You don't have to swallow frogs

Over the weekend, an interview circulated in which New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein talked to Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, among other essays and books.

Their conversation is a great lens through which to look at the ways information, relationships, and politics are interacting right now. I’ll make some observations about it that I hope will help you ponder what to focus on in the world and how to work toward change effectively.

First, I’ll sum up what they said, then I’ll pull back to a larger framework, to Ezra Klein’s focus on, as he wrote it, “Why are we losing?” I’m going to suggest that the arguments he’s making for what to do about our current disaster show why his approach is guaranteed to damage the very principles he says he supports (and likely does!).

I’ll also make an argument that Coates is clearer on what he needs to do because he hasn’t stumbled over some of the tripwires that have caught Klein. What’s more, he’s defined a framework of context that makes sense of the world and reinforces his own values. These ideas lead him to particular kinds of actions.

I think the conversation hit hard for a lot of readers because it involves two people of good will who are on good terms being—at least to my view—as honest as they know how to be with one other in the moment about the current political crisis and what needs to be done to address it. They don’t flinch about bringing up their fears, frustrations, and disappointments with one another. And they listen to what the other person is actually saying.

I’m arguing that Ezra Klein is lost in the moment. But this is no insight. He says the same himself. And I do believe he’s looking for an answer. I’m just not sure if he could see that Coates was giving it to him right there on the spot—not the exact answer Klein needs, but a route to finding it. I want to make use of that model to suggest you can use it to find your own answer, if you haven’t yet. 

What they said

The discussion was very long. In case you don’t want to read or watch it, I’ll summarize it a little here and pull out a few key exchanges. But it’s worth taking the time on your own, even piecemeal, to go through it all.

Klein laid out his thinking that he and Coates both very much want to see the forces of democracy or freedom in some form halt or reverse the damage that Trumpism is inflicting. He’s wondering whether, in order to draw more voters in, the left will have to give some things up. He noted the horrifying beliefs that many Americans have about trans people at present and wondered what to do. He talked again about running anti-choice/pro-life Democrats in red states.

He explained that his opinion piece on Kirk’s death (“Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”) was an attempt to acknowledge the community afflicted by grief in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, a way to sit with those affected by the murder. He seemed to realize that a lot of his readers felt he had done harm with that essay, and was still working to figure out how.

Klein worried that Coates’s long history of pessimism about the prospects for true democracy could lead to a kind of fatalism about being able to make progress. For his part, Coates clarified that he doesn’t intend his pessimism about democracy’s immediate prospects in the U.S. to be read as fatalism. He sees himself as part of a tradition of people who fought and died to end the institution of slavery or to guarantee rights to those facing exclusion and discrimination. Many of those people, he noted, died without ever achieving their goals. But they’re all part of his moral and intellectual heritage.

Coates criticized Klein’s statements about Kirk. Underlining his opposition to political violence, he suggested that respect for grief would be a fine response. But to see Klein deny in his piece that Kirk was a hatemonger was deeply distressing.

When Klein pressed him to shape a larger political strategy for the country, Coates demurred. He acknowledged that politicians have a different task than he does, that they might need to say things that he would never say or to court voters in ways he wouldn’t.

The most important section of the whole interview, I would argue, is where Coates explained how it is he decides what to do. He said, “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.”

We’re all a little lost

A lot of what I’ll address from their talk will be critical of Klein’s positions. I know countless people have been jumping on him, but I don’t mean this post as an attack so much as I feel it’s vital to understand what’s happening to Klein, because I think the same thing is happening in one form or another to millions of people who oppose Trump. And it’s important to recognize that we’re all caught up in some pretty common and predictable patterns of reaction, because knowing that can help in sorting out what’s meaningful and what’s not.

The difference between them bears some relation to the story of the hedgehog and the fox, which is very old but was popularized in a 1953 essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The idea is that some people are foxes and some people are hedgehogs. The hedgehog knows one big thing really well, and the fox is not an expert but clever and can figure a lot of different things out.

In this case, Klein and Coates both have been given and have built large platforms from which they address political issues of our era. Klein has made his career as a fox, and Coates as a hedgehog. I’m going to suggest the more important difference between their approaches is something else, so the metaphor is already somewhat stretched. But if you don’t know their work, the concept does tell you a little about each of their styles.

Klein has bright-kid syndrome. He’s risen through the world by launching vast projects and addressing big questions. In this moment, he seems to feel that he has to come up with the whole answer to the question that Trumpism represents. And since Trump’s ascent, he has struggled visibly. He acknowledged as much in the conversation with Coates, saying, “I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man.”

