Ta-Nehisi Coates is harnessing hate toward political ends

And praise for Ezra Klein's new political project

In the poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost turns the simple act of repairing a stone wall into a meditation on the social boundaries of our world. Boundaries between neighbors, between nations, and between ourselves. He reflects on whether such walls preserve the peace or merely keep us apart. As the poem begins, he says even nature seems to dislike walls. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he writes, noting how the annual ground frost swells under “and spills the upper boulders in the sun.”

Each spring, therefore, after the winter frost, and the hunters, and natural wear, the wall dividing the speaker’s land from his neighbor’s must be mended. So the two men walk the line, each picking up fallen stones and placing them back. Ironically, they work together to maintain their separation. But as they work, the speaker begins to question whether the wall actually serves much purpose. There are no cows to keep in, and it’s not as if the apple and pine trees ever trespass. But his neighbor insists on tradition and the inherited wisdom of his father, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

As with Frost’s other celebrated poem, “The Road Not Taken,” the popular reading here is incorrect. In that one, people assume he is saying that when you face two choices in life, you should take “the one less traveled by,” when instead he is quietly criticizing that attitude. In this poem, the last line about “good neighbors” is usually the only one that survives in memory, the only one people recognize, and so they think that is the message of the poem. But that’s what his neighbor believes, and if you look closely, you can see the poet shaking his head.

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This week’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show is “Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines,” except it’s actually Klein on bridging gaps vs. Coates drawing racial lines, and this reflects their respective political projects but also the communities to which they belong, with Klein seeking to unite a divided nation and the tikkun olam of his Jewish heritage, and Coates, intent on reshaping American moral life around black experience, and the narcissism of black progressives.

I’ve written about how Coates fancies himself a journalist, yet routinely violates journalistic ethics, or his Orientalist new book The Message, in which he catalogues his parachute journalism while dismissing the need for fact-checking or even hearing the side of the accused. His intellectual odyssey ends with him embracing the most uncharitable interpretation of Israeli politics imaginable, claiming not just that they are literally perpetrating evil, and that there is nothing to discuss about the matter, but that there is nothing more Coates needs to see or hear, nothing more to learn, no corrective information possible. Never mind that he would never accept someone doing the exact same thing to the black American community. In fact, he can’t even reflect on himself. As the conservative author @Helen Andrews writes:

The problem with Coates is that he never turns his critical eye inward. Ezra should have said, “So you think Charlie Kirk promoted hate. Have you considered that some people might feel exactly the same way about you?”

One punch I pulled in my review of his last book—which, let’s be honest, got me in enough trouble as it was—was a section I cut trying to get him to stop thinking about white people’s complicity in violence for a minute and start thinking about his own.

He spends a lot of time in the book persuading ordinary Israelis to grasp their complicity in violent dispossession. You personally may never have hurt a Palestinian, he says, but the house you live in is yours only because of evil deeds your countrymen did and are doing today.

The book ends with Hassan Jaber, a 91-year-old Palestinian in Chicago, who longs for the land he grew up on. This was in living memory. His family wants to return. Coates implies that any solution is hollow if it doesn’t involve this guy getting his house back.

He analogizes their plight to every historical crime he can think of from Jim Crow to imperialism—but never anything that implicates himself.

Coates is from Baltimore. The city was 80% white in 1940, and it’s about 25% white today. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who fled. By the time Coates was growing up, Baltimore was majority black and that majority was consolidating political power, which it holds today.

I want to ask him: Did that happen peacefully? Or is there a violent dispossession in the recent past from which you benefited?

Is there a 91-year-old Baltimore native who longs for the beautiful row house he grew up in, who can’t return to his old neighborhood because he’s afraid for his physical safety? What would it take for that guy to get his house back?

The analogy isn’t exact. Coates’s analogies aren’t exact, either. The point is to get you to think about the systems of dispossession that you benefit from beyond your individual actions. That’s Coates’s whole theme, getting people to reflect on their complicity in violence.

It would really help his argument if once, just once, he applied that to himself.

It’s just not that complicated, Coates repeatedly claims about the most complicated conflict in human history. He does this not because he is stupid, but because he is smart. He realizes that his own relevance as a black intellectual on the left requires his input on the two major issues of progressivism today: the trans movement and the Palestinian movement. He also knows that he must take a pro-Palestinian stance, and that in order to capably do so requires Rashid Khalidi or Ilan Pappé levels of expertise, and even they often fail at the task. Rather than spend the next 20 years trying to educate himself, Coates simply says, I know all about this because this is racism and I am black therefore I am an expert in racism. But in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Coates is back on familiar territory, having gone form offering the most uncharitable interpretation of Israel possible back to his home turf of offering the most uncharitable interpretation of white people possible, specifically Kirk:

I think Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger. I really need to say this over and over again … 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.

