Just off the rip Ezra seems to be the type of pundit that frames real life... consequential politics in a flippantly shallow perspective or position of a some sort of sporting contest or a weekend run through the Vegas casinos.
Like this isn't 3 card monte, there's no quick fix touchdown play “Philly Special” or magical overnight one hitter quitter tactic that you can pick up and toss out there to win power and solve the deeply entrenched socio-political issues that this country has consistently been constrained by since it's inception and there never has been…. These are issues that people have been fighting against for hundreds of years now in this country but he wants the quick answer and to shorten the historical frame of reference for this discussion to exclude that reality... Which is why he constantly tried to evade engaging whenever Coates would attempt to ground him in a HISTORICAL political reality that black people have been experiencing since we got here.
He like many non-blacks doesn't have the lived or ancestral passed down experiences to digest the very sober matter of fact macro level self aware understanding of “winning and losing” that Ta-Nehisi is operating from which leads him to believing the solution is simply thiemmicro strategy of capitulation to the opposition through one or more of the below get rich quick style schemes
“We just need to go on Joe Rogan”
“Lets run candidates who’s policies chase our base away because it's a purple disctric even though the polling data says people don't want that”
“Why not make more agitator style hot take content in conservative spaces”
Like these things SOUND possibly reasonable in isolation but none of these attempts are specifically strategic in themselves and certainly can't be seen as the cure holistically, and even more headscrating is the irony of Ezra pleading with his liberal audience to follow the so-called conservative playbook on amassing power while ignoring THEIR number #1 strategy which is submitting to a complete absolutist dedication of their OWN right winged racist nationalist political ideology. Doubling tripping down on it even. Which is the opposite of what Ezra suggests liberals do.
MAGA isn't trying to do this nonsensical political tightrope walk of reaching across the isle to find common ground with their opponents. Hell fukk no, they won by leaning deeeeeply away from any kind of moderate or collaborative instincts…. They leaned deeply into radicalism and grew their base by activating people who were otherwise disinterested in “politics” all together.. Which Ezra seems adverse to doing... MAGA made NEW coalitions, they didn't chase after old ones and that was intentional ...its counter intuitive at best and disingenuous at the least to ask liberals to immulate conservative political success when you're saying that the main insight libs should take from them is to pacify instead of completely defeat your opponents ideology… it doesn't square with any reality of the conservative movement at all.
Ezra strikes me as the type that would have been arguing that blacks were asking for “too much” during the civil rights era because he is afraid of taking principled stances against the majority due to whatever negative ramifications he thinks that will cause HIM regardless of the negative consequences that inaction would have on the larger impacted group … he thinks that embracing bigots will protect people from more bigotry lol... It's asinine.
This is clearly the fist time that he has felt politically and socially vulnerable (a reality that black people in this country inherently have been forced to navigate in as Coates keeps trying to articulate) and his natural instics in that state of discomfort is to immediately find ways to SELF preserve by sacrificing things that aren't as theeating to HIM personally. As someone mentioned previously, he's the kind of moderate non black MLK warned about. The kind that would have no problem selling others down the river to protect himself.
Coates summed the ills of Ezra’s whole perspective up perfectly when he said:
“You take very seriously the need to convince the people outside of the tent right now to come in…. I want you to take as seriously the need to KEEP the people already in the tent there”
In all of his MAGA political strategy fawning, this is the reality of what MAGA does that he misses. You have to motivate YOUR base first. And you're not going to do that by gaslightghing them or lecturing them about how they need to move closer to the opposition that's actively trying to harm them. It's not what the MAGA strategy that he wants to emulate does, It's bad politics, its nonsensical logically, and just simply wrong from a human perspective.
Trump's PLAN LEAKED to Press, Dems SECRETLY HELPING Him?!"
