Ezra Klein and the Perils of Misplaced Pluralism

Why are liberals fawning over illiberalism?

Liberals face a nearly impossible challenge in trying to advance our ideas in a society where they are not taken for granted. We have to try to do three things at once:

1. We have to argue passionately for the toleration of ideas we find anathema, including fundamentally illiberal ideas, and to ensure that they find legal protection and a place in the public square up to the point where they cause actual harm and damage to others;

2. We have to model the framework for the civil discourse we believe should shape a healthy democratic society, which at times requires platforming and engaging in good faith with ideas we disagree with;

3. We have to advocate for our liberal commitments themselves, making the case for them, arguing against their opponents. We have to try to win within that very marketplace of ideas that we are trying to preserve.

This means that liberals are trying to both create a fair environment for the distribution of ideas while also keeping a thumb on the scale about the ideas that they believe in. This is a delicate balance, and it is easy to fail. The fear of losing sometimes leads liberals to shut down discourse, while the fear of being seen as hypocritical sometimes leads liberals to spend more time tolerating the intolerable than arguing against it. The line between arguing for societal toleration of bad ideas and trying too hard to make more social space for them is thin and arbitrary.

And the hardest issue, always, is for liberals to determine when under the auspices to a commitment to pluralism we accept in our orbit those who are not committed to pluralism themselves. I’ve long felt that these decisions are hard in practice but conceptually straightforward: Liberals should commit to build pluralistic societies that include anti-pluralists up until the point where the anti-pluralists begin to destroy that very framework. We should build big tents that include everyone besides those that are trying to take down the tent poles. It then becomes incumbent on pluralists to draw lines.

Two cases stand out to me: one from 2020, and one from this week.

In 2020, The New York Times ran a controversial op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the deploying of the United States military into American cities to quell the rioting that emerged following the racial justice reckoning after the murder of George Floyd. Subsequently, and following some outrage, the editors ultimately disparaged the piece as “not meeting editorial standards.” That episode included the sacking of multiple employees involved and Bari Weiss’ dramatic public resignation. Weiss’ argument – part of a larger campaign to restore “classical liberal” values to a society going through a progressive ideological turn – was consistent with my first bullet point above: it maintained that the priority, especially for a newspaper committed to the proliferation of diverse ideas and opinions on the issues of the day, was to maintain as wide a tent as possible. A generous reading of Weiss would claim that Cotton’s piece did not meet the threshold of actually endangering American lives, and that the urgency of pluralism outweighed any imagined threat to the public good. And I agreed with aspects of Weiss’ broader critique that narrow partisan viewpoints were increasingly compromising the public discourse in shutting down ideas that deserved a fair airing.

But I disagreed that defending Cotton was a good test case. I wrote then that the choice in that moment was not as simple as making room for controversial ideas like Cotton’s; but that liberals, who see human life, liberty, and dignity as paramount, should also fight against dangerous ideas that threaten those commitments. I felt Weiss was hiding the football: I suspected that she was not merely making the claim that Cotton’s op-Ed should be published for the benefit of open discourse, but that she agreed with it. This was my judgment, of course, but it was born of Weiss’ public hostility towards the “woke” movements that were powering the racial justice protests. I felt that the obligations of liberals, as I outlined above, included both the advocacy for an open tent and a willingness to make clear which ideas were wrong. That means, in certain cases, the refusal to platform them. To not publish something is not the same as banning it. There is no hypocrisy in liberals not weighting all opinions identically.

This is the spirit in which I find myself dissenting again in the second case, this week’s opinion piece by Ezra Klein and his surprising defense of the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. To date, Klein has largely modeled the liberal approach which I have been describing, with sincerity and in good faith. His track record in opening up debate on Israel and Jewish issues, especially since 10/7, has been admirably balanced: he has sought to create a platform in which genuine disagreement about Israel-Palestine can be aired, while remaining true to the ideological framework of liberalism and with signals of his own commitments.

