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.
So many of them love to take his grounding statements "It's important to make chickens" like it's the height of his intellectualism. He usually makes that kind of comment when the other person is arguing for free-range only chickens, and Yglesias has to come around and make the point that they're talking about massively increasing the price of a staple protein eaten in the vast majority of US households. Which is exactly what 2/3rds of Americans are going to hear from that argument.
Also, I lose all trust when people start critiquing twitter fights. Twitter has the magical ability to temporarily turn our smartest journalists (e.g. Ezra Klein) into nincompoops. The very platform demands and rewards shallow hot takes.
The exchange with Breunig displayed above was damning. It took me a few volleys to realize Yglesias actually thought his self-canceling assertions could coexist and that he was serious, not trolling. Woof.
Ezra klein is not one of our smartest journalists. He’s a canny huckster, managing to sell a slops bucket of fifty year old bullshit as an amazing new idea, but I wouldn’t say he’s a journalist really.
Twitter is showing him as he really is, without an editor to wipe his arse.
Does he have a lot of far right critics then? I’ve only ever seen him critiqued by centrists who are orders of magnitude smarter and more interesting than his right wing ass.
As an Yglesias reader I check out these hit pieces from time to time just to make sure they're still mostly ad hominem attacks and out of context quotes. It's reassuring this is the best his opponents can come up with.
There is not a single ad hominem in this peace. The article points out that Yglesias is nearly always ignorant of the subjects he claims knowledge of and assumes bad faith on the part of anyone who disagrees with him while being wildly inconsistent in his views. That is not ad hominem. That is direct criticism of Yglesias.
>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.
This is the opening paragraph. The authors I respect attack ideas, not people.
"Ad hominem" is "Your argument is wrong because you're an idiot"; it is not "Your argument is wrong because of x, y, and z, and you're an idiot for making it."
That’s true, but if the opening sentence is what Tim quoted, long experience tells me that the author is too filled with bias to provide a good-faith reading of the ideas of the person the author is criticizing.
Do you not notice how circular this is? The fact that the writer made observations and came to certain conclusions is not evidence of "bias," it's basic communication. The only way to see bias in this process is by assuming that one is already correct and therefore anyone contradicting one's pre-existing conclusions *must* be biased. It's like saying that everyone is closed-minded until they agree with me, at which point they become rational, free thinking observers.
It isn’t circular at all, I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m getting at. I’m saying this: the fact the author decided to throw in insults that, as we both agree, are not part of the actual argument makes me less trusting of the author’s credibility for when he presents his actual arguments. This is not a logical deduction, but rather an empirical heuristic; but it still is reasonable thing to do on my part.
The author’s job here is to persuade me, the reader, that his judgement is correct. The author is going to present an argument, but that argument is rarely as straightforward as a mathematic proof. It relies on context, particularly when it is making a claim about specific events and statements. If I, the reader, am to accept the author’s argument, I have to trust that the author is not misrepresenting the context of those events. Gratuitous insults suggest that the author really dislikes the guy he is about to make an argument attacking. This does not guarantee that the author hasn’t provided the necessary context, but it does raise the likelihood that he won’t, either willfully or due to cognitive biases.
Somewhat of a pattern to get Iraq wrong, then get Palestine wrong - two of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century. It's the same blindspot in favor of Washington consensus imperialism. He didn't learn anything from being wrong about Iraq. You'd think you'd get some humility from the experience, but then again why would he? There were no real professional consequences for anyone who got Iraq wrong. If anything it was rewarded, it shows you're a team player.
No. They are not saying his arguments are wrong because of who he is. The article is saying he is hypocritical and ignorant. That is not ad hominem. That is criticism. Criticizing his not ad hominem
>The article is saying he is hypocritical and ignorant. That is not ad hominem.
That is the literal definition of ad hominem: "to the person/man." Not all ad hominem is bad, and you can say that people deserve criticism, but it's still ad hominem.
