Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates Had a Good Talk. The Backlash Was Revealing.

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If you believe everything you see on social media, then the recent conversation^[2] between New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein and author Ta-Nehisi Coates was shocking and appalling. The podcast episode, which stretched on for more than an hour, set the internet ablaze. Readers left hundreds of comments on the Times website; commenting was eventually closed^[3]. Thousands of listeners registered their outrage on X and Bluesky and Substack and their own podcasts and the pages of various progressive publications. According to many of them, the conversation exposed a “fundamentally blinkered^[4]” view among liberals like Klein, who was repeatedly dismissed as an amoral opportunist^[5] eager to choose white supremacy^[6] and throw the vulnerable under the bus^[7]. Many seemed angry that the conversation even happened in the first place—and especially that Coates had given Klein the time of day.

If you listened to the Klein–Coates conversation and your brain hasn’t been broken by the outrage algorithm, you might be more than a little confused by the backlash. The discussion was sprawling and at times tense, but felt important and useful: two smart men who share a single desired outcome—a free, fair nation—but have very different ideas about how to get there, hashing it out in public.

The core question of the interview was how the broader left, and the Democratic Party in particular, moves forward in an era of extreme unpopularity and illiberal backlash, despite authoritarian Trumpism and unprecedented right-wing encroachments on fundamental rights and freedoms. For those who haven’t listened, one significant point of disagreement between Coates and Klein was to what extent and where Democrats should compromise, especially on issues of rights and equality, in order to win elections. Another was more fundamental, about how each man sees his role.

In Coates’ view, history is long and it is necessary to defend the most vulnerable through political ups and downs; in Coates’ view, too, it’s not really his job to advise the Democratic Party on political strategy, as much as it is to use his voice to advocate for what he actually believes to be true and just, regardless of the political wisdom of listening to him. He sees himself as one dot along a long line stretching from those who fought the evils of slavery to those who fought the evils of Jim Crow to those who continue to fight the evils of racism, bigotry, and discrimination. No person in this long history ever saw the work completed; America has yet to become a fair and equal place. But the steadfast commitment to getting there someday has resulted in incredible progress. Coates maintains that sense of purpose and place on a much longer historical trajectory; he’s a public thinker who imagines the world as he wants it to be, and settles for nothing less.

In Klein’s view, that kind of moral purity might feel nice, but it’s how you get Donald Trump in power—and how you leave the most vulnerable in a far, far worse position. To Klein, his position as an influential public thinker requires thinking about political power and sharing his views on how Democrats might better capture and wield it. For Klein, the long sweep of history is made up of thousands of tiny moments, each a potential turning point. And if the good guys squander them and the bad guys take charge, then the bigger aims of left and liberal politics are delayed or denied.

I’m more personally inclined to Coates’ view than Klein’s—but their perspectives are less in conflict than parallel. And the actual solution might in fact lie less in what either man said than in what they did: had a public discussion about a series of fundamental disagreements in which they asked each other hard questions and considered even harder solutions without vilifying or morally condemning each other. Democrats and the left more broadly need to have these same tough conversations—without immediately jumping to attacking the character or morals of anyone who might propose a different strategy to get to a shared goal.

Progressive politics have always looked like this, and have always required Coateses as much as Kleins. We need the righteous, those who do not accept the world as it is, and whose moral imaginations are expansive. And we need the realists and incrementalists, those who address the here and now. The idealists absolutely should push the realists ever further. And the realists should do what they must to win.

Part of why I was so troubled by the response to the Coates–Klein conversation was in the insistence that there must be winners and losers, one man who was entirely correct and one entirely wrong (“Ta-Nehisi Coates Shreds Ezra Klein’s Losing Strategy^[8],” “Ezra Klein vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates and It’s Not Even Close^[9],” and “Ezra Klein Got Completely Destroyed By Renowned Author Ta-Nehisi Coates^[10]” were among the representative headlines). The conversation was not intended to be a debate, and yet many of those who listened to it were eager to pronounce one man vanquished and the other victorious—or one brilliant and the other an idiot. Many seemed legitimately angry at Klein for arguing that progressives need to think about winning elections, and that might mean moderating on some issues.

I disagree with a lot of what Klein said; for example, abortion is now a losing issue for conservatives, not liberals, and pro-choice politics are also smart politics even in red states. I also don’t think a party can compromise on issues of fundamental rights and still be seen as trustworthy leaders. And I agree with Coates when he criticized Klein for whitewashing Charlie Kirk’s legacy, and agree that while we should not celebrate a person’s death, we also shouldn’t paper over who they were in life. Those of us who make our living writing about politics and culture have an obligation to do so honestly. Painting Kirk as a good-faith debate enthusiast who just wanted to talk it out is about as dishonest as it gets.

But taking issue with some of what Klein said, or even deeply disagreeing with him, is part of the necessary work here. Declaring him the loser of the debate and not worth listening to on anything ever again is exactly the kind of absolutism that has made the left so unpopular: There really is an impulse to excommunicate anyone who doesn’t toe an ever-moving party line. We should all be fundamentally allergic to any claim that a single strategy or approach will win Democrats elections. Klein is right that being a party of moral scolds and absolutists has not helped. But as the party figures out how to move forward, the broader left needs to be able to talk amongst ourselves—to disagree, to get comfortable with respectful conflict. We shouldn’t be looking for factional domination or the triumph of one school of progressive thought and strategy over another.

We should be asking: What wins elections? What changes cultures? How are those things in tension, and what do you do then? Where might they support each other? What role do we each play in the broader political ecosystem of voters, politicians, commentators, thinkers, writers, activists, culture-makers, and engaged citizens? Can we understand that the job of the politician is distinct from the job of the historian and cultural critic, which is distinct from the opinion journalist, even as the critic and the journalist both push the politician and hope she listens?

The Democratic Party needs to better balance pragmatism with idealism. Politicians and their staffers, too, need to better distinguish between the left’s most effective activists and American voters. They also need to be a national party in a country that is incredibly ideologically and culturally diverse. What works in New York City is less likely to play in Alabama, and that’s OK; Democrats shouldn’t cede portions of the country where voters like our health care policies and worker protections, but are less keen on our reputation as a bunch of holier-than-thou snobs just waiting to criticize you over using the wrong terminology. And they don’t need to insist on running milquetoast moderates in the most liberal cities and districts.

The Democratic Party needs both the Kleins and the Coateses. Instead of choosing sides and going to war, we should get talking.

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