Why The Left Would Rather Lose Than Talk To Conservatives

No matter how obvious that is to the bulk of this country, the left has largely buried its head in the sand, refusing to alter its messaging, to budge on losing battles, and unwilling to treat their political adversaries as people worth talking to—insisting that engaging with them on any level, providing them with a platform, or being in the same room would be a corrupting force against their humanity. Engaging with adversaries on any level, even if explicitly to push back against their ideas in a legitimately consequential way, is framed as betrayal. 

The Man Trying to Save the Democrats From Themselves

But there is one prominent dissenter in the liberal intellectual bubble who is attempting to spread the word: what we’re doing isn’t working, so we need to try something new. That man is Ezra Klein, a New York Times opinion columnist and author of “Why We Are Polarized” and co-author of the recent political manifesto “Abundance,” with Derek Thompson. Klein has positioned himself as the guy pushing the left to embrace big-tent coalition politics over the uncompromising purity-testing brand of progressive politics that the left has embraced, as a necessary strategic political opposition to what he sees as the rising authoritarian right. This, he argues, is necessary because politics is about power and coalition-building, not wish-making.

He’s made the rounds in recent years, urging Democrats to become more competitive again by running more strategic candidates that can actually win in red states, such as pro-life and economically populist Democrats, rather than idealistic candidates that have no hopes of winning. The other strategic selling point he argues the Democrats need to budge on is their self-exclusion from media ecosystems that hold huge sway over persuadable audiences that don’t hear from them, such as Joe Rogan’s podcast. He argues that the left’s decision to opt out of engaging with people who aren’t ready-made sycophants that agree with them on every issue is killing them politically, and is why they continue to lose or, when they win, just scrape by at 50.1%. 

Klein received flak, at first, for vocally opposing Joe Biden’s run for a second presidential term, arguing that he was too old to run again. However, following a disastrous performance in a presidential debate with Donald Trump, dangerously close to election time, revealing the former president’s ever-apparent cognitive decline, public opinion swung. Klein’s forewarning that Biden needed to drop out for them to have a chance now rang as a prescient warning ignored that probably cost them the presidency. Now, people are listening. But it’s clear that those who do inhabit a dwindling minority position within their political cause.

The Politics of Persuasion

In the wake of the public assassination of conservative political activist, media personality, and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, Klein made a bold move. While the broader left was busy assassinating Kirk’s character in addition to his body, Klein published an article in The New York Times titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” It was a refreshingly adult reaction, equal parts mature and respectful as it was sophisticated.  

Klein makes the case that Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way by showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him; that he was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion, admitting he envied what he built. “When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.” Diverging from the dominant opinion on the left that Kirk was a despicable hate monger, Klein had positive things to say about the legacy of a man whose politics he so intensely disliked. “A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy,” Klein wrote, and “liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.” 

As irresponsible provocateurs gave clumsy, reckless statements, Klein called for a measured approach that asked the left to reclaim some dignified respect. Despite abhorring Kirk’s project, he had the sense of humanity to urge fellow liberals not to spit on mourners immediately after a murder, arguing it would be more appropriate to sit with conservatives in their grief. He cited the inaugural episode of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast, in which he admitted that his son was a huge fan of Kirk, while hosting him on the inaugural episode of his podcast, as a testament to Kirk’s project. 

Most respectfully, he urged the left to avoid wrapping Kirk’s death around his views, warning that tolerance for political violence poses the threat of contagion that will come for us all, and that, given how uncomfortably close we are to a national rupture, we should tread carefully. “American politics has sides,” Klein acknowledged, “but both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project—we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment.” 

The greatest threat to the survival of the great American experiment? Of free and fair elections, of freedom of expression, of a battle of ideas? Political violence. What Klein was getting at was that by directing the conversation at that moment in time, towards Kirk’s “offensive” beliefs rather than the elephant in the room: that he was killed merely for espousing certain opinions which a good chunk of the country agree with, was setting us on a dangerous course we are not prepared for, and will end up being all of our undoing. 

