Max Notes
I strapped in with a cup of coffee to endure the conversation between New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and after an hour realized that I probably should have taken a Xanax instead. I’ll sum it up for those of you who don’t have the patience, though some of my additional thoughts will weave into a larger narrative. This was a conversation between a man trying desperately to find a home for a centrist ideology and someone who represents a population that has never been allowed to live in the middle.
Ezra Klein has a listening problem. Over the course of the hour, and the entirety of his writing career as far as I can tell, Klein attempts to understand why the world can’t see what he sees. I lost track of the number of times he interrupted the flow of conversation to restart with, “I guess what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is...” He is so deep in his own head and steeped in utter disbelief that liberalism just isn’t enough for everyone even though it has failed people along the political divide that he cannot attend to the answers being given directly to him.
America is a deeply racist place. It’s built on fear and precarity and othering. The countless examples of halted progress given to him by Coates were treated with a shrug and determination that there must be some other answer. There simply isn’t. Klein continues to practice the politics of compromise from a privileged position to find balance in the center. In doing so he completely misses the reality that there are those in the country who have never tasted the benefits of this strategy because any center implies that there are outliers. In the case of America, these outliers are winners and losers and to be Black in this country is to be dealt a losing hand. Moreover, he fails to realize that the center is no longer what he imagines it to be.
Reaching out to his Black colleague and friend to purportedly find common ground on their public disagreement in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder was the ultimate expression of liberal pandering. It could have been a transformational moment. But Klein wasn’t looking to genuinely learn from this experience; he was looking for an ally to let him off the hook and tell him that his actions were okay because his feelings were well intended.
Klein has become the avatar of liberal guilt. It was evident throughout the subtext of the conversation. He was essentially mourning the loss of an America that never truly worked for the person sitting across from him. He even started the conversation with the notion that Democrats lost the plot when Hillary Clinton uttered the words, “basket of deplorables” to identify supporters of Donald Trump. When Coates countered with the institution of slavery, the violent end of Reconstruction, the entirety of Jim Crow, and the two-tier economic system that developed after World War Two, Klein pivoted the conversation to McCarthyism. When that line was exhausted, he turned to Trumpism.
In every example, Klein searched for a time when things were bad but we ultimately came out ahead; looking for clues from the past for how to guide our politics in this moment. He was searching for answers to questions that Coates doesn’t have the luxury of answering. Klein offered examples when America overcame extremism before. But each was an example of the liberal establishment coming under attack and ultimately prevailed in a way that preserved the status quo while the battle for Black Americans endured.
We won the Civil War. We can do it again.
We fought the Civil War to prevent secession because it would have meant utter economic collapse. In the aftermath, there was a brief window of optimism for the Black community, with several formerly enslaved people rising up to participate in the economy and even serve as representatives. The advances were too much for the white establishment so it was almost immediately crushed and the Jim Crow era began.
New Deal reforms helped lift millions out of poverty and the Great Depression, leading to the Civil Rights era.
From banking regulations and housing rights, New Deal reforms specifically excluded Black Americans. There was a pecking order in the recovery. Whites first and then World War Two. Upon returning from the war, Black Americans were once again specifically excluded—in writing and in legislation—from the benefits of the post war economic policies and legislation. But we needed labor and everyone participated, including Black Americans, despite being blocked from suburban mobility and the expansion of credit.
But at least Civil Rights happened, right?
Sure. Twenty years after the end of World War Two. Followed by twenty more tumultuous years with FBI witch hunts, Civil Rights assassinations, more Black bodies in foreign wars leading to the era of mass incarceration.
Obama?
And that’s where Klein, along with every other establishment liberal usually lands. How about that Obama? But even Coates acknowledges how Obama couldn’t really be a Black man in power. That’s not how power in America works. He even mentioned how he can’t truly represent the Black experience in his own writing at times, because so many still cannot hear what he has to say. Just as Ezra Klein cannot.
There have always been two Americas. But when figures like Klein and others taste the bitterness that is life in the other America, it shakes them to the core. It shakes me to the core. I’m scared in a way that I’ve never felt but at least I have the decency to acknowledge that it’s because the privilege that I’ve enjoyed is in danger of being taken away.
Coates gave the answer to it all on a couple of occasions. There have been advances, but sometimes it’s exogenous forces that make them obvious. Sometimes the change doesn’t come in our lifetimes and as a result of the work we put in. Klein repeatedly called this perspective “pessimistic” and “fatalistic.” The quizzical way that Coates responded each time to this characterization tells us everything we need to know about the divide that remains between white liberal America and Black and Brown people in America.
One person’s pessimism is another’s lived experience.
