This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are two things that are true about what President Donald Trump said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.
Archived clip of Donald Trump: He did not hate his opponents; he wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie.
One is that it’s frightening to see the president of the United States talk this way about his political foes.
Archived clip of Trump: I hate my opponent. And I don’t want what’s best for them. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Erika.
The other is that it’s also an opportunity: I don’t think that is a strong politics. I think there are opportunities in countering it, and it will need to be countered.
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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer I admire — somebody I have a genuine friendship with. 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 think it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to say that we need to reach across divides and disagreement — but then not talk across my own. So I wanted to talk to Ta-Nehisi about the piece and the aftermath of Kirk’s murder — but also about a disagreement, or question, that I think is about more than Kirk: There’s something very unsettled in the broad coalition of the left around the work of politics, around who we talk to and when and how. When is that work moral? When is it necessary? When is it a betrayal?
Ezra Klein: Ta-Nehisi Coates, welcome back to the show.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Thanks. I don’t know what number time this is. [Laughs.]
If you go back to the Vox days, I think you’re on the leader board, for sure.
Yes.Well, it’s good to see you, man.
Good to be here, Ezra. Thank you.
All right, well, let’s jump into the disagreement. You wrote a piece responding to my column on Charlie Kirk.
Which was so uncomfortable.
It’s OK. What was your disagreement with what I wrote after Kirk was assassinated?
First of all, I just want to thank you for having me. I’ve had to read things about me that criticize my work. It’s never easy, and people often have a very, very different response than the one you had — which is to invite me here and to talk it out.
So, I appreciate that. I want to say that upfront.
I felt that when I initially read the column — and I guess we should be fully transparent here and say there was a discussion between us privately before there was a public thing.
Yes. We text.
Yes, we do text regularly, and we did text about this.
So, I felt like, having not done the research that I eventually did for the column, there was something off about what I knew about this guy and the presentation of him as — and I don’t want to misquote you here — basically a paragon of politics and how politics should be done.
I think I had the same reaction that most ordinary people would have, which is absolute horror at the idea that this guy was speaking somewhere and was killed.
But I always think it’s important to differentiate how people die versus how they live.
And then after doing the research, I have to be honest with you, that’s when it got really, really difficult — when I went past my initial impressions and started going through all of the clips of the things he said, the way he talked about people, the way he described groups in ways that, honestly, even as I was writing it, I was uncomfortable saying.
So the idea that this guy should be in any way celebrated for how he conducted politics — the fact that he just slurred, across the board, all sorts of groups of people and then ran an organization which appeared, to me, to be just a haven of hatred — I would not want that to be a model for my politics.
I know we talked between us that you were not attempting to make a statement for the entirety of it. But I feel like, at a certain point, somebody does something that is so large that it’s tough to think about their legacy and take that out of it. And that’s how I felt about him.
I want to get at the right level of disagreement here.
One thing for me is that in the immediate hours after somebody is murdered in public, when you see that sort of grief and horror pouring out of the people who loved him — and many people loved him — 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.
That’s not my view of the person’s whole legacy, but going to people when they’re grieving like that and saying: Listen, I want to tell you what I really thought of your friend — just feels like not what you do in a community.
I can see people coming down on both sides of that.
I actually think that is a great impulse after somebody has been killed — and not just killed, but because we live in the media environment that we live in, it’s seen, and it will live forever. And that person’s family — you know what I mean?
It’s being looped in front of all of us, which I think has a lot to do with how this was taken.
It’s terrible. It’s terrible to have young kids who will have to grow up knowing that is a thing that exists in the world.
I’ll go one step further on this.
One thing I wrote about in that piece that I do worry about is — I worry we are already in a cycle of political violence, of mimetic violence. I think about Pelosi. I think about Shapiro. I think about the near assassination of Trump.
After that happened, I thought about me, I thought about you. I thought about all kinds of people I know. So, I do think there’s just something about when violence takes hold, there’s something about it that begins to breach all lines. That’s part of my reaction, too.
I think all of that is understandable. But was silence not an option?
Silence to me was not grieving with people. I felt it was important, as someone who is liberal, as someone who has a voice, that there are moments like that.
I really do feel — and it’s funny, because you said something like this in your piece, but it was a little bit more offhand: Political violence is an attack on us all.
And in that moment, even if it’s very temporary, it’s important to come together, to try to see other people in their grief, to try to cool things down just a little bit.
Given everything you read that Charlie Kirk said — and we probably don’t have very different views on the value of the things he said — why do you think he was winning?
That’s not really hard for me to understand. If I could just back up for a second, I want to say two things.