It also isn’t helpful, because those people can’t be ignored; they have to be won over. The left has no tenable solution to this; they only wish to continue to push harder on their firmly held issues, refusing to hedge or compromise or meet people half way lest they “sell out,” which has the consequence of ensuring that they can’t win. This is all in the name of an incredibly juvenile revolutionary fantasy. Klein’s point is, if you can’t win, what’s the point? Is it better to be politically pure or to effect change?

Can the Left Start Doing Politics Better?

One figure who embodies this frustrating blind spot on the left is author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Best known for his Atlantic essay The Case for Reparations and a shelf of books on America’s racism, Coates has long been treated as the intellectual go-to on all matters of race. He had a palpably negative reaction to Klein’s article and took aim at it in his own penned piece for Vanity Fair, "Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause." He accused Klein of whitewashing Kirk’s legacy and compared it to the whitewashing of the southern cause after the Civil War.

In that same article, he disingenuously characterized Kirk as a white supremacist and undercut his agreement with Klein’s warning that political violence is a virus by following it up with, “It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, 'defended the Second Amendment'—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes” before citing examples such as Kirk’s opposition to Lia Thomas, a biological male, competing on the women’s swim team at the University of Pennsylvania.

This prompted Klein, a prominent thought leader at The New York Times, to invite Coates onto his New York Times Opinion podcast to hash out their points of contention and discuss the future of liberal politics. This conversation and the reactions it has provoked show a telling divide between liberals who get it and those who are destined to repeat their mistakes. Their diverging takes on the appropriate response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination may have spurred this conversation, but it’s just a microcosm of the broader picture consuming modern liberal politics: you’re either with them or against them. 

To be against them is to be depriving them of their humanity, enacting fascist authoritarianism, and espousing words akin to violence. These are all characterizations that justify literal violence against their opponents, by design. Klein is right to be worried and disturbed by this strategy, but he appears to be alone on that front. Here is the central question Klein zeroes in on with Coates, who embodies this sort of out-of-touch academic coastal elite liberal who writes off anyone who isn’t in their inner circle: “There’s something very unsettled in the broad coalition of the left around the work of politics, around who we talk to and when and how. When is that work moral? When is it necessary? When is it a betrayal?” 

These are prescient questions for the left to answer, of course, because they’ve been getting their asses handed to them in recent elections, and polls show they’re out of step with everyday Americans on their highest priority talking points, like trans rights. They are not just slightly out of step. These are 70-30 issues. The more they harp on them, the less willing they are to compromise, the more vicious they are in their characterization of people occupying the “wrong side of the line” on said issue, the more they are going to lose. 

Almost 70% of Americans believe transgender athletes should only be able to play on sports teams that match their sex at birth rather than the gender they identify with, and 4 in 10 Americans support laws that would restrict and/or ban transgender care for minors, even with parents’ consent. 

Missing the Forest for the Trees

Klein asks Coates what he took issue with regarding his opinion on Charlie Kirk. Coates articulated that he felt like there was something off about what he knew about Kirk and the presentation of him as a paragon of politics and how politics should be done; that it’s important to differentiate how people die from how they lived.

“So the idea that this guy should be in any way celebrated for how he conducted politics — the fact that he just slurred, across the board, all sorts of groups of people and then ran an organization which appeared, to me, to be just a haven of hatred — I would not want that to be a model for my politics.” Coates added, “I feel like, at a certain point, somebody does something that is so large that it’s tough to think about their legacy and take that out of it.” This tendency to say “political violence is wrong BUT” is not very promising, and even the line of thinking is extremely concerning. 

This is the sort of philosophy that says: everyone’s conservative uncle, their parents, their grandparents—who hold views in line with Kirk—are so problematic that I can’t be horrified enough by the use of political violence as intimidation to condemn it without the use of any qualifiers; and, in the wake of their deaths, we’ll be marching on their graves, litigating their every problematic opinion as a strike against their humanity, and denying them the dignity of grief.

