Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Steven Pinker, and the Fragility of Norms

I’ve been listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast for years. His series on AI or Israel have been consistently enlightening, but lately he’s turned more directly to the state of America itself, the forces reshaping it, and the history that brought us here.

His latest episode, Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines, is a striking one. Klein speaks with Coates, a longtime colleague and friend, who had taken issue with an earlier episode on Charlie Kirk. Coates responded in Vanity Fair with an essay now titled Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause. (It appears it originally circulated under a different title—one of those quiet edits that often happen online.)

What makes the conversation worth listening to isn’t the clash so much as how much they actually share, and how they wrestle with their disagreements in public.

Coates’s critique is sharp:

“By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy.”

He notes that Klein’s earlier praise for Kirk was odd because it contained “not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.” The irony of that omission becomes sharper when you read what Kirk actually said. In 2022, for instance, Kirk encouraged fathers at a swim meet to form a line and confront a trans athlete: “Hey, tough guy, you want to get in the pool? ’Cause you’re gonna have to come through us.”

Against that backdrop, the podcast’s pivotal moment comes when Klein wonders aloud why Democrats don’t do what Kirk does: go into hostile territory and sell their message. Coates pushes back: “Should we go to a Christian nationalist church and force a debate about abortion?”

It’s a devastating question, because the answer is obvious: that doesn’t work. Kirk could do it because he had long enjoyed a certain protection. The social norms—whether of moral sense, decorum, or mutual respect—as well as the privileges that sheltered some Americans, worked in his favor. He had little to lose by ignoring those norms, so long as everyone else abided by them. But for Coates or someone like him, the risk wouldn’t just be boos and heckling; in some places, it could mean a mob, even violence. That double standard has always existed. And that was before Trump, who has shown, as Steven Pinker reminds us, how norms only hold when they are common knowledge. Once that shared understanding breaks, once people no longer believe others will uphold the rules, norms unravel.

This is where Steven Pinker’s recent work resonates. On Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara, Pinker discussed his book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. His point: norms aren’t just “what people do.” They depend on common knowledge. Everyone knows the rule, knows that others know it, knows that others know that they know, and so on. Break that chain, and the norm collapses.

Trump, Pinker argues, created “a new norm—making truth optional.” By flouting rules with impunity, he showed that what was once common knowledge (“you can’t just lie openly and expect to get away with it”) no longer held. That unraveling leaves us in uncharted territory.

So when people say “why don’t Democrats just do what Kirk does,” the answer is partly: because it’s dangerous, and partly: because it’s not the same moral terrain. To use Kirk’s tactics would be to accept his terms. And if norms are already crumbling, the fight for America’s future won’t be about mimicry. It will require a different kind of courage, the kind that insists on fairness even in unfair conditions, and one that refuses to mistake recklessness for strength.

NB: Some commentators, including a recent piece in The Bulwark, ask why Democrats don’t have their own Charlie Kirk or Turning Point USA. But Kirk’s success in today’s atmosphere—of fake news, virality, and sound bites—depends on stepping outside the practices of a norm-bound society. To copy his methods would not only be dangerous for Democrats; it would mean discarding the very norms they seek to defend.