Eventually You're Going to Have to Stand for Something

Each day the king would emerge from his castle with his favorite princes and his most loyal soldiers and go into the city to kidnap a dozen of the citizens, some for his harem, others to be sold to far lands. Any who opposed this practice were put to the sword.

The people, seeing that the king would not be swayed from this vile abuse, sent envoys to the princes and court advisors to petition for relief. Indeed, the princes and advisors had long been in debate about the king's practices, with a loyal faction contending that a king is chosen by the almighty and it is a sin worthy of banishment or death to question him, while others believed that the king's abuses were excessive and ought to be moderated.

The moderate princes and advisors agreed to meet with the envoys. They stroked their beards and told the people's spokesman that it was their belief that no respectable citizen should be robbed or imprisoned, tortured or killed. They conveyed to the people their support for any peaceful and respectable opposition to the king, but reminded them to take care of their passions, for kings and princes and advisors and citizens alike all must live in peace with one another.

So the people began to speak out against the king, and the king would respond. Some he would imprison, others he would torture, others he would kill. And a great despair grew in the hearts of some people, while in the hearts of others, hatred blossomed.

One day the king's party was ambushed, and the king barely escaped, while two of his soldiers and one of his favorite princes lost their lives. Anticipating reprisal, the restless people gathered in a mob outside the castle walls. The moderate princes and advisors became frightened to see that their kingdom had at last descended into violence. We are going to have to find ourselves some loyal soldiers willing to kill and imprison citizens," they murmured to one another.

Ezra Klein pissed me off last week. I'm probably not alone.

Let's bring our players out on the stage, and talk about their skills and their gift, by which I mean something a person is good at and what the world derives from their application of that skill, respectively.

Pete Hegseth is a former Fox News host who has been elevated by a white supremacist political party to the level of Secretary of Defense, which he now self-styles as Secretary of War. He recently gathered all our military's generals together into a single room, at great expense and risk, so that he could preen and bellow at them in a grotesque celebration of war crimes, massacre, and lawless violence, and an admonishment to them that the military should commit such acts. His skill was somewhat lacking, it must be noted, since he clearly expected applause and got none. Hegseth's gift is brute authoritarianism and blind loyalty. His gift is for the exclusive benefit of violent supremacist authoritarians, particularly his boss, the would be dictator Donald Trump, who succeeded Hegseth on stage and informed the assembled generals that the military—which has already been sent to invade U.S. cities—should be used to kill U.S. citizens, as a sort of training ground for mass murder overseas.

This is only the latest declaration of literal war against the citizens of the United States by the President of the United States and his Defense Secretary, which I wanted to mention in case you are the sort of person who has been scolding everyone else that political violence is never acceptable. In fact, this sort would tell me that my use of the word "war" is polarizing and inciting, to which I say take it up with the President of the United States and his so-called Secretary of War.

Meanwhile, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer, by which I mean he is a public intellectual who appears on TV and talk shows and podcasts, but he mostly writes—sometimes fiction, but primarily deeply researched critical essays on American history, culture, and politics. He writes with prodigious skill that astonishes and inspires me and he is deservedly published in all the big places. His gift is moral clarity; the ability to look at matters of justice and injustice and present them for what they are with precision and clarity and fresh insight, even when that presentation runs counter to popular framing, even when doing so might cost him materially or reputationally. It's an illuminating light, this moral clarity, and we all benefit from it.

And Ben Shapiro is the author of many books with titles like How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them, Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings, and Facts (Still) Don't Care About Your Feelings, but my impression is he is mostly known not as a writer but a professional talk-guy—podcasts, mostly, but some TV too. When it comes to skill I suppose you'd have to say that he has a certain talent at talking. He's certainly very fast at it. Shapiro's gift is extolling supremacy—the dominant cultural belief in the United States that some people matter and others don't, and that those who matter should get to do whatever they want to those who don't. Shapiro's work is dedicated to promoting all of the ideas that run downstream of that main belief—either policies designed to enact supremacy or arguments used to justify those policies and their abusive effects. This makes him a very successful supremacist hatemonger, of which there are many, because supremacy is the dominant cultural belief. If you want to know a bit about how Shapiro and his media organization The Daily Caller operate, you could go many places, including here.

And Ezra Klein is betwixt and between Coates and Shapiro, in that he is a professional talk guy and a writer, and to me it seems like those two hats apply equally to him in the public mind. Like Coates, he is an essayist published in all the big places, but unlike Coates, he also has a podcast, which is hosted by the New York Times, which is a newspaper that takes events like the America's budding dictator summarily murdering people on fishing boats and describes them with headlines like "In Bold Move, President Tests Boundaries of Legality." Anyway Klein seems to have a fair amount of skill in both his writing and his talking, insofar as in both his presentation and affect is thoughtful and articulate, and for what it is worth he does not seem to shrink from criticisms against him. Anyway, that's Klein's skill, which seems to be considerable. As for what his gift is ... it turns out even he isn't sure. More on that in a bit.