I published a book 10 years ago, “Between the World and Me,” and one of the constant reactions to that was that it was overly pessimistic about this country, it was overly pessimistic about the future: Why are you so dark, Ta-Nehisi? Why can’t you give us any sense of hope?
The reason I would always say is because 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.
The implication of that is however good we felt in 2008, 2013, 2014, 2015 — there will be backlash.
Those of us who were crying in 2008 watching Obama give that speech, those of us who were so moved by watching him and Michelle step outside the car and felt so much fear for him — and then when nothing happened felt so great about that. Those of us who believed that seeing a Black family in the White House mirroring the best we had to offer — there are other people watching that, too.
And I don’t take any joy in saying this, but we sometimes soothe ourselves by pointing out that love, acceptance and warmth are powerful forces. I believe they are. I also believe hate is a powerful force. I believe it’s a powerful, unifying force. And I think Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger.
I really need to say this over and over again. I have a politic that rejects violence, that rejects political violence. I take no joy in the killing of anyone, no matter what they said.
But if you ask me what the truth of his life was — and the truth of his public life — I would have to tell you it’s hate. I’d have to tell you it is the usage of hate and the harnessing of hate toward political ends.
Then let me flip that question a bit. Why are we losing?
We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.
See, that feels very fatalistic to me.
It doesn’t feel fatalistic to me. It feels like the truth. Let me express what I mean.
I’m Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’m the writer, I’m the individual, right? But I am part of something larger, and I’ve always felt myself as part of something larger. I have a tradition, I have ancestry, I have heritage. What that means is that I do whatever I do within the time that I have in my life, whatever time I’m gifted with, and much of what I do is built on what other people did before them.
Then, after that, I leave the struggle where I leave it, and hopefully, it’s in a better place. Oftentimes it’s not. That’s the history in fact. And then my progeny, they pick it up, and they keep it going.
I am descended from people who, in their lifetime, fought with all their might for the destruction of chattel slavery in this country. And they never saw it. They never saw it. In my personal belief system, they died in defeat, in darkness.
So I guess the privilege that I draw out of this, the honor that I draw out of this, is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.
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. It just is. I don’t even mean like the Malcolm X, Martin Luther King variety of it — which is the norm, too.
You would be hard-pressed to have a conversation with a Black person in this country who is a descendant of slavery and not have them be able to tell you themselves: Look, my uncle, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, they lived in a small town in Mississippi, in Tennessee, in Alabama, and they got into some sort of dispute with a white man. Either they were lynched or we had to run.
Political violence runs through us. It is our heritage. Is that good? No. Do we valorize it? Absolutely not. Do we minimize it? Absolutely not.
But a life free of it is not a thing that’s really in reach in my time.
Sometimes I think that having a historical scope that wide can make the present too deterministic.
I look at the last eight, 12 years, and what I see having happened is we, the coalition I am in, the things I believe in, lost ground. And people determinedly worked to make that so.
Charlie Kirk worked to make that so — successfully. I think that when he began going to college campuses and putting out a sign at a table, what he was eventually going to build was not obvious. I think he was a successful political actor.
In 2016, we lost to Donald Trump the first time — very narrowly. We won the popular vote.
Then in 2020, we almost lost to the Republicans, and began seeing that we were losing a bunch of voters we thought we were fighting for — losing more working class voters, losing on white voters. Something was changing, but we won. OK.
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.
So, for me, it’s not enough to say: We lost, there are backlashes, sometimes you lose. I think it requires a very fundamental rethinking — a disciplined, strategic rethinking — of: What have we been doing? Why are people preferring this to us?
I do think it opens up into something more, that there is a practice of politics here that, in a narrow sense, I was talking about Kirk, but in a broad sense it reflects something that I thought was going to be an argument stretching across the show for a year.
I think more of it came out in this than I had intended, probably. But, 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.
Can you say more about that — writing them off — please?
If we want to talk about writing them off, let’s start here. I’ve been obsessing, for a piece I’ve been writing, about the Hillary Clinton “deplorables” comment. I want to play it.
Archived clip of Hillary Clinton: You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right? [Audience laughs and applauds.] The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to — their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, meanspirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America ——
What do you think when you hear that?
She probably shouldn’t have said it.
Do you think it’s true?
I mean, it’s probably not how I would say it, but there are things that I would say.
I probably would say what I said earlier in the interview about the force of — and I’ve been saying this probably since as long as we’ve been talking. I just want to be clear about something: I shouldn’t be running for president of the United States.
You know what I mean? My expectations for the rhetoric of writers, intellectuals, journalists, et cetera, is very, very different than what the expectations should be for people who expect to hold office.
