Where Is the Line?
On Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the struggle to define the boundaries of what is acceptable in America. If we can’t even agree to hold the line against Trumpism, democracy must perish.
Thomas Zimmer (Opens in a new window), Oct. 05, 2025
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The MAGA project isn’t any less extremist, dangerous, or anti-democratic just because Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
How should (small-d) democratic America respond to the radicalizing assault on democratic self-government and the foundations of the constitutional order? It has been over a decade since Donald Trump came down the golden escalator and quickly took over as the leader of the American Right. He was elected president in 2016; he orchestrated a multi-month, multi-level scheme to nullify the result of the 2020 election before inciting a violent insurrection; and then, four years later, he was elected president again. There is no easy answer to the problem of Trumpism, at least not one that translates to a political recipe that is easily put into practice. But there are wrong answers – dangerous answers even.
Last week, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein suggested it was time for liberal America to change course. In a conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates published as an episode of his podcast (Opens in a new window) “The Ezra Klein Show,” arguably the NYT’s flagship liberal program, Klein insinuated it was time for mainstream America to redraw the line that demarcates the respectable and acceptable from that which is not; to stop drawing a line that designates Donald Trump as beyond the pale. I believe Klein is dangerously wrong.
Where do we draw the line? And who gets to draw it? It is a fundamental question that any democratic society must continually answer: What is considered within the boundaries of mainstream politics and therefore deserving of respect – and what should get you ostracized from democratic discourse and “polite” society? What counts as “practicing politics the right way” (Opens in a new window) – and what is to be treated as despicable behavior detrimental to the polity? What ideas are to be discussed as legitimate contributions – and what is to be fought as extremist ideology? What is political conduct deserving of all the privileges and respect of democratic politics – and what should trigger an immune reaction instead, a forceful mobilization of the system in defense of democracy?
The line between those who are inside those boundaries and those who exist outside is not always clear; it is historically contingent, it moves, it is contested. Must we redraw that line to include Donald Trump and the political project he spearheads? It would be exactly the wrong lesson to learn from a decade of Trumpism as the dominant force on the Right.
Yet Ezra Klein is not alone. He is a major voice on the center and among mainstream liberals – his position, platformed by the New York Times, will influence a lot of people. Klein’s musings about redrawing the line are, more importantly, a manifestation of a pervasive tendency in American elite circles to accommodate rather than fight back, to acquiesce rather than stand firm. The question since January has been whether or not the movement that took power would be able to consolidate authoritarian rule. If leading voices on the center and center-left are wavering, giving themselves permission to move the line instead of holding it, it’s a disaster.
An uncomfortable conversation
Ezra Klein has been on quite the journey lately. The day after the murder of Charlie Kirk, he came out with a column (Opens in a new window) praising Kirk for “practicing politics the right way.” It was a rather bizarre piece: Klein invented a fully sanitized version of Kirk, suggesting that he either knew very little about the man and his role on the Right – or had decided that presenting a fictionalized character was worth it if it allowed him to make the point he wanted to make.
Klein has been widely (Opens in a new window) and rightfully criticized (Opens in a new window) for that piece, for whitewashing Kirk (Opens in a new window) and for valorizing the work of a man who mobilized his audience via the activation of racial and male grievance, whose engagement in “debate” was only ever geared towards mocking his opponents and creating sound bites he could use to fearmonger and scandalize.
The most prominent critique came from Ta-Nehisi Coates (Opens in a new window) – which prompted Klein to invite him on the podcast. Their conversation is a little awkward at times, for two reasons: Klein and Coates are friends, and both are noticeably uncomfortable with having a public dispute. And there is also a significant disconnect between them. “Why do you think he was winning,” Klein asks Coates early on in the conversation, referring to Kirk’s success with a mass audience on the Right; “why are we losing?” He seems to expect answers about political strategy and tactics, actionable advice for Democratic consultants. But Coates insists that his role as a writer and public intellectual is not to help the Democratic Party prepare election campaigns – his obligation is to the truth, to understanding and exploring this moment in U.S. history, where it sits in the context of the struggle for freedom and democracy that has defined this country at all times, how being victimized by political violence has always shaped the Black experience. This seems to frustrate Klein, who has a much more immediate perspective on what is going in America: “We’ve written a lot of people off,” he argues, without ever making it entirely clear who the “We” is that he keeps bringing up. The liberal elite, the Democratic Party, the Left… something like that. For someone who is generally so policy-oriented, it’s quite remarkable how Klein doesn’t present any concrete evidence for his central assertion – beyond getting pretty worked up about Hillary Clinton infamously declaring that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” in a speech in September 2016 (Opens in a new window). For Klein, that is all the evidence needed. He doesn’t care about Clinton’s actual argument in that speech, however awkwardly presented, that was less about writing off the “deplorables” and much more about not writing off those supporters of Donald Trump who might be understandably frustrated by the system simply not working for them. Or about looking at the Democratic platform in 2016, or the governing record of the Biden era, to see whether or not his assertion is backed up by actual policy. Or about exploring what we do and do not know about the motivations of Trump voters in 2024 and whether that aligns with his blanket statement. All he gives us is soundbite punditry.