No it is not the definition. You confuse ad hominem and criticism. By your definition, every criticism is an ad hominem. It is not. Like a lot of people you don’t understand what the term means
Yes, Tim. When your rebuttal of an argument points not to the argument but *to the man*, this is indeed an ad hominem: "This argument is wrong because the guy making it is a craven doofus." When you rebut an argument with your own substantiated arguments and then make a moral judgment of the person making the argument, this is not ad hominem: "This argument is wrong because x, y, and z, and the guy making the argument is a craven doofus."
As someone who reads Matt for housing policy, the amount of good faith which he affords NIMBY's can be deeply frustrating, but I always find it impressive nonetheless. If there's anyone writing on substack who *isn't* straw-manning those he disagrees with, it's Matt. Maybe he wrote that way two decades ago, but it hasn't been the case for a long time now.
To be fair, there were a number of items listed that Yglesias appears to have been wrong about with the benefit of hindsight.
However, Yglesias has been a pundit for a very long time and offered a lot of opinions. Hard to say if his batting percentage is above or below average, relative to other pundits.
In an ideal world, we would be able to sort all pundits by accuracy in order to know who to listen to. Until then, I suppose we can listen to winners of forecasting competitions like https://substack.com/@peterwildeford/note/c-146663376?
I think his most valuable and interesting work is less his occasional analysis of contemporary politics and more his discussion of low-level policy ideas and implementations. He’s also brings this reasonable and down-to-earth vibe to this more polarised writing.
Any accurate reading of Yglesias, I think, has to separate Yglesias-the-Thinker with Yglesias-the-Shitposter.
Being exposed to him mostly in the form of his long form work, or in podcasts, he often strikes me as someone with unique (centrist contrarian!) ideas that make you think. As a left-lib, I don’t *always* agree with him, but that’s okay.
Then I see his Twitter feed and understand why he’s disliked by a wide swath of people. The dude isn’t *completely* internet poisoned, but I suspect it might have been better for him if he took the Klein route and gfto of social media.
A lot of centrists seem to interpret any criticism as "emotional bullying" because ultimately their politics are based on the false perception of victimhood.
Which makes it extremely funny that the rest of culture ran with it and now you have the right wing doing their own version of DEI and identity politics, and being completely oblivious about the irony.
Do you let this distaste affect your own held political beliefs? I agree a lot of leftists are fucking annoying and can veer into hysterical moralizing. But, you know, get over it. Every corner of political culture is full of deeply annoying people making emotional appeals. It drives engagement.
The idea of doing "whatever it takes to drive engagement" is hurting our politics & should be moved away from. I am not against emotional appeals sometimes, but when it's too much, for too long a time, it makes people depressed or indifferent. It also frankly leads to bad policy.
I try not to let it affect my politics. I probably mostly agree with leftists about what problems there are, but I often disagree strongly about how they should be handled.
If emotional appeals gloss over empirical falsehoods or denial of trade offs then yes, it's problematic. You can't have open borders and a welfare state.
I am baffled at your inability to understand the most blatantly obvious sarcasm of all time ever in history. Truly generational ability to ignore what a person means.
People like yglesias can only understand politics as a game. Because they've never had any of their material needs go unmet. He's telling on himself because he only views politics bas a game of factional power rather than a means to an end.
The goal of participating in politics should be to facilitate changes that improve people's lives. Yglesias seems to think it's just to gain power for power's sake.
Yglesias (and many other centrist libs) have chosen to pursue power for power's sake by ingratiating themselves to those who are already in power. They can't bring themselves to take an unpopular position because their entire game revolves around sucking up to the powerful while simultaneously masquerading as someone who is somehow challenging power. It's an illusion that only results in superficial tweaking around the edges and exactly zero real change for the better ever happening
Populist economic leftist policies are across the board extremely popular and the failure of centrist democrats to embrace them is the primary reason they keep losing.
Do you believe that Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders are economic populists? Do you have an explanation for why they can’t win a primary with an electorate that should be even more sympathetic to economic populism than the general? I believe their failure to win a primary should poke hole in the theory that left economic ideas are “overwhelmingly” popular.
The worst thing anyone at the DNC did to sabotage Bernie was leaking a single debate question to Clinton in 2016. Nobody did anything to sabotage Warren--hell, she picked most of Biden's staff when he actually got to the white house.
