Process is the Tech Debt of Politics: How Klein's View of Politics Leads to Reaction Instead of Progress

Since I am going to be talking tangentially about the fallout from the Charlie Kirk assassination let’s get the obvious out of the way. No assassination is good or justified. No one is allowed to decide who lives and dies. You cannot have a society if you allow people to decide who is and is not worthy of life, and Kirk’s murder is a another step down a terrible road ending in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the whole world blind and toothless. It was, in a word, bad.

I suspect that the Charlie Kirk assassination is when Ezra Klein, a couple of years from now, will claim that the left abandoned him, leaving him no choice but to become a right winger. It will be nonsense, but I have no doubt that he will sincerely believe it, no doubt that other will take him at is word, and no doubt that his kind of politics make such a move almost inevitable.

Klein, as you probably know, wrote an op-ed after Kirk’s assassination claiming that Kirk practiced politics the “right way”. He caught a lot of heat for such an opinion, and deservedly so. Kirk did not practice politics the right way. I will get to why that is true in a moment, but what fascinates me is how Klein ended up at such a terrible, fact-free position. No one’s motives are clean and clear, and I am sure there are many things driving his op-ed, but I am struck by the focus on doing things the right way. Process, it appears, means more to Klein than what the process is supposed to be preserving.

First, we should be clear that Kirk was not doing politics the right way. In doing so, we will see how some of the ways he did politics the wrong way is illustrative of why Klein’s process focused world-view is so damaging. Kirk did not believe that everyone should be a full participant in society. His organization created a Professor’s Watch List dedicated to harassing teachers who exposed views and facts that Kirk’s portion of the right wing did not like. The list explicitly encouraged people to harass the people on the list and described teaching material they did not like as “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”. Hardly a bastion of free speech.

In addition, Kirk stated that some people were not worthy of full participation in society. He called for harming gay people. He claimed that black people are not qualified for the jobs they hold, saying that several prominent black woman did not have the brainpower to hold those jobs and that they stole them from white people. He called for the attacker Nancy Pelosi’s husband to be bailed out by an “amazing patriot”. He said that the Civl Rights Act was a huge mistake and that MLK jr was an awful person. He seemingly implied that Mamdani and the 9/11 attackers were equivalent. I could go on, but these examples demonstrate that Kirk was actively trying to remove certain people from full participation in society. And that is what Klein’s focus on process misses.

Klein claims that because Kirk went to college campuses and debated people, that because he organized a get out the vote campaign, that he was practicing politics correctly. Put aside for the moment that his debates were not designed to change minds but rather get viral clips, that what he did was more like crowd work than an exchange of ideas, Kirk’s debates were not politics being done right. Why? Because, as noted, he clearly wanted to drive people of certain races and opinions out of public life. And that is always wrong in a democracy. Klein cannot see that because Kirk followed the process.

In Klein’s mind, process is what protects democracy. If you participate in the forms, then what you want to achieve does not matter. We must always treat everything in good faith, and if we do so, then liberal democracy will be protected. Klein never seems to ask himself what is the purpose of the process. If he did, he would realize that the process is not more valuable than liberal democracy. The purpose of the process of democracy is to allow every member of society to have a say in that society, even if they lose the arguments. It is to ensure that the losers can take another run at winning, at convincing their fellow citizens that they are right. And it is to ensure that all people are treated as people, not as categories. Any process that attacks those principles is flawed.

Charlie Kirk, even if he used the tools of the process, was attempting to build a world in which some people were excluded and lessor in life because of what they are, not what they as an individual have done. Such advocacy for oppression cannot be politics done the right way. You cannot have a process for defending liberal democracy that elevates turning some citizens into second or third class members of that democracy. If Klein looked at the reasons for the process’s existence, he might understand that simple fact. But he has apparently mistaken the process for the principle, and as such is blinded to what is actually happening.

There is a concept in IT, and other engineering disciplines, called technical debt. It means, simply, that sometimes you do things that will work but aren’t as effective, efficient, or supportable as you would like in order to meet a short-term goal. You acquire the debt of having to fix them later, and good organizations make time to pay down that debt. Process is the technical debt of politics. Sometimes, a process that worked in the past is no longer suitable for the present. Kirk followed the rules that Klein believed are democracy and so Klein seems to believe that Kirk was a good faith operator in the democratic tradition. Nothing could be farther than the truth. Kirk was advocating for a less free, less democratic, less equal society — Kirk was attacking the very pillars of the liberal democracy the process as supposed to protect. Klein should have seen that, but I suspect that Klein is too married to the process to understand that the process is not the goal — liberal democracy is.

The problem is that process is easy. Follow the rules and you cannot be wrong, no matter the effect of the rules. Dealing with reality is much harder. Dealing with people who attack the foundations of liberal democracy is not easy in a society where free thought is a requirement for the system to function. And I don’t have easy answers — protecting something as chaotic as liberal democracy is not an easy task. (And no, to reiterate, such defense never includes political assassination). But I do know that process alone will not always suffice. That sometimes, we need to have the hard conversations. And that we need to stop pretending that advocating for discrimination and the destruction of liberal democratic values is doing politics the right way.

Unfortunately, if you think process is the same as value, as Klein seems to think, you will see any attempt to deal with those hard questions as an attack on democracy. And in a few years, I suspect, we will see Klein a fixture on the right wing, talking about how the left’s disdain for democracy drive him away, even as he hob-knobs with people who claim that jews push hatred of white people. I hope I am wrong, that I do Klein a disservice. But if you value process over the thing the process is meant to protect, I think it almost inevitable that you stop caring about the thing the process was put in place to defend.