Klein did a little writing last month, after his friend Charlie Kirk was murdered by a gunman at a public event. Kirk was a supremacist hatemonger in the mode of Ben Shapiro, and if you want to know more about that you could go many places, including here. I say Kirk was Klein's "friend" though they apparently did not know one another, because Klein made a display of grieving him as one would grieve a friend. He wrote an elegy to Kirk, praising as "exactly right" Kirk's way of doing politics—a way of doing politics which I feel compelled to remind you was hatemongering. Kirk did wrap his hatemongering in the trappings of open discourse and public debate, though, and the trappings of open discourse and public debate are things that Klein seems to hold dear. Somewhere in recent days Klein also suggested that Democrats might need to start embracing anti-choice politicians in places like Kansas (where a recent anti-abortion referendum was soundly defeated), and might need to encourage politicians to not support trans people so vigorously, in order to win. This led a lot of people to ask questions like "when exactly were Democratic politicians supporting trans people?" and "what would we win if we've already surrendered what we were fighting to achieve?"

Klein has demonstrated his commitment to open discourse and public debate; first by having prominent hatemonger Ben Shapiro (friendship status uncertain) on to his podcast to chat for a couple hours about the need for unity; next, by having on his friend Ta-Nehisi Coates—who has written an excellent piece criticizing Ezra's Kirk piece—so Klein could talk at Coates for an hour about how we need to be practical to regain power, and how those practicalities are going to have to come at the expense of the humanity of some of our neighbors, and how having historical conversations about who in fact has been killing who is all a little too much of a downer. The fact of interview with Shapiro and the content of the interview with Coates exposed Klein's moral emptiness in ways that he should find deeply embarrassing.

A lot has already been written about these conversations, especially the one with Coates. I don't want to rehash every bit of it. I would like to write today about what it is that I find so frustrating and toxic about Ezra's approach, and how if we are going to escape from this horribly fraught time, we are going to defeat the current dominant cultural belief of supremacy with a vision of unified human solidarity, and that means we are going to have to be better than Ezra.

I'm going to focus on two specific quotes; one from Klein's introduction (which I did listen to) to his conversation with Shapiro (which I did not listen to), the other from his conversation with Coates (which I watched in full).

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Here is the first rather lengthy quote, which Ezra Klein delivered direct to the camera in his preface to his talk with Shapiro.

[Kirk] was murdered for participating in our politics. Somewhere beyond how much divided us there was something that bonded us too, some effort to change this country in ways that we think are good. I believe this so strongly, that we have to be able to see that the bullet that tore into [Kirk] is an act of violence against us all .... the stakes of our politics are frightening to me ....

All I can say for me in the work I do is that I want to create a space that takes our disagreements seriously, that takes the stakes of them seriously, the consequences for people seriously, but does so without deepening our divisions irreparably. We are going to have to live here with each other.

Well right off the bat we have Klein passing into common currency the counterfeit Republican framing for why Kirk was murdered. I think he was murdered while participating in something that looks like "our" politics, I suppose. He was killed because we live in a world where if somebody wants to kill somebody else, it's astonishingly easy to do. Oh well.

But other than this, one might wonder why I would have a problem with this quote, because I actually do want us to live in a country where we all live with one another despite any differences. One also might wonder why I would turn such a critical eye toward somebody with whom I seem to share so much common ground on an issue-by-issue basis. Klein is concerned about the viral nature of violence in our culture, and I am, too. Klein is alarmed about the level of rhetoric and where it seems to be heading, and I am, too. Klein would like to avoid the horrors of what seems like on oncoming civil war. Me too! Me too!

And yet, I find myself almost entirely in opposition to Klein , because I can't get over the degree to which his approach is designed not to defeat the human spirit of supremacy that drives all these horrors, but to sink comfortably into it and join with it. And I cannot get over the degree to which Klein's response is emblematic of the politically-empowered white liberal response to this age of autocratic fascist abuse and violence, in his predictable rightward instinct and in his seemingly impenetrable assumption that, even though he admits he has no idea what the solution to our present situation might be, he is still just the person to deliver a solution. And Klein is not just any talk-guy; like Shapiro's influence in Republican spheres, Klein has the attention of Democratic politicians.

The nature of Klein's quote (above) is an admonishment. Because of the nature of Klein's audience, and because of the nature of the criticism to which Klein is responding, it's not an admonishment to the Bens Shapiro or Charlies Kirk or other authoritarian supremacists of the political world. Rather, it's an admonishment to people who are opposed to this authoritarian supremacist movement, for not being willing enough in his view to live with authoritarian supremacists.