The idea that economically populist policies are universally popular is simply false. Some economically populist policies are popular under some circumstances, but most are only popular if you measure popularity by polls that only ask "would you like more free stuff" and leave out the tradeoffs that handing out that free stuff would require.
I think we both simply have a different view on the power of columnists to set the agenda for the Democratic Party. I do not believe that these people have the ability to do that. I also think that if you do believe that a bunch of columnists can sink a left aligned candidate, I don’t know how a left aligned candidate could ever win a general election.
Capitalists set the agenda for the party. The columnists like yglesias are merely the propagandists working hand in glove with the capitalists and the party. Yglesias was literally advising Biden during his presidency
"Is your belief that 1. Left ideas are not actually unpopular." I think the belief here can be summarized more like "not necessarily at the moment, but with enough time and motivation they can be made popular" i.e. Henry Ford, if we asked people what they wanted they would want faster horses, its essentially a form of idealogical entrepreneurism.
I think that this is a coherent ask of politicians. So I think depending on your values, this could make sense. But I think that politicians are less political tastemakers, and more weathervane. Also I think that I’d rather have more moderate democrats than fewer, more ideologically aligned ones
Capitalists are in power. Wall Street, silicon valley, the oil industry, the healthcare industry, the military industrial complex. That's who is in power and always has been. Regardless of whether the blue team or red team wins. All of the worst things that Washington does are done with huge bipartisan agreement.
Those are the people and industries that are in power that people like yglesias refuse to challenge. They're also the people signing their paychecks.
At a certain point this kind of comment is simultaneously true and nonsensical. Coal plant operators that whispered to Manchin and Warren affiliated wind turbine advocates were both “capitalists” trying to influence public policy, but to treat them as a united front isn’t going to generate much analytical value.
The issue here is obvious. Yglesias cares more about winning elections than leftists do. That's it. That's the whole friction. Alot of Leftists view concessions towards electorally popular positions as immoral.
(1) Democrats should work to enact certain wonkish policies (like deregulating mobile home manufacturing), even though they're too technical for persuadable voters to care about, because they're good on the merits and will create positive results that voters will eventually care about; and
(2) Democrats should strongly express certain moderate cultural positions (such as skepticism of trans women in women's sports) because punching left on cultural issues, especially where leftists' maximalist demands were never going to happen anyway, is a low-cost way to win over persuadable voters.
The stuff in strand #1 is popular with (a relatively small subset of) beltway consultants, plus economists and lawyers, but nobody else cares about it.
The stuff in strand #2 is widely popular among the persuadable voters who switched from Biden to Trump in the last election.
If a policy will benefit the public it can and should be articulated in a way that the public understands - that is a key role of politics in a nominally representative government. If he can't do that and hides behind policy being too complex for the proletarian rubes he isn't exactly a shining light of Democracy, he's an elitist.
Wonks, lawyers, economists, and beltway consultants are not exactly champions of the common man. They have built up a lot of well earned bad will from the public from passing policy (and deregulating existing policy) that have had negative results and were bad on their own merits, except for the small classes that benefitted (themselves included). Assuming ignorance from people who don't agree with a policy is unfortunately a common trend I see from liberals. People aren't just suspicious of this because they're ignorant, many are suspicious because they've seen this movie before.
Point 2 is basically being a Fox News host by pandering to the lowest common denominator. That does less than nothing to advance the common condition, and seems like a losing strategy (see: 2024 election where Kamala ran Yglesias's perfect campaign - his words). Democrats will never do this as well as Republicans already do, and will alienate supporters that they currently take for granted in the process (like in 2024). These people aren't the "persuadable voters who switched from Biden to Trump", they'll vote 3rd (or 4th) party, or won't vote. "Moderates" don't seem to consider the risk of alienating the left.
"If a policy will benefit the public it can and should be articulated in a way that the public understands."
It's not that the public doesn't understand, it's that they don't care. I challenge you to try to convince someone plucked off the street that deregulating mobile homes by allowing them to be built with detachable chassis is an issue they should care about.
Your point about "wonks, economists, and lawyers" having created negative policy results is true but meaningless. It begs two obvious questions: (1) have they created more negative outcomes than positive outcomes? and (2) has some other class of persons done better? The answer to both questions, at least in America's case, is largely no.