Klein defends his worry about mimetic violence. 

"After [a series of attempted and successful political assassinations] happened, I thought about me, I thought about you. I thought about all kinds of people I know. So, I do think there’s just something about when violence takes hold, there’s something about it that begins to breach all lines," Klein said. Coates gives a telling answer, “was silence not an option?” Klein maintained that political violence is an attack on us all, and in that moment, even if temporary, it’s important to come together, meet people in their grief, and try to cool things down a bit.

When Coates is asked why he thinks someone like Kirk was winning, there is no self-reflection, only a knee-jerk reaction to label him a hate monger and an implication that America is a deeply hateful country whose hate can sometimes be riled up and spill out. When asked, “Why are we losing?” His response is equally out of touch. “We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.” As if it’s random. Then Coates invokes some irrelevant whataboutism, bringing it back to race, as he always does, and insisting that political violence is the norm for the black experience in this country. 

He lists awful things that have happened in the past: chattel slavery, assassinations of civil rights leaders, and racist lynchings. What do they have to do with where we are, with where the threat of political violence lies today? Coate lives in an alternate world where he’s being held down by the system, under threat of severe racism and violence, while he runs cover for the people shooting our conservative brothers in the neck. 

Klein rightfully pushes back, “Sometimes I think that having a historical scope that wide can make the present too deterministic. For me, it’s not enough to say: We lost, there are backlashes, sometimes you lose,” Klein argued. “I think it requires a very fundamental rethinking — a disciplined, strategic rethinking — of: What have we been doing? Why are people preferring this to us?” Klein demonstrates here that he sees something Coates doesn’t. He’s able to pinpoint exactly what the problem is: that Kirk was doing something the left abandoned, at its own peril. 

The One-Sided Deplorables Problem

They’ve stopped “doing politics” and started writing people off. “And in writing people off, we are losing, and we are unable to protect ourselves, unable to protect them, and just unable to make good change in the world.” He traces this inclination to write people off to Clinton’s infamous “deplorables” comment about Trump’s supporters. While Coates agrees it wasn’t politically savvy for such a divisive figure running for president in a high-stakes election to make a comment like that, he reveals that he sees nothing wrong with it. He doesn’t see the error in exercising politics in this way, arguing that he has different expectations for the president than public intellectuals who are supposed to go against the grain. But it’s just as grating when the journalistic class does it as when high-ranking politicians do it. 

Klein sees the Hillary deplorables comment as a manifestation of an emerging liberal culture that worsened over time and has contributed to their losses. If you look at what the conservatives have been doing, they’ve been gaining ground by going in, having debates, and using them opportunistically, Klein argued. A lot of liberals’ pushback against Kirk revolved around the claim that he wasn’t debating to find the truth. “Of course, he wasn’t debating to find the truth. 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.” 

To claim someone wasn’t engaged in debate to find truth is difficult to establish, especially because Kirk’s debate tactic of choice was to employ the Socratic method. He would ask people to define their terms, Steelman their argument, try to find a point of agreement, and use that bridge to link it to his overall argument. It’s true that Kirk, in these debates, had a solid political and philosophical framework in place that provided him with pre-existing positions from which he would argue and try to convince his opponent. That’s literally just argumentation. That’s philosophy.

If you didn’t believe in anything, what would you even be debating? So even here, Klein as well lets the mask slip and shows that he believes the libs to have a monopoly on truth and good faith discourse. Coates pushes back with what he thinks is a real gotcha, “But would you like to see one of us put up a sign outside of, say, some white evangelical church in Alabama: Debate me on abortion? And then use that content to say: Such and such 'smashes' church parishioner? Or: Such and such 'owns' church parishioner? Would you like to see a version of that?” I love Klein’s response here, which is an unambiguous, '"Yes, I think we should go to places that feel unfriendly to us and have conversations, but that there’s nothing stopping them from doing it in a way that’s more aligned with their value structure and political approach."

