I think it must be a weird time to be Ezra Klein (or similar). His gig is basically to have insightful things to say about where we're at, politically. And I'm not sure anyone can really make sense of it all.
We're dealing with a very strange group of political actors at the moment, people driven by weird and somewhat opaque personal agendas. Or maybe not opaque as much as inexplicable.
They really are a crew of weirdos. I guess that may sound kind of judge-y, but it would take a much better mind than mine to make sense of it all.
Better days, y'all. They will come. We're mostly olds here, so maybe not before we peg out, but they will come. In the meantime, hold fast to what is worthwhile.
2025-09-29 21:22:22
My guess is that people who prefer preventable deaths over government assistance have been convinced that resources are so scarce that we can’t afford to have a government that prevents those deaths.
Maybe. But what I take away from all of it is less a concern about scarce resources per se, and more a feeling that folks don't want their money going to help "that person over there". For various definitions of "that person over there".
So less a matter of scarcity, and more a matter of "why should I pay for that guy?".
And to GFTNC's point, I do think all of that is related to folks feeling (correctly or not) that government is helping "that person over there", but not them. So, not that *government* lacks resources, so much as *they* lack resources, and nobody is helping *them*, so why should they support it?
That doesn't really explain the guy who'd throw his sister under the bus, but I do think it applies to a lot of folks. And they're not always wrong.
I do think that a lot of working class people were left behind by the neo-liberal triangulation stuff of the Clinton and (to a lesser degree, but still) Obama administrations. And I also do think that the (D) party of those years was tone-deaf to those folks' concerns.
I guess it was a way to win elections, but a lot of folks got left out in the cold.
He was making a transactional bet. A bad call, all of the "college educated moderate (R)'s in the Philly suburbs" did not suddenly decide to vote (D). Some likely did, many did not, because tax breaks and 401k's.
Schumer made a bet, and lost. As did we all.
2025-09-29 17:35:38
I find nous @5.56 extremely fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly the comparison with his college God squad and the whole concept of a transactional view of people.
seconded
It’s not that I think deep discussion about our shared issues is not worthwhile, it is that my instinct is to save the lives first
I'm not sure it's always possible to save the lives without engaging in the deeper discussion.
My thinking about where we're at as a country took a turn a while back, based on two events.
The first was during a (R) candidate's debate in 2011. The topic was health insurance, and Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical scenario - a healthy 30 year old man declines to buy health insurance, has an accident and falls into a coma, requiring intensive care.
Ron Paul said this was an example of people taking responsibility for themselves - "That's what freedom is all about - taking your own risks". To which Blitzer replied, "So should society just let him die?".
And the room erupted in a chorus of "Yeah!" and applause.
Paul's response to Blitzer was more measured - he felt that this was where charity (not government) should step in. But that was a room full of people who were very enthusiastic about the guy being left to die.
The second was an interview in the NYT with a guy in the upper midwest who was opposed to government involvement in health insurance. The guy's sister had a chronic illness and was being kept alive through a federal health insurance program, I forget if it was Medicare or Medicaid.
The interviewer pointed out that, if the guy's preferences were enacted in policy, his sister would die. The guy said he understood that, and still felt programs like the one keeping his sister alive shouldn't exist.
Long story short, I realized that a large number of people in this country were not operating from the same basic moral or ethical basis as, for instance, me. The differences were not matters of policy, but were much, much deeper and more fundamental.
It more or less gets back to Thatcher's idea that "there is no such thing as society". People sharing a polity have no obligation toward the safety or well being of others.
Root hog or die.
That is the divide that you have to cross if you want to save lives. If you want public policies and actions that get folks fed and housed and gets them access to health care, you have to get past the millions and millions and millions of people in this country who are basically OK with letting their neighbors die as long as it isn't government helping them out.
You might be able to do that a la Ezra Klein, by trying to meet them halfway - "just run some pro-life (D)'s". Or similar. But as Coates calls out, you can't get very far with that without throwing some set of folks under the bus.
So who gets thrown under the bus, and who gets to have their life saved?
In the podcast, Coates calls out the history of the social safety net stuff introduced by the New Deal. The way FDR made that happen was basically to make it available to everybody *but* black people. That was the transaction.
It's good that it happened at all, for most people, but a lot of folks were screwed.
I guess we could continue to try to inch forward, expanding the scope of "who counts" bit by bit. But we're going to continue to bump up against the folks who think the idea of a guy having an accident and dying because he was foolish is an applause line.