Where are the lines?
Klein is desperate to get Coates to agree with him that a reconciliation with the Right, restoring some form of political and civic unity, must take precedent now: “We are going to have to live here with one another,” (Opens in a new window) as Klein put it in another column in the wake of the Kirk murder. For Coates, however, the real issue is who will get to define the conditions under which Americans coexist: “For me, the bigger question is: Where are the lines?”
Klein is eager to pick up on that idea: Where is the line? “What does it mean to be on the other side of the line?” Coates answers: “If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.”
This prompts Klein to ask: “And so what do you do with the fact that so many people think that is OK?”
It is worth quoting at length the next passage in the conversation where Klein outlines his own thinking around this question, and why he ultimately believes holding the line, or drawing the line in the first place, might be a mistake:
“I think that one reality is that the president of the United States is a person who, in his comportment as a human being on the public stage, I would have said in 2008, 2012, in 2016, should be on the other side of the line. … I think he’s a person who does not act with any sense of public, or even personal, decency. … And then he won in ’16, lost sort of narrowly in ’20 and then won in 2024. And the thing that this 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 the thing that I am struggling with is that for most people, or a lot of people, the plurality of the voters in the last election: He is somehow not way over the line. That means there are a lot of people who are willing to accept things that I thought we would have found unacceptable. I would have thought that the way he acts in public is unacceptable. And it’s not. So, I think for me … there was a view that we could work with politics by drawing these lines. That there are people who are going to be inside them and outside them, and we could work that way. I am working with the question of: What happens if you don’t believe that? If you don’t control the line?”
Ezra Klein never crosses into explicitly arguing that what Donald Trump is saying and doing is fine, acceptable, respectable. And purely on a diagnostic level, he is evidently correct: Many millions of Americans do not consider Trump beyond the pale, they do not agree he is outside the boundaries of the acceptable – or it certainly hasn’t stopped them from voting for the man and elevating him to the most powerful political position on earth.
But this isn’t just diagnostics. Klein’s position is entirely based on the assumption that liberal America must reconsider its relationship with Trump. “We” have (supposedly) tried to ostracize him, shun him, scandalize him. But it hasn’t worked. Drawing the line hasn’t worked. And with so many millions of fellow Americans supporting the man, it might not be justified anymore either.
Notice how Klein describes the results of the past two presidential elections: Trump “lost sort of narrowly in ‘20” – that was a 4.5-point win for Joe Biden; but Democrats “got our asses handed to us” in 2024 – which was just a 1.5-point loss. That’s a rather tendentious way of characterizing these numbers, isn’t it? The insinuation is clear: Forget the numbers, “the people” are with Trump. The people spoke, and Liberals have no right to declare the people’s choice unacceptable, to consider the people’s tribune to be beyond the pale. Klein’s decision to whitewash and valorize Charlie Kirk should be seen in this context: As Kirk was successful with millions on the Right, Ezra Klein redrew the line to include him within the realm of the respectable, the noble.
Apologist sleight of hand
If this were just the personal opinion of one – albeit very famous – New York Times columnist, it would hardly be worth paying so much attention to it. But this isn’t about Ezra Klein, really. This tendency to obscure the radicalization of the Right, to normalize and legitimize rightwing extremism, to accommodate Trumpism, is a pervasive feature of the Trump era – it is one of its core pathologies. Since the mainstream discourse stipulates that extremism must be “fringe” in these United States, anything that has broad support is reflexively sanitized as not extremism. This apologist sleight of hand is often deployed to provide cover for extreme forces within the Republican Party: If extremism is not defined by its ideological and political substance, but as “something fringe,” then the minute it becomes GOP mainstream, it ceases to be regarded as extremism. And just like that, not only do extremist ideas and policies get automatically legitimized - by definition, the Republican Party, regardless of how substantively extreme, also gets treated as “normal” simply because it ain’t fringe, because it’s supported by almost half the country.