This I agree with. I think that there are different jobs in all this. 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.
What Clinton was saying there came from somewhere. It came from the culture that had emerged. It got worse over time. And then I think it really contributed to us losing.
Meanwhile, this is why when I say, like in that initial piece, there was something that I respected in what Kirk was doing — like going in, having debates, using them opportunistically — people have thrown back at me that he wasn’t debating to find truth.
Of course, he wasn’t debating to find the truth. He was doing politics. He was trying to persuade people. And I’ve watched on our side, not opportunistic engagement but a lot of, I would say, counterproductive disengagement.
But would you like to see one of us put up a sign outside of, say, some white evangelical church in Alabama: Debate me on abortion? And then use that content to say: Such and such “smashes” church parishioner? Or: Such and such “owns” church parishioner?
Would you like to see a version of that?
I would like to see people on our side, yes, go to evangelical churches. Go to places that feel unfriendly, have conversations.
Look, I put up things on YouTube.
They’re fairly successful — not the best of the business — and I don’t use “destroys” in capital letters in them.
I think you can do it more aligned to, hopefully, our value structure, our political approach, our political aesthetic. At least the one that I believe in. I shouldn’t overuse the term “our” here. But we weren’t doing that, either.
I don’t know that we weren’t. I, for instance, have. I don’t know if it’s on YouTube anymore — but for instance I think about when I received an invitation to go to West Point, and I had to go up there to talk about “Between the World and Me.”
I had to challenge them very, very directly about what it meant to have, at that time, Confederate memorials up there and to talk about a Confederate — I can’t remember what the motto is exactly — but basically, it’s an argument against lying and what it meant to have that there and have those grand historical lies.
We had a really great interaction. I know everybody didn’t agree with me. It would never occur to me, and I think it actually insults the dialogue to take that and say: Ta-Nehisi owns West Point cadets! Ta-Nehisi smashes —
Do you really not recognize the kind of culture I’m talking about here? Like, really?
No, I’m sorry. Say more. What do you mean?
I think there really was a move toward the sort of approach Clinton is offering here. I think we began to pull back. I really do —
Maybe it would help if you define the “we.”
I’ll define the “we,” because I actually think this is a very hard thing about talking about political parties — because they’re diffuse. It’s a lot of people doing a lot of things all at once.
Right.
But I think of the huge backlash to Bernie Sanders for going on Joe Rogan’s show because Rogan was transphobic. Such a big backlash that when I defended him — I became a Twitter trending topic. 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.
I think there was a politics of content moderation that took hold that was more about enforcing boundaries of what were and were not ideas we should be engaged with — rather than about engaging them, even if opportunistically.
And when I go back to something I was saying to you a minute ago, I am in a process right now of thinking: We failed. We lost. The loss is having terrible consequences. What do we need to rethink? How do we become competitive again in places where we’re not?
And I think there is something in here. Do people feel like, even if they disagree with us on some things, they have a place with us? And my experience going around the country, talking to people — I’ve been on a lot of right-of-center podcasts lately — is that, rightly or wrongly, what they took, and something that really empowered Trump in the last election, was a sense that they didn’t.
They 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.
I think two things. I think about how much you argued that Biden shouldn’t run again. What if he doesn’t earlier and you have a Democrat who wins the presidency?
There are other big explainers that I can see for it that don’t feel so diffuse.
The other thing is — and I know you don’t want to talk historically — but when you say fatalism, I take that to mean: What’s the point of fighting? But I think that misapprehends the philosophy here.
It’s not that you know what’s going to happen. It’s not that you know what Donald Trump is going to do. It’s that you don’t underestimate what you are up against.
It’s actually kind of the opposite. I mean, man: You yourself wrote these articles about how high the level of racial resentment was in this country or some segment of it. The term that was used at the time was “racially resentful” — I call it racist — but it flooded down to Barack Obama’s dog, Bo.
That’s not a small amount of power. That’s not a small force.
Just really quickly getting back to Charlie Kirk: I would watch those clips of him saying those things, and I would see how people would cheer and get charged by it. They were excited.
People get activated by hate. It’s a very, very, very strong force. So I don’t think it requires you to feel that you’ll eventually lose. On the contrary, I think it requires you to feel that even if you do lose, you have this steadfastness to keep going.
One thing that I am seeing happen — and I think I really saw it in some ways more in Trump’s first term, but I see it now, too: 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. Somebody we both know — I’ll say an eminent academic of one form or another — email me after these pieces and say to me: We are not on the same side anymore. That what I was doing — it was too far. Like, we are just not on the same side if I could say these things.