Coates is then purposely obtuse in saying “I don’t know that we weren’t. I, for instance, have” and cites a single speech he gave at the military academy West Point, where he directly challenged the presence of Confederate memorials on the campus and admitted they “had a great conversation.” But West Point is itself anomalous in that the academy skews heavily conservative, young men from patriotic families who issued him an invitation to “counter insularity” and “forward equality while bridging the civilian-military divide.” 

In other words, conservatives, yet again, are the ones leading the charge in bridging the divide, and Coates has deluded himself into believing that giving a single lecture to a conservative audience arguing against the existence of Confederate monuments constitutes the same style of effective politics that Kirk and the broader conservative movement are invested in. That campus, clearly receptive to pushback, ended up removing the Confederate symbols from its campus.

Coates disingenuously insists that he doesn’t know what Klein is talking about when he articulates that the left has retreated from the battle of ideas, opting instead to cocoon themselves inside their comfy echo chambers. So Klein gets specific, citing the huge backlash to liberal figures going on Joe Rogan’s show because of Rogan’s “transphobic” comments; that Klein himself trended on Twitter when he defended him. Or when Elizabeth Warren got heat for appearing on Bill Maher’s show and engaging because Maher is an “Islamophobe.” Or the protests at Netflix when they brought on Dave Chappelle. 

He characterizes this as the politics of content moderation, “enforcing boundaries of what were and were not ideas we should be engaged with — rather than about engaging them, even if opportunistically.” And, from Klein’s point of view as a liberal who wants to advance liberal policy, he argues that this strategy has failed and had terrible consequences. Logically, then, they need to rethink their strategy and figure out how to become competitive again in places they’re not. A big component of that, and this should be obvious to anyone who hasn’t completely deluded themselves (as does happen when you refuse to engage with heterodox ideas), is that people feel they don’t have a place in modern liberal ideology. Klein correctly concedes that this is a feeling that has emerged directly out of liberal behavior and treatment of dissenting opinion. 

The lack of self-reflection in academic elites like Coates is funny, too, because for all of the liberal accusations of “self-hating women” and “self-hating blacks” that they love to throw around, they can’t extrapolate that onto the right-of-center voter’s theory of mind. If you understand so intuitively why voters have a vested interest in voting for people who fight for them, like them, and against those who do not, why should that stop with minority identity groups (women, gays, people of color, trans people)? 

Why should conservatives vote for people who hate them enough to, at worst, justify political violence used against people who think like them, and at best, do cowardly apologism for that violence? Klein illustrates how far the problem has drifted by revealing that an academic peer of his emailed him following the publication of these recent pieces that "we are just not on the same side anymore if you can say these things.” Coates also pedantically holds onto the unhelpful sentiment that he’s all for bridging gaps, “but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity.” This is the crux of where a moderate like Klein and a bloviating “intellectual” like Coates diverge. 

Choosing Between Moral Purity and Political Power

Klein understands that politics is about power, so his goal is not to have this great kumbaya moment but to work with people the left has unfairly written off so that they can actually advance liberal policies they believe will improve people’s lives. Klein points out that political coalition building has been diminished by liberals because they’ve come to the view that a pretty wide variety of people are in some way deplorables, and that’s perhaps not only unwise but politically more harmful, because they can’t actually advance any of their political initiatives. There’s also this concern of being on the fringe of national rupture, and a huge swath of liberal ideologues seems fundamentally uninterested in bridging that gap for the sake of the country. If anything, it appears they would prefer it to break. 

The point escapes Coates, who takes every opportunity to deny that he participates in the uncharitable characterizations akin to Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, but in the next breath, states that people like Kirk post content that is “actively destructive to humanity,” and he “has to draw a line there.” Coates takes the trans debate as an evocative example, but mistakenly reduces it to whether "trans folks are human beings and deserve humanity." 

