Pull Up the Roots
Breakfast for dinner.
This excerpt is one of the stupidest things I've ever read. Watching people gush over Ezra Klein's reheated neoliberal, elite-centric bullshyt as "the way forward" is embarrassing. This kind of analysis sounds smart until you realize it's built on vibes, not facts.
It's also a brazen lie to claim that Democrats moved "sharply left on virtually every issue" between 2012 and 2024 when the party's actual record shows a *moderate* course correction *at best.* Supporting higher corporate taxes, modest industrial policy, or expanding the child tax credit is not "far left" anywhere outside of Beltway fantasyland. Democrats still catered to capital, they still obsessed over deficit reduction, and still deferred to developers on housing. The "sharp left turn" narrative only exists in the heads of pundits who panic whenever policy shifts even slightly away from donor-class orthodoxy.
And the idea that Democrats "moved left on race and lost Black voters" is comically detached from reality. Black voters didn't drift because the party got too progressive -- they drifted because the party under-delivered. It's also insulting to make that claim while ignoring how voter suppression played a larger part in that fracturing. Reducing that to "they moved too far left" erases the material reasons people lose faith. Like, ask yourself this: If "moving left on race" means addressing systemic racism, how would that alienate Black voters -- the very group most affected by those issues? There's no logic in his analysis.
Same with "they moved left on economics and lost the working class." First, he needs to stop hiding his hand here and say "white working-class." And acknowledge how that demographic has voted since party realignment and before. You can't ignore that crucial dynamic if you want your analysis to be taken seriously.
The GOP didn't win white working-class voters by outflanking Democrats economically, it won them through culture wars, resentment politics, and decades of right-wing media indoctrination. He's pretending a handful of social media progressives are the Democratic Party while ignoring the corporate donors and consultants who still run the show.
His entire framing reeks of the kind elite detachment that intentionally confuses rhetorical progressivism (more inclusive rhetoric, social awareness, online activism) with structural leftism (redistribution, public investment, labor power). Then it blames the former for every electoral challenge while letting the real failures of neoliberal policy off the hook.
Klein's argument is backward. If Democrats have a problem, it's that they didn't move left enough in economic power, labor rights, housing, and accountability for corporate capture -- you know, things that actually matter.