Hatred. Not Kirk’s Christian faith, which was the heart of his life’s work and which for him centered on compassion and love, nor his practice of engaging students in open ministry, nor the unmatched civility with which he did so, particularly in his later years, after becoming a husband and a father and settling into his manhood and becoming less combative and thorny than when he started out — remember, he started doing these campus debates at 18, and people came at him hard. No, for Coates, Kirk is not just a hateful bigot literally perpetrating evil, but there is nothing to discuss about the matter, nothing more Coates needs to see or hear, nothing more to learn. Never mind that he would never accept someone doing the exact same thing about George Floyd, Michael Brown, Jacob Blake, or Rayshard Brooks.

Coates is like one of Socrates’ blind interlocutors, Euthyphro or Meletus, as arrogant and unwilling to learn as they are wrong, who think they already know what “piety” or “justice” is, and whose certainty is ultimately exposed as hollow. Or, if you prefer, Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, full of pompous advice, convinced he knows how the world works, yet shown to be verbose, meddling, and often wrong. What all these characters share is that they amusingly represent the danger of ignorantly presuming wisdom without examining the limits of one’s own knowledge.

Unfortunately, as with so many other issues these days, Kirk’s death has been grossly politicized. But our politics have become so extreme at the far ends that politicization can sometimes warp things to the point that it’s not so much a matter of whether you are left or right, but whether you are functionally intelligent. Certain politicized narratives are so extreme they become informal IQ tests, which is not to say that those who fail have a low absolute IQ, but they do have a low functional IQ, meaning while their Stanford-Binet results might say 125, when the subject comes round to religion or politics, they suddenly talk like someone nestled in at 95. This is because they are repeating the talking points of less intelligent people, and have accepted those talking points not as a consequence of studied consideration, but as a tribal signal, as the faith of their family, or perhaps the creed of their country, or because such is the politics of their cultural identity, as much as faith or the nation to which they belong.

And I think Coates clearly falls into this trap, because you need only read his writing or listen to him think aloud to recognize that he’s a very smart and very thoughtful guy. He simply is. But the second he applies his black analytical lens to things — and he applies it to everything — he is unable to think outside the parameters of first-order woke racialism. In the wake of Kirk’s death, like many others, I have consumed an inordinate amount of footage of him, and I have seen him speak to gay students, trans students, and black single mothers with compassion and genuine Christian love. I have also seen him viciously tear into homophobic and racist speakers alike. I have seen him repeatedly preach civility, tell his fans to pipe down when they spoke over an interlocutor, even if that person was in the middle of insulting him, and respond with patience and kindness in the face of hatred. I have seen him respond directly to questions, circle back if he got something wrong, and rephrase if misunderstood.

In other words, I have seen something I never quite see with Coates. Profoundly good faith. And you can see Coates’ bad faith in his take on Kirk, whose viewpoints are conservative, yes, but in terms of social conservatism, fairly similar to a mainline 1990s Republican. That’s how unhinged progressives have become, that they now view an old-school Republican as far-right and full of hatred, if not literally fascist. Yet on every major social issue of the 90s — abortion, gun rights, immigration, religion, family values, law and order, welfare, affirmative action, teen pregnancy, or multiculturalism — Kirk lines up, and then extends that logic into contemporary discussions over pronouns, trans rights, DEI, and so on.

Coates’ bad faith when it comes to subjects such as Israel, Kirk, or anything that touches on race, is evident once again in this interview when he remarks, “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.” This is bad faith, and functionally stupid, because absolutely no one is claiming trans folks are not human or that they don’t deserve dignity. Rather, the debate is about entering women’s bathrooms, prisons, and sports, or the medical ethics around giving hormones, puberty blockers, and surgical procedures to minors, or balancing respect with not wanting to parrot scientific absurdities. But Coates fails to articulate even one of these facts. The progressive orthodoxy on trans rights is demented and so Coates, in his eagerness to toe the line, is left with nothing intelligent to say.

