How not to talk about politics

Wonk policy discourse revels in arbitrary complexity while eliding fundamental political and ideological questions

By way of Chapo Trap House, I learned of a recent conversation between Ezra Klein and a Congressman from Massachusetts published in the New York Times under the headline “A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently.” (If you want to dig in for yourself, I highly recommend listening to the Chapo discussion rather than trying to read it word for word. Rarely in my life have I ever consumed such a potent soporific, at least in prose form.)

The Congressman in question, one Jake Auchincloss, is just the latest example of a kind of politician we’re periodically introduced to via pieces like this. Making clear he doesn’t agree with everything his interlocutor says, here’s how Klein frames the discussion.

Democrats are in the opposition now — that means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative, creating another center of gravity in American politics. So one thing I’m going to do on the show this year is talk to Democrats who sound like they are trying to find that alternative — crafting an agenda that is alive to this moment, not just one carried over from the past. Among the Democrats talking about the abundance agenda, he has had particularly interesting things to say.

From the outset, Auchinsloss is thus presented to us as someone thinking in new and interesting ways, both about public policy and the future of the Democratic Party. Pretty much from the get-go — note Klein’s reference to something called the “abundance agenda”, which we’ll return to below — there are some telltale signs that we’re dealing with something far more generic.

The funny thing is that Auchinsloss begins by making a number of points that are perfectly reasonable and might even be precursors to insight. He hails from a once solidly blue district whose biggest city went for Trump in November and laments that the GOP has made headway when it comes to building the kind of multiethnic working class coalition that used to form the Democrats’ electoral firewall.

Auchinsloss says many things that on the face of it seem very complicated. He deals in concepts that sound both incredibly sweeping and exhaustingly granular. In Tom Friedmanesque fashion, many of these turn out to have smaller concepts contained inside of them, the anecdotes and metaphors unpacking themselves like verbal Matryoshka dolls stuffed with ever-tinier quantities of nonsense.

Though he can’t resist market-speak — “my view…is that voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke” — he also makes a sensible argument about the salience of cultural issues in elections and seems to suggest Democrats should give up the game of trying to outflank the right: “If you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is guns, immigration or trans participation in sports, you’re probably not going to be a Democratic voter.”

Taken on its own, this is a welcome enough sentiment from a liberal Congressman. The Democratic effort to capture affluent Republican voters by talking up their love of guns or pandering to anti-trans paranoia hasn’t succeeded even on its own very narrow terms and (if you’re reading him generously at least) Auchinsloss seems poised to mount the case for a more populist and majoritarian kind of politics that foregrounds material concerns. It’s at precisely this moment, however, that his spiel starts to morph inexorably into bog-standard centrist boilerplate. “The core Democratic economic message,” he says, “is that taxes plus housing plus health care is less than half your wallet. That is our economic telos. And that requires treating cost disease where it afflicts sectors across the United States economy — most notably housing and health care.”

It’s all well and good to emphasize housing and healthcare, and a policy agenda that aspires to reduce the financial burden imposed by essential costs sounds perfectly fine in the abstract. The real question is what any of this actually means and, from here on out much of the discussion becomes utterly impenetrable for the casual reader not versed in the esoteric nomenclature of its wonk interlocutors.

Source: The Ezra Klein Show (YouTube).

Auchinsloss says many things that on the face of it seem very complicated. He deals in concepts that sound both incredibly sweeping and exhaustingly granular. In Tom Friedmanesque fashion, many of these turn out to have smaller concepts contained inside of them, his anecdotes and metaphors unpacking themselves like verbal Matryoshka dolls stuffed with ever-tinier quantities of nonsense.

In the span of just a few sentences, we thus go from a definition of “cost disease” as it relates to healthcare and the housing market — illustrated by way of references to haircuts and the assembling of cars — to some generic pablum about the need to invest in biotechnology and medical devices, which are in turn defined as “those…things that turn a service — which is all the people at a hospital who perform services to care for people — into a product.”

There are thousands upon thousands more words in the same vein, touching variously on blockchain technology (Auchinsloss is for it); healthcare (he’s a fan of the private kind, wanting to fund community health clinics but go no further for reasons that are neither coherent nor really even discernible); education (“What if we made the commitment that every single kid is going to get in-depth one-on-one tutoring, both A.I. and also teacher delivered — and we just flipped the script entirely on what it means to have education?”); the absolutely inscrutable idea of an “attention tax” that funds local journalism; housing (he thinks there needs to be “an economy of Legos rather than Monopoly”); markets and free enterprise (he is also a fan, but is against both excessive government bureaucracy and corporate capture).

And so on and so on.

The effect of all this is quite dizzying, but not because anything being said is particularly complicated.

Remember “the abundance agenda”? I won’t go into it too much, but the basic idea — which as far as I can tell started making the rounds in late 2023 — is that the American economy needs more stuff and fewer regulatory barriers to its creation. There’s obviously a bit more going on than that, but what we’re dealing with here is more or less just a reheated version of the supply-side neoliberal policy thinking that’s been dominant for decades; the kind of sloganized abstraction that periodically circulates in wonk discourse to make things that are actually pretty orthodox sound novel and groundbreaking.

In much the same way, the register in which Klein and Auchinsloss are conversing is more about revelling in its own arbitrary complexity than seeing the world in new or interesting ways. If you belong to its target audience or have a fetishistic relationship with arcane detail, this style of wonk content offers a constant drip feed of specialized-sounding phrases that are more about signifying depth and intelligence than actually conveying them: holding up the most dogmatically held nostrums of a chamber of commerce meeting or business school seminar — the free market is good! private healthcare is more efficient! — then stacking them with byzantine excess until they sound smart and transgressive.

Plenty of serious policy discussion is indeed very complicated — and there is absolutely nothing wrong with specialized or academic knowledge.

What we’re dealing with here, however, is a more superficial kind of complexity generated by the centrist ethos itself. Healthcare is a perfect illustration: a single payer system is both simpler to explain and more efficient when it comes to delivery and costs than any private model, but it’s also the kind of contentious policy idea a politician like Auchinsloss rules out by default as socialistic and utopian. Having precluded any deeper ideological interrogation of the problem, all that’s left for him to do is circle the drain by proposing labyrinthine regulatory tweaks and other things in a similar vein.

A further, related problem is that wonkism of this kind almost by definition misconstrues (or perhaps misrepresents) social and political problems as puzzles in which all of the required pieces are already available. In the sense of extremely narrow policy debates, this might well be true: the ideal timing of crosswalk signals in a particular neighbourhood, for example, or the specific rules that should be codified in a municipal bylaw concerned with backyard chickens — policy issues of this scale quite often do resemble technical puzzles and don’t really require much more than the effective application of specialized knowledge. Most major issues of public interest, however (once again, think of healthcare) raise much more fundamental questions, almost invariably related to the distribution of power and/or resources. They are political and ideological first and technical second. Obscuring that reality muddies things far more than it clarifies them.

In the world of establishment liberalism, this genre of wonkery serves the vital function of making public policy discussion seem opaque and obscure to the average person. When necessary, it can also be an effective cudgel against progressive heterodoxy and a tool to discipline the Democratic Party’s liberal base (if you aren’t sure what I mean, this 2016 piece by Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman costarring none other than Ezra Klein is a masterful case study of this in action).

Either way, granularity, convolution, and nuance-mongering are themselves the point here. “Thinking differently” most certainly is not.