Remember when many a member of the polite society commentariat (Opens in a new window) reacted with indignation to Joe Biden calling MAGA “semi-fascism” (Opens in a new window) before the 2022 midterm elections? The mere suggestion that something extreme, something sort-of-fascist-ish, could have mass appeal in the United States was treated as a scandal (Opens in a new window), an outrageous gaffe, peak liberal arrogance. Or think of how the discourse quickly changed when the election results came in last November. When Donald Trump staged an openly fascistic rally in Madison Square Garden shortly before the election, even mainstream outlets were willing to acknowledge that he was offering something that was aggressively hostile to democratic pluralism. But then he won, and the discourse quickly shifted to how he had mobilized a multi-racial coalition and how that supposedly made any talk about MAGA being defined by white male grievance and Christian nationalism obsolete.
If we take a step back for a second, the idea that if a political movement garners mass support, it can’t possibly be extremism, incompatible with democratic self-government, or beyond the pale in a broader cultural and societal sense is utterly implausible and historically illiterate. History is full of authoritarian movements that had mass appeal (the Nazis, to mention the obvious example, were supported by anywhere from 30 to 40 per cent of the German population when they rose to power in the early 1930s). And we don’t have to look to history at all: Orbán was supported by about half the voting public in the last Hungarian parliamentary election in 2022, and no one seriously argues that the AfD, which currently leads the national polls in Germany, is not the political home of German rightwing extremism.
Pathologies of the American political discourse
Because Donald Trump has the support of millions of Americans, he can’t possibly be a dangerous extremist (Opens in a new window), his ascent was never a real threat (Opens in a new window) to the survival of the Republic, and liberals should finally stop indulging the “great moral panic,” (Opens in a new window) as a Washington Post columnist put it, that democracy is under assault… It’s an argument so facile, so implausible, so ahistoric that it’s worth unpacking why it has any credibility at all, to the point where smart, well-informed people like Ezra Klein are swayed by such notions.
First of all, the argument finds fertile ground in a deep-seated myth of American exceptionalism. In its purest form, it holds that Americans are essentially immune to authoritarianism of any kind – the “soul of the nation” won’t allow it, or the country’s DNA, or the freedom-loving national character… The political mainstream has generally – or at least rhetorically – moved to a slightly more nuanced understanding of the American story. But the collective imaginary is very much still grounded in exceptionalist ideas. Just think of how many times you have heard politicians utter the phrase “This is not who we are!” when referring to racism and white supremacy. On the basis of such exceptionalist mythology, examples of extremism garnering mass support elsewhere in the world don’t count: Sure, other societies might be susceptible to authoritarianism’s siren call… but this is America! Remarkably, such arguments must also ignore that America has had plenty of experience with broad popular support for state authoritarianism in its own history. Significant parts of the country existed first as a slavocracy and then, after a brief interlude during Reconstruction, as a one-party apartheid regime during the so-called Jim Crow era. During the same period, Native Americans were disenfranchised, dispossessed, and persecuted by the American state. However, this fundamental historical reality gets obscured by the fact that throughout its existence, the United States has conceived of itself as a democracy. And while that isn’t necessarily wrong, depending on the definition of “democracy,” it has installed in the nation’s collective imagination the idea of a glorious democratic past stretching back 250 years: The world’s oldest democracy, stable and consolidated – it is hard to reconcile mass support for Trumpian extremism with such notions.
Secondly, this tendency to latch onto any argument that helps to normalize Trump and his supporters is also indicative of how strong the incentives are within mainstream discourse to sanitize the political choices of white conservative Christians. We are constantly asked to presume benign motives and reach for non-incriminating explanations. They are just “regular folks,” and as such, they can do no wrong. Usually, this is achieved by exculpatory tales about why they didn’t mean to or had to support extremism. Maybe they were seduced by a brilliant demagogue; maybe they lack political agency entirely: Economic anxiety, anti-elite backlash, or just a reaction to Liberals being mean – someone or something made them do it. Whenever people rode waves of racial resentment to political prominence, their success has been described in such terms. Whether it was George Wallace’s surprisingly successful presidential run in 1968 or David Duke’s near-victory in the 1990 senate election in Louisiana.
