Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

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There are two things that are true about what President Donald Trump said at Charlie Kirk's memorial service. He did not hate his opponents.
He wanted

the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie.
One is that it's frightening to see the President of the United States talk this way about his political foes. I hate my opponent,

and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry.
I am sorry, Erica. The other, I think, is that it's an opportunity.
I don't think that is a strong politics.

I think there are opportunities in countering it, but I think it will need to be countered.

And for me, one of the central questions animating the show this year that has been animating it since the election is, how did we get here?

How did we let these people get back into power? What went wrong in our approach to politics that we ended up here?

This has been a conversation I've been engaged in since Charlie Kirk's murder, and I wanted to have it with somebody who has maybe not liked the way I've been approaching it.

Tomasi Coates is a writer I admire, somebody I have a genuine friendship with.

In the days after Kirk's murder, he published a piece in Vanity Fair, pretty harshly critical of what I had written and what he saw as a whitewashing of this man's legacy and role in politics.

He compared what I was doing there to the whitewashing of the Southern cause after the Civil War.

I think it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to say we need to reach across divides and disagreement and then not talk across my own.

So I wanted to talk to Tanahasi about the piece, about the aftermath of Kirk's murder, but also about a disagreement or a question at least that I think is about more than Kirk.

I think there's something very unsettled in the sort of 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?

As always, my email, ezraklianshow at nbytimes.com.

Tanasi Coates, welcome back to the show. Thanks.
I don't know what number of time this is.

I think you're one one of the, if you go back to the box days, I think

you're on the leaderboard for sure.

Well, it's good to see you, man. Good to be here.
Thank you. All right.
Well, let's jump into the disagreement. You wrote a column responding to my column on Charlie Kirk.
I'm so uncomfortable.

It's okay.

What was your disagreement with what I wrote after Kirk was assassinated? Yeah.

First of all, I just want to thank you for having me. I've had to read things about myself that, you know, criticize my work.
It's never easy.

And people often have a very, very different response than the one you had, which is to invite me here and talk it out. So I appreciate that.
I want to say that up front.

I

felt that when I initially read the column, and I guess we should be fully transparent here and say there was a discussion between us privately before there was a, you know, a public thing.

Yeah, we text. Yeah, we did.
We do text regularly and we did text about this.

So

I felt like having not done the research that I eventually did for the column, there was something off about about what I knew about this guy and the presentation of him as,

and I don't want to misquote you here, but as basically a paragon of politics and how politics should be done.

I think I had the same reaction that most ordinary people would have, which is absolute horror at the idea that this guy was somewhere speaking and was killed.

But I always think it's like important to differentiate how people die versus how they live. And then after doing the research,

I had to be honest with you, that's when it got really, really difficult.

When I went past my initial impressions and started going through all of the clips of the things he said, the way he talked about people, the way he, you know, described groups in ways that honestly, even as I was writing it, I was uncomfortable saying.

And 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, you know, all sorts of groups of people, and then ran an organization, which appeared to me just a haven of hatred.

You know,

I would not want that to be a model for my politics.

And I know, you know, as we talked, you are not attempting to make a statement for his, the entirety of it.

But I guess 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. And that's how I felt about them.

So I think I want to get at the right level of disagreement here. So I think one thing for me is that, I don't know,

for me, the immediate hours after somebody is murdered in public,

when you see that sort of grief and horror pouring out of the people who loved him and many people loved him, my instinct then is to just sit with them in their grief, right?

To say, I can for this moment find some way to grieve with you, to see your friend the way, or in some version of the way you saw him, right?

That's not my view of the person's whole legacy, but going to people when they're grieving like that and saying, listen, I want to tell you really what I thought of your friend just feels, it feels like not what you do in a kind of a community.

I can see people coming down on both sides of that.

I actually think that actually is a great impulse that after somebody's been killed, and not just killed, but because we live in the media environment that we live in, that it's seen and that it will live forever.

And that that person's family, you know what I mean? That it was being looped in front of all of us. Jesus Christ.
Which I think has a lot to do with how this was taken. No, it's terrible.

It's terrible. And to have to go, like to have young kids who will have to grow up knowing that that is a thing that exists in the world.
You know what I mean?

And I'll go one step further on this.

One thing I wrote about in that piece that I do worry about is I worry we are already in a cycle of political violence, of mimetic violence. I think about Pelosi, I think about Shapiro.

I think about the near assassination on Trump. I think about when after that happened, I thought about me, I thought about you, I thought about all kinds of people I know, right?

So I do think there's just something about when violence takes hold, that there's something about it that it begins to breach all lines.

That was part of my reaction to. You know, I think all of that is understandable, but I guess

was silence not an option? Yeah, silence to me was not grieving with people. I felt it wasn't important as someone who is liberal, as someone who has a voice, that there are moments like that.

Like, I really do feel, and it's funny because you said something like this in your piece, but it was a little bit more offhanded, that political violence like that is an attack on us all.

And that in that moment, it creates, for me,

even if it's very temporary, that it's important in a moment like that to sort of,

yeah, come together, to try to see other people in their grief, to try to cool things down just a little bit.

I guess, given everything you read that Charlie Kirk said, and we probably don't have very different views on the value of the things he said,

why do you think he was winning? I mean, that's not really hard for me to understand. I mean, if I could just back up for a second, I want to say two things.

You know, I published a book 10 years ago, Between the World and Me, and one of the constant, constant reactions to that was that it was overly pessimistic about this country.

It was overly pessimistic about the future. Why are you so dark, Tanahasi? Why can't you give us any sense of hope?

And the reason I would always say is because any sort of sober examination of the history of this country says that those of us who believe in equality, those of us who believe in respecting the humanity of our neighbors and of

everyone,

that we're up against some really, really powerful forces of history and powerful, powerful narratives.

And the implication of that is however good we felt in 2013, 14, 15, 2008, there will be backlash.

