The Agony and the Ecstasy of Matt Yglesias

Image credit: Current Affairs Magazine/Cali Traina Blume. Used with permission.

Over the past two decades, the perverse incentive structures of America’s elite media have caused a new species of pundit to rise from the Beltway’s primordial ooze, at once less insightful and infinitely more annoying than any of his progenitors. In one way or another, some version of him has always been with us. But, since the 2010s, both the growing gentrification of the blogosphere and the increasing melding of political discourse with the ephemeral and game-ified patterns of social media have combined to make him more visible, more influential, and more soullessly pedantic than ever before.

Matt Yglesias, viceroy ex-officio of Washington’s eggheaded centrist cognescenti, originally hailed from the world of blogging — which emerged during the Bush era as institutional liberalism’s would-be secret weapon against the barbarian hordes on its left and right. This was a new media economy that favoured workmanlike writing, wonkish generalism, and the capacity to express status quo positions and arguments in a register of transgressive freethinking. Not incidentally, some of its early virtuosos were pro-war liberals who gleefully hippy-punched their way through the War on Terror en route to becoming the unofficial palace guard of Barack Obama’s court. Some of them became fabulously rich in the process, and a few — notably Yglesias himself — parlayed their positions into even greater influence during the next Democratic administration.

In the words of climate writer Dave Vetter, the basic MO of tiresome scribes like our erstwhile Vox savant (with a hat tip to his comrade in arms Noah Smith) consists mainly in writing “horrifically ill-informed, reactionary opinion pieces about subjects [you] know nothing about” then sitting back and calmly waiting for the money to arrive. That’s certainly a good chunk of the story, though Yglesias has himself innovated on the form by adding his own unique fusion of centrist posturing and kindergarten empiricism to the mix.

As Dan Zak wrote in a 2023 profile for the Washington Post:

Matt Yglesias can talk about supervolcanoes and about Habsburg federalism and about the semiconductor industry in Taiwan vs. China. He can talk about regulatory sensitivities around geothermal drilling. He can talk normative ethics and the Ghent system and occupational licensing and maritime commerce in Westeros, the fictional realm of “Game of Thrones.” He can talk about all these things and, perhaps more importantly, he can sound like he knows what he’s talking about.

“So even very small improvements in the welfare of chickens has an incredible sort of aggregate impact,” Yglesias said on a podcast last February, concluding a mini-monologue on poultry with this: “It’s actually very, very important if we can make chickens’ lives slightly better.”

That is a perfect Matt Yglesias quote: grandiose but granular. Draped in idealism and wisdom but anchored in data and incrementalism. Clear on its face but dotted with leaps like “incredible” and “very,” then hedges like “sort of” and “slightly.”

The affect is one of solution, of authority, of “aha!”

The effect is vaporous, curious, “huh?”

Vapid contrarianism; off-the-charts dorkiness; an obtuse penchant for moral and ideological incuriosity that frequently slides into intellectual malpractice — these have been the longstanding hallmarks of Yglesias’ rather insipid style and, for what it’s worth, they’ve formed the constituent ingredients of a very successful and lucrative career.

The other important constant has been the author’s incessant, almost prophetic propensity to be spectacularly wrong about consequential things. From his salad days as a bespectacled twenty-something championing the Bush administration’s war on terror through to the Slate era ur-take following a lethal factory collapse in Bangladesh that has since become the stuff of internet legend, Yglesias has been so brazenly incorrect on so many different points and issues that even the most committed Matty aficionados often struggle to keep up.

In recent years, among (many) other things, he has variously argued: that US imperial competition with China is a more urgent priority than fighting climate change; that the 2021 social media de-platforming of Donald Trump had seemed to vanquish him without consequence; that the soon-to-be convicted charlatan and corporate fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was “for real” and motivated by altruistic concerns; that the Joe Biden of 2024 was cognitively sharp as a razor and fit to stand for reelection; that Kamala Harris was running a model presidential campaign built around centrist patriotism, support for Israel, and economic common-sense; that Kamala Harris lost because her campaign was successfully captured by progressive interest groups; that the Democratic leadership should get on the phone with Elon Musk to talk about solar panels and deficit reduction amid his falling out with Donald Trump; that critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, despite being technically correct, are somehow more politically implicated in its destruction than elected liberal politicians who helped facilitate it. (And so on and so on.)

When it comes to proffering a general theory of Yglesiasism, Zak’s intensely satisfying 2023 essay for the Washington Post has much to commend it.

Insofar as the piece leaves anything out in retrospect, it’s mainly down to the passage of time and its subject’s apparent determination to constantly evolve into an ever-worse version of himself. In this respect, a recent exchange over Gaza offers new insight into the somewhat byzantine machinations of his peerlessly contrarian mind (with thanks to Ben Burgis, from whom I plucked the following screenshots):

His staggering lack of consistency aside — you’ll notice here how our hero pivots from portraying campus activists as Machiavellian sectarians to writing them off as “idealistic dupes” without missing a beat — Matt Yglesias seemingly cannot comprehend the fact that some people orient themselves politically on the basis of moral and ethical commitments that transcend their immediate self-interest, or involve non-instrumental concern for the welfare of others. Everything, as he sees it, is ultimately just another factional fight: a confrontation in the political marketplace where competing discourse entrepreneurs variously ply their trade in search of maximum return before moving on to the next debate with the same objective in mind. Some, like himself, might be savvier or more enlightened, but — once stripped of pretence — each is fundamentally guided by the same raw drive for power, influence, and clout.

It’s an amoral cosmology that quite plainly mirrors the worst aspects of Beltway culture as a whole. At this gilded nexus of corporate lobbying, think tanks, elite media outlets, and institutional power, moral consistency has long been scarce and guile superabundant. This is a world where deference and obsequiousness (toward the right people anyway) can often get you very far while even the most polite departures from orthodoxy typically result in exile. It is a place where status is in many ways the reigning currency, the moral rightness or wrongness of particular positions is at best a secondary concern, and even the most damaging or indefensible political decisions rarely spur introspection or impede the subsequent prospects of those who wield power.

Speaking of the former, none other than Yglesias himself — in reflecting on his support for the Iraq War some years later — once offered a genuinely perceptive comment about the nature of centrist contrarianism:

Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite. My observation is that this kind of fake-dissident posture is one that always has a lot of appeal to people.

I couldn’t agree more.