This, here, is a slightly different variation of this sanitizing myth: White innocence is achieved not by justifying and apologizing widespread support for political extremism - but by decreeing that whatever a significant portion of “regular folks” are supporting categorically cannot be extremism in the first place.
Finally, underlying such arguments that “we must live here with one another” and therefore cannot afford to draw lines is a striking inability to separate between Republican voters and the political leaders of the American Right. I want to be careful not to exculpate Trump’s voters: As a default assumption, we should take them seriously and assume they knew who they were voting for – which means we can hold them accountable for the results of their political choices. At the very least, they did not consider Trump’s open promise of instituting a white nationalist purge and erecting a vindictive autocracy a deal-breaker. But that is still not the same as arguing that everyone who voted for Trump is an extremist who is fully on board with what Russell Vought and Stephen Miller want to do to America. There are certainly those who are, who believe a dose of Trumpian extremism is exactly what this country needs right now. Some are just fascists, or people who vehemently reject modern society and aggressively disdain multiracial, multi-religious pluralism. There is another big bucket of people who, while not considering themselves rightwing extremists, are giving themselves permission to make common cause with the extreme Right by either prioritizing a very narrowly defined self-interest (taxes!) – or by telling themselves radical measures are needed against what is supposedly the real, more acute threat: “the Left.” And then there is a third group that voted for Trump based on a vague combination of “vibes,” a generalized frustration with the system (and Democrats as the party in charge as well as the “system party”), and a hefty dose of ignorance and disbelief, either unaware of what the Trumpists were really planning or convinced that they wouldn’t be able to implement it anyway. My point is: It really is worth grappling with the reasons why Trump still garners mass support. But that’s a very different endeavor from simply using Trump’s mass appeal as a justification to normalize MAGA. That is not any more serious of an argument than claiming Trump can’t be racist because some Black people and Latinos voted for him.
Why are liberal elites so eager to move the line?
There is one more factor that helps explain the eagerness of influential people in the (small-d) democratic coalition to accommodate and acquiesce: The position of the liberal commentator in the discourse, and the role he assigns to himself. As America falls apart, Ezra Klein aspires to be the voice of reason and demonstrate that he can still operate across the divide and do politics where everyone else has given up on it. Some of this is intended to demonstrate how magnanimously above the partisan fray one is: a performances of faux-high-mindedness. There is, in Ezra Klein’s case, also a genuine desire to model good democratic behavior. But trying to find ways to do politics with the other side is not the same as creating a sanitized fiction of the other side as the basis of your politics. There is acknowledging the political realities and adapting to a new situation – and then there is denying that reality so that you can continue to do “normal politics” because that is what you are more comfortable with.
Too many prominent liberals and Democratic politicians are jumping at the chance to sacrifice a substantive commitment to democratic values and principles on the altar of “unity.” “I don’t get to draw the line,” Ezra Klein told Ta-Nehisi Coates. I don’t get to divide the county, he meant to say. And if alleviating “division” were the overriding concern, he would be right. But from a democratic standpoint, drawing a line and attempting to hold it means grounding your politics in substantive commitments that are non-negotiable. By not drawing a line, Klein isn’t fostering understanding. He runs the risk of helping to establish an aggressively anti-democratic movement and its leaders as legitimate.
Hold the line
There is a tone of despair in Ezra Klein’s voice – and that I share wholeheartedly. He is right to be dismayed at the state of the country, at what the continued mass support for Donald Trump says about America. “I have lines that I think should and should not be acceptable, but those lines clearly have no relationship to my country and its politics,” he told Coates. That is certainly true in the sense that there is indeed no consensus over where those lines are and who gets to draw them. There never was. It is true, therefore, that those who think Donald Trump should be beyond the pale cannot claim to be representing “the country” – but neither can the Trumpists. America is deeply divided over exactly that question. There has never been a consensus that the nation should exist as a pluralistic democracy. And right now, those who fundamentally reject that vision are in power. But the reaction to that reality should not be to abandon our democratic commitments in search for unity.
“I don’t get to draw the line,” Ezra Klein says. He is right, of course, in a narrow sense; but the larger implication – Who am I to draw the line? – is exactly wrong. Democracy depends on all of us, and especially those with a broader public platform, drawing the line. What that looks like in practice, in our professional lives and private interactions, depends on our individual personal situation. But it is an obligation that we must accept. Who are we to draw the line? We are citizens who demand to live in a democratic Republic.