"Point 2 is basically being a Fox News host by pandering to the lowest common denominator"
Of course, because there's no difference between "we should protect trans individuals and their medical care vigorously and have a skeptical--but real--conversation about trans women in women's sports" and "we should just ban trans people."
"2024 election where Kamala ran Yglesias's perfect campaign - his words"
Those are absolutely not his words. He praised her nomination speech. He praised certain other specific moves she made. But Kamala was (understandably, given her record) perceived by the public as further to the left than Trump was to the right, and she did very little to try to fix that perception except for the aforementioned excellent nomination speech.
The evidence is overwhelming that Trump won because he persuaded voters, not because he turned out the base. Democrats have spent the past decade and a half worrying about alienating the left more than anything else, and it has yielded terrible results in electoral terms. We need to stop worrying about alienating the left and go back to the strategy of worrying about alienating normal people.
Wonks, economists, and lawyers from both parties have been running the country since the neoliberal order began establishing itself in the mid 70's. They've had remarkably similar priorities and disdain toward popular will so no one else has really had the reigns of power in that time.
The benefits vs the drawbacks is a matter of opinion, there are plenty of both. If you purely look at measures like GDP then of course they knocked it out of the park, but GDP isn't really the end-all-be-all. During that time US life expectancy peaked and has begun to fall, incomes for normal people have become completely detached from inflation, college has become prohibitively expensive, and all manner of trades work has left the country for overseas.
Matt was actively uncomfortable with how much he liked Kamala's campaign, he couldn't find much to criticize until it blew up so spectacularly. Clearly you also share some of the same opinions which apparently puts you at odds with the population as a whole. To many she refused to even pander to the left at all, and was even looking openly to undo the best parts of the Biden admin (Lina Khan's antitrust work was excellent and she was all set to fire her as soon as she took over). Her stance on Gaza was essentially indistinguishable from Trump's once you looked past the "humanitarian" boilerplate that Democrats like to roll out while approving child-bombings. Commitment to Israel was a core part of her campaign. I love how everyone "forgets" about foreign policy as something that the public should have some say in.
Trump did turn out his base, Kamala didn't turn out hers. Trump gained voters from 2020 (+3 million), Kamala lost Biden voters (-6 million). If she only lost the 3 million that Trump gained she would've won the popular vote at least, and depending on where those votes were located could've turned the EC.
HRC's campaign was a poorly run victory lap to collect every high $$ speaking fee she could, Kamala's was another try at that same strategy. Campaigning while female was the most progressive part of either candidate. Biden had the most progressive campaign since Obama in '08, and he got record turnout and a record vote total.
The DNC is pandering to a specific vision of the left that ruffles the fewest donor feathers. They've turned the entire political history of leftism into blue hair, land acknowledgment, and HR generalists with pronouns in their email signatures. I think you know better than to call that the sum total of leftism. With a noteworthy exceptions (Biden 2020) its given up on economic populism on national campaigns. Medicare for all has retreated to a fringe position in the party. The happiness of the various military contractors seems to outweigh that of the population at large.
If you believe in some manner of "moderate centrism" you need to give people contrast with the wildly right wing option that already exists, not another, marginally less racist right wing option. That will lead exclusively to right wing outcomes, which I think we agree is not ideal.
I find it really funny trolling through the comments on this article that there are basically two mostly incompatible viewpoints as to why democrats are able to lose to a rube like Trump:
1) The democrats run away from (trust me bro) extremely popular leftist policies at their expense. If they were all for M4A, they’d win congress.
2) Democrats have alienated huge swathes of persuadable voters by embracing/tolerating fringe cultural and economic viewpoints. If they would just signal moderate viewpoints they would appeal to moderate voters and win races.
>Keep up that fox news level straw man of the left
During the 2020 Democratic primary, Kamala Harris completed a "candidate values survey" in which she answered that she supported taxpayer funded gender surgery on federal prison inmates.
We fucking nominated a "fox news level straw[wo]man of the left." That's most of why we lost.
Oh wow, the 2020 presidential primary, the one famously won by someone other than Kamala Harris?
