Just days after New York Times columnist Ezra Klein claimed that Charlie Kirk’s career of spewing hateful rhetoric against women, Black people, and queer people meant that he was “practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Klein is at it again with another harebrained take. This time, the author and Democratic retreat speaker suggested that the Democratic Party should embrace anti-abortion candidates in order to win elections and halt the country’s authoritarian drift.
In a podcast interview with his colleague Ross Douthat published on Thursday, Klein said the following, emphasis mine:
And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.
Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.
And one of my biggest frustrations with many people whose politics I otherwise share is the unwillingness to match the seriousness of your politics to the seriousness of your alarm. I see a Democratic Party that often just wants to do nothing differently, even though it is failing—failing in the most obvious and consequential ways it can possibly fail.
This is so many levels of wrong, I don’t even know where to start. I suppose I’ll begin by saying that Republicans and independents support abortion access, it’s just not their top issue. This is how four states that voted for Donald Trump in November also passed constitutional amendments enshrining abortion access—including Klein’s example of Missouri. Kansas and Ohio also passed pro-choice amendments in 2022 and 2023, respectively, then reelected Trump last year. So it beggars belief that Republicans would vote in the blue column if only an anti-abortion Democrat were running. No, they are voting for conservatives for other reasons. Those reasons include villainizing immigrants and “wokeness” as the purported reasons why voters can’t afford anything, when the actual reasons are the GOP’s hatred of labor unions and love of billionaires.
Meanwhile, Klein’s claim that people alarmed at the direction of the country need to compromise on abortion access ignores the reams of evidence that prove how restricting abortion rights goes hand-in-hand with authoritarian governance. As his own employer reported in 2021, “Curbs on women’s rights tend to accelerate in backsliding democracies, a category that includes the United States, according to virtually everyindependentmetric and watchdog.” We have state abortion bans in this country because our government is no longer responsive to the will of the people. Further capitulating now will only make things worse, you simpleton.
As for Klein saying that the Democratic Party “wants to do nothing differently,” it actually already has a long history of embracing anti-abortion politics and has never fully supported bodily autonomy. Former president Joe Biden could barely muster a defense of the right to choose, and when he did, he still infected it with anti-abortionstigma. Rather than rejecting any government interference—which would be a real difference—Democrats have always compromised by allowing states and the federal government to ban the procedure later in pregnancy under the Roe v. Wade framework.
But, apparently, it’s not just Klein who thinks like this. After an anti-abortion writer shared a snippet of this interview on Twitter, writing, “Ezra Klein says the more worried you are about authoritarianism, the more willing you’ve got to be to run run pro-life Democrats in red states,” Neera Tanden, former domestic policy advisor to Biden and current CEO of the think tank the Center for American Progress, chimed in.
Tanden wrote, “This is something people really have to take seriously. We need to expand the tent.” But in the eyes of top Democratic advisors, the tent always expands to the right—never to the left. Progress! It’s a shame that her former boss didn’t take seriously the threat of a national abortion ban under a second Trump term, and chose to run for re-election, instead of bowing out and allowing for a primary, when he was not physically up to the task.
(By the way, the original poster, Leah Libresco Sargeant, argued in the Times for women to treat ectopic pregnancies by having a fallopian tube removed rather than getting an injection of methotrexate. Sargeant would love for Democrats to give up on what is her top issue.)
Ezra Klein 🤝 Neera TandenDespite the overwhelming popularity of abortion rights in all states, we should surrender instead
Democrats should do things differently to win Senate seats in states like Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri. But seeing as I’m not someone who whitewashes people with hateful legacies, I have some other ideas about what that entails. The cure for GOP’s racist and xenophobic scapegoating over the economy is to clean up corruption and actually take care of people by doing things like: ban members of Congress from trading stocks, increase corporate tax rates and fully fund the IRS to catch wealthy tax cheats, support Medicare for all or at the very least a public option, cap more prescription drug prices, permanently repeal the anti-abortion Hyde Amendment, co-sponsor the PRO Act to end anti-union “right to work” laws, establish postal banking, pass Congressional term limits, and co-sponsor an amendment overturn Citizens United. Oh, and end arms sales to the Israeli government.
Instead of throwing people who need abortions under the bus, maybe Klein—and those who agree with him—should consider…not.