I have a feeling right now that we are closer to genuine national rupture, certainly, than we’ve been in my lifetime. The idea that this experiment, that America could topple into something else, into something much worse, into some kind of new extended regime feels very real to me.
I remember when I was on the “Why We’re Polarized” book tour —
Yes, I remember. I interviewed you for it.
You did. The end of that book is its recitation of what happened in the 1960s: The political assassinations, the violence in the streets, what the state was doing, what was happening.
But on the book tour, I would say my nightmare scenario is that level of violence and fracture with these kinds of parties, where politics is not, for all of its flaws, a calming force — because the views are diffuse across the two parties — but an accelerant. And I think we’re much more now in the world I was fearing.
That should make you think: OK, what does some kind of de-escalation before you get to rupture look like?
The other is that there are a lot of people who live in places we used to win not that long ago.
I’ve been thinking about Obamacare. When Obamacare passes, there are Democratic senators in Arkansas, in Louisiana, in West Virginia, in Missouri, in Indiana, in North Carolina, in South Dakota, in North Dakota.
And I’ve been thinking that, 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.
Yes. I think a couple of things about that. First of all, I just want to bring in the historical perspective. Not that long ago, I can remember when Obama won — and I believe you would remember this, too: There were all of these pieces about the end of conservatism and the end of the Republican Party. [Laughs.]
Yes.
You don’t know how it’s going to go. Nobody really does. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about how it’s going to go. I’m not saying you shouldn’t ——
In 2005, there were all these pieces about the end of the Democratic Party. Democrats had lost touch with the heartland. They were never going to get it back.
That’s right. That’s right. So it’s always important to keep that in the background.
Just in terms of bridging gaps and everything, I have a basic level of respect that I accord to everybody. I want to say what I have to say. I don’t want to shrink back from it. But I do think, on a basic level, 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. Because there are real consequences.
So, when I read his words toward trans people — Jesus.
The language toward Haitians, specifically, which was: Haitians will become your masters if you don’t elect Trump. I mean, this is very, very familiar to me. It’s this idea of Haitians or other immigrants coming into the country, raping your daughters.
This was really, really, really dark stuff. It’s at the core of this country.
So, I feel for Haitian immigrants who are in Ohio, who are living under the weight of this. For trans kids who are dealing with being — I don’t even want to use the term “bullied” — beaten up, attacked, threatened.
It’s very, very important to me, given the post I have, to say: I see you. But also: This dude was wrong.
I’m all for unifying, I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity. I just can’t.
I think the thing we go to there — “Not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity” — I’ve gotten a lot of that in email. Like: How am I supposed to talk to these people? How am I supposed to deal with these people who are denying my humanity?
I’m not against talking to them about it. I’ll talk to you very clearly. [Laughs.] I have no problem with that.
I’m not even 100 percent sure if we disagree, or if you just see your role differently. But I think that in losing as badly as we have, we have imperiled trans people terribly.
Yes. Joe Biden did that.
Politics is for power. So I think the question I am genuinely struggling with isn’t how to have a great kumbaya moment — but that we have to take seriously that something we’re doing is not working.
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.
So I take your point when you say: Look, I want people to feel seen in my writing — and I want people to feel seen in my writing and my podcasting.
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.
I think it has weakened the last couple of years —
I would never use that language. Jesus. When you were asking me about that Hillary Clinton clip — I would never say it like that.
That’s great. I think it’s good that you wouldn’t say it like that.
I don’t even think that, by the way.
I don’t even focus on people. I am at war with certain ideologies and ideas, and I want them expunged. I want to turn them into phrenology. That’s what I want. But I don’t want the people out. When you start talking about who people are in their bones —
In a way, I think we’re saying something not too dissimilar here. I guess the place where I felt a lot of pushback, and maybe this was not your pushback — the first piece, I can just accept that there’s a disagreement on what to do in the 24 hours after a death. You felt like I was whitewashing the guy.
I do. Yes.
I know you do.
I do. It was very upsetting.
I know you do.
The second piece I did, which I think you saw, was more about this question of: What are we going to do living here in two types of disagreement?
One with a right where Charlie Kirk and the kinds of things he believed in and the way he did his politics has become sort of the center of it. He’s not unusual for the MAGA coalition. He’s a uniting force within it.
And then two: What are we going to do? How are we going to be here with people who are, like, halfway there?
What does it mean to be in this political community together? What do you think about that question?
About how to live together?
Yes.
Well, first of all, I think it’s a truth. It’s foregone — because, like, we are. I really, really believe that.
