understand that as politics.
But were I there in that time, it would have been incumbent on me to yell at F.D.R. to not do that.

Klein

• I think that the idea that political coalition-building, building across these gigantic differences, building across public opinion — both not just as you wish it existed, but as it exists — has often become seen and treated as betrayal, cowardice, moral fallibility.
  it’s good for intellectuals to criticize politicians. But my view is that the political practice became too weak
• one way the second Trump term has changed me is I think what got built, for all of its flaws in the back half of the 20th century, was much more fragile than I’d understood. Not just the legislation or any of that but the actual sense of what you could and could not do, what we would and would not accept.
• I don’t know what my role is anymore
  I think there are places I’ve failed. I think there are things I got right, too. Like: We shouldn’t have run Joe Biden again. I think I was right about that.
• I said in a podcast with my colleague Ross Douthat — he was pushing me on left radicalism — I was saying I don’t care about left-wing radicalism. I don’t think it’s a great threat
• And I said that the question for me is: How do we win Senate seats in places like Kansas and Missouri and Ohio? I said I would like to see us doing things in red states like running pro-life candidates. But in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act passed, there were 40 House Democrats who were pro-life, at some level. You had to do this whole negotiation with this guy Bart Stupak.
• there are states that we do not even think about competing in anymore. I’m not talking about Ohio here.
  I think you have to try things. By the way, not only moderation kind of things. You could try going much harder on economic populism, which some people are trying
• there is a question of whether or not people feel like you respect them and like them, even if they disagree with you. Before people will give you power, they don’t even ask if they like you, they ask whether you like them. And I think a lot of the country feels we don’t like them.

Coates: What immediately strikes me is if you take the reproductive rights example — which I know it’s not necessarily the example that you would hold out. But I think the problem with musing about that is: Abandoning it is a very real possibility for people who don’t have the option to fly to another state or do X, Y and Z. So I suspect when they hear somebody of your status, even if it’s not the example you mean, putting it out in the air, they feel

• Klein: We lost power in a way that allowed Donald Trump to drive the Supreme Court to a 6-3 Republican majority, and that majority overturned Roe v. Wade and actually abandoned all these people, actually [expletive] them over.
• Klein: In 2008, as you and I both know, Barack Obama ran as a public opponent of gay marriage.*
  At a time when not only — I won’t speak for you — was I not opposed to it, but most of us did not think he was opposed to it. Like, at his heart, we did not think he was opposed to it.
  But he was playing politics.

Coates: you know what my position was during the election about Palestine, about Gaza.
Kamala Harris was running to be the first Black woman to be president of the United States. You cannot imagine how animated Black folks were about that. And some would argue the base of the Democratic Party, Black women, were going to see that she was not taking a position that I thought was particularly moral. (I said:) We have been fighting this battle for a long time. We have never had the luxury of electing people who represented the best of us. This is why I’m voting for her. This is a really, really serious thing.
if you have to convince them of something that’s extremely, extremely uncomfortable, or tell them that you’re taking a position that is extremely uncomfortable, I just think you owe them a little more.

I think Coates has a pretty strong point about how there should be different expectations for different roles. It's kinda like how a market-player's behavior should change based on how big they are:

• an individual citizen/blogger/consumer can say whatever they want, or be silent, or lie, because they have no power, and can only face a downside.
  • and in the voting booth they should have a brain about picking the lesser-of-2-evils.
• an influential non-politician (e.g. Klein, Coates) should be honest about having strong disagreements with politicians or other people, and be honest about compromising those beliefs. E.g. Klein should say "I think Sherrod Brown is very wrong about being pro-life, but I still think he's the best Democratic candidate for that election". Now of course, that might undercut his message of trying to support Brown, but I think some honesty and directness is appropriate
• if you're a politician, you shouldn't lie about your beliefs/plans
  • of course, if the Other Side is doing it (e.g. right-wing Supreme Court nominees or sec-HHS nominees pretending they'll be reasonable), then....