You know, those of us who were crying in 2008, watching Obama give that speech, you know, those of us who were so moved by watching him and Michelle step outside the car and felt so much fear for him.

And then when nothing happened, felt so great about that.

Those of us who believe that seeing a black family in the White House, mirroring what, you know, some of us felt the best of us was the best that we had to offer,

there are other people watching that too. You know what I mean? And I don't take any joy in saying this, but we sometimes soothe ourselves by pointing out that love,

acceptance, warmth, that these are powerful forces. I believe they are.
I also believe hate is a powerful force. I believe it's a powerful, powerful, unifying force.

And I think Charlie Kirk was a hate monger. You know, I really need to say this over and over again.
I have a politic that rejects violence, that rejects political violence.

I take no joy in the killing of anyone, no matter what they said. But if you asked 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 had to tell you it is the usage of hate and the harnessing of hate towards political ends.
Then let me flip that question actually a bit.

Why are we losing? We're losing because there are always moments when we lose. See, that feels very fatalistic to me.

It doesn't feel fatalistic to me. It feels like the truth.
I mean, and let me, let me express what I mean.

I'm Tanasie Coates. I'm the writer.
I'm the individual, right?

But I am part of something larger. And I've always felt myself as part of something larger.
I have a tradition. I have ancestry.
I have heritage.

What that means is that I do whatever I do within the time that I have in my life, whatever time I'm gifted with. And much of what I do is built on what other people did before then.

And then after that, I leave the struggle where I leave it. And then hopefully, it's in a better place.
Oftentimes, it's not. That's the history, in fact.

And then my progeny pick it up and they keep it going. I am descended from people who, in their lifetime, fought with all their might for the destruction of chattel slavery in this country.

And they never saw it. They never saw it.
In my personal belief system, they died in defeat and in darkness.

And so

I guess the privilege that I draw out of this, the honor that I draw out of this, is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.

The fact of the matter is, as horrifying as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, And as horrifying as the feeling is, this moment that we are in, you know, 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, right? Which is the norm too.

You would be hard pressed to have a conversation with a Black person in this country that 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. They got into some sort of dispute with a white man, and 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. Do we minimize it? Absolutely not.

But a life free of it is not a thing that's really in reach in my time.

Sometimes I think that having a historical scope that wide can make the present too deterministic.

So to me, I look at the last, you know, eight, 12 years.

And

what I see having happened

is

we, the coalition I am in, the things I believe in,

lost ground.

And people determinedly work to make that so.

Charlotte Kirk worked to make that so successfully, right?

I think that when he began going to college campuses and putting out a sign at a table, what he was eventually going to build was not obvious, right? I think he worked.

I think he was a successful political actor.

And

I think that from when in 2016 we lost to Donald Trump the first time, very narrowly, won the popular vote, right?

And then in 2020, we almost lost to him and began seeing we were losing a bunch of voters we thought we were fighting for, right? Losing more working class voters, losing non-white voters, right?

Something was changing, but we won, so okay.

And then in 2024, we really got

our asses handed to us. And we let a much more dangerous form of politics fully erupt.

And I think that reflects strategic decisions they made.

I think it reflects decisions we made.

So I think for me, it's not enough to say we lost. their backlashes, sometimes you lose.

I think it requires a very fundamental rethinking, like a a disciplined strategic rethinking of what have we been doing? Why have we, why are people preferring this to us?

And I do think that is like, it opens up into something more that I think that there is a practice of politics here that in a narrow sense, I was talking about Kirk, but in a broad sense reflects to something that I thought was going to be an argument stretching across the show for like a year, right?

I think more of it came out in this than I had intended, probably.

But I think in many ways we've stopped doing politics. We've written a lot of people off.

And in writing them off, we are losing and we are unable to protect ourselves, unable to protect them, just unable to make good change in the world.

Can you say more about that writing them off, please?

Why don't we start it here if we want to talk about writing them off?

I've been obsessing recently for a piece I've been writing about the Hillary Clinton deplorables comment, and I want to play it.

You know, to just be grossly generalistic,

you could put put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.

Right?

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.

And unfortunately, there are

people like that.

And he has lifted them up.

He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people. Now have 11 million.
He tweets and retweets.

They're offensive, hateful,

mean-spirited, rhetoric.

Now, some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. What do you think when you hear that? She probably shouldn't have said it.
But you think it's true?

I mean, it's probably not how I would say it, but, you know, I mean, there are things that I would say,

you know, I probably would say what I said earlier, you know, in the interview about the force of, and I've been, I mean, as I've been saying, this probably since as long as we've been talking,

you know, but I'm not right. I just want to be clear about something.

I shouldn't be running for president of the United States. You know what I mean?

And my expectations for the rhetoric of writers, intellectuals, journalists, et cetera, is very, very different than what the expectation should be for people who hold, who, you know, expect to hold office.

Yeah. So this I agree with, right? I think that there are different different jobs in all this.

But when I say we began writing people off,

I think that something that happened, and I think something I saw in this debate, but kind of like underneath it,

was that the work of politics of bridging over a lot of profound, fundamental moral disagreements, I think became somewhat demeaned, diminished.

It began to seem like in many cases a betrayal to people. The tent shrunk.
The people I feel more comfortable with wielding power shrunk.

And I think what Clinton was saying there came from somewhere. It came from, you know, the sort of culture that had emerged.
It got worse over time.

And then I think it really contributed to us losing.

And meanwhile, this is why when I say, like, in that initial piece, there was something that I respected in what Kirk was doing, like going in, having debates, using them opportunistically.

A lot of people throw them back at me that, oh, he wasn't debating to find 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.

Would you, but would you, 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,

you know what I mean, church perish. It hears such and such owns churches.
I would like to see

people on our side. Yeah.
Go to evangelical churches, go to places where that feel unfriendly, have conversations. And look, I put things up on YouTube.