I’m not renouncing my American citizenship. They’re not renouncing their American citizenship. So this, then, as far as I’m concerned, is a contest of ideas and narratives.
All I can go to is my role as a writer, and my role as a writer is to state things as clearly as I possibly can, to make them in such a way that they haunt, to state truths and to reinforce the animating notion of my politics — which is that all humanity is equal and is worthy of that.
And I actually think all of the political and policy positions that I find myself in sympathy with are attempting to affect that in the real world. So, again, I’m putting aside your piece, but I’m just thinking about the moment we’re in. When I hear or see people who are honored and commemorated in such a way that they almost become a national religious figure, and then I see their content, and I see that their content is actively destructive to humanity, I have to draw a line there.
For me, the bigger question is: Where are the lines? I think there’s no problem with saying: Listen, you can’t throw epithets at people. You are out if you do that. I’m sorry. If you want to have a debate about whether we should have affirmative action in colleges? I’m here for it —
What does it mean to be on the other side of the line?
I’m sorry — what do you mean?
Once somebody is on the other side of the line, what does that mean for you?
For instance, once you think it’s OK —
No, no, no.
I’m trying to make this concrete.
I am, too. 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.
If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.
And so what do you do with the fact that so many people think that is OK?
I think what you try to do is — again, this is the difference. I don’t necessarily have the crystal ball to say that in this time I’m going to be able to convince a majority of people that, for instance — let’s just take the thing that’s hot right now: Trans folks are human beings and deserve humanity.
Although I think most people know that you shouldn’t say what he said — like, that [expletive] is rude. It’s just rude to talk to people like that. And I think most people know that.
So as I’m thinking my way through the question, I actually think that’s not a hard line to draw. I think not calling people out of their name, that’s actually a basic value that most people have.
And I think people who think it’s not, who are pushing that, are actually themselves on the other side of the line.
I want to hold on this for a minute. Because I do think this is a very core question —
And that’s different from policy, Ezra.
Yes, I understand it’s different from policy.
I think that one reality is that the president of the United States is a person who, in his comportment as a human being on the public stage, I would have said in 2008, 2012, in 2016, should be on the other side of the line.
Yes.
I think he’s a person who does not act with any sense of public, or even personal, decency.
Right.
And then he won in ’16, lost sort of narrowly in ’20 and then won in 2024.
And the thing that this has led to, for me, is recognizing that I don’t get to draw the line. Now it doesn’t mean I don’t have one in my own heart. 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.
So, I think for me — and this goes back to the culture that you maybe feel didn’t exist, but I feel did — there was a view that we could work with politics by drawing these lines. That there are people who are going to be inside them and outside them, and we could work that way.
I am working with the question of: What happens if you don’t believe that? If you don’t control the line?
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 and become an absolute dominant force on the right — bigger than he ever was in his smarmy libertarian phase.
This stuff has real appeal, as you said. That’s not a surprise on some level. It’s just something you have to deal with.
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.
I’ve been asking the question without really having an answer — I want to be honest about this — of: What follows from that?
I think you do have a line.
I’m sure I do.
I think there are things, for instance, that I could say that would make you say: There’s no point in Ta-Nehisi coming up and being on this podcast. And likewise, there are things you could say that would make me say: There’s no point in me talking to Ezra there.
I’m saying what happens if 35 percent of the country, 40 percent of the country, the dominant political force in the country, is inside that. Does that change anything or not? Does the line just hold?
No. I mean: Welcome to Black America. That’s our history. The line we have drawn in general has not been majoritarian politics, unfortunately.
That has just been what it is, you know? And at the times that it has been majoritarian politics, people have done things and fiddled with government or done extremely violent things to make it not so.
How do you deal with Trump substantially increasing his share of the Black vote?
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.
I think, from your perspective and from my perspective, we probably don’t believe hugely different things. But a huge amount of the country, a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about 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?
This feels like a very salient question. The Republican Party is going to make sure this is a relentlessly salient question.
Right. I agree with that.
Where does that approach leave us? Where do we go on that?
I think that’s a great question. I think a couple of things.
Again, my tradition is the only thing I have a reference point for, so I’m sorry to keep going back to this. But when I look at the times that we have lost, if I think specifically about the Black tradition, for instance, it’s hard for me to say that politically they did something wrong. You know what I mean? Reconstruction falls. What was the thing that should have been done?
On the contrary, I see a kind of courage that I wish we had today in a lot of people. I see people willing to die and take bullets all the time. What more could Ida B. Wells have done to get the anti-lynching bill passed? Here is somebody who was banished from Tennessee on threat of being killed, after she saw her friends murdered and lynched.