But Klein is onto a fascinating political project of late, and I’m here for it. Klein was one of the early voices flagging Biden’s mental decline. And his new book with

Derek Thompson

, Abundance, is all about the failure of leftist bureaucratic bloat. He is trying to fix our political divide by first acknowledging where the left has gone wrong, and this is probably the only way we are ever going to come back together, if we ever really do. When you fight with a friend or a spouse, it’s good form to begin by acknowledging your own mistakes. It invites the other party to do likewise.

And Klein has proven he’s capable of the task, unlike Coates. This interview came about, mind you, because Coates had a real problem with the fact that Klein recently said he admired Kirk for reaching across the political aisle and trying to engage young people. Klein saw the virtue in this, and celebrated it, and declined to talk trash about a good man in the days after his murder. Coates found this incredibly offensive, so Klein, again the peacemaker, invited Coates on his show to hash it out. Early into the conversation, Klein asks about the left, “Why are we losing?”

Insanely, yet capturing everything wrong with woke ideology, Coates replies not by acknowledging the purity testing on the left, the intolerance, the anti-white racism, the trans insanity, the cancel culture, the framing of their political opponents as literal Nazis, or anything else, but instead budges not even a millimeter. He never acknowledges that progressives went too far, became hateful, or intolerant, or that they made any mistake at all. Everything is to be blamed on the right, or Israel, or white people, or even more crazily, on the ebb and flow of history itself, as Coates replies: “We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.” He adds:

As horrifying as the killing of Charlie Kirk was […] 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.

This is the delusion of progressive black America. Remember when the George Floyd protests resulted in billions in property damage and dozen of murders, all because progressive black Americans and their allies believed police were waging open season on them, even though Washington Post data found that in the years leading up to George Floyd, police were annually killing only about a dozen unarmed blacks, and research by Roland Fryer found that police killed more whites per capita than blacks?

Similarly, Coates wants you to think that lynching was so rampant that almost every black American knows someone who was lynched. But historians estimate about 4,700 people were lynched in the United States, 30% of whom were white, meaning there are likely tens of thousands of black Americans today who are descendants of those people. If we include cousins, nephews, and so on, the number could run into the hundreds of thousands. If the number is 100,000, we’re talking about 0.2% of the black population today. If it’s a whopping 300,000, we’re talking 0.6%. In other words, almost no black people alive today know anyone who was lynched. At another point, Klein comments on how shrinking support for the left is partly the result of leftist extremism pushing people away. This is sort of amazing because few progressives see or even seem capable of seeing this. Imagine how revolutionary it would be for American politics if MAGA supporters woke up tomorrow, fully cognizant and critical of Trump’s imperfections. Here’s Klein:

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. […] It got worse over time. And then I think it really contributed to us losing. Meanwhile […] there was something that I respected in what Kirk was doing — like going in, having debates, using them opportunistically […] 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.

Coates rejects the message and instead asks if Klein would like to see progressives debate abortion with white evangelicals in Alabama. But Klein immediately says “yes,” it would be good to “go to places that feel unfriendly.” Coates replies, with his characteristic narcissism:

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.

In other words, Coats responds to the idea that no one on he left was doing what Kirk did — day in and day out, engaging hundreds of students across campuses, often for hours at a time — by offering up the fact that he once went to a campus, in a highly controlled environment, met a select group of military cadets who were on their best behavior, in front of their superiors, in an office, where he spoke for one hour. Klein breaks in, asking, “Do you really not recognize the kind of culture I’m talking about here? Like, really?” And Coates says he has no idea at all, so Klein explains:

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.

He’s describing cancel culture without using the phrase, probably because he knows that, like “woke,” although it’s an objective fact, it rubs certain people the wrong way, and would probably force Coates to conclude that Klein is a white supremacist or something. But his overall point is solid. Just as he was one of the earliest and few to speak out on Biden’s declining state, he is now one of the few progressives willing to openly acknowledge that wokery has ruined progressivism, even if he is reluctant to put it in such direct terms. But he is, at least, starkly honest about that loss:

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.

He just hit the nail on the head. And my heart goes out to him. He really is trying to embody everything that was good about what Charlie Kirk did, and he clearly seems to care deeply. But what he doesn’t seem to realize is that Coates is one of the foremost people who have made conservatives feel like they are unwelcome as fellow countrymen. In fact, he’s reflecting that rhetoric in this very interview, and at one point halfway sort of laments that we all have to live in the same country, or that conservatives have to exist, but we do, so we might as well just accept that fact and move on. Klein again tries to make the point:

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.