They're fairly successful, not the best of the business. And I don't use, you know, capital letters destroys in them.

I think you can do it more aligned to hopefully our value structure, our political approach, our political aesthetic, at least the one that I believe in. I shouldn't overuse the term our here.

But we weren't doing that either. I don't know why we weren't.

I, for instance, I have, I don't know if it's on YouTube anymore, but I received an invitation, for instance, I think about when I went up to West Point and I had to go up there and talk about Between the World and Me.

I had to challenge them very, very directly about what it meant to have at that time Confederate memorials up there.

and to, you know, talk about, you know, a Confederate, I can't remember, you know, what the model is exactly, but basically it's an argument against lying and what it meant, you know, to have that there and have those grand historical lies.

I mean, we had a great, a really, really great interaction. I don't know that, you know, every, I know everybody didn't agree with me.

It would never occur to me, and I think it actually insults the dialogue to take that and say Tanahasi owns West Point cadets. Tanahasi owns that.
Do you really not?

You don't recognize the kind of culture I'm talking about here. Like, really?

You think that's true? No, I'm sorry. Say more.
No, I mean, what do you mean? I think there really was a move towards the sort of approach Clinton is offering here. I think we began to pull back.

I really do. But maybe if you define the

witnesses,

because I actually think this is a very hard thing about talking about political parties because they're diffuse.

Right. It's a lot of people doing a lot of things all at once.
But 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 myself a Twitter trending topic. To Elizabeth Warren for going on Bill Maher's show, Bill Maher's 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 than about engaging with them again, even if opportunistically.

And when I go back to something I was saying to you a minute ago, I am in a process right now of thinking, we failed, right? 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, that they have a place with us?

And my experience going around the country, talking to people, I've been on a lot of, you know, right of center podcasts lately, is that, you know, rightly or wrongly, like what they took and something that really empowered Trump in the last election was a sense that they didn't.

And 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. So I think two things.
I think about

how much you argued that like Biden shouldn't run again.

What if he doesn't earlier and you have a Democrat who wins the presidency? You know, I get other big explainers that I can see for it. You know what I mean?

That don't feel so diffuse. You know, the other thing is, and I know you don't want to talk historically, but when you say fatalism, like I take that to mean that, what's the point of fighting?

But I think that misapprehends the philosophy here. It's not that you know what's going to happen.

It's not that you know Donald Trump is going to, it's that you don't underestimate what you are up against. You know, it's actually kind of the kind of the opposite.

You, you yourself wrote these articles about how high the level of racial resentment was, that this country or some segment of it was so,

as the term was used at the time, racially resentful. I call it racist, but racist, that it flooded down to Barack Obama's dog, Bo.

That's not a small amount of power. Like that's not a, you know, a small force.

And so, you know, just really quickly getting back to Charlie Kirk, like, I would watch those clips of him saying those things, man.

And I would see how people would cheer and get charged by it. Like they were excited.
People get activated by hate. It's a very, very, very strong force.

And so I don't think it requires you to feel that you will eventually lose.

On the contrary, I think it requires you to feel that even if you do lose, you have this kind of steadfastness to keep going.

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One thing that

I am seeing happen, and I think I really saw it,

sometimes it's more in Trump's first term, but I see it now too,

which is

the worse from your perspective, my perspective, the other side gets,

the more people want their reaction to sort of be and their strategy to be emotionally consonant with how they're feeling about it.

Because these people are so bad, there can be no quarter.

I had somebody we both know,

I'll say

an eminent academic of one form or another,

email me after these pieces and just say to me, like, we are not on the same side anymore. What I was doing was too far, right? Like, we are just not on the same side, if I could say these things.

I have a feeling right now that we are closer to genuine national rupture, certainly we've been in my lifetime.

The idea that this experiment, that America could topple into something else, into something much worse, into some kind of new extended regime, feels very real to me. Right.

I remember when I was on the Why We're Polarized Book Tour, the end of that. I did use you for it.
You did, yeah.

The end of that book is this recitation of what happened in the 1960s, the political assassinations, the violence in the streets, like what the state was doing, what was happening.

But on the book tour, what I would say is my nightmare scenario is that level of violence and fracture with these kinds of parties, where politics is not a, for all of its flaws, a calming force because like the views are diffuse across the two parties, but an accelerant.

And I think we're much more now in the world I was fearing. Okay, so that's, I think it should make you think, okay, what is some kind of de-escalation before you get to rupture look like?

But the other is that there are a lot of people who live in places we used to win not that long ago. So I've been thinking about Obamacare.

When Obamacare passes, there are Democratic senators in Arkansas, in Louisiana, in West Virginia, in Missouri, in Indiana, in North Carolina. in South Dakota, in North Dakota.

And I've been thinking that I think for a lot of us, to twist the line about capitalism, it has become easier to imagine the end of the country than winning a Senate seat in Missouri or Arkansas.

And I think that's a problem.

Yeah. So I think a couple of things about that.
First of all, I just want to bring in the historical perspective not that long ago. I can remember when Obama won.

And I believe you would remember this too. And there were all of these pieces about the end of conservatism and the end of the Republican Party.

You don't know how it's going to go. Nobody, nobody, nobody really, it doesn't mean you shouldn't think about how it's going to go.

I'm not saying you shouldn't, but you really, no one really, really, I mean, again, to. And in 05, there were all these pieces about the end of the Democrats.
Yes, it was.

Democrats had lost touch with the heartlands. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right. They were never going to get it back.
That's right. That's right.

And so I think it's always like important to keep that in the background.

Look, I have, just in terms of bridging gaps and everything,

I have a basic level of respect that I accord to everybody. You know what I mean?

I want to say what I have to say. I don't want to shrink back from it, you know what I mean? But I do think, on a basic level,

there's a respect that has to be had for people that I disagree with, right?

At the same time,

I recognize that part of my audience, and I would say an important part of my audience, is people who have never enjoyed that respect.