You can only get so far without having the deeper conversation. The harder conversation.
2025-09-29 02:09:23
To Tony's question, and Michael's reply, yes, there are likely millions who think Kirk was "doing Christianity the right way".
And there are many, likely millions, who see Christianity in it's nationalistic form as falling somewhere in the range from harmfully misguided to plainly idolatrous.
So, no single point of view there.
My own perspective, FWIW, is that Kirk's America is not my America, and I do not hear the voice of Jesus in anything he had to say.
2025-09-28 23:12:51
Thanks for sharing this LJ, I had not seen it. I have a lot of thoughts, I'll try to boil them down and be concise.
First, my general impression of the podcast is that Coates is very clear about his positions, but Klein seemed to be struggling to be as clear - to articulate the points he was trying to make. Some of this may be due to the different roles they see themselves in - Klein seems to see himself more as someone who is politically active, trying to find ways to persuade other folks to his point of view. Coates is very clear that he is not a political strategist, he is here to speak truth as he sees it. Those are really different jobs.
I think Klein is correct to say the (D)'s as a party are flailing. My personal take on why they have lost "the heartland" - the "common people" - is that with very few exceptions they've kind of stepped away from the parts of the country, and the demographics, that we normally associate with those folks. I mean, literally - they have failed to fund and support local (D) organizations and infrastructure in lots of places. They've basically written off a lot of the country. That worked for a while, now it doesn't. And hasn't.
Just show up and listen would solve a lot of problems.
He's also correct to say that a lot of folks feel that the institutional (D) party basically doesn't like them. They don't. Don't understand them, aren't interested in them, think they are idiots for voting for (R)'s and don't seem highly motivated to figure out what those folks are about.
There are a lot of places they could be winning, that they likely don't even know exist.
All IMO. And so, enough from me about the (D)'s as a party.
Klein is correct to say that Kirk was "doing politics the right way", if you assume the goal of politics is to amass power. Kirk was an ambitious, even driven, hard working dude, and he built an electoral organization that kicks ass. He was very very good at *politics*. At creating the conditions to win.
What Kirk was absolutely *not* about was engagement and dialogue with his political opposites. After his murder, I felt obliged to at least watch some of his debates and other appearances. Kirk was not there to hear or understand any point of view other than his own, other than as a means of building his own counter-arguments. He was there to repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat his talking points. And he was there to make conservative young people feel like it was cool to be a conservative on campus.
And much of what he had to say was straight-up bigotry. White supremacist sexist bigotry. Full stop.
No amount of "civility" - a sort of observance of debate-team rules - can white-wash that.
Folks say he was "reaching out to the other side". He was not. He was reaching out to folks who agreed with him, or thought they might, and were uncomfortable out it in a campus environment, so that they could feel like they weren't alone.
A thing that folks don't seem to want to say, because it will seem like they're being mean to college conservatives, is that the whole "militant Christian nationalist capitalist western civilization strong men do big things" mythology doesn't stand up well to critical thought. Which is sort of the point, or at least one of the important points, of higher education.
It's meant to teach you to think. Some ideas don't survive critical thought.
I appreciate the good intentions of folks who believe the solution to where we are at is to let the marketplace of ideas play out. The best ideas will win out, right?
But that requires an openness of mind, and a willingness to engage your opposites in good faith and with respect. And that is not on offer.
I'm with Coates when he says there are folks who have crossed a line, and that a fruitful conversation with them is not likely to happen. I have my own lines, which are pretty much summed up in Coates' "not at the expense of my neighbor's humanity".
I won't, as Clinton did, call my political or social opposites "deplorables". But I will say that many of the things they believe and say and so are, in fact, deplorable, and I'm not interested in debating them about it.
Blacks are prowling the streets looking for whites to prey upon.
Blacks have descended into criminality and dysfunction since desegregation.
SCOTUS justice Jackson is intellectually inferior and is taking a white man's place.
Transgender people are mentally ill freaks.
And so on.
No. No to all of that. And no, I'm not going to debate about it with you as if we were discussion "who's better, Beatles or Stones?".
There are conversations I won't have, because I'm not going to give the time of day to that kind of delusional toxic nonsense. Not least because it supports and engenders some of the cruelest policies and actions we've seen in a long time.
I also second Coates when he points out that political violence is absolutely nothing new in our national history. The folks who say "this isn't who we are" are... mistaken.