But no matter how many times Klein tries to make the case that the left has gone too far, Coates cannot find a way to apply this criticism to black Americans:

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 agree with this. Some things are beyond our control and we must make peace with this truth. But the stark difference I see again and again in this exchange is one in which Klein is examining the mistakes people on his side are making and Coates’ refusal to do so, while also blaming everything on everyone outside his group, as has been his modus operandi across his career. And, as delicately as possible, I feel that Klein exposed this. He exposed that Coates doesn’t understand things like realpolitik, power politics, hard-nosed diplomacy, or geopolitical realism. He exposed that Coates is a gifted writer who writes beautifully about his own personal experiences, but whose understanding of politics and the world around him is too childish, too infantile to produce any insights we can use. What sits between the world and him, to borrow from the title of his book, is his own ego.

Coates has no coherent theory of what politics is or how to do politics. Even as Klein carefully lays out the problem, and the fact that you cannot lord over a demographic and dehumanize them forever, then wonder why they oppose you, Coates cannot see it. He will not see it. In his black narcissism, Coates can only read this description as applying to black Americans. He probably regards realpolitik as Machiavellian, and probably regards Machiavellian politics as proto-fascist.

The problem is, we need an ethics that focuses not on some ideal of racial virtue, or the ethos of noble striving, but on a context-dependent understanding of the messy realities of survival. Coates demonstrates he cannot think strategically without feeling like he is betraying people to the left of him, who he refuses to criticize, just as he refuses to criticize the black rights movement, and instead talks about it as though it was one breathtaking story of heroic defiance. But the black rights movement, or more accurately, black resistance, has contained multitudes, including sociopaths and monsters. The movement has tilted toward crab mentality, racism, and violence. This is why we must honor the strategic genius of figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr, for if the movement was as Coates seems to think, then an MLK figure was never needed, except to message to whites.

I have no doubt that this is precisely how Coates views the matter. But, of course, this fundamentally misunderstands MLK’s legacy as a uniter of his people in the direction of peace and as a diplomat to whites. A similar thing can be said of A. Philip Randolph, who used union organizing and political bargaining to make progress, or Bayard Rustin, a behind-the-scenes strategist who emphasized coalition-building and pragmatic tactics. Or Thurgood Marshall who, as an NAACP lawyer, pursued a carefully timed and incremental legal strategy, built up step-by-step, that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. Or Malcolm X in his later years, who moved toward pragmatic alliances and framing black rights as human rights. Coates denies himself the ability to understand the genius of any of these men because he refuses to leave the Platonic cave of his racial worldview, and prefers to watch the shadows of racial oversimplification on the wall rather than join Klein in the light.

I have been deeply impressed by Klein’s new political project of acknowledging the problems on the left and, more generally, trying to figure out what the left has done wrong that led the nation to electing President Trump twice, rather than, as many others on the left too often do, simply blaming the right, typically by calling them all racist or fascist. Klein is far too intelligent for that kind of analysis, whereas for Coates, it is the very water in which he swims.

Maybe the biggest compliment I can pay Klein is to say that his project reminds me of the project of his namesake, the Jewish priest Ezra, the “second Moses” who, after the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BC, when the Persian Empire allowed the Jewish people to return to their homeland, enacted reforms that emphasized strict adherence to the Torah, notably opposing intermarriage with non-Jews, but also reviving public readings of scripture, laying the groundwork for synagogue practice, and shifting religious authority from prophets and kings to scribes and teachers. In the Hebrew Bible, the first half of the Book of Ezra recounts the return and Temple rebuilding, while the second half covers Ezra’s reforms. It’s a book about restoration, the centrality of the Torah, and preserving holiness through separation.

Ezra confronted by the angel, Maerten de Vosprentmaker, 1585

Ezra is a big deal in Judaism. He marks the transformation from Israelite religion to a Judaism rooted in law and study, and Jews today remember him as a second founder of the faith, who reestablished the Torah as the heart of community life and who united a divided and weakened people. Coates is lost in the bitter, racial resentment that plagues progressive politics and poisons coalition building, harnessing that hate toward political ends. I can only wish him failure for such a project. But Klein is busy writing a book of Ezra for our divided nation, a recollection of what was valued and lost, a record of shared beliefs that we can unite around, and that necessarily means reaching out to people like Coates, and including his perspective, and so this interview was refreshing to see, and I wish Klein nothing but success.

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