You know what I mean? People who, in fact, are subjects of the kind of hate that Charlie Kirk was harvesting. And

I

can't ever,

A, contribute to making them feel like they've been abandoned.

And B, I can't ever stand by and watch somebody do that.

And in the name of

unity or whatever, act like that, that's not happening because there are real consequences. And so it's like,

when I read his words towards trans people, Jesus.

When When I read, you know what I mean, the language towards Haitians specifically, which was very, very, Haitians will become your masters if you don't elect truck.

I mean, this is very, very familiar to me. You know, it's this idea of Haitians coming into the country or immigrants raping your daughters.
I mean, this was really, really, really

dark stuff. It's at the core of this country.
And so

I feel like.

For Haitian immigrants that are in, you know, Ohio who are living under the weight of this, for trans kids who, you know what I mean, are dealing with, you know, being, I don't even want to use the term bullied, beaten up, attacked, threatened.

You know what I mean? It's very, very important

to me,

given the post I have to say, I see you, but also this dude was wrong. And I'm all for unifying.
I'm all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor's humanity. I just can't.

I think this, the thing we go to there, right? Not at the expense of my neighbor's humanity.

Because I've gotten a lot of that in email, right? Like, how am I supposed to talk to these people? How am I supposed to deal with these people who are denying my humanity?

I'm not against talking to them about it. I'll talk to you very clearly.

I have no problem with that.

I guess

the place where I'm not even 100% sure if we disagree, if you just sort of see your role differently, right?

I think that in losing as badly as we have,

we have imperiled trans people terribly.

Yes. Politics is for power.
Joe Biden did that. Politics is for power.

And so

I think that the

question I am just genuinely struggling with isn't how to have like a great kumbaya moment.

But I think it is taking seriously that something we're doing is not working. I mean, I had Sarah McBride, who's the first trans member of Congress on the show.

And, you know, she was talking, we were talking about every single survey you can offer on like trans rights has gone in the wrong direction in the past couple of years, right?

We've just begun to lose that argument terribly. And that has put people in real danger.
So I take your point when you say, look, I want people to feel seen in my writing.

And I want people to feel seen in my writing and my podcasting.

But the place I'm trying to push towards is I think that there is a

diminishment of the political coalition building that we now need to do because we have come to the view that a pretty wide variety of people are in some ways kind of deplorables.

I think it's weakened to be in the last couple of years. I would never use that language.
Jesus Christ. But like, that's not so.

But I think about that, Hillary Clinton, that's what, like, I would never say it like that. That's great.
I think it's good that you wouldn't say it like that, but I still, and I'm not saying that.

I don't even think that, by the way. Like, I don't, like, I don't even focus on people.

Look, I am at war with certain ideologies and ideas, and I want them expunged I want to turn them into phrenology that's what I want but I don't want the people you know what I mean out

so in a way I'm not sure I mean in a way I think we're saying something not too dissimilar here I guess the place where I felt a lot of pushback and maybe this was not your pushback right

was

you know the first piece I can just sort of Like, I accept that there's a disagreement on like what to do in the 24 hours after a death.

Like you feel like I was whitewashing the guy and I felt like I was sort of.

Yeah, I know you do. I know you do.
It's very upsetting. I know you do.

The second piece I did, which I think you saw, was more about this question of

what are we going to do

living here in sort of

two types of disagreement. One, with a right where Charlie Cook has become sort of the center of it, right? He's not unusual for the MAGA coalition.

He's a sort of uniting force within it and the kind of things he believed and the way he did his politics.

And then two,

what are we going to do? Like, how are we going to be here with people who are like halfway there, right? What does it mean to be in this political community together?

What do you think about that question? About how to live together. Yeah.
Well, first of all, I think it's a, it's a truth. You know what I mean? I think it's a, you know, like it's a foregone.

Like we are. We are.
I really, really believe that. You know, I'm not renouncing my American citizenship.
They're not renouncing their American citizenship.

So this then, you know, as far as I'm concerned, is a contest of ideas and narratives. 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 probably the animating notion. of my politics.

And that is that all humanity is equal and is worthy of that, you know?

And I actually think all of the sort of political and policy positions are, you know, that I probably find myself in sympathy with are attempting to affect that, you know, in the real world.

And so, and again, I'm putting aside your piece, but I'm just thinking about the moment we're in. When I hear or see people

who are honored and commemorated

in such a way so that they almost become a national religious figure, and then I see their content,

And I see that their content is actively destructive to humanity. I have to draw a line there.
Like, I just, I think like,

for me, like the bigger question is, where are the lines? You know what I mean? And I think there's no problem with saying, listen, you can't hurl epitaphs at people. You're out if you do that.

I'm sorry. Look, you want to have a debate about whether we should have affirmative action, you know, in colleges? I'm here for it.
You want to have a debate.

What does it mean to be on the other side of the line? I'm sorry, what do you mean? What is it? So once somebody's on the other side of the line, what does that mean for you?

For instance, once you think it's okay for you to be able to do that. No, no, no, no.
I'm trying to make this conversation. No, I am too.
Yes.

Once you, for whatever, whatever the definition of the line is,

what does it mean for you for somebody to be on the other side of it? Right. Not somebody who just died.
Right. But somebody still living.
Right. If you think it is okay

to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and I is probably not possible. And so what do you do with the fact that so many people think that is okay?

I think what you try to do is, again, again, this is the difference, right? Like,

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.

Although, I think most people know that you shouldn't say what he said. Like, that shit is rude.
It's just rude to talk to people like that. And I think most people know that.

So, as I'm thinking my way through the question, I actually think that's not a, you know, a

hard line to draw. You know, I think not calling people out of their name, I think 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.

But so I want to hold on this for a minute because I do think this is like a very likely. Yeah, I understand it's different than policy.
That's different than policy. I think that one

wondrous reality is the president of the United States is a person

who in his

compartment as a human being on the public stage,

I would have said

in 08, in 2012,

in 2016,

should be on the other side of the line. Yeah.