“I think most people know that you shouldn’t say what he said — like, that [expletive] is rude. It’s just rude to talk to people like that, and I think most people know that.” He continues down this train of thought, “I actually think that’s not a hard line to draw. I think not calling people out of their name, that’s actually a basic value that most people have, and I think people who think it’s not, who are pushing that, are actually themselves on the other side of the line." Herein lies the problem. People who don’t support children transitioning or men competing in women’s sports are denying trans people’s humanity, according to their rhetoric.

This is why these people can’t be reasoned with. To them, the line is drawn at not agreeing with 100% of the nonsensical positions they hold. And as admirable as Klein’s attempt to reform his side of the political divide is, it’s ultimately looking futile, because while he understands that it’s political suicide to insist that you get to draw the line and everyone else must herd in around you, he’s still operating from a fundamentally flawed political understanding. His interest in getting people like Coates to shut up isn’t because he detects the fundamental error in their worldview, but because he opportunistically recognizes that it costs them popularity and power.

“A huge amount of the country, a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong," Klein says. And so the question of what to do with these people is a politically expedient question: should we compromise or win them over so that we can retain power? 

Maybe the majority of the country is against you because there’s a fundamental flaw in your position, and a moral one, at that. Coates continues to refer to random historical black history to answer fundamental questions like, "Do we need to contend with the opinions of the prototypical American voter?" Then, they do a false moral equivalence to past evils that were once popular. Again, we’re talking about unobjectionable positions like thinking biological sex is real and cannot be fundamentally changed.

Coates clarifies his disagreement this way: politicians and intellectuals have different roles. Politicians must compromise to get things done, but writers and thinkers, he argues, have the job of speaking truth to power. He even grants that F.D.R.’s New Deal required cutting deals that excluded black Americans, and while he understands the move politically, “Were I there in that time, it would have been incumbent on me to yell at F.D.R. to not do that.” Likewise, though he himself pushed for reparations, he claims he never expected Barack Obama to campaign on it, since that would have been politically suicidal as the first black president. 

“But that’s different than my role,” he insists, as if he’s making some great moral difference while the political stooges in their empty suits have to tout the party line. From the outside looking in, it’s just stupid all the way down. You have people arguing for immensely unpopular, unethical, nonsensical positions like men fighting women in combat sports, and they convince themselves they’re the last remaining moral fiber of this country. 

Klein worries about left-wing pessimism and fatalism, “that we are losing and don’t want to change anything,” he says. His approach is pragmatic: why not just try things? He cites the Affordable Care Act as proof of its efficacy. In 2010, it passed only after negotiations with 40 pro-life House Democrats. “On the bright side, you don’t have to do those negotiations now, Klein notes. “On the downside, you can’t pass the Affordable Care Act." That’s the heart of his argument. Conservatives are winning because they’re taking whatever they can get and running with it to accumulate more power, influence, and expand their network of allies. If a celebrity pays a modicum of lip service to right-of-center opinions, they’re showered with praise. If a celebrity even slightly diverges from liberal orthodoxy, they’re completely ostracized from the left and smeared as a right-wing extremist. 

Liberals want to live in this hypothetical utopia where only the most idealistic versions of their political ideas come to fruition. 

They don’t care about reality or consequences. They only want to maintain their moral purity and virtue signal, which is why they can’t even engage with the concept of choosing between the lesser of two evils in a thought experiment; as if the weight of that decision is too much for them to bear the responsibility of and would morally stain them for betraying the most principled ideal, even if it would never actually work or get support or be put in place. 

Politically, liberals approach the trolley problem by refusing to engage. They can’t determine whether the ethical answer is to refuse to pull the lever because it’s wrong to exercise your will over people, or if it’s wrong to avoid pulling the lever so fewer people die. Their knee-jerk response is literally to state the obvious: “Oh my god, who tied these people to the track? That’s wrong! I can’t engage any further because people should not be tied to the train tracks.” The deeper divide here is over the purpose of politics itself. For moderates like Klein, politics is consequentialist, so compromise, persuasion, coalition-building, and engaging people you dislike are all worthwhile endeavors because winning matters. For out-of-touch liberals in the bubble, politics is performative; a chance to signal moral purity, even if it ensures losing.