In fact Kamala Harris has never won a primary, even when she was the party's nominee. I think the fact that someone this obviously unpopular (completely separate from the quote) was shoved down the country's throat at the last second as the OnLy PoSsIbLe AlTeRnAtIvE to Trump is why she lost.
The sheer volume of Yglesias ball washers that have scuttled in like rats into the comments to lecture leftists who “don’t get Matty” just fills me with joy. Telling on themselves.
I love these pathetic "takedowns" by left-wing nobodies who are CLEARLY just trying to engage in a battle with a well-known blogger to raise their own profile.
Don't you have anything better to do? Who exactly are you trying to convince? What problem are you solving? Patting yourself on the back?
I find Yglesais to be smarter and more interesting than the majority of his critics.
So many of them love to take his grounding statements "It's important to make chickens" like it's the height of his intellectualism. He usually makes that kind of comment when the other person is arguing for free-range only chickens, and Yglesias has to come around and make the point that they're talking about massively increasing the price of a staple protein eaten in the vast majority of US households. Which is exactly what 2/3rds of Americans are going to hear from that argument.
Also, I lose all trust when people start critiquing twitter fights. Twitter has the magical ability to temporarily turn our smartest journalists (e.g. Ezra Klein) into nincompoops. The very platform demands and rewards shallow hot takes.
The exchange with Breunig displayed above was damning. It took me a few volleys to realize Yglesias actually thought his self-canceling assertions could coexist and that he was serious, not trolling. Woof.
Ezra klein is not one of our smartest journalists. He’s a canny huckster, managing to sell a slops bucket of fifty year old bullshit as an amazing new idea, but I wouldn’t say he’s a journalist really.
Twitter is showing him as he really is, without an editor to wipe his arse.
nobody knows the half of it, actually...but jillikers, raiding a blog for criticism like this isn't the best look, is it?
this guy has probably stopped reading the comments on this, but if he hasn't, he could ask me what i know, if he really wants to start some bsns.
He could be smart and interesting, but if he actually believes the stuff he says then he is a complete moron lol
Does he have a lot of far right critics then? I’ve only ever seen him critiqued by centrists who are orders of magnitude smarter and more interesting than his right wing ass.
As an Yglesias reader I check out these hit pieces from time to time just to make sure they're still mostly ad hominem attacks and out of context quotes. It's reassuring this is the best his opponents can come up with.
There is not a single ad hominem in this peace. The article points out that Yglesias is nearly always ignorant of the subjects he claims knowledge of and assumes bad faith on the part of anyone who disagrees with him while being wildly inconsistent in his views. That is not ad hominem. That is direct criticism of Yglesias.
>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.
This is the opening paragraph. The authors I respect attack ideas, not people.
"Ad hominem" is "Your argument is wrong because you're an idiot"; it is not "Your argument is wrong because of x, y, and z, and you're an idiot for making it."
That’s true, but if the opening sentence is what Tim quoted, long experience tells me that the author is too filled with bias to provide a good-faith reading of the ideas of the person the author is criticizing.
Do you not notice how circular this is? The fact that the writer made observations and came to certain conclusions is not evidence of "bias," it's basic communication. The only way to see bias in this process is by assuming that one is already correct and therefore anyone contradicting one's pre-existing conclusions *must* be biased. It's like saying that everyone is closed-minded until they agree with me, at which point they become rational, free thinking observers.
It isn’t circular at all, I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m getting at. I’m saying this: the fact the author decided to throw in insults that, as we both agree, are not part of the actual argument makes me less trusting of the author’s credibility for when he presents his actual arguments. This is not a logical deduction, but rather an empirical heuristic; but it still is reasonable thing to do on my part.
The author’s job here is to persuade me, the reader, that his judgement is correct. The author is going to present an argument, but that argument is rarely as straightforward as a mathematic proof. It relies on context, particularly when it is making a claim about specific events and statements. If I, the reader, am to accept the author’s argument, I have to trust that the author is not misrepresenting the context of those events. Gratuitous insults suggest that the author really dislikes the guy he is about to make an argument attacking. This does not guarantee that the author hasn’t provided the necessary context, but it does raise the likelihood that he won’t, either willfully or due to cognitive biases.