I think he's a person who does not act with any sense of

public or even personal decency. Right.

And

then he won in 16,

lost sort of narrowly in 20, and then won in 2024. And I think the thing that that has led to for me is recognizing that I don't get to draw the line.

Now, it doesn't mean I don't have one in my own heart,

but I think that is the thing that I am struggling with.

Not only is he clearly for most people, or a lot of people, plurality of the voters in the last election, not somehow way over the line, but like

that means it's a lot of people who are willing to accept things that I would have, I thought we would have found unacceptable.

Like I really, if you had told me, like I would have thought that the way he acts in public is unacceptable and it's not. And so

I think for me, and this goes back to maybe the culture that you feel didn't exist, but I feel did.

that there was a view that we could sort of work with politics with drawing these lines, that there are people going to be inside them and outside them, and we could work that way.

And I think that I am like working with the question of what happens if you don't believe that, if you don't control the line. What I see is any line that existed at all collapsing.

So I'm watching like Holocaust revisionism on like the biggest right-wing podcasts.

Right.

I'm watching Tucker Carlson like turn into, you know, what I would describe as a white nationalist and become an absolute dominant force on the right, like bigger than he ever was in his, you know, Smarmy libertarian phase.

And this stuff is real appeal, like, as you said, right? That's not a surprise on some level. It's just something you have to deal with.
And so

that's where this question of the line drawing, like I have lines of what I think should and should not be acceptable,

but those lines clearly have no relationship.

to my country, the politics. And I think I've been asking the question without really having an answer.

i want to be honest about this of well what follows from that i think you do have a line i think i'm sure i do i think there are things for instance that i could say that would make you say it's no point in tana as he coming up on and being on this podcast and likewise there are things you could say obviously that obviously it's no point in me talking to as well yeah i'm saying what happens if 35 of the country 40 of the country the dominant political force in the country is inside that does that change anything or no like the line just holds no i mean welcome to black america That's our history.

The line we have drawn in general has not been majoritarian politics, unfortunately. That's just been what it is, you know?

And at the times that it's been majoritarian politics, people have done things and, you know, fiddled with government or done, you know, extremely violent things to make it not so.

How do you deal in that, in that answer? Like, how do you deal with Trump really substantially increasing? his share of the black vote.

Actually, I think where he is is about where actually Republicans tended to be before Barack Obama. So I'm a little less.

I mean, there's a conservative portion of our community that's always voted Republican.

And I think, you know, obviously, I think sexism is a very, very real force.

You know, I don't think it's completely explanatory, but the idea that there is, say, 20% of black men who are fundamentally conservative, that doesn't really surprise me too much.

But I guess let's take, because I think this is a hard case. I think from your perspective and from my perspective, we probably don't believe hugely different things.

A huge amount of the country, a majority of the country believes things about trans people, about what policy should be towards trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people that like, we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong.

Right.

And what politically, not in a column or something, but politically should our relationship with those people be? Do we win them over? Do we compromise with them?

Like this feels like a very salient question. The Republican Party is going to make sure this is a relentlessly salient question right

so i agree with you where does

the approach leave us right where where do we go on that yeah no i think that's a great question look i think a couple things i think

again look my my tradition is the only thing i have a reference point for so i'm sorry to keep going back to this but

When I look at the times that we have lost, if I think specifically about the black tradition, for instance, it's hard for me to say politically they did something wrong. You know what I mean?

Like Reconstruction Falls. What was the thing that should have been done? On the contrary, I see, you know, a kind of courage that I wish we had today in a lot of people.
You know what I mean?

I see people willing to die and take bullets all the time. You know what I mean? What more could Ida B.
Wells have done? you know, to get the anti-lynching bill passed.

I mean, here is somebody that, you know, was banished from Tennessee on threat of being killed after she saw her friends, you know, murdered and lynched.

And one of the things I will say is when I look back at that long tradition, and I look back in 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's 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, the appearance.

All of that's true.

But if we don't have World War II and

the planet does not get a view of how horrific it can be when you decide you're going to eliminate people based on their traits, civil rights movement happened. I don't know.
I don't know.

I think windows open and close. And so I think some of this is up to the decisions that politicians make.
I think some of it is also up to what is happening in the broader mass culture at the time.

I think all this kind of works together. I'm not against, you know, this kind of strategizing.
I think that that has to happen.

But I think you also have to recognize like how broad the world is when you say politics.

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I think there has been a period, particularly on the left, in which the

Civil War, pre-it, post-it, the writings of that time, the people of that time, have become a sort of rooting period, a place where we sort of go back and look and think about who are we?

What was revealed about us? I'm taking nothing away from that.

But that's obviously a period where politics ultimately fails. I actually think, and I've thought about this a lot in reaction I've read in the last couple of weeks.

I've thought a lot about how many people believe we are already in a cold civil war, that we are in a time that we are dealing with divisions and questions. I see it on the right, for sure.

I hear it on the left. I have a lot of email that's like, we need a national divorce.
How that's going to be effectuated, never exactly clear.

Do people you respect say that to you? Well, yes, actually, I will say that, but I'm not going to, people say things to me that are off the record and I shouldn't say it. But

you don't believe that, though. I think this is really important.
I was curious what you would say to this question.

You don't believe we are at a point where the next 10, 20, 30 years can't be shaped by decisions we would understand is within normal politics, within elections and legislation and organizing and so on.

No.

Good. I think that's great.
I mean, look, I mean, that could happen. Yeah.
That could happen. But I guess the broader thing I am thinking about is

how much does this era stand out in the long sweep of American history? Yeah. It's bad.
Well, so this is actually, but I don't, I wouldn't, it wouldn't make my list for the worst.

No, I agree with you. I agree with you.
I'm where you are on this, to just be super clear. Okay.

