What is Ezra Klein thinking?

The New York Times columnist is asking the right questions, but pushing the wrong answers

A lot of people on the left love to criticize Ezra Klein. I’m not one of those people. To be clear, I do criticize him, but I genuinely don’t relish doing so. I have, at times over the years, been a real fan of his work. He’s proven willing to take courageous stands, and he’s got real pull. As The New Yorker’s David Remnick said in a recent interview with the New York Times columnist and podcast host, Klein “wields a great deal of influence among Democrats in Washington”—meaning he has the potential to play a meaningful role in rebuilding a Democratic Party that has a fighting chance of stopping MAGA’s fascist takeover of America.

So when I see Klein missing the boat, my reaction is not just frustration, but disappointment. That’s been particularly true in the weeks since the killing of Charlie Kirk.

To be fair, I do believe that Klein has been asking a lot of the right questions. The problem—and it’s a big one—is that he’s answered those questions with a fundamentally blinkered political analysis that leads to the wrong conclusions. This was most apparent in his recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom he invited on his show following Coates’s scathing response to Klein’s claim in the aftermath of Kirk’s death that the far-right demagogue had been “practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

Here’s what Klein gets right: There’s something seriously wrong with the Democratic Party. In response to their recent electoral losses, Klein said, Democrats need to engage in “a very fundamental rethinking—a disciplined, strategic rethinking—of: What have we been doing? Why are people preferring [MAGA] to us?” This is self-evidently correct. The Democrats have lost multiple elections to Donald Trump, and as far as I know there’s not a single member of the party elite that’s faced serious career repercussions for their role in these catastrophes.

But what is Klein’s explanation for why people are choosing MAGA over Democrats? He argues that Democrats have “stopped doing politics.” That’s an inoffensive enough claim, but the problem is that Klein’s understanding of “doing politics” focuses—not entirely, but certainly overwhelmingly—on compromise. He valorizes the idea of “political coalition-building, building across these gigantic differences, building across public opinion—both not just as you wish it existed, but as it exists.” But the primary examples he has offered in recent interviews for what it would mean for Democrats to “do politics” and build broader coalitions—running more pro-life Democrats in red states and accepting MAGA’s basic framing of Charlie Kirk’s life and legacy—all involve ceding ground to the right. And this demonstrates a poor analytic grasp of political reality and of what is necessary to build a truly majoritarian Democratic coalition.

Here’s what Klein seems not to understand: We are living in populist times. We throw the word “populism” around a lot, but a populist time is one in which most people have stopped seeing the previous systems of political authority as legitimate. There are a lot of developments that led us here: the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis and our government’s failure to prosecute those responsible for it, the impunity of lawless elites, the hollowing out of entire economic sectors and geographic regions by private equity and corporate consolidation, the rank corruption unleashed by Citizens United, the unchecked growth of obscene inequality and concomitant rise of oligarchs, the socially destructive profit-seeking of social media companies, and so on. These crises of legitimacy create opportunities for populist leaders and movements to forge new majoritarian or even super-majoritarian alignments—if they can tap into the public’s growing discontent. But doing so requires a compelling populist vision that clearly names the problem—“elites” or “the establishment”— and articulates a new set of aspirations for “the people.”

As we have seen far too vividly in recent years, this vacuum can be filled either by left-wing populism or right-wing populism. Substantively, these political tendencies are very different. Left-wing populism, which in America has been embodied most clearly by Senator Bernie Sanders, seeks to unify “the people” around a program that would actually address the core dynamics of inequality, corruption, and corporate impunity driving our loss of faith in American institutions. By contrast, the right-wing populism of Donald Trump seeks to unify a portion of “the people” both in opposition to a scapegoated other—immigrants, transgender people, radical leftists, scientific experts, Palestinians—and around a backwards-facing nostalgia for a more hierarchical time.

In his interview with Remnick, Klein praised how Trump “built coalitions when he thought it would serve him” and “welcomed R.F.K., Jr., and all of his voters—from Joe Rogan all the way down—into their coalition.” But he seems to misunderstand how Trump built his populist coalition. It was not—and this should be overwhelmingly obvious, but I guess it needs stating—by giving in or compromising. It was by creating and defining a new bottom versus top (in affect if not in substance) axis of struggle under which a range of discontented forces could see themselves. A majority of the country didn’t vote for Trump because he convinced them he was open-minded and ready to surrender issues that mattered to him and his base for the sake of finding common ground. They voted for him because they believed he was an uncompromising fighter who would take on what they felt was an illegitimate system. Once someone buys into that, there’s a lot of other disagreements they’re willing to overlook.

Klein has no vision for that larger tentpole under which a majoritarian Democratic coalition could organize itself in this period of populist unrest. (Or, rather, the vision he has promoted—the “abundance” agenda—has been proven definitively to not be a strong electoral frame, such that even its strongest proponents have stopped selling it as such.) So his most concrete prescription, which he first shared in an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, and has repeated again in a series of other venues, boils down to “run pro-life Democrats in red states”—which, he’s made clear by explaining he “was using pro-life as an illustrative example,” is a stand-in for abandoning other groups and rights being targeted by the far-right, like, one can presume, transgender people and immigrants.