And when I look back at that long tradition, and I look back on the times that people have won and the places they’ve won, it’s often not been their heroism that was the decisive factor, ultimately. It has often not been their strategy that was the decisive factor.
Folks look back at the civil rights movement, for instance, and they talk about how brilliant it was to do the sit-ins and use mass media in the way that Martin Luther King used mass media appearances. All of that’s true.
But if we didn’t have World War II, and the planet did not get a view of how horrific it can be when you decide you are going to eliminate people based on their traits — would the civil rights movement have happened? I don’t know. I think windows open and close. And so some of this is up to the decisions that politicians make. Some of it is also up to what is happening in the broader mass culture at the time. All of this kind of works together.
I’m not against strategizing — I think that has to happen. But I think you also have to recognize how broad the world is when you talk about politics.
I think there has been a period, particularly on the left, in which the Civil War — prewar, postwar, the writings of that time, the people at that time — has become a rooting period, a place where we go back and look and think about who we are and what was revealed about us. I’m taking nothing away from that. But that’s obviously a period where politics ultimately fails.
I’ve thought a lot — in the reactions I have read in the last couple of weeks — about how 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.
I see it on the right, for sure. I hear it on the left too. I have a lot of emails that are like: We need a national divorce. How that is going to be effectuated is never exactly clear.
Do people you respect say that to you?
Well, yes, actually. I will say that. People say things to me that are off the record, and I shouldn’t say it.
You don’t believe that, though? You don’t believe we are at a point where the next 10, 20, 30 years could be shaped by decisions we would understand as within normal politics, within elections and legislation and organizing and so on?
No.
Good. I think that’s great.
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.
No, I agree with you. I’m where you are on this, just to be super clear.
OK.
But one reason that the amount we focus on the Civil War period is tricky is because that’s a period when it didn’t work like that. You actually had to go over the cliff of that and have the war.
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.
I think another way of glossing that is that you have the rise of Red Scare politics, which predate McCarthy. You have Joseph McCarthy, who is an unbelievably dominant force for a period.
It’s insane. That’s right.
Everybody who challenges him loses. He becomes a complete kingmaker.
He’s eventually boxed out and beaten by Dwight Eisenhower, a center-right, very anti-Communist politician, who could take the center from McCarthy.
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. And he does it with Lyndon Johnson on the bottom of the ticket, representing Southern politics in the Democratic Party.
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.
I take from this — because I think we’re sort of in a new McCarthyism — some lessons on how politics can work, the give-and-take of it.
We’ve brought up the Civil War a bunch, but what do you take from this period?
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 —
Me, neither.
[Both laugh.]
I’m not a fan of J.F.K. Camelot revisionism. He’s not a very good president.
That’s a separate thing from why politics happen the way they do.
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. And I just think that’s really, really, really, really important.
We don’t all have the same role. When I wrote “The Case for Reparations,” it was not my expectation, nor did I even think it would be politically intelligent, for Barack Obama to go up and yell: I’m for reparations. But that’s different than my role.
I guess the substructure of a bunch of what I am saying, which may or may not be in argument with you, is — when I texted you to come on, I was like: I have been thinking about what the underlying arguments are here. So you’re getting this spilling out of my brain.
I think that there is a work of politics that for a bunch of different reasons has become demeaned. And this does not speak well of the people in power doing it, but I think that they are not doing it well. In the culture around them, I think politicians are not always leaders. I think they’re often followers.
And 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.
I think it’s fine to say people have different roles, and, in fact, it’s good for intellectuals to criticize politicians. But my view is that the political practice became too weak. I don’t think that was true for Obama. In preparing to talk to you, I read your piece “My President Was Black.”
It’s a beautiful piece.
Thank you.
And it’s very much in this tension, where you say quite a bit: It would have been a bad idea for Barack Obama to say the things I’m saying here.
Yes.
To do the things, in some ways, I wish he had done. It would have been that politics wouldn’t have worked. There would have been no Obama presidency, and his presidency would not have been successful.
I’ve been thinking about that line — in my own work and just in the political culture as I see it — that line between the intellectual, analytical work and the actual work of politics, the “How do we live here with each other?” work. I think that is actually honorable work. It feels right now, to me, morally urgent and necessary — and not just over disagreement, just the whole thing being done in a strategic and disciplined sense.
One of the things I’ve thought about is the need to raise the status of old-fashioned politics. I’ve been surprised to find myself feeling that way. But 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.
