In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.

Tragedies can expose division in any group, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk exposed a profound division in the Democratic Party.

Recommended Stories

• Chinese money seeps into every level of American politics
• Virginia Democrats want to bring radicalism back to the Commonwealth
• The family-housing boom we need

On one side, you have New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who lauded Kirk for “practicing politics in exactly the right way” by showing up on college campuses, debating anyone, and becoming “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” 

On the other side, you have author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who called Kirk an “unreconstructed white supremacist.” For Coates, any praise of Kirk’s efforts to engage with people he disagreed with was the equivalent of “burying the truth of the Confederacy,” which Coates says “allowed for the terrorization of the Black population.”

WHY SCHUMER HAD TO SHUT IT DOWN

Setting aside the fact that Kirk, unlike the Confederates, never participated in armed violence against the United States, many of the loudest voices on the Left sided with Coates and castigated Klein for expressing anything but disdain for Kirk and his political views. 

Klein responded to Coates’s criticism of his kind words for Kirk by inviting him on his New York Times podcast. The exchange crystallized a growing rift in the Democratic Party.

For Klein, Coates’s dismissal of Kirk and his followers sounded too much like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s famous lines from her 2016 speech at an LGBT fundraiser in New York City. Klein played the full quote for Coates.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton began.

“They’re 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 but 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 American,” Clinton finished.

After the clip ended, Klein asked Coates, “What do you think when you hear that?”

“She probably shouldn’t have said it,” Coates began before Klein cut him off.

Klein pressed, “But you think it’s true?”

Coates replied, “I mean, it’s probably not how I would say it, but you know, I mean, there are things that I would say.” In other words, yes, Coates agrees with Clinton’s premise that large swaths of Americans do, in fact, have deplorable ideas and are irredeemable.

Klein then made the case that by refusing to engage with people who disagree with Democrats on certain cultural issues, the party is making it harder for the Left to wield political power. 

“I think in many ways we’ve stopped doing politics,” Klein said. “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 a good change in the world.”

Coates eventually mustered three responses. First, he claimed this isn’t really his problem. “I shouldn’t be running for president of the United States. You know what I mean?” Coates said. “And my expectations for the rhetoric of writers, intellectuals, journalists, etc., is very, very different than what the expectation should be for people who you know expect to hold office.”

Klein responded by noting that “political strategy” is downstream from “political culture” and that what Coates says about whom Democrats should and should not engage with does affect how Democratic politicians behave. He mentioned activists attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for speaking to alleged transphobe Joe Rogan. Coates seemed to accept that he has a role in deciding who is and is not acceptable for Democratic politicians to engage with. 

Coates next denied that the Democrats have a problem that needs addressing. He pointed out that Klein made the case that former President Joe Biden shouldn’t have run and added, “I think, you know, obviously I think sexism is a very, very real force,” implying that former Vice President Kamala Harris lost because she is a woman.

Klein wasn’t satisfied with this answer either. He pointed out that it took 60 senators to pass Obamacare in 2010, with senators from Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, and Missouri. “It has become easier to imagine the end of the country than winning a Senate seat in Missouri,” Klein said. In other words, if Democrats want to accomplish anything, barely eking out victories with the current constituency isn’t going to work.

What Democrats need to do, Klein argued, is allow Democratic candidates in red states to take positions that Coates would consider deplorable. “Do people feel like even if they disagree with us on some things that they have a place with us?” Klein asked rhetorically.

“We have come to the view that a pretty wide variety of people are in some ways kind of deplorables,” Klein said.

Coates objected to Klein bringing up the “deplorables” line again.

“So when you ask me about that Hillary Clinton line … I would never say it like that,” Coates explained. “I don’t even focus on people like that. 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 is that what Democrats are really fighting now, ideologies that are demonstrably false, like phrenology? 

Klein and Coates touched on other issues, including immigration and affirmative action, but most of their conversation centered on gender ideology. And science is simply not on the Democrats’ side.

Coates and Klein may wish it were not so, but sex is binary. All male mammals are fundamentally different from female mammals, and this includes humans. Now, there are some extremely rare genetic disorders, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which women with female genitalia are born with XY chromosomes and no ovaries, but these are usually women who consider themselves women and only find out about their condition when menstruation fails to occur during puberty. Almost all of them go on to live their lives as women.

This is not what is happening in the contagion of young girls who suddenly want to be boys and men who suddenly decide they want to be women. If a grown man wants to dress up as a woman, that is fine. But no American is under any obligation to participate in his delusion. And no young woman should be forced to share a bathroom with a biological man pretending to be a woman.

Neither Coates nor Klein ever even acknowledged the very real harm their transgender delusions inflict on vulnerable women who want single-sex safe spaces.

Coates brought up the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, arguing that it took more than just excluding unapproved voices to achieve political progress. It took outright violence. But is this an actual comparison the Democratic Party wants to stake its electoral viability on? That the struggle to put men in women’s locker rooms is the same as ending bathrooms separated by race?

Coates later said politics is “a contest of ideas and narratives” and that his “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.”

Good luck convincing the 70% of people who believe that, like every other mammal on the planet, a human’s biological sex is determined at birth. 

Coates also took issue with Kirk’s views on immigration, decrying his rhetoric about Haitians in particular “coming into the country” and “raping your daughters.” Kirk’s inflammatory rhetoric aside, there is no acknowledgment by Coates or Klein that Democratic Party elites are far outside the mainstream on immigration as well.

Biden’s “humanitarian” catch-and-release policies at the southern border allowed over 5 million illegal immigrants into the country in just four years, the largest illegal immigrant invasion in our nation’s history. Where is Coates’s compassion for the American citizens who now face longer wait times in emergency rooms, can’t find affordable housing, and have half their children’s class filled with students who can’t speak English?

Coates doesn’t care about their plight. In Coates’s mind, anyone who expresses any discomfort with the mass migration policies of the Biden administration is no better than a Confederate secessionist.

Klein succinctly summarized the difference between him and Coates. “I think from your perspective and from my perspective, we probably don’t believe hugely different things,” Klein began. “A huge amount of the country, right, 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 we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong, right?”

Coates agreed. 

Klein continued, “What politically should our relationship with those people be? Do we win them over? Do we compromise with them?”

“I’m all for unifying,” Coates continued. “I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity.”

And this is the real question the Democratic Party now faces: On which issues is it willing to deny the fantastical claims of the base so it can expand its tent?

Are Democrats willing to admit that men should not be allowed in women’s locker rooms?

Are they willing to deport an illegal immigrant whose only crime is being in the country illegally?

Are they willing to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion policies even if it means more Asians and fewer other minorities in higher education?

For Coates, the answer appears to be “no.”

“If you think it is OK to dehumanize people,” Coates explained, “then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.”

The problem for Democrats is that Coates has a rather reductive view of who is and is not worthy of human dignity. In his book Between the World and Me, Coates writes of the first responders, police, and firefighters who gave their lives to save others on 9/11: “They were not human to me.”

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S WAR ON CALIFORNIA FARMS

The Democratic Party’s capacity for empathizing with others is quite selective. It includes men who believe they are women and illegal immigrants but does not include women who want single-sex spaces or parents who want their children’s classmates to be able to speak English. 

Until Democratic Party elites like Coates and Klein are able to empathize with the very real pain being felt by the “deplorables,” they will continue to lose elections.