That sense of being at a loss (and again, I appreciate that he is honest about it) leads him into a spiral he can’t seem to escape. Karla Monterroso, founder of Brava Leaders, said in September about Klein that “he’s doing emotional processing in public and passing it off as political analysis.”

If so, Klein’s been processing for a long time. Editor of Liberal Currents Adam Gurri noted a year and a half ago—before Biden had even dropped out of the 2024 race—that an episode of the “Ezra Klein podcast is more about his personal feelings of powerlessness than about any serious analysis of the chances any alternative to Biden has.”

All this is just to say that Klein has been in a state of alarm, or at least in an unsteady place, for some time. The world he thought he lived in turned out to be very different from what he’d imagined it to be. He’s learned that far more of his fellow Americans are willing to do far worse things than he suspected.

And he’s scared. He acknowledges as much. Klein told Coates that after Kirk was shot, “I thought about me, I thought about you.” 

The long view

This is where Coates’s worldview is more helpful. Looking at the long sweep of American history, he suggests that “Political violence is the norm for the Black experience in this country.” He talks about the power of love, but also the enduring power of hate.

It might sound pessimistic to see, as Coates does, the likelihood of many losses looming ahead, even as we fight for wins. But if you consider the long history of the problem at hand, it releases you from bright-kid syndrome, from the illusion that you yourself are going to have every answer or fix the world. You understand that to do so is impossible. You are—at most—going to be one piece of that solution in a chain of many people that begins before you were born and continues after you die.

Coates’ long view gives everything a kind of historical context. And I’ve seen others who are historians get dinged for that approach—for looking at the current situation through a defining lens from the past—as if it results in outdated references or tools.

I’d agree that it’s important to realize that different lenses can be useful in figuring out what to do, so it’s a good idea to consider things from a variety of angles. But my sense is that most people like Klein—liberals with a big platform who see themselves as pragmatic types—have accidentally become reactive centrists because they don’t have a clear idea how this moment fits into history and what it is exactly that they’re doing.

They don’t look often enough at context, past or present. Instead, they seem to see each moment as an independent crisis—or a recent one—often missing how many times the same dynamics have played out or indicators of how to proceed have already appeared.

Unmoored talking points

As I mentioned in last week’s Tuesday post, Klein had recently recommended the Democrats run pro-life candidates in Missouri, Ohio, and Kansas, having apparently forgotten that voters from those exact states had embraced abortion-rights referendums. The issue came up again in the conversation with Coates, but Klein seemed to stick to it, as if the concept behind his suggestion was more important than the context in which it would be applied.

Klein also addressed how successful attempts to vilify trans people have been, acknowledging his fears over the ways Republicans will make this an issue in coming elections. To be clear, he isn’t just worried about the political cost of backing trans people but also the additional grievous harm that will be inflicted on trans people if Trump-supporting politicians continue to win.

I’m using these examples because these are the ones that Klein mentioned as areas in which he felt that people on the left should, perhaps, compromise in selecting politicians or accepting policies that they don’t really want. That Klein is stuck on these examples shows how deeply he is lodged inside the framing that the Republicans have put forward.

When you’re scared you get tunnel vision. If everything’s malleable, potential or imaginary future harms start to seem equivalent to concrete harm, even violence, being inflicted today. You start to equate things that aren’t equal. And you lose sight of your power. This, I would argue, is more likely to lead to fatalism and surrender than Coates’s approach.

You don’t have to accept a bad-faith argument

Coates and Klein talked about meeting people where they’re at. But if you not only listen to someone but reinforce their world view—by pretending, for instance, that Charlie Kirk was not a hatemonger—you’re either lying to yourself, or you’re lying to them.

It’s true that the political beliefs Kirk’s audience or MAGA supporters have been sold about trans people (or the border or abortion) have been sold to them in bad faith. They might have likewise accepted those beliefs in bad faith because they actually just want to see violence against vulnerable groups. Or they might genuinely believe them to be true. But the answer isn’t to lie more to those people. And it’s especially not to reinforce the bad-faith lies they’ve been sold.

If you start doing that, you lose your way. Here’s where Coates’ clarity comes in handy. You treat people humanely—everyone.

People can come in the tent without agreeing on every policy. But you have to make the demand that all people will be treated humanely. That belief guides what you yourself will do. You don’t buy into the MAGA lies to get supporters. You give them a vision of what you support, and you call them to it.

Swallowing live frogs

Author Czeslaw Milosz wrote that “A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt.”

