Manufacturing His Fascist Legacy
Ezra Klein’s new career turn is to legitimize the fascist coup.
The recent Ezra Klein–Ben Shapiro conversation reveals precisely the fatal flaw I identified in Futility of The Klein-Hazony Dialogue, the liberal delusion that fascism can be debated into civility. Klein’s framing of Charlie Kirk’s murder makes this clear. While expressing grief, he simultaneously whitewashes Kirk’s role as a fascist ideologue by treating his death as equivalent to criticism of his politics. This rhetorical sleight of hand collapses the distinction between a fascist leader being killed and the entirely legitimate denunciation of his movement. It is liberalism’s stock-in-trade to transform the fight against fascism into an issue of civility, as though fascism were a simple matter of tone.
Kirk, like Shapiro and Trump, did not merely express “conservative” opinions, he openly organized for fascist politics. Trump, restored to power with nearly half the electorate behind him, embodies the fascist project today. Yet Klein insists that “we are going to have to live with one another,” as though fascists were just another community of opinionated citizens. This is the essence of liberalism’s cowardice, it confuses tolerance with survival. But fascism is not a viewpoint to be respected, it is an existential threat to be annihilated. To suggest we must “find what we can recognize in one another” with our would-be executioners is not bridge-building. It is surrender.
The conversation itself, by treating Shapiro as a legitimate partner in dialogue, becomes part of the reproduction of fascist power. Klein is not engaging in free exchange of ideas; he is laundering reactionary ideology through liberal respectability. This is precisely what the Frankfurt School described as repressive tolerance, tolerating the intolerable in the name of pluralism, which in practice protects reaction and neutralizes resistance. Klein’s liberal pluralism does not challenge fascism; it normalizes it. The act of giving Shapiro a mainstream platform grants him intellectual legitimacy and folds his dehumanizing rhetoric into the field of acceptable discourse.
A materialist analysis makes clear why this is happening. Fascism is not merely a collection of “bad ideas,” nor is it a random turn in political taste. It is, as history demonstrates, the ruling class’s emergency measure in times of capitalist crisis, when parliamentary democracy can no longer guarantee accumulation and order. As I argued in Rest in Piss Charlie Kirk, the fascist playbook is simple, redirect popular anger away from capital and toward scapegoats, sanctify reactionary leaders as martyrs when they fall, and deploy violence against the working class in the name of “restoring” civilization. That is exactly what we are witnessing now. Kirk’s death has already been weaponized by the right, turned into evidence of left-wing “terror” requiring an authoritarian crackdown. Klein’s rhetoric provides the moral vocabulary to make this inversion stick.
Klein’s claim that Kirk deserves recognition because he “showed up” on college campuses illustrates the bankruptcy of liberal pluralism. By this logic, even explicit neo-Nazis, provided they gather a crowd, must be considered legitimate voices. But mainstream acceptance does not validate ideas; it indicts the political order that normalizes them. Fascist ideologues like Kirk or Shapiro are not worthy of respect because they are “popular.” They are popular because the institutions of capital, including media, think tanks, and universities, allow them to be. Klein’s pluralism is not neutrality but complicity in this process of normalization.
By urging us to “find what we can recognize in one another,” and that “sometimes that might mean overlooking what we can’t recognize in one another,” Klein is quietly prescribing a moral truce that amounts to a willful blind eye. Overlooking what, precisely? Not mere differences of taste but the organized machinery of exclusion, the openly conspiratorial projects to strip whole populations of rights, and the everyday terror inflicted on migrants, queer people, Black communities, and the poor. That ability to overlook is not a neutral virtue. It is the luxury of those whose security rests on property and privilege.
When Klein begs us to overlook the unrecognizable grimace of authoritarianism, he is asking those endangered by fascism to accept their own erasure for the sake of polite society. This kind of live and let live attitude is not enlightened nor is it kindness; it is complicity in the consolidation of a fascist power coup. The only ethical response to fascism is to refuse the injunction to look away and to bind solidarity to struggle, because recognition without redistribution only cements the rule of the oppressor.