Florid prose is not ad hominem.
Is that why the author has to resort to critiquing his opinions from 20 years ago?
Somewhat of a pattern to get Iraq wrong, then get Palestine wrong - two of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century. It's the same blindspot in favor of Washington consensus imperialism. He didn't learn anything from being wrong about Iraq. You'd think you'd get some humility from the experience, but then again why would he? There were no real professional consequences for anyone who got Iraq wrong. If anything it was rewarded, it shows you're a team player.
Two does not a pattern make champ.
But two points do make a line. 😊
The piece is full of ad hominem attacks. Deeply unserious and uncurious.
No. They are not saying his arguments are wrong because of who he is. The article is saying he is hypocritical and ignorant. That is not ad hominem. That is criticism. Criticizing his not ad hominem
>The article is saying he is hypocritical and ignorant. That is not ad hominem.
That is the literal definition of ad hominem: "to the person/man." Not all ad hominem is bad, and you can say that people deserve criticism, but it's still ad hominem.
No it is not the definition. You confuse ad hominem and criticism. By your definition, every criticism is an ad hominem. It is not. Like a lot of people you don’t understand what the term means
The difference is this:
Criticism: your argument is bad for these reasons. You’re also displaying inconsistent logic in the following ways.
Ad hominem: you are ignorant for making the bad argument. You’re a hypocrite.
Hope that helps.
Yes, Tim. When your rebuttal of an argument points not to the argument but *to the man*, this is indeed an ad hominem: "This argument is wrong because the guy making it is a craven doofus." When you rebut an argument with your own substantiated arguments and then make a moral judgment of the person making the argument, this is not ad hominem: "This argument is wrong because x, y, and z, and the guy making the argument is a craven doofus."
He called him a dork, for instance.
As someone who reads Matt for housing policy, the amount of good faith which he affords NIMBY's can be deeply frustrating, but I always find it impressive nonetheless. If there's anyone writing on substack who *isn't* straw-manning those he disagrees with, it's Matt. Maybe he wrote that way two decades ago, but it hasn't been the case for a long time now.
NIMBYs are generally leftists. So of course he affords them good faith
To be fair, there were a number of items listed that Yglesias appears to have been wrong about with the benefit of hindsight.
However, Yglesias has been a pundit for a very long time and offered a lot of opinions. Hard to say if his batting percentage is above or below average, relative to other pundits.
In an ideal world, we would be able to sort all pundits by accuracy in order to know who to listen to. Until then, I suppose we can listen to winners of forecasting competitions like https://substack.com/@peterwildeford/note/c-146663376?
I think his most valuable and interesting work is less his occasional analysis of contemporary politics and more his discussion of low-level policy ideas and implementations. He’s also brings this reasonable and down-to-earth vibe to this more polarised writing.
Any accurate reading of Yglesias, I think, has to separate Yglesias-the-Thinker with Yglesias-the-Shitposter.
Being exposed to him mostly in the form of his long form work, or in podcasts, he often strikes me as someone with unique (centrist contrarian!) ideas that make you think. As a left-lib, I don’t *always* agree with him, but that’s okay.
Then I see his Twitter feed and understand why he’s disliked by a wide swath of people. The dude isn’t *completely* internet poisoned, but I suspect it might have been better for him if he took the Klein route and gfto of social media.
A lot of leftists seem to think that if their emotional bullying techniques don't work on someone, it makes them a bad person.
A lot of centrists seem to interpret any criticism as "emotional bullying" because ultimately their politics are based on the false perception of victimhood.
“False perceptions of victimhood” did we not just spend a 15 years of suffering through the left playing oppression Olympics?
Which makes it extremely funny that the rest of culture ran with it and now you have the right wing doing their own version of DEI and identity politics, and being completely oblivious about the irony.
Sure. But in neither case, I don’t think it’s the centrist dying on the hill of victimhood
It sounds to me like you might be an anti-semite Mr. Dorroile.
I think the main difference is that we consider the constant emotional appeals to be distasteful
Do you let this distaste affect your own held political beliefs? I agree a lot of leftists are fucking annoying and can veer into hysterical moralizing. But, you know, get over it. Every corner of political culture is full of deeply annoying people making emotional appeals. It drives engagement.