Apropos of nothing in particular:
I think it must be a weird time to be Ezra Klein (or similar). His gig is basically to have insightful things to say about where we're at, politically. And I'm not sure anyone can really make sense of it all.
We're dealing with a very strange group of political actors at the moment, people driven by weird and somewhat opaque personal agendas. Or maybe not opaque as much as inexplicable.
They really are a crew of weirdos. I guess that may sound kind of judge-y, but it would take a much better mind than mine to make sense of it all.
Better days, y'all. They will come. We're mostly olds here, so maybe not before we peg out, but they will come. In the meantime, hold fast to what is worthwhile.
My guess is that people who prefer preventable deaths over government assistance have been convinced that resources are so scarce that we can’t afford to have a government that prevents those deaths.
Maybe. But what I take away from all of it is less a concern about scarce resources per se, and more a feeling that folks don't want their money going to help "that person over there". For various definitions of "that person over there".
So less a matter of scarcity, and more a matter of "why should I pay for that guy?".
And to GFTNC's point, I do think all of that is related to folks feeling (correctly or not) that government is helping "that person over there", but not them. So, not that *government* lacks resources, so much as *they* lack resources, and nobody is helping *them*, so why should they support it?
That doesn't really explain the guy who'd throw his sister under the bus, but I do think it applies to a lot of folks. And they're not always wrong.
I do think that a lot of working class people were left behind by the neo-liberal triangulation stuff of the Clinton and (to a lesser degree, but still) Obama administrations. And I also do think that the (D) party of those years was tone-deaf to those folks' concerns.
I guess it was a way to win elections, but a lot of folks got left out in the cold.
Don't believe me, let Senator Chuck Schumer break it down for you.
He was making a transactional bet. A bad call, all of the "college educated moderate (R)'s in the Philly suburbs" did not suddenly decide to vote (D). Some likely did, many did not, because tax breaks and 401k's.
Schumer made a bet, and lost. As did we all.
I find nous @5.56 extremely fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly the comparison with his college God squad and the whole concept of a transactional view of people.
seconded
It’s not that I think deep discussion about our shared issues is not worthwhile, it is that my instinct is to save the lives first
I'm not sure it's always possible to save the lives without engaging in the deeper discussion.
My thinking about where we're at as a country took a turn a while back, based on two events.
The first was during a (R) candidate's debate in 2011. The topic was health insurance, and Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical scenario - a healthy 30 year old man declines to buy health insurance, has an accident and falls into a coma, requiring intensive care.
Ron Paul said this was an example of people taking responsibility for themselves - "That's what freedom is all about - taking your own risks". To which Blitzer replied, "So should society just let him die?".
And the room erupted in a chorus of "Yeah!" and applause.
Paul's response to Blitzer was more measured - he felt that this was where charity (not government) should step in. But that was a room full of people who were very enthusiastic about the guy being left to die.
The second was an interview in the NYT with a guy in the upper midwest who was opposed to government involvement in health insurance. The guy's sister had a chronic illness and was being kept alive through a federal health insurance program, I forget if it was Medicare or Medicaid.
The interviewer pointed out that, if the guy's preferences were enacted in policy, his sister would die. The guy said he understood that, and still felt programs like the one keeping his sister alive shouldn't exist.
Long story short, I realized that a large number of people in this country were not operating from the same basic moral or ethical basis as, for instance, me. The differences were not matters of policy, but were much, much deeper and more fundamental.
It more or less gets back to Thatcher's idea that "there is no such thing as society". People sharing a polity have no obligation toward the safety or well being of others.
Root hog or die.
That is the divide that you have to cross if you want to save lives. If you want public policies and actions that get folks fed and housed and gets them access to health care, you have to get past the millions and millions and millions of people in this country who are basically OK with letting their neighbors die as long as it isn't government helping them out.
You might be able to do that a la Ezra Klein, by trying to meet them halfway - "just run some pro-life (D)'s". Or similar. But as Coates calls out, you can't get very far with that without throwing some set of folks under the bus.
So who gets thrown under the bus, and who gets to have their life saved?
In the podcast, Coates calls out the history of the social safety net stuff introduced by the New Deal. The way FDR made that happen was basically to make it available to everybody *but* black people. That was the transaction.
It's good that it happened at all, for most people, but a lot of folks were screwed.
I guess we could continue to try to inch forward, expanding the scope of "who counts" bit by bit. But we're going to continue to bump up against the folks who think the idea of a guy having an accident and dying because he was foolish is an applause line.