This is the grain of sand at the center of the pearl of my ire, because "we are going to have to live here with each other" is the exact premise that Republicans do not agree with any of us about, and while Klein in his remarks pays lip service to some of the recent proofs of this clear fact, his analysis of what to do about it he excises this reality entirely. In his mind, he and Kirk were just two guys, both trying to change the country for what they thought was good. It's a bond. Never mind that what Kirk thought was good was the American military in the streets of Chicago, and mass kidnapping in service of a white ethnostate, and the end of bodily autonomy for women and queer people, and so forth. In the Klein world, moral clarity about abuse is polarizing, and polarization, not abuse, is the problem to solve.

We are going to have to live here with each other. Not an option if you are trans, as long as supremacists (or those who would capitulate to them in the name of winning) are still permitted to wield the levers of power. Not an option if you are an immigrant. Not an option if you are pregnant with a complication. Not an option if you are sick, or out of work. Not an option if you are homeless. And eventually not an option if you are in opposition in any way to to the dictator president and his coterie of supremacists, or if you just happen to fall afoul of somebody with a grudge and a trigger finger and not much to lose. Not even an option if you are Charlie Kirk, it turns out. The bullet that ripped into him was an act of violence against us all—specifically, an act of violence that springs out of a world of inevitable gun massacres that people like Charlie Kirk have insisted upon as a core tenet of their individual freedom to enact political violence. The Republican position is supremacist, and supremacism is fundamentally anti-human, so eventually the Republican position will come for us all, just as when Charlie Kirk was murdered, the Republican position came for Charlie Kirk.

By his own admission, Kirk's murder affected Ezra Klein in a personal way that all the previous acts of supremacist violence committed against all its other targets across the span of history did not. So we see that Klein recognizes a "we" in Charlie Kirk that he does not recognize in trans people or in any of the other people I listed in the previous paragraph. In this, he reveals to us—perhaps without even knowing he is doing so—that for him, the disagreements he has with Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro are window dressing compared to the fundamental kinship he feels to them, three princes of public discourse, just trying their best to do what's best, whether "what's best" is feeding a hungry kid or blowing him up or zip tying his hands behind his back in the middle of the Chicago night.

When Klein scolds that "we have to live here with each other" he is making a statement about who it is he is getting ready to live with and who he is getting ready to live without, and most gallingly he is ignoring the fact that when it comes to supremacists all of us have been living with them already all along. Nobody is suggesting mass deportation of white supremacists, or the dissolution of straight marriages, or stripping away health care for conservatives. The troops and the cops weren't ever sent down primarily white streets, masked kidnappers aren't terrorizing white churches or corporate courtrooms. These supremacist hatemongers are being criticized, yes, and opposed, yes, and yes the culture of violence they have created sometimes ricochets back on them, but we are living in the country they demanded on having. We are all now experiencing the Republican proposition for humanity. Many of us are demanding they stop pursuing this proposition, and Republicans and other supremacist hatemongers insist this demand represents violence against them. Klein, by drawing the lines where he draws them, is agreeing with Republicans about this.

The Republican proposition is mass immiseration, mass expulsion, mass control, and mass murder, aimed at an increasing number of us. Republicans are not being vague about that, and it's not theoretical; it is happening right now in cities across the United States and on the seas and across the seas. We will never truly oppose political violence or hope to prevent future political violence if we can't see the violence and its causes clearly and say clearly what they are; we will never overcome the dominant supremacist belief system in our country or the political spirit that wants to see that violence increased if we cannot understand that it is this spirit that we are contending with.

The way out of our present age of political violence is not scolding "we have to live here with one another," at those who are not threatening anyone's life, at those whose very existence supremacists refuse to accept. Rather the way out is standing between supremacists and their targets and telling them "no, you have to live with them, just like we live with you, and if you can't do that, then you have a problem with us, too." It's turning to those who just aren't comfortable with trans people and saying "we don't negotiate about people's rights over here, and if you want to see how hard we'll fight for you against the billionaires and bosses who are robbing you blind, watch how hard we fight for them. If hating trans people is so important to you that you're willing to get robbed to death to secure it, we aren't the party for you."

You know what? I think that message might just build a coalition.

If we can't do that, then we are simply moderate princes and advisors, politely and respectably demurring against but never truly opposing the king; politely commiserating with but never actually supporting the people he kills. We've chosen the side of the king. No matter what we tell ourselves in our secret hearts, we've decided to live lives of respectably quiet disapproval in his castle.

Time for the exchange from the interview with Coates.

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This for me is the key moment of the conversation:

Coates: Would you define for me how you see what your role is?

Klein: 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’m a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on, and I’m in the business of political persuasion.