Klein situates the need to engage with and debate Piker as a case study for this very practice. He writes:

Conversation is not a reward to be bestowed on those with whom we agree; it’s a necessary habit in a democracy. The point is not to find agreement so much as to deepen understanding. To talk with others is to believe in the possibility of change — theirs and your own. Whether you like everything that someone has said should be severed from the question of whether that person is worth talking to.

Yes, this is right, and Klein is also right to note that talking to people you disagree with isn’t just good practice; it is good political strategy. Talking to people you disagree with is also a necessary tool to persuade them that they are wrong. It is a way of holding them accountable. It is a way of forcing them to confront viewpoints counter to their own. We need more of it.

But the test cases are instructive, and I disagreed with Bari Weiss in hers back in 2020; and now I disagree with Ezra Klein. I am shocked that Klein is using Piker to make the case for open discourse. It is not just that Piker has said venomously offensive things — that America deserved 9/11, that the sexual violence on 10/7 was irrelevant, that a “liberal Zionist is a liberal Nazi,” that he stands under the flag of Hezbollah, or that he vastly prefers Hamas to the State of Israel. If Klein’s point was exclusively that our society must broaden the parameters of our pluralism – well, maybe, in a vacuum, and if the only goal was pluralism itself…although, again, in the case of Piker: yuck.

But that’s not really Klein’s argument. Klein is using the liberal principle of pluralism to try to argue that liberals need illiberals like Piker - illiberals who want to destroy liberalism - for the sake of our own political future. He is actually prioritizing the urgency of winning the next election over adherence to liberal principles, and in doing so is savaging those principles along the way. Klein’s argument is that the left needs to find our own demagogues, and to embrace them and their platforms - even to make excuses for them - just as the right has taken advantage of Joe Rogan’s influential platform. This means, in the case of Hasan Piker, embracing the changing of the goalposts in the acceptability of Jew-hatred in liberal societies (despite Klein’s claim sanitizing Piker’s record by saying he has, on one occasion, endorsed a Jewish politician); it means accepting that terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah can be talked about in fawning terms, and normalizing anti-Americanness as a feature of the American liberal order; it means claiming, counterfactually, that the illiberal populism of the unmodulated and unmoderated podcast-host-as-kingmaker is good for democracy when you think it can serve your side.

Liberals must not decide that they need the ugliest forms of illiberalism in order to try to restore our fragile and collapsing liberal order. This was true when it involved defending a US Senator hoping to impose martial law on American cities, and it is true now when it involves the demagogue-ing of our public square and the soft-pedaling of antisemitism. On both sides, violence is the tool of authoritarianism, and the enemy of the liberal project. Piker’s very project involves the delegitimating of the very liberal order by whose rules Klein is playing. Why does Ezra Klein think this is going work? And actually: why would he want it to?

This is a fragile time for pluralism, and we should absolutely stretch beyond our comfort zones to create dialogue across difference. We have to find ways to prevent our culture of hyper-polarization from setting Americans against each other in ways that are disproportionate to our actual disagreements, and to prevent the extremism that opportunistically feeds on hyper-polarization to erode a sane liberal center. Weiss wanted to us to confront the emerging sacred cow of anti-racism in 2020 and to challenge how it was becoming an orthodoxy; Klein wants us to widen the conversation to include a genuine reckoning with the critiques of the anti-Zionists. Liberals should advocate for a public square with a free and fair exchange of ideas, even those that threaten the status quo.

But this is also a fragile time for liberal democracy. Its enemies are on our editorial pages, in public office, on Twitch streams, and wherever your podcasts can be found. They are not challenging our commitments; they are threatening the very rules and norms on which we rely. I know that the fear of losing elections these days is real, and I understand why liberals may want to reject the rules of the game if they perceive that they are not being respected by the other side anyway. And if we go this route, we will win the battle and lose the war.

A liberal society is worth fighting for. We should not capitulate to its enemies in searching for its salvation.