How does a person convince themselves they need to swallow live frogs? They see themselves as being pragmatic in difficult times and willing to make difficult choices. They imagine that doing something unpleasant is the same as doing something effective. They think it will save them. But developing a rational theory of eating live frogs is not going to save anyone.

I’m reminded of the large news organization my spouse used to work for years ago. When a maelstrom hit—one that was affecting all of journalism—a top editor called together the whole newsroom to talk about the future. They would, he announced, have to decide which of their core values to keep.

The point is supposed to be that they’re your core values. The outlet lost its principles, and soon went into a tailspin that was in no way delayed and was perhaps accelerated by abandoning its values. If you’ve figured out your core principles, then they will guide you about what to do. Remember, you’re not just performing an idea, it’s your life. It’s who you are.

Who are you talking to? Who are you listening to?

I think Klein, like many former liberals, is getting rolled by his exposure to people who imagine themselves to be free-thinkers but are actually adjacent to hacks like Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania. (If you don’t already know who they are, they’re not really worth looking up.) Because Klein doesn’t seem to currently locate himself in a tradition or perhaps has lost the ability to do so, he imagines that the pain of trading away core values is a positive example of compromise.

But those self-described freethinkers advocating surrendering whole communities will never become more like him. Klein will only become more like them.

I’m curious who he thinks his audience is. It’s not Charlie Kirk fans, because they’ll never be convinced by Ezra Klein says—they’ve bought into a very different worldview. And if he’s trying to persuade politicians to compromise, it’s not necessary. Most politicians have already shown themselves more than willing to do it. His encouragement is superfluous, and even dangerous. Politicians, even good ones, often cherry-pick pundit ideas to bolster their platforms. But pundits rarely shape politics.

If his listeners are his intended audience—as I hope is the case—he’s doing them a disservice when he broadcasts his sense of being at a loss as political thought and transforms his personal drama into a national one. The truth is that Harris lost the presidential election by 1.5%, and in a post-Covid headwind that threw out parties in power, she outperformed incumbents in most countries.

This is not a discussion of whether and how Harris could have run a better campaign. It’s more to say that in context, the loss is not the kind of signal that Klein seems to see it as. It was a devastatingly close result in a series of devastatingly close results in the U.S. in the recent decades that have gone both ways.

You don’t have to panic. You don’t have to burn all the bridges and retreat. You can make a principled stand for what you believe while welcoming in alienated voters looking for hope and community.

We’re in for a long haul. If Klein wants to serve his listeners, I would argue that this is the message he could be delivering. The more he persuades them into this malleable middle of trading ideals away, the more of them he will coax into becoming just as lost as he is.

I believe he’s in the throes of a real struggle over how to proceed. But as of right now, he’s only serving the political movement and business interests that benefit from a morally compromised, morally compromising political left. His lack of compass in this moment means that he’s being played by a system that benefits from his confusion and his willingness to spread that confusion.

Action plan for non-pundits

Again, I appreciate the honesty that Klein and Coates showed in their conversation. What I’m writing isn’t meant to humiliate or insult anyone, or to say you shouldn’t acknowledge moments when you’re uncertain. It’s to show the dangers of how a smart person with good intentions can talk themselves into swallowing live frogs. There’s a lot of harm being done by the Trump administration to a lot of people right now. But this swallowing frogs bit is less something someone does to you, and more something you do to yourself.

And honestly, I think that many of us have also gotten stuck imagining that we’re also pundits and politicians and somehow responsible for figuring the whole crisis out and having opinions on each new outrage and who should do what.

Let me just say you don’t have to do all that. You don’t even have to know exactly what you think everyone else should do. Some of those are tough decisions! You just have to know what to do yourself.

And although I admire much of what he has written, I’m not saying to make Coates your personal hero. There are complicated aspects to Coates’s position that people could disagree with, which I haven’t much done here. He himself acknowledges that politicians have different responsibilities than he does and couldn’t take the path that he has taken.

But the truth for nearly everyone is simpler. You don’t have to turn your back on the big issues, but you also don’t have to import the entire national crisis into your personal one.

You just have to think for yourself. Know what tradition you’re aligned with, whether it’s a philosophical one, a religious one, or one that rises out of a particular past oppression—or all of the above. There might even be a group or a school of thought you’re reacting against. If you haven’t thought about these things before, read less daily news and try to find an approach that reflects what matters to you.

Having answers to that will do a lot to give you direction. But you don’t even have to dig that deep to make a difference right now. Figure out today what your core values are and don’t trade them away.

Coates’s “all humanity is equal and is worthy of that” is not a bad place to start. But find the foundational ideas that matter to you. Then look for ways to act in the world, close to home, that rise out of those values.

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