Shapiro, dressed up as a “reasonable conservative,” is in reality a propagandist for fascist ideology. His “Lions and Scavengers” framework is pure social Darwinism, casting progressives and the marginalized as parasites gnawing at the flesh of civilization. This rhetoric is not academic debate, it is ideological preparation for violence. Its function is to dehumanize political opponents so that their repression or elimination appears not only permissible but necessary. Klein’s respectful engagement with this garbage provides it cover, obscuring its fascist essence under the veneer of “civilized debate.”
Klein’s handwringing about political violence reveals the liberal incapacity to distinguish between the violence of oppressors and the resistance of the oppressed. In his framing, denouncing Kirk’s eliminationist politics is equivalent to Kirk’s own threats of violence. This is false equivalence at its most grotesque. By treating both sides as equally extreme, Klein follows the same path that all liberal traditions who fell to fascisms allure followed; they side with order over justice, authority over liberation, and civility over civilization. His complaint about online algorithms amplifying extremism may be correct as far as it goes, but it ignores the fundamental point that these platforms are capitalist enterprises. They privilege reactionary content because outrage generates profit. They suppress leftist voices not because of some quirk of programming but because the material interests of capital align with reaction, not emancipation.
The silence on class is deafening. Neither Klein nor Shapiro can admit that capitalism itself creates the conditions for fascism. Capitalist society ensures that the rich man lives at the expense of the poor, and when wages fall, rents rise, and environmental catastrophe advances, working people’s anger demands an outlet. If not organized through class struggle, it is captured by demagogues. Fascism channels this rage toward scapegoats, immigrants, Black people, queer communities, while leaving the real exploiters untouched. This is no accident; the bourgeoisie prefers fascist scapegoating to working-class organization. That is why Shapiro blames the oppressed for society’s decline while Klein calls for civility rather than revolution.
Here we see the dialectic of liberalism and fascism. Liberalism imagines itself as the rational middle ground, the protector of discourse, yet in practice, it functions as the incubator of reaction. By refusing to acknowledge antagonism, liberalism ensures fascism is treated as a legitimate partner rather than a mortal enemy. This is not merely an intellectual failure, but an ideological function. Liberal intellectuals like Klein serve capital by neutralizing resistance, turning existential struggles into academic debates. In doing so, they perform their historical role as guardians of bourgeois hegemony.
The alternative is not liberal nostalgia but organized class struggle. The conditions that generate fascism, widening inequality, collapsing wages, and ecological disaster cannot be debated away in podcast conversations. They must be confronted by constructing counter-power, unions, tenants’ organizations, mutual aid networks, and community defense rooted in working-class life. As Engels wrote in Anti-Dühring, “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” Fascism will not be reasoned with; it must be destroyed and replaced with something better.
The Klein-Shapiro dialogue is the perfect expression of liberalism’s terminal crisis. Where earlier generations understood fascism as an existential threat to be defeated, neoliberal liberalism treats it as an intellectual position to be “understood.” Politics becomes an academic seminar while fascists seize the streets and state power. Klein’s liberal civility does not mitigate this danger; it accelerates it. His project of mutual recognition is not a cure but a weapon in the hands of the enemy.
History offers no middle ground. Fascism must be destroyed utterly. Trump’s second term, cloaked in democratic pretenses, is fascism in American form. Klein’s refusal to name this reality makes him complicit in the normalization of authoritarianism. The task is not to listen more carefully to Shapiro or mourn Kirk as a tragic figure but to organize the working class to defend itself against both liberal betrayal and fascist reaction. The choice is not between dialogue and violence in the abstract; it is between their violence and our resistance, between fascism and freedom.
Or, as Buenaventura Durruti taught us, “The only church that illuminates is a burning church.”