What Is Ezra Klein Thinking?
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 “judge 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.
