Marty Levine
October 1, 2025
This weekend, the New York Times published a fascinating and, I think, important discussion between op-ed writer Ezra Klein and the noted author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The conversation was prompted by Klein’s thinking about Charlie Kirk’s political effectiveness and importance, in a column he published shortly after Kirk’s murder:
You can dislike much of what Kirk believed, and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.
Coates, writing in Vanity Fair, reacted strongly to these words, challenging Klein’s looking past Kirk’s bigotry and seeing him as a model to be followed. Coates wrote:
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s “civility” are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community as “freaks” and referring to trans people with the slur “tranny.” Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that. Large “dedicated” Islamic areas were “a threat to America,” Kirk asserted, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was a “Mohammedan,” with Kirk supposing that anyone trying to see “Mohammedism take over the West” would love to have New York—a “prior Anglo center”—“under Mohammedan rule.”
Their conversation continued a debate about progressive/Democratic strategy and their base supporters that has infuriated me for many years: should we be tacking to the right so we can satisfy moderates or should we go left and hold fast to the values we say we are fighting for?
Klein, speaking for a bigger tent strategy, suggests that Democrats and Progressives’ unwillingness to speak and work with those they disagree with is what is standing in the way of getting the progress we desire. Our unwillingness to work “across the aisle” and moderate our positions was making it easier for the right to push our country in the direction it is now going. And, as a result, those we seek to uplift and protect are being placed in greater danger.
He cites a Hilary Clinton 2016 campaign speech as an example of the mistakes progressives are making that alienate and push right voters we need to have power. He quotes part of her speech below:
We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables…The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he [Trump] has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
For those who think like Ezra Klein, the Democratic Party is in disarray because it has lost millions of former supporters who feel they have been ignored, disregarded, and demonized. And these voters are so alienated that they jumped on the MAGA train that is moving the nation closer to autocratic rule. For Klein and those who agree with him, the solution is to listen and moderate, to make the tent bigger by not insisting on agreement with issues that may turn off some of these lost supporters.
I struggle with this strategy. Actually, I find it reprehensible.
If our goal is to ensure our nation lives up to its aspirations of equality, equity, and humanity, then how can we compromise with those who demand we allow some of us to be ignored and sent to the back of the bus? How can we partner with those who see members of our community as evil and second-class?
That seems to me what Klein is asking us to consider. He wants pragmatic politicians who will make compromises to build an electoral victory.
Many of the issues that seem to divide us involve core principles about the innate worth of each person. And the “compromises” needed may not be tolerable.
- Which part of a woman’s right to control her own body are we willing to give up? Is it abortion, contraception, IVF, or other medical services?
- What part of the LGBTQI+ community should lose its place in our society? Is it gay marriage or trans rights?
- Which segment of the immigrant community are we ready to sacrifice? Do we stop providing the right to ask for asylum? Do we end the ability of “dreamers” to continue to live in our country? Is it birthright citizenship?
- Is it making it harder to vote because of the fear of phantom illegal voters?
- Is it rolling back the criminal justice reforms that have ended abuses that have plagued black and brown people for decades?
- Do we agree that climate change is not a real threat and moderate how we try to prevent its worst impacts?
- Do we agree that public education is a failed system and should be totally privatized?
And what do we do about policy differences that affect how we approach growing wealth inequality and a very frayed social safety?
In each case, moderation means someone needs to go to the back of the line and wait for progress to come to them, and some of the societal improvements we have worked to achieve will need to be rolled back. Who will be asked to accept what I believe to be a second-class status?
Klein seems to be relying on the truth of the words Martin Luther King, Jr spoke often, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
This has been the argument that I have heard over and over again. Starting with Bill Clinton’s Presidency through the term of Barack Obama, making health care available to those who were unable to get it was a goal. And the leaders of the Democratic Party followed Klein’s advice. Rather than insisting on universal coverage, Medicare for All, they sought to build a broad coalition by moving away from universality and were willing to leave many out of the system. The ACA (Obamacare) was the result — a patchwork of private insurance, government premium subsidies, and expanded Medicaid. The compromise allowed each state to provide its own version of the plan. Millions benefited, but it was neither universal nor really supported by the Republicans who had been wooed. For them, from the day it was signed into law, the goal was to rescind it.
This is a story that has repeated itself through our nation’s history. We make social progress, and then there is a backlash that tries to roll it back. Whether that progress results from compromise or not may not matter. What matters is that moving our nation to where progressives want it be, having it fulfill what we think the nation stands for, making this a more equitable society which focuses on improving the lives of all, rubs many as wrong.
And those people will push back.
Hilary Clinton’s offensive language is not the problem. Progressive values and visions are not the problem.
More fundamental is the bias gene that has been a part of our nation since our founding. Politicians fighting against progressive values and policies have always been ready to do what they can to activate the biases and hatreds that are in our national makeup. The southern strategy of the Nixon and Reagan years was effective in moving millions of voters into their base. Rather than hold the debate on what level of support our nation should have for those living in poverty they chose to focus on “welfare queens” personified by pictures of disheveled African American women, often fictional stories. Rather than debate how best to deal with crime they put forward pictures of Willie Horton, a black man, as their argument for harsher sentences and unconstitutional policing.
Just yesterday, President Trump again played the race card as the government was unable to pass a budget bill, and the Federal Government shut down. Rather than defend his position on its merits or negotiate a compromise he chose to picture House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries as Hispanic and put words in Senate Minority Leader Schumer’s mouth, invoking racial and gender bias.
These are tactics that work because they touch an unresolved fear of black people, of migrants, and of anyone who can be depicted as “the other.” How can one compromise with this?
Those who have been crafting, guiding, and funding the rise of what is now the MAGA movement have been willing to play on this American flaw. They have funded the building of a political infrastructure of foundations and think tanks, which has one singular mission: limit government so their ability to acquire wealth and hold power is not defeated. They are willing to call on racism and the fears of being left out to mobilize the political environment we see now. They have been single-minded and uninterested in compromise because, I believe, they have a fundamental difference with progressives. They see each person as responsible for their own fate. They see those who struggle and are left behind as having no one to blame but themselves. They see individuals and not communities. Government itself is a problem and has no reason to create the safety net that Progressives see as its responsibility.
Democrats, choosing compromise over confrontation, have ignored this fundamental difference. The compromise policies that have become law have not had the scope to deliver the improved lives that they have promised for far too many. And by being moderate and compromise-seeking, they have allowed MAGA to play on the fears of those for whom life is still a challenge by pointing at minorities who have taken away their benefits. So, immigrants are the reason that prices are so high. Safety net programs are the reason that communities stagnate. It is those un-American others who are the problem.
If I am correct, we have a disturbing question to face. Are the majority of our fellow citizens so afflicted by bias and racial animosity that they can always be riled up to fight change that is designed to make this a fairer, more equitable nation? Is the arc of moral progress not up but down?
I think we don’t know because for so long the Democratic Party has seen itself as a party of compromise and centrism, not of values. It has not believed that it can be successful by passing and implementing programs that actually fulfill their vision. Until it is willing to live its principles we will never know if our problem right now is caused by just not delivering on its promises or if our country is just a racist, xenophobic morass where progressive values will never stand for the long haul.
It is time for Progressives to stop compromising and worrying about those who disagree with them. It is time for us to demonstrate that our vision will make this a better world for the majority, and not worry about those who cannot overcome their bias.