But I actually think one reason then the amount we focus on the Civil War period is tricky is because that's a period when it didn't work like that, right?

You actually had to go over the cliff of that and have the war. I've been thinking a lot about, because I've been reading a lot about McCarthyism.
So I've been thinking about that whole period.

And

you just sort of brought up the World War II as sort of a generator of the politics that allows us to have the great society, the civil rights sect, etc. I think another way of

sort of glossing that is you have the rise of Red Scare politics, which predate McCarthy.

You have McCarthy, who, Joseph McCarthy, who is just for a period an unbelievably dominant force. It's insane.
Everybody who challenges him loses. That's right.
He becomes a complete kingmaker.

He's eventually boxed out and beaten by Dwight Eisenhower, sort of center-right. you know, very, very anti-communist politician, but who can sort of take the center from McCarthy.

But then it's like, what happens next? Nixon, who is the genteel red baiter to McCarthy's non-genteel red baiter, runs in the next election. He's beaten by JFK, who's a very center-left,

very anti-communist, sort of runs to Nixon's right on communism.

And he does it with Lyndon Johnson, you know, on the bottom of the ticket, sort of representing Southern politics in the Democratic Party.

It's a very, very, in a way, checkered series of moves that are accepting huge amounts of McCarthyism at that time.

And yet it does sort of lead to political power that is then wielded in a very, very different way within fairly short order.

I take from this, I've been thinking about this because I think we're sort of in a new McCarthyism,

some lessons on how politics can work and like the give and the take of it. We've been sort of brought up the Civil War a bunch, but what do you take from this period?

I take something that we've kind of been circling for this entire conversation, which is that the role of politicians and the role of writers, intellectuals, etc. is very, very different.

Politicians do things that I wouldn't do. I don't, for instance, I don't hold JFK or RFK up, you know what I mean, as the people out.

Right.

I'm not a fan of JFK Kavlot revisionism. But you know, I guess not a very good president.
That's like a separate thing from whether, you know what I mean,

why politics happens the way they do.

Let me give you an instance that often also comes up.

That's not the Civil War, and that's the New Deal, right?

I think there is a pretty strong argument that the New Deal quite did, I mean, not a strong argument, but it's pretty clear that the New Deal did quite a bit to create the social safety net, expand, create an American middle class, right?

That's true. Did FDR want to, in his heart, exclude black folks in the way that they were excluded from it? No.

That was the price of getting the thing done. I understand that as politics, but were I there in that time, it would be incumbent on me to yell at FDR to not do that.

And I think, I just think that's really, really, really, really important. We don't all have the same role.

You know, when I wrote case for reparations, it was not my expectation, nor did I even think it would be politically intelligent for like Barack Obama to go up and yell, I'm for reparations.

You know what I mean? But that's different than

my role.

I guess the substructure substructure of a bunch of what I am saying, which may or may not be an argument with you, it's just as I, when, when I texted you to come on, I was like, I've been thinking about what the underlying arguments are here.

So you're kind of getting this spilling out of my brain.

I think that there is a work of politics that for a bunch of different reasons has become demeaned.

And I think, and this does not speak well of the people, so to speak, in power doing it, but I think that they are not doing it well.

I think the culture around them, I think politicians are not always leaders. I think they're often followers.

And

I think that the idea that that kind of political coalition building, building across these gigantic differences, building across public opinion, both not just as you wish it existed, but as it exists, has become, you know, seen and

like treated as often betrayal, cowardice, moral fallibility. It's not, I think it's fine to say people got different roles.
And in fact, it's good for intellectuals to criticize the politicians.

But my view is that the political practice became too weak. I don't think that was true for Obama.
I went back preparing to talk to you and I read your piece, My President Was Black.

It's a beautiful piece. Thank you.
And it's very much in this. tension, right?

Where you say quite a bit, like, it would have been a bad idea for Barack Barack Obama to say the things I am saying here,

to do the things in some ways I wish he had done. That politics wouldn't have worked.
There would have been no Obama presidency and his presidency would not have been successful.

And

I think I've been thinking about that line in my own work and just in the political culture as I see it, that line between

the sort of intellectual analytical work

and the actual like work of politics, the how do we live here with each other work, right? Which I think is actually honorable work. And I think is

feels right now to me

like morally urgent and necessary.

And not just over disagreement, just the whole thing being done in a strategic and disciplined sense.

I think one of the things I've thought about is the need to actually raise the status of just like

old-fashioned politics.

And I think I've been surprised to find myself feeling that way. But I think one way the second Trump term has changed me

is

I don't, and maybe you always believe this, right? You know, I'm not putting this on you.

I think what got built for all of its flaws in the back half of the 20th century was much more fragile than I'd understood. Not just like the legislation or any of that,

but the actual sense of like what you could and could not do, what we would and would not accept.

And I've just like like the sense that we can just tumble all the way back has become much more real to me.

And so the work that people did to begin to build those guardrails and like how hard that actually was,

you know, and the disappoint we eventually felt, I feel like we began to take something actually quite beautiful for granted or only see what wasn't there as opposed to what was.

And it's forced a little bit of, for me,

like, how did they do it? How did they get out of the last one of these? You know, I'll just say,

and I think I'm speaking for a broader community here.

We are not happy, but we are not surprised, man. And again, the reason why we go back to Reconstruction and the Civil War

is

because it is before the 1960s, the only glimpse at the possibility of a real democracy in this country. And it happened.
And in some places, it was actually quite, quite successful.

You know, you have people who, you know, had been enslaved, who are written off as illiterate fools, who, you know what I mean, serving in legislatures, Congress, and actually, you know, with the standard of the time, actually, it's such a hopeful, incredible, incredible story.

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

And it was violently destroyed. You know, once you see that and once you have that in your heritage,

once you, you know what I mean, understand that. Once you understand that Martin Luther King could be standing up telling people, telling his own people, we do not embrace violence at all.

It is morally repugnant. We embrace love.

