I’m glad you posted that because I caught up to it on my Saturday run and wanted to discuss it.
Regardless of whether @wildcat09 thinks him a dipshit, their back and forth mirrored the conversation going on in the shutdown thread and it’s essentially between the activist side and the pragmatic side. The activist side says “we have to stick to our principles in order to convince voters that we’ll standby them”, while the pragmatic side is “swing voters don’t like us, so let’s try to look more appealing to them.”
Ta-Nehisi’s best point, in my opinion (and even though I disagree with it) is that the things the Democrats need to do to appeal Trump voters requires they abandon groups they have tried to protect (this is in response to Ezra’s suggestion that the Dems need to run pro-life candidates in red states).
I’ve always struggled with Ta-Nahesi’s viewpoints because he seems overly concerned with black rights and the black experience at the expense of any other minority groups, and that’s how the first hour of the interview went, but the last 20 minutes or so he departed from that a bit and it was a better look at challenging Klein’s attempts to find a moderate position with Kirk’s support.
My second favorite part was Ezra’s struggle to articulate what he thinks his role is-is he a provocateur pushing the party, a public intellectual, an ideas guy, etc., largely because I’m asking those same questions as Joe Citizen about what I and the rest of us should be doing.
And that was my favorite part 👌