The sense that we could just tumble all the way back has become much more real to me. So the work that people did to begin to build those guardrails and how hard that actually was, and the disappointment we eventually felt — I feel like we began to take something actually quite beautiful for granted or only see what wasn’t there as opposed to what was.
It has forced, for me, a sense of: How did they do it? How did they get out of the last one of these?
I think I’m speaking for a broader community here: We are not happy, but we are not surprised, man.
And again, the reason we go back to Reconstruction and the Civil War is because it is, before the 1960s, the only glimpse at the possibility of a real democracy in this country. It happened, and in some places it was actually quite successful.
You have people who had been enslaved, who were written off as illiterate fools, serving in legislatures, in Congress. And actually, with the standard at a time, it’s such a hopeful, incredible story. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And it was violently destroyed. Once you see that, and once you have that in your heritage, once you understand that Martin Luther King could be standing up, telling his own people: We do not embrace violence at all, it is morally repugnant, we embrace love — and that could get you shot. Not “Burn it down!” but love can get you shot — you just have a different view of your country.
I emphasize this over and over again. It is not a fatalistic view. It is not written in stone that we will ultimately lose. But you understand that losing is a possibility.
There’s a Buddhist meditation I like. This is a weird place to go. But it goes like this: I’m of the nature to grow sick. I’m of the nature to grow old. I’m of the nature to lose the people I love. I’m of the nature to die. How then shall I live?
I love that.
Yes, I do, too. Because sometimes you need the reminder.
What I hear you saying is: We are of the nature, too.
Yes.
And I think the place I’m trying to push is: How then shall we live? Because in this distinction you’re making: You would have been there, correctly, yelling at F.D.R.
And I’m not asking you, but, like, me: My work, my role —
Can you answer that? Would you define for me how you see what your role is?
I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question.
The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime. And the role I somehow have is sometimes that. But I’m a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on, and I’m in the business of political persuasion.
And I feel like me and the people who believe what I believe — not narrowly speaking, but the whole broad coalition — have failed in a really consequential way.
You feel like you’ve failed in your work?
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 think I’ve gotten a lot right, but I’ve definitely gotten things wrong.
But we are here now, that’s what I would really say. And it is forcing me to rethink things I would prefer not to rethink.
I’ll give you an example. Because people are mad at me on this one right now.
Please.
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. I don’t think it’s a huge political problem. I worry about left-wing pessimism, fatalism, that we are losing and don’t want to change anything.
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.
People got really upset about that. And I get why. 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.
Yes, I remember.
On the bright side, you don’t have to have those negotiations now. And on the downside, you can’t pass the Affordable Care Act.
And the point is not that one issue. For example, Susan Collins is, in theory, pro-choice, but she votes for Mitch McConnell and John Thune as leader. That’s how you build power on some level, right?
Like Joe Manchin — I wish he were still a senator from West Virginia, as much as I have deep disagreements with him.
I think that I am a person — and I think that you are a person, whether you admit it or not — who is one of the people with a voice in shaping what our political culture is. And I believe at some level that political strategy is downstream from political culture. I think it means exploring things that are uncomfortable and being pretty disciplined, in a way that maybe I haven’t been, about separating the question of what I believe from what I believe will win power. Because I currently think that the cost of losing power is horrifying and dangerous, and we can’t keep doing it. So that’s where my head is.
Can we stay with that? I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but the immediate thing that springs to mind, for me, in that question is not who you’re abandoning, but: How do you square the fact that reproductive rights have proven to be pretty popular in red states? I’m thinking about referendums that have been passed such that they’ve had to change the rules.
How do you separate that? Like, there are people who didn’t vote for Kamala but who say: Give me my reproductive rights.
I was using pro-life as an illustrative example.
But there are many red districts in this country, and 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. I think you might need to combine those two strategies, which is sort of the Dan Osborn in Nebraska approach.
Even before the question of what your policies are — and I believe this very deeply — 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.
I know that. I’ve seen the focus groups. I’ve seen the survey data. I’ve talked to the people who work on this. Changing that is going to require making moves that somehow send a loud enough signal that people begin to think we have changed it at some level.
Sherrod Brown should be able to win in Ohio.
Yes.
The reason he cannot win in Ohio is the Democratic Party itself is a millstone around his neck that drags him down.
So what do you do about that?
I’m not here to tell you I have the answer. What I would feel much better about is if there was a strategic discipline about finding it.
If you will take this very gentle pushback.
Yes, please. You’re here for it. [Laughs.]
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 — and it’s not just that you’re putting it out in the air. You’re putting it out in the air and then saying: I don’t necessarily even mean that one.
But if you’re going to say that, I think you really have to put the data behind it. I think that’s really important.
