Ezra Klein’s Fictional Politics and the Crisis of Meaning MacIntyre Predicted

On the Loss of Meaning in American Political Commentary

In his September 7th New York Times column, Ezra Klein sets out to warn Democrats against funding the government under Trump, whom he portrays as presiding over a full-fledged “authoritarian consolidation.” The column is framed as a stark alarm: “This is not just how authoritarianism happens. This is authoritarianism happening.”

The line is meant to shock, to sound definitive. What follows is a twenty-two-minute jeremiad, equal parts melodrama and moral panic. Trump is said to preside over an Oval Office “festooned with gold,” to deploy raids and purges, to command cabinet meetings filled with sycophants offering praise that “would have made Saddam Hussein blush.” Klein assures his readers that “Democrats cannot fund this government,” that they must resist complicity in Trump’s “autocratic takeover.”

The problem is not that Trump should be spared criticism — it is essential in a democracy to scrutinize elected leaders. The problem is that Klein’s column does not analyze so much as dramatize.

Yet the column offers us less a map of politics than a script for a serialized dystopia. The problem is not that Trump should be spared criticism — it is essential in a democracy to scrutinize elected leaders. The problem is that Klein’s column does not analyze so much as dramatize. Instead of clarifying what is at stake, it collapses categories into fiction. Words like authoritarianism, corruption, and complicity are deployed as alarms, not concepts. They demand indignation but deny us the standards needed for judgment.

Klein's words perform outrage but cannot ground judgment.

This is precisely what Alasdair MacIntyre diagnosed in After Virtue. Modern political culture, he argued, has inherited fragments of moral language but lost the traditions that gave them sense. “We possess simulacra of morality,” MacIntyre writes. “We continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.” Substitute democracy or politics for morality, and Klein’s column could serve as the illustration. His words perform outrage but cannot ground judgment.

Consider Klein’s favored analogy: “Donald Trump is corrupting the government the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth.”

The metaphor is vivid, but what does it mean? The Mafia was an anti-state order of coercion. The presidency, however disordered, remains a constitutional office embedded in law. To collapse the two is not to clarify reality but to indulge imagination. As MacIntyre would note, this is language detached from the practices that give it intelligibility. “Corruption,” here, is not analyzed as a legal or institutional breach; it is reduced to disgust.

The same failure surfaces in Klein’s strategic musings. He argues Democrats might need to shut the government down because “a shutdown is an attentional event.” This phrase is revealing. No appeal to principle, no theory of power, no account of institutional responsibility — only the claim that spectacle might redeem meaning. Klein mistakes politics for theater, confusing emotive shock with moral substance. In MacIntyre’s terms, this is emotivism: the reduction of moral and political utterance to expressions of feeling, devoid of rational content.

No appeal to principle, no theory of power, no account of institutional responsibility — only the claim that spectacle might redeem meaning.

MacIntyre argued that in the absence of shared traditions of reasoning, public discourse devolves into interminable disagreement, with each side wielding fragments of moral vocabulary as weapons of persuasion. Klein’s column is a case in point. “Authoritarian consolidation” is one of his chosen phrases, but what is being consolidated, and how is it to be measured? The words are never explained. They function emotively: to say “consolidation” is to invoke urgency and danger, not to offer criteria for judgment.

He repeats the move with “complicity.” If Democrats fund the government, they are complicit in Trump’s abuses. But complicity is a serious moral category, requiring standards of causation, proximity, and intent. Klein never provides them. He uses the word as a cudgel. For MacIntyre, this is what happens when fragments of moral language outlive their contexts: words like justice, rights, or complicity survive, but as simulacra, detached from their rational grounding in traditions of practice.

The most revealing passage in Klein’s column comes when he approvingly quotes Senator Jon Ossoff: “Corruption is why they just defunded nursing homes to cut taxes for the rich… Corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied… Corruption is why that ambulance costs $3,000.” Here “corruption” is made to explain everything. But in explaining everything, it explains nothing. What Ossoff performs — and Klein repeats — is not analysis but emotive rhetoric. MacIntyre would call this the degeneration of moral language into pure assertion: corruption is bad, therefore whatever I dislike must be corruption. Detached from institutions and traditions of practice, the concept collapses into tautology.

The same pattern appears when Ossoff shifts from policy complaint to personal attack: “So Trump promised to attack a broken system. I get it. Ripe target. But here’s the thing. He’s a crook. And a con man. And he wants to be a king. Yes, the system really is rigged, but Trump’s not unrigging it. He’s re-rigging it for himself.” The cadence is effective, the rhetoric sharp — but it exemplifies what MacIntyre warned against: politics reduced to moral condemnation without shared standards. To call an opponent “a crook” or “a con man” may rally applause, but it provides no criteria for judgment, no framework to distinguish genuine critique from partisan invective. It is emotivism in its purest form: the expression of feeling, not the articulation of reason.

To call an opponent “a crook” or “a con man” may rally applause, but it provides no criteria for judgment, no framework to distinguish genuine critique from partisan invective.

The arc of Klein’s essay is familiar: looming crisis, feeble opposition, catastrophic future. The imagery is lurid — golden offices, cabinet sycophants, mafias in the state. It reads less like political commentary than a Netflix script. What is lost in this performance is precisely what MacIntyre urged us to recover: the ability to make coherent judgments rooted in practices of reasoning.

Klein's essay reads less like political commentary than a Netflix script.

Klein is right that American politics is in crisis. But he cannot articulate why, because he lacks the concepts. His words — autocracy, corruption, complicity — are fragments, simulacra, detached from the practices of law, constitutional order, and moral reasoning that would make them intelligible. In MacIntyre’s terms, this is the fate of our public discourse: interminable alarm, theatrical imagery, and emotive assertion.

Recovering Political Meaning

If Klein’s column exemplifies the collapse, what would recovery look like? It would mean returning to first principles: What powers does the executive legitimately hold? What responsibilities bind legislators? What standards define corruption or complicity? It would mean distinguishing abuses of power from lurid metaphors, categories from slogans. It would mean rebuilding the practices of political reasoning that MacIntyre saw as essential to moral coherence.

The irony is stark. Klein claims to resist “authoritarianism,” yet his own rhetoric accelerates the very crisis of meaning that makes democracy fragile.

The irony is stark. Klein claims to resist “authoritarianism,” yet his own rhetoric accelerates the very crisis of meaning that makes democracy fragile. He dramatizes where he should clarify, emotes where he should reason. Words become detached from truth, serving only to alarm.

If democracy is to be defended, it will not be by the fiction of New York Times columnists, but by the hard work of recovering language capable of judgment. MacIntyre’s warning remains: unless we restore the practices that give moral and political words their meaning, we will be left only with fragments — slogans without substance, commentary without truth.