But throwing vulnerable people under the bus isn’t by itself—unmoored from a broader populist vision like Trump’s—a compelling electoral strategy. Harris ran as a full-on immigration hawk in 2024. It got her nowhere, both because the people whose top priority is cruelty to immigrants were never going to choose her over Trump, and because her rightward lurch on immigration and other issues did nothing to resolve her campaign’s utter failure to do what Trump’s campaign was monomaniacally focused on doing: naming enemies and channeling people’s valid frustrations about our rigged system against them.

In place of that larger vision, Klein makes an extremely tired turn, arguing to Remnick that “we should rediscover the politics of Barack Obama.” This is bewildering for multiple reasons. First, it downplays the degree to which Obama relied on populist electoral strategies, whether running in 2008 as an outsider committed to cracking down on Wall Street and banning lobbyists from working in his administration, or running in 2012 on explicitly populist messaging that was described as “channeling his inner Huey Long.” Second, it ignores where the politics of Obama—which I think can be fairly described as populist campaign promises followed by neoliberal governance once in office—actually led us: Trump’s election in 2016.

If we’re looking to rediscover Democratic political strategies that led to durable majoritarian coalitions—and that realigned and expanded the Democratic Party, bringing in new loyal constituencies—we’d be well-served to consider FDR, who created a New Deal coalition that broadly encompassed industrial workers, white farmers, and ethnic and religious minorities. Most crucially, FDR’s program wrestled the Black vote away from the GOP, the party of Lincoln and Emancipation. Now that’s a big-tent strategy, and one that—to again state the obvious—was not achieved through milquetoast moderation. It was achieved by naming enemies, channeling people’s frustrations, and crafting a new bottom versus top (in both affect and substance) axis of struggle, centered on a leader who asked voters to “[j]udge me by the enemies I have made,” who stated clearly that all “the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering” were “unanimous in their hate for me,” and who bragged, “And I welcome their hatred.”

What’s particularly frustrating about Klein’s refusal to engage squarely with these ideas—he’s made a couple references to Democrats “trying more things,” including economic populism, but these have always been offhand—is that it has to be intentional. I mean, this is the main debate happening right now in the Democratic Party, between populists who want Democrats to focus on fighting oligarchy, and moderates like Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer who are hunting for AIPAC-approved candidates they can invite to Napa wine caves for crypto roundtables with the DSCC. (I know that sounds like an unfair caricature of the other side of this debate; tragically it is not.) Even conservative analysts, like Patrick Ruffini, whom Klein invited on his show to explain how he predicted the 2024 election, recently argued that “the best chance for Dems to win the Senate is to nominate some DSA-lite ultra-populist for president who scrambles the coalitions enough for Dems to win Ohio.”

Klein’s blinders on this topic lead him to make analytic mistakes in his diagnosis of the Democratic Party’s problems. For example, speaking with Coates, he described “the huge backlash to Bernie Sanders for going on Joe Rogan’s show because Rogan was transphobic” as a prime example of “a politics of content moderation that took hold that was about enforcing boundaries of what were and were not ideas we should be engaged with.” While that incident certainly inculpated some of these dynamics, the backlash to Rogan’s 2020 endorsement of Sanders—which was led and exploited by Sanders’s opponents—should be understood in large part as a story of a Democratic establishment cynically weaponizing identity politics to stop a Sanders-led populist takeover of the party, a tactic Democratic elites have utilized frequently to protect themselves.

If we don’t diagnose that problem correctly, we’re not going to resolve it effectively. While the excesses of performative woke-ism have, since last November, been framed by centrists as an electoral anchor forced on the establishment by the left, it’s usually the other way around. Sanders doesn’t actually want to engage in offputtingly radical identity politics. He just wants to continue protecting the rights and safety of all vulnerable groups, and believes that—just as Trump got regular people who aren’t Christian nationalist bigots to hold their noses on MAGA’s social extremism because they trusted he’d take on a system they hated—Democrats can bring along working class voters who don’t agree with every piece of our social program if they’re offered a compelling populist vision by a candidate they trust will fight for them.

As I said at the top, I don’t relish criticizing Klein, who at times has played a singular role in pushing the Democratic Party in the right direction. Since the 2024 election, his stature and capacity to influence the party have grown substantially, and in my opinion he has not risen to meet that challenge and opportunity. In his interview with Coates, he argued that this moment called for “exploring things that are uncomfortable and being pretty disciplined … about separating the question of what I believe from what I believe will win power.” I don’t know how regularly Klein reads The New Republic, but if by some chance this essay crosses his desk, here’s my heartfelt imploration: When it comes to the debate raging within the Democratic Party over whether Democrats should reorient their ill-defined program and decrepit brand around a populist economic message, please reconsider whether you are being adequately disciplined in separating the question of what you believe from what will win power.

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This essay appeared in The New Republic. It’s a great publication, check it out!