I will stand behind it. I will say, and I think this is actually the nub of it — I’m glad we’re here.
I am saying the thing it sounds like I’m saying. To be very clear. I think in a place like Nebraska, you should try to run some pro-life Democrats. I wish people, instead of saying that an expressive or strategic question in politics was betraying or abandoning the people we wish to protect, I wish what we said was: 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.
Right.
When I say the work of politics has become diminished, part of how that happened is that talking about this creates this counterargument: Well, even to discuss it is to abandon.
In 2008, as you and I both know, Barack Obama ran as a public opponent of gay marriage.
Right.
He ran opposed to it. 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. That playing of politics allowed him to name Supreme Court justices, and that led to the decision that created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
And I am saying that kind of playing politics is needed.
I can give you an example from the other side, by the way.
Yes, go for it.
[Laughs.] Brother, 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 had to talk in front of Black audiences about that, and I had to go before Arab American and Palestinian American audiences here, and say: Look, I’m with you. You can be mad at me. You probably will be mad at me. I get it. But for me, politics is the lesser of two evils. 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.
And when you hear these Palestinian Americans and when you hear these Muslim Americans and when you hear these Arab Americans upset about this, you can’t just yell at them. You have to take them seriously.
These were hard, very difficult conversations. When I made those conversations, I had to be buttoned-up about it. I just think you take very seriously the need to convince people outside of the tent right now. We have to convince them to come in.
I guess what I want from you is I want you to take as seriously people who are in the tent and who are vulnerable and afraid. And 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.
That’s all I’m saying, man.
Yes, that’s fine. I’ll take it. But I want to put this on you for a minute. You keep sort of putting it back on me.
I’m open. Go ahead.
You keep putting it back on me here on “The Ta-Nehisi Coates Show.” [Laughs.]
You are one of the most influential public intellectuals in the country. I know you don’t like to think of politics as a thing you do, but it is a thing you do. What, then, should we do?
As bad as you know this can get, given that you are not a hopeless person or one who doesn’t think you should just collapse into fatalism, what do you think should happen now?
I think that really depends on what your role is. I don’t have a great overarching theory for what everybody needs to do because I think we all have different positions. I know what my role is.
I do see myself as part of politics, by the way. I think that’s a very important way of answering the question.
I’m not going to be the person who yells at you because you went on a bunch of right-wing podcasts. I’ve said many times in the course of this interview: I see myself as a writer. I see myself as a journalist. I see myself as someone for whom it’s very important to state the truth plainly and to clarify things as best I can.
I’m not a strategist for the party, and — as you raised, in that Barack Obama piece — I’ve tried to respect the difference.
I’m not pushing you to be a political strategist. Something you see me doing here — and something people are reacting to me doing — is saying: There is something about knowing that this much of the country is on the wrong side of what my line would have been, knowing that what Kirk was doing was working — and that imposes a set of questions upon us that needs to be answered.
The thing I’m struggling with in this conversation, and even in that question, is the fact that there are things that you, yourself, have actually advocated for that, had they been done, we would be having a very different conversation.
I think I want it to not be close.
You said what?
I want it to not be close.
See, you will call this my fatalism, but I am not surprised that it is. I think it’s going to be close. I think it will be close for a very long time. I would like for it to be less close, too.
But do you think that’s within our power — or not really?
Listen, I have a friend, I’m not going to out him — he’s a mutual friend of ours — who always says: This is the best set of white folks we have ever had in the entire history of Black America. This is the most woke, this is the least racist, this is the most aware group that we have had.
For us, and for those of us who ground ourselves in a larger tradition, this is not close. This is a remarkable time in terms of our freedom as writers and journalists to speak to people, in terms of the amount of people who are empowered and have some amount of privilege and could just look away and are not looking away.
It’s not a great time politically — you understand what I’m saying? But it’s just not the worst, either. It’s not the worst.
Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
The first book is a book called “The Brothers” by Stephen Kinzer, which is a joint biography of Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles. One was head of the State Department and the other was head of the C.I.A., and they worked to overthrow multiple countries during Eisenhower’s time. It’s just an incredible, mind-boggling book, and it has been helping me answer some questions about the role of America in the broader world.
The second one is an oldie but goody, which I reached for before I wrote my piece: “Race and Reunion” by David Blight, which I think is just essential because it shows how a country forgets in service of a politic that I would say is problematic.
The third one is our mutual friend Chris Hayes’s book “Sirens’ Call,” which actually tells us a lot about the conversation that we’re having today and the influence of social media screens and distraction.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Ezra. I appreciate it, too.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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