Why Ezra Klein Cannot Save the Left from Itself

Even the best and most attractive left-coded vision of America is hollow at its core.

Since the right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk was murdered, the left-wing pundit Ezra Klein has been among the most thoughtful and insightful voices advocating for an American culture that simultaneously engages political disagreement and condemns political violence. From his enormous platform at The New York Times, Klein has been participating in talks and debates with conservatives: The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, The New York Times’ own Ross Douthat, and Utah Governor Spencer Cox.

Despite more than 20 years at the apex of journalism and media, Klein has not, by his own admission, published any piece that provoked as much backlash among those on his own side as his recent op-ed arguing that, while many of Charlie Kirk’s views may have been deplorable, the Turning Point USA founder nevertheless “practiced politics the right way.” Much of that backlash has been emotionally evocative yet logically incoherent. Writing in Vanity Fair, for example, Ta-Nehisi Coates misrepresents Klein’s argument about the place of words in politics in order to speculate that Klein would support the enslavement of Black people if doing so served his own interests.

I am a political centrist absent any consistent political ideology. I have lived in normie blue America my entire life. Having worked mostly in higher education and socialized mostly in liberal circles, I have been the conservative in countless rooms and conversations simply via the willingness to wearily point out once boring realities, like that men are not women and crime is not good. This is despite being a registered Democrat who shares many if not most of Klein’s progressive political impulses toward more government-sponsored abundance myself.

From this jaded vantage point, I appreciate Klein greatly. His non-ideological honesty, moral clarity, and political courage in this moment are laudable, as far as they go. But the sad, alarming fact is that they don’t go anywhere near far enough.

The best and most attractive left-coded vision of America, as articulated by Klein, is hollow at its core.

Mature and pluralistic as his vision is, Klein does not embrace or articulate any purpose for life in America (or life itself) beyond an emphasis on Democrat-coded diversity and inclusion yoked to Republican-coded prosperity. He fails to recognize that the left’s fundamental absence of aspirational ideals and moral guidance is part of what draws rightward the young people with whom he admits envying the late Kirk’s engagement. For example, even as a self-proclaimed “left pronatalist” (and even when pressed by Douthat), Klein will not say outright that marriage with children is not just a choice that all Americans should be able to make, but the most important and foundational choice that we want most Americans to make.

I hope and pray that my own four sons (all things being equal, which I do understand that they never are) marry in their 20s, not their 30s; that they marry in the Catholic Church of their raising; and that they and the women they marry are blessed with the openness and the ability to welcome several children of their own and to bring them up in the faith. As long as Klein’s elite left considers erstwhile universal parental preferences like my own offensively impolitic rather than normatively aspirational, the Democrats are lost.

And thus, with the frightening and growing excesses of the GOP on the other side, so is the nation. When clear espousals of self-evident virtue are countercultural enough as to be anathema to even the most reasonable people with influence on the left, it is inevitable that traditional morality will be unduly and monistically dogmatized by those on the right.

Leaving Republicans in sole possession of any public relationship to the cultural norms without which nihilism inevitably makes headway is an enormous mistake, both on its own terms and for America’s political future.

So, God help us. It seems no one else will.