This is extraordinarily revealing. Coates is very clear about his role: he is in opposition not against human beings, but against hateful and abusive lies and ideas that strip people of our shared humanity. Earlier he says "my role as a writer is to state things as clearly as I possibly can, to make them in such a way that they haunt, to state truths and to reinforce the animating notion of my politics — which is that all humanity is equal and is worthy of that." And we are back to gifts again. As I said, Coates has a gift of moral clarity—to state with precision and impact illuminating and basic truths for the illumination of the rest of us. This means he knows who he is and what he is about, and can speak with authority to it.

Klein, when asked directly, has no idea what gift he has to offer, or to whom to offer it. The best he can do is to say he'd like to persuade, but earlier admits he is totally unsure of what. He reveals that what he most wants is to be in peacetime and free to explore his interests, to which I say, no shit. Do you think trans people don't want that, too? Do you think homeless people wouldn't have rather been free to pursue their interests? Do you think refugees fled their homes because they don't want to live in peacetime?

Klein's stated priority is living within peacetime. We can see that he seeks whatever peace he can retreat to at whatever terms are on offer. He declares peace with those who have not stopped waging war, at the expense of whoever's humanity is currently being demanded. Republicans are framing Democrats as being radical on trans rights? He can give way on that. Republicans are framing Democrats as extreme on bodily autonomy? He can give way on that. He points at polls that show diminishing support for trans rights or reproductive rights as proof that "we" are losing the argument, but never pauses to wonder why a party would be losing an argument that it has been scared to even make. He compromises on behalf of others with people he is too cowardly to truly oppose even rhetorically, and he can't even really articulate that the reason why he is doing this is that he is too afraid and too self-regarding to do otherwise.

What scares Klein (per his Shapiro into) are the stakes of American politics, which have gotten far too high for his liking. But it is a historical fact (as Coates continually reminded Klein, to Klein's consternation) that for many people, who do not get to be we in the formulations of people like Ben Shapiro, the stakes were always high, and the threat has always been present. Klein's approach would make the stakes higher specifically for already threatened people, precisely at the moment that the stakes have become personally alarming to him, and he says that he believes this will be persuasive of a group that has already declared itself immune to persuasion.

This is how bullies operate, you know. It's the old fascist offer: If you let me hurt your buddy, it will go better for you and everyone else. If you stop your buddy's struggle, it will go better still for you and everyone else. It's a lie, of course, but if you don't have any moral character you might take the offer. In the end, Ezra Klein did not persuade but was persuaded. His opponents won by refusing to give in, but he gave in before he was asked. What is his role? He doesn't know. You have to believe in something to know that. His gift is something he keeps for himself.

What is happening right now is that some people in this country are actively murdering the rest of us. They were not under threat of murder when they started, and if they stop murdering us, we will not murder them back, provided we stay true to principles of universal human solidarity—in fact, we would create a world that would feed them if hungry, shelter them if cold, care for them if sick, and recognize their essential humanity. If we stop struggling or are forced to stop struggle, then the murder will commence in a more quiet or orderly manner.

And I think it is an extraordinary indictment of the character of our nation's thousands or millions of Ezras Klein that they set himself in opposition not against the violence currently being done but against the struggle.

I think it is an indictment of intentions of those who seek to draw the boundaries of discourse so that they maintain peace with those waging war, instead of working to establish peace for the first time on behalf those against whom war is being waged.

An indictment of the principles of those who would take the popularity of bigotry as a rationale in favor of appeasing it and joining with it.

An indictment of the imagination of those who can think of no way to turn down the temperature of rhetoric than to platform as respectable the people who are turning the temperature up, and by accepting unchallenged dehumanizing narratives about what constitutes extremist thinking around marginalized communities.

An indictment of the moral clarity of those who do all this in the name of living together without being honest about the people they are willing to live without.

An indictment of the political instincts of those whose strategy in the face of massively unpopular right-wing bullying is not to encourage radical solidarity with everyone who is under the threat of violence, but to turn ever further right in an attempt to make a peace with these self-proclaimed warfighters, in order to win.

And as for winning, I think it is an indictment even of Klein's apparent intelligence that he thinks that the way to persuade people to join the Democrats is to have Democrats abandon what are their alleged ideals, especially since they just lost so badly not by standing up for trans people, but by doing exactly what Ezra Klein is now proposing, because they listened to people like Ezra Klein.

You can't beat the mentality that leads to abuse by taking on the abuser's mentality. You can't defeat bad ideas by adopting them. You can't grow a coalition by selling out its members. And you can't persuade people who disagree with you that you can be trusted to fight for them when you won't even fight for those you say are with you.

Eventually you have to stand for something, or somebody else will tell you where to stand, and if you'd rather not, they'll force you to stand there, and stand there you will.

And there you'll be, standing in a place somebody else chose for you. You and the nothing you built inside.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He's working one end to the other, and all points in between.