A lot of people on the left love to criticize Ezra Klein. I’m not one of those people. To be clear, I do criticize him, but I genuinely don’t relish doing so. I have, at times over the years, been a real fan of his work. He’s proven willing to take courageous stands, and he’s got real pull. As The New Yorker’s David Remnick said in a recent interview with the New York Times columnist and podcast host, Klein “wields a great deal of influence among Democrats in Washington”—meaning he has the potential to play a meaningful role in rebuilding a Democratic Party that has a fighting chance of stopping MAGA’s fascist takeover of America.

So when I see Klein missing the boat, my reaction is not just frustration but disappointment. That’s been particularly true in the weeks since the killing of Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA.

To be fair, I do believe that Klein has been asking a lot of the right questions. The problem—and it’s a big one—is that he’s answered those questions with a fundamentally blinkered political analysis that leads to the wrong conclusions. This was most apparent in his recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom he invited on his show following Coates’s scathing response to Klein’s claim in the aftermath of Kirk’s death that the far-right demagogue had been “practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

Here’s what Klein gets right: There’s something seriously wrong with the Democratic Party. In response to their recent electoral losses, Klein said, Democrats need to engage in “a very fundamental rethinking—a disciplined, strategic rethinking—of: What have we been doing? Why are people preferring [MAGA] to us?” This is self-evidently correct. The Democrats have lost multiple elections to Donald Trump, and as far as I know, there’s not a single member of the party elite who’s faced serious career repercussions for their role in these catastrophes.

But what is Klein’s explanation for why people are choosing MAGA over Democrats? He argues that Democrats have “stopped doing politics.” That’s an inoffensive enough claim, but the problem is that Klein’s understanding of “doing politics” focuses—not entirely, but certainly overwhelmingly—on compromise. He valorizes the idea 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.” But the primary examples he has offered in recent interviews for what it would mean for Democrats to “do politics” and build broader coalitions—running more pro-life Democrats in red states and accepting MAGA’s basic framing of Charlie Kirk’s life and legacy—all involve ceding ground to the right. And this demonstrates a poor analytic grasp of political reality and of what is necessary to build a truly majoritarian Democratic coalition.

We are living in populist........

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