And that that could get you shot.

Not burn it down. Love can get you shot.

You know, you just have a different view of your country.

I emphasize this over and over again. It is not a fatalistic view.
It is not, we, you know, it is written in stone that we will ultimately lose, but you understand that losing is a possibility.

But so then what does that, there's a Buddhist meditation I like.

This is a weird, weird place to go, but it goes like this.

I'm of the nature to grow sick.

I'm of the nature to grow old.

I'm of the nature to lose the people I love. I'm of the nature to die.
How then shall I live?

And

yeah, and I do it because sometimes you need the reminder.

What I hear you saying in a way is we are of the nature too. Yeah.

And I think the place I'm trying to push is then, how then shall we live? Because

in this distinction you're making between like you would have been there correctly yelling at FDR. And I'm not like asking you, but like me, right? Like my work, my role.

Can you answer that? Can you say what you, I think it's a good point. Like, would you define for me how you see like what your role is?

I don't know what my role is anymore. i'll be totally honest with you man i feel very conflicted about that question

the role i want to have

is a person

curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime

and

the role i somehow have

is sometimes that

but

i am in the business i'm a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on.

And I'm in the business of political persuasion.

And I feel like me and the people who believe what I believe,

not narrowly speaking,

but, you know, like the whole broad coalition

have failed in a really consequential way.

And I think it is. It's like you failed in your work.

I think there are places I failed. I mean, I think there are things I got right to.
Like, I think we shouldn't have run Joe Biden again. I think I was right about that.

I think I've gotten a lot right, but I think I've gotten definitely things wrong. But I think we are here now, right? That's what I would really say.

And

it is forcing me to rethink things I would prefer not to rethink. I will give you an example because people are mad at me on this one right now.
Please.

I said in a podcast with my colleague, Russ Dow, that he was pushing me on left radicalism. I was saying, I don't care about left-wing radicalism.
I don't don't think it's some great threat.

I don't think it's a huge political problem. I worry about left-wing pessimism, fatalism, that we are losing and don't want to change anything.

And I said that the question for me is, how do we win Senate seats in places like Kansas and Missouri and Ohio?

I said, I would like to see us doing things like in red states, and here I meant redder than those, you know, running pro-life candidates. People got real upset about that, and I get why.

But in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act passed, there were 40 House Democrats who are pro-life at some level. You had to do this whole negotiation with this guy, Bart Stupak.
Yeah, I remember. Yeah.

And on the bright side, you don't have to have those negotiations now. And on the downside, you can't pass the Affordable Care Act.
And the point is not that issue, right?

That one issue, you know, although things like the example, say, Susan Collins, where she's in theory pro-choice, but she votes for Mitch McConnell and John Doon as leader.

Like that's how you you build power on some level, right? If you have those, you know, Joe Manchin, I wish he were still a senator from West Virginia as much as I have deep disagreements with him.

I think that

I am a person, I think you are a person, whether you admit it or not, who is one of the people with a voice in shaping what our political culture is.

And I believe at some level that political strategy is downstream from political culture.

I think it means exploring things that are uncomfortable and being pretty disciplined in a way, maybe I haven't been about separating the question

of what I believe from what I believe will win power. Because I currently think that the cost of losing power

is

horrifying and dangerous, and we can't keep doing it. So that's Yeah, so can we state with that exactly?

Because, you know, the immediate thing, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but the immediate thing that springs to mind for me in that question is not who you're abandoning, but how do you square the fact that in fact,

reproductive rights has proven to be pretty popular in red states? And I'm thinking about referendums that have been passed such that they've had to, you know, change the rules.

Like, how do you, how do you separate them? When I, again, I sort of said this in Glacier. Like there are people who didn't vote for Kamala, but give me my reproductive rights.
I think that

I was using first

pro-life as an illustrative example.

But there are many red districts in this country and there are states that we do not even think about competing in anymore, right? I'm not talking about Ohio here.

I think you have to try things.

By the way, not only

moderation kind of things, you could try going much harder on economic populism, which some people are trying. I think you might need to combine those two strategies, right?

Which is sort of the Dan Osborne in Nebraska approach.

I think even before the question of what your policies are, and I believe this this very deeply, there's a question of whether or not people feel like you respect them and like them, even if they disagree with you.

Before, I think people will give you power. They don't even ask, do they like you? They ask whether you like them.
And I think a lot of the country feels we don't like them.

Not I don't believe that. I know that.
I've seen the focus groups. I've seen the survey data.
I've talked to the people who work on this.

Changing that is going to require making moves that somehow send a loud enough signal that people begin to think we have changed it at some level. Sherrod Brown should be able to win in Ohio.
Yes.

The reason he cannot win in Ohio is the Democratic Party itself is a millstone around his neck that drags him down.

So what do you do about it? I don't, I'm not here to tell you I got the answer. Yeah.
What I would feel much better about is I felt there was like a strategic discipline about finding it.

So I just, just,

if you will take this very gentle push back,

please.

I think

you're here for it.

I do think like what immediately strikes me is if you take, I know you would just, you know, it's not, you know, the example necessarily that you would hold out about reproductive rights, but I think the problem with musing about that is

abandoning it is a very real possibility for people who don't have the option necessarily to fly to another state or do X, Y, and Z. So I suspect when they hear somebody of your status,

Even if it's not the example you mean, putting it out in the air,

like they feel, and it's not just that you're putting it out in the air, it's putting it out in the air. And actually, I don't necessarily even mean that one.

No, like if you're going to say that, I think you really got to

think you got to, you got to put the, you got to put the data behind it. I think that's really, really important.
I will say, and I think this is actually the nub of it, right?

Like, I'm glad we're sort of here.

I am saying the thing it sounds like I am saying to be very, very clear. Right.
I think in a place like Nebraska, you should try to run some pro-life Democrats.