The idea of doing "whatever it takes to drive engagement" is hurting our politics & should be moved away from. I am not against emotional appeals sometimes, but when it's too much, for too long a time, it makes people depressed or indifferent. It also frankly leads to bad policy.
I try not to let it affect my politics. I probably mostly agree with leftists about what problems there are, but I often disagree strongly about how they should be handled.
If emotional appeals gloss over empirical falsehoods or denial of trade offs then yes, it's problematic. You can't have open borders and a welfare state.
This
Someone who doesn't seem to believe anything can't believe real people believe things. Thank you for this piece.
Yes, everyone who doesn't believe what you believe doesn't believe in anything.
It's a reminder of why liberalism emerged after a century of religious conflict
It is sometimes hard to fathom the crazy stuff you guys believe. Biological males should compete in women sports, including martial arts?
I am baffled at your inability to understand the most blatantly obvious sarcasm of all time ever in history. Truly generational ability to ignore what a person means.
Any specific examples?
The tweet about banning Trump from Twitter is the most sarcastic tweet ever sent ever in life ever.
It's a common trait among the online bloggerati.
People like yglesias can only understand politics as a game. Because they've never had any of their material needs go unmet. He's telling on himself because he only views politics bas a game of factional power rather than a means to an end.
The goal of participating in politics should be to facilitate changes that improve people's lives. Yglesias seems to think it's just to gain power for power's sake.
Yglesias (and many other centrist libs) have chosen to pursue power for power's sake by ingratiating themselves to those who are already in power. They can't bring themselves to take an unpopular position because their entire game revolves around sucking up to the powerful while simultaneously masquerading as someone who is somehow challenging power. It's an illusion that only results in superficial tweaking around the edges and exactly zero real change for the better ever happening
Is your belief that
1. Left ideas are not actually unpopular.
2. Left ideas are unpopular, but politicians should have them because other benefits.
Populist economic leftist policies are across the board extremely popular and the failure of centrist democrats to embrace them is the primary reason they keep losing.
Do you believe that Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders are economic populists? Do you have an explanation for why they can’t win a primary with an electorate that should be even more sympathetic to economic populism than the general? I believe their failure to win a primary should poke hole in the theory that left economic ideas are “overwhelmingly” popular.
Because the democratic party and their associated media apparatus (people like yglesias) have blocked them every chance they get.
The worst thing anyone at the DNC did to sabotage Bernie was leaking a single debate question to Clinton in 2016. Nobody did anything to sabotage Warren--hell, she picked most of Biden's staff when he actually got to the white house.
The idea that economically populist policies are universally popular is simply false. Some economically populist policies are popular under some circumstances, but most are only popular if you measure popularity by polls that only ask "would you like more free stuff" and leave out the tradeoffs that handing out that free stuff would require.
I think we both simply have a different view on the power of columnists to set the agenda for the Democratic Party. I do not believe that these people have the ability to do that. I also think that if you do believe that a bunch of columnists can sink a left aligned candidate, I don’t know how a left aligned candidate could ever win a general election.
Capitalists set the agenda for the party. The columnists like yglesias are merely the propagandists working hand in glove with the capitalists and the party. Yglesias was literally advising Biden during his presidency
lol, no.
"Is your belief that 1. Left ideas are not actually unpopular." I think the belief here can be summarized more like "not necessarily at the moment, but with enough time and motivation they can be made popular" i.e. Henry Ford, if we asked people what they wanted they would want faster horses, its essentially a form of idealogical entrepreneurism.
I think that this is a coherent ask of politicians. So I think depending on your values, this could make sense. But I think that politicians are less political tastemakers, and more weathervane. Also I think that I’d rather have more moderate democrats than fewer, more ideologically aligned ones
I'm so confused by this take. Who do you think is in power??
Capitalists are in power. Wall Street, silicon valley, the oil industry, the healthcare industry, the military industrial complex. That's who is in power and always has been. Regardless of whether the blue team or red team wins. All of the worst things that Washington does are done with huge bipartisan agreement.
