Spineless Democrats Stuck in 1996 Like Ezra Klein Should Just Admit They’re Anti-Abortion

By Jacob Weindling | September 22, 2025 | 12:13pm

Screenshot via The Ezra Klein Show on YouTube

Elections Democratic Party

Spineless Democrats Stuck in 1996 Like Ezra Klein Should Just Admit They’re Anti-Abortion

Ezra Klein is proof that there is no actual generational split in the Democratic Party, and terminal 1996 brain is a mindset that anyone of any age can adopt. The man was born a couple years before me, but the way he thinks about politics, you would think he was a top staffer at the 1996 Democratic National Convention doing the Macarena next to Hillary Clinton. I wrote last week how Klein’s “Charlie Kirk did politics the right way” article in the New York Times was the political equivalent of people who believe that professional wrestling is real, and Klein has continued to lean into his idiotic Republican instincts, stepping in it again in a conversation with Ross Douthat detailing how he can be an even bigger mark.

They were talking about what everyone has talked about since November, how Democrats can win elections and make America stop hating their guts. Klein, who performs one of America’s preeminent Very Serious shticks that has grabbed the attention of powerful Democrats, got Very Serious about Democrats needing to embrace a “willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win. Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri,” wrote Klein. “Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.” Neera Tanden, the current president and CEO of the top Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, shared this quote and wrote, “This is something people really have to take seriously. We need to expand the tent.”

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We do need to expand the tent, but using the tradeoff at the heart of President Bartlet’s grand (idiotic) bargain does not exactly help powerful Democrats like Klein and Tanden fight the allegations that they are stricken with incurable West Wing brain and long to live in a fictional universe. It’s interesting and pretty telling how in the wake of a new poll showing Americans souring on capitalism to a degree they never have, Klein and Tanden aren’t looking to expand the tent towards the nearly half of Americans who don’t view capitalism positively, including 49 percent of Independents, and instead are pursuing an “abundance” agenda centered around deregulating industry. These kinds of spineless Democrats are always looking to capitulate to their right, because they are feckless boobs…or, because they’re old school Republicans who are dismayed that they don’t have a home in either party. Either way, Klein gave away the game in this quote that he doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s talking about, and you can stop taking him seriously forever. He’s just doing full blown Jed Bartlet cosplay and nothing more here.

In 2022, Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected an amendment that would have banned abortion in the state, 59 percent to 41 percent. The next year, voters in Ohio passed Issue 1 easily, by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin, which codified reproductive rights in the Ohio Constitution, effectively restoring the state’s Roe v. Wade-era rights. Elected Missouri Republicans banned abortion, and in November, in a state that Trump won by 18 points, voters also overturned this ban by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent. Kansas has had a staunchly pro-choice Democratic governor since 2019, and Laura Kelly consistently vetoes anti-abortion legislation passed by Kansas’ Congress. Does Ezra Klein know anything that has actually happened in politics recently? Or does he just live his entire life in the fictional universe in his head?

That these are two of the thought leaders among Democratic politicians is proof of how braindead so many Democratic politicians are. Gallup found last year that 60 percent of Americans think that overturning Roe was a bad thing, and that 59 percent did not want it overturned in 2022. These people are inventing a constituency in their head and trying to appeal to it, then calling themselves the grown-ups in the room. Chuck Schumer takes a lot of shit for governing for his fictional invented family, the Baileys, but at least he’s honest about how his politics are animated by a work of pure fiction. Klein and Tanden clearly watch episodes of the West Wing like they’re a PBS documentary.

It says so much that the Democratic Party, currently living closer in time to 2050 than 2000, is animated by a kind of politics from the 1990s who’s crowning achievement was winning 49 percent of the popular vote against what at the time, was seen as the oldest man that major American politics has ever produced (fun fact: Bob Dole in 1996 was nine years younger than Joe Biden is now and six years younger than Trump). These people are professional failures who look at a clear outlier era of politics that was sparked by a recession and fueled by a once-in-a-generation innovation as proof that their narrow conception of politics is actually the only way to win. Pay no attention to the giant Congressional majorities that the New Deal and Great Society Democrats established well through the Reagan era, this party’s sex pest who hung out with Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein apparently figured everything out when he won an election with 43 percent of the popular vote by saying “the era of big government is over.”

I hate these incompetent hacks the party adores so much.

Ezra Klein’s Democratic Party has functionally become America’s conservative party, while the Republicans could not be described as such, and are much more like a revanchist party of sorts. The Democratic Party power center has pretty explicitly run on preserving the status quo since the Hope™ and Change™ election, and have been wholly rejected by a clear majority of America for it, all while they continue to preach a vision of politics that is completely detached from any kind of reality we inhabit. Did Barack Obama win Indiana in 2008 because he ran against abortion? What about North Carolina? Do these people have any idea how any Democrat has won any election since the invention of Gmail?

Democrats like Klein and Tanden portray themselves as savvy politics knowers, but prove they don’t really know anything about the subjects they talk about time and time again. A state that votes for Trump by 18 points and to overturn abortion bans by 4 points is much more complex than the safe space that smooth brains like Tanden and Klein operate in, and if the Democratic Party is truly going to save itself and make strategic and political decisions that make sense in red states and districts, it must stop listening to this group of ideologues whose core principles all revolve around turning back the clock to 1996 where their unpopular brand of politics was a little less unpopular than it is now.