You can only get so far without having the deeper conversation. The harder conversation.
To Tony's question, and Michael's reply, yes, there are likely millions who think Kirk was "doing Christianity the right way".
And there are many, likely millions, who see Christianity in it's nationalistic form as falling somewhere in the range from harmfully misguided to plainly idolatrous.
So, no single point of view there.
My own perspective, FWIW, is that Kirk's America is not my America, and I do not hear the voice of Jesus in anything he had to say.
Thanks for sharing this LJ, I had not seen it. I have a lot of thoughts, I'll try to boil them down and be concise.
First, my general impression of the podcast is that Coates is very clear about his positions, but Klein seemed to be struggling to be as clear - to articulate the points he was trying to make. Some of this may be due to the different roles they see themselves in - Klein seems to see himself more as someone who is politically active, trying to find ways to persuade other folks to his point of view. Coates is very clear that he is not a political strategist, he is here to speak truth as he sees it. Those are really different jobs.
I think Klein is correct to say the (D)'s as a party are flailing. My personal take on why they have lost "the heartland" - the "common people" - is that with very few exceptions they've kind of stepped away from the parts of the country, and the demographics, that we normally associate with those folks. I mean, literally - they have failed to fund and support local (D) organizations and infrastructure in lots of places. They've basically written off a lot of the country. That worked for a while, now it doesn't. And hasn't.
Just show up and listen would solve a lot of problems.
He's also correct to say that a lot of folks feel that the institutional (D) party basically doesn't like them. They don't. Don't understand them, aren't interested in them, think they are idiots for voting for (R)'s and don't seem highly motivated to figure out what those folks are about.
There are a lot of places they could be winning, that they likely don't even know exist.
All IMO. And so, enough from me about the (D)'s as a party.
Klein is correct to say that Kirk was "doing politics the right way", if you assume the goal of politics is to amass power. Kirk was an ambitious, even driven, hard working dude, and he built an electoral organization that kicks ass. He was very very good at *politics*. At creating the conditions to win.
What Kirk was absolutely *not* about was engagement and dialogue with his political opposites. After his murder, I felt obliged to at least watch some of his debates and other appearances. Kirk was not there to hear or understand any point of view other than his own, other than as a means of building his own counter-arguments. He was there to repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat his talking points. And he was there to make conservative young people feel like it was cool to be a conservative on campus.
And much of what he had to say was straight-up bigotry. White supremacist sexist bigotry. Full stop.
No amount of "civility" - a sort of observance of debate-team rules - can white-wash that.
Folks say he was "reaching out to the other side". He was not. He was reaching out to folks who agreed with him, or thought they might, and were uncomfortable out it in a campus environment, so that they could feel like they weren't alone.
A thing that folks don't seem to want to say, because it will seem like they're being mean to college conservatives, is that the whole "militant Christian nationalist capitalist western civilization strong men do big things" mythology doesn't stand up well to critical thought. Which is sort of the point, or at least one of the important points, of higher education.
It's meant to teach you to think. Some ideas don't survive critical thought.
I appreciate the good intentions of folks who believe the solution to where we are at is to let the marketplace of ideas play out. The best ideas will win out, right?
But that requires an openness of mind, and a willingness to engage your opposites in good faith and with respect. And that is not on offer.
I'm with Coates when he says there are folks who have crossed a line, and that a fruitful conversation with them is not likely to happen. I have my own lines, which are pretty much summed up in Coates' "not at the expense of my neighbor's humanity".
I won't, as Clinton did, call my political or social opposites "deplorables". But I will say that many of the things they believe and say and so are, in fact, deplorable, and I'm not interested in debating them about it.
Blacks are prowling the streets looking for whites to prey upon.
Blacks have descended into criminality and dysfunction since desegregation.
SCOTUS justice Jackson is intellectually inferior and is taking a white man's place.
Transgender people are mentally ill freaks.
And so on.
No. No to all of that. And no, I'm not going to debate about it with you as if we were discussion "who's better, Beatles or Stones?".
There are conversations I won't have, because I'm not going to give the time of day to that kind of delusional toxic nonsense. Not least because it supports and engenders some of the cruelest policies and actions we've seen in a long time.
I also second Coates when he points out that political violence is absolutely nothing new in our national history. The folks who say "this isn't who we are" are... mistaken.
And so, I fail to be concise.