I wish people, instead of saying that an expressive or strategic question in politics, was betraying or abandoning the people we wish to protect, I wish what we said was we lost power in a way that allowed Donald Trump to drive the Supreme Court to a 6-3 Republican majority.

And that majority overturned Roe v. Wade.

It overturned Roe v. Wade and actually abandoned all these people.

Actually fucked them over, right?

It is

part of i think

when i say that like the work of politics has become diminished it is part of how that happened that talking about this creates this sort of counter argument well even to discuss it is to abandon in 08 as you and i both know barack obama ran as a public opponent of gay marriage right He ran opposed to it at a time when not only, I won't speak for you, was I not opposed to it, but most of us did not, yeah, most of us did not think he was opposed to it.

Like at his heart, we did not think he was opposed to it.

But he was playing politics. That playing of politics allowed him to name Supreme Court justices, and that led to the decision that created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

And I am saying that that kind of playing politics

is needed.

I can give you an example from the other side, by the way, too. Yeah, go for it.
Brother, if you know what my position was during the election about Palestine, about Gaza, Kamala Harris

was running to be the first black woman to be president of the United States. You cannot imagine how animated black folks were about that.

And some would argue the base of the Democratic Party, black women. You know what I mean? We're going to see this thing.
She was not taking a position that I thought was particularly moral.

I had to talk in front of black audiences about that.

You know what what I mean? And I had to do the other thing, which was go before Arab American audiences here, Palestinian American audiences here, and say, look, I'm with you.

You can be mad at me. You probably will be mad at me.
I get it. But for me, politics is the, you know, the lesser of two evils.
We have been fighting this battle for a long time.

We have never had the luxury of eglecting people that represented the best of us. And this is why I'm voting for her.
This is a really, really serious thing.

And when you hear these Palestinians, Palestinian Americans, and when you hear these Muslim Americans, and when you hear these Arab Americans upset about this, you know, you can't just yell at them.

You have to take them seriously. These were hard, very, very difficult conversations.
But when I made those conversations, look, man, I had to be buttoned up about it. I just think

you take very, very seriously the need to convince people outside of the tent right now, right? About like, we have to convince them to come in.

I guess what I want from you

is I want you to take as seriously people who are in the tent and who are vulnerable and afraid.

And if you have to convince them of something that's extremely, extremely uncomfortable or tell them that you're taking a position that's extremely uncomfortable, I just think you owe them a little more.

That's all I'm saying. Yeah, man, that's fine.
I'll take it. But I want to put this on you for a minute, right? You keep sort of putting it back on me.
Yeah, I'm open. Go ahead.
I won't.

You keep putting it back on me here on the Taunasi Coach Show.

You are one of the most influential public intellectuals in the country. I know you don't like to think of politics as a thing you do, but it is a thing you do.

What then should we do? As bad as you know this can get, and given that you are not a hopeless person

or who, you know, doesn't think you should just collapse into fatalism, what do you think should happen now?

I think that really depends on what your role is. I don't have a great overarching theory for what everybody needs to do because I think we all have different positions.

You know, I know what my role is. And I do see myself as part of politics, by the way.
Yeah. You know, and I think that's a very, very important way of answering the question.

I mean, I'm not going to be the person that yells at you because, you know, you went on a bunch of right-wing podcasts.

You know, I've said many times in the course of this interview, I see myself as a writer. I see myself as a journalist.
I see

myself as someone for whom it's very, very important to state the truth plainly and to clarify things as best I can. I'm not a strategist for the party.

And I've tried to, as you raised in that Barack Obama piece, I've tried to respect the difference. I guess I'm not pushing you to be a political strategist, right?

I think that for me, something you see me doing right here, something I think people are reacting to me doing is saying that something about knowing that this much of the country is, you know, on the wrong side of what my line would have been.

Right.

Knowing that what Kirk was doing, what people like him were doing, was working, that that imposes a set of questions upon us that need to be answered. Right.

The thing I'm struggling with in this conversation and even in that question is the fact that there are things that you yourself have actually advocated for that had they been done, we would be having a very different conversation.

I think I want it to not be close. You said what? I want it to not be close.
Oh, you want, oh, see, I mean, you will call this my fatalism, but I am not surprised. I think it's going to be closed.

I think it'll be closed for a very, very long time. I would like for it to be less closed too.
But do you think that's within our power or not really?

Listen, I have a friend, and I'm not going to out him. He's a mutual friend of ours, who always says, this is the best set of white folks we have ever had in the entire history of Black America.

This is the most woke. This is the least racist.
This is the most aware group that we have had. You know what I mean? Like, for us.

And for those of us who ground ourselves in

a larger tradition, this is not close.

Like, this is a, you know, remarkable, remarkable time, you know, in terms of our freedom, you know, as writers and journalists to speak to people in terms of the amount of people who are

empowered and have some amount of privilege and could just look away and are not looking away, you know,

it's not a great time politically. You understand what I'm saying? But it's just,

it's not the worst either. No, it's not.
It's not the worst, you know? All right, then, I think always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

So the first book is a book called The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer, which is a joint biography of Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles, and how incredibly one was head of the State Department, the other was head of the CIA, and how they worked to overthrow multiple countries during Eisenhower's time.

It's just an incredible, mind-boggling book, and it's helping me answer some questions about the role of America in the broader world.

The second one is an oldie but goodie, which I've reached for before I wrote my piece, Is Race and Reunion by David Blight, which I think is just essential because it shows how a country forgets and forgets in service of a politic that I would say is problematic.

The third one is our mutual friend Chris Hayes' book, Sirens Call, which I think, in fact, actually tells us a lot about the conversation that we're having today, you know, and the influence of social media screens and distraction.

Honesty Coach, man, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Ezra. I appreciate it too.

This episode of the Esther Clown Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker.
Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Zahota.

Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Jack McCordick, Marina King, Kristen Lin, and Jan Koepel.

Original music by Amin Sahuta and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Busta.
The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

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