Those are the people and industries that are in power that people like yglesias refuse to challenge. They're also the people signing their paychecks.
I’m pretty sure Yglesias doesn’t get a paycheck. He is a Substacker. He gets paid based on newsletter subscriptions.
1. Vox was/is a corporate funded venture that propelled him to where he is today.
2. His new effort, the argument, has raised millions of dollars in donations from wesltgy powerful politically connected (to the DNC) people.
1. This is a silly criticism of Vox and Yglesias (who isn't even at Vox anymore)
2. Is the argument Ygelsias's new venture? Is he an owner there?
3. So what? Does any of this mean that the specific arguments made by Yglesias are wrong because of who he is or what he does?
You’re talking to a crazy person, just let it go
No. The Republicans are in power.
I'll let Ygelsias's work speak for itself on why he's not an anti-capitalist. Expecting him to be is silly.
To the extent Yglesias has power or influence himself, it's because he's persuasive. He's not above criticism, but *your criticism* is bad.
At a certain point this kind of comment is simultaneously true and nonsensical. Coal plant operators that whispered to Manchin and Warren affiliated wind turbine advocates were both “capitalists” trying to influence public policy, but to treat them as a united front isn’t going to generate much analytical value.
The issue here is obvious. Yglesias cares more about winning elections than leftists do. That's it. That's the whole friction. Alot of Leftists view concessions towards electorally popular positions as immoral.
ARE the positions advocated by Yglesias widely popular or are they just popular in his echo chamber of highly compensated beltway consultants?
Yglesias has two main strands to his thinking:
(1) Democrats should work to enact certain wonkish policies (like deregulating mobile home manufacturing), even though they're too technical for persuadable voters to care about, because they're good on the merits and will create positive results that voters will eventually care about; and
(2) Democrats should strongly express certain moderate cultural positions (such as skepticism of trans women in women's sports) because punching left on cultural issues, especially where leftists' maximalist demands were never going to happen anyway, is a low-cost way to win over persuadable voters.
The stuff in strand #1 is popular with (a relatively small subset of) beltway consultants, plus economists and lawyers, but nobody else cares about it.
The stuff in strand #2 is widely popular among the persuadable voters who switched from Biden to Trump in the last election.
If a policy will benefit the public it can and should be articulated in a way that the public understands - that is a key role of politics in a nominally representative government. If he can't do that and hides behind policy being too complex for the proletarian rubes he isn't exactly a shining light of Democracy, he's an elitist.
Wonks, lawyers, economists, and beltway consultants are not exactly champions of the common man. They have built up a lot of well earned bad will from the public from passing policy (and deregulating existing policy) that have had negative results and were bad on their own merits, except for the small classes that benefitted (themselves included). Assuming ignorance from people who don't agree with a policy is unfortunately a common trend I see from liberals. People aren't just suspicious of this because they're ignorant, many are suspicious because they've seen this movie before.
Point 2 is basically being a Fox News host by pandering to the lowest common denominator. That does less than nothing to advance the common condition, and seems like a losing strategy (see: 2024 election where Kamala ran Yglesias's perfect campaign - his words). Democrats will never do this as well as Republicans already do, and will alienate supporters that they currently take for granted in the process (like in 2024). These people aren't the "persuadable voters who switched from Biden to Trump", they'll vote 3rd (or 4th) party, or won't vote. "Moderates" don't seem to consider the risk of alienating the left.
"If a policy will benefit the public it can and should be articulated in a way that the public understands."
It's not that the public doesn't understand, it's that they don't care. I challenge you to try to convince someone plucked off the street that deregulating mobile homes by allowing them to be built with detachable chassis is an issue they should care about.
Your point about "wonks, economists, and lawyers" having created negative policy results is true but meaningless. It begs two obvious questions: (1) have they created more negative outcomes than positive outcomes? and (2) has some other class of persons done better? The answer to both questions, at least in America's case, is largely no.
"Point 2 is basically being a Fox News host by pandering to the lowest common denominator"
Of course, because there's no difference between "we should protect trans individuals and their medical care vigorously and have a skeptical--but real--conversation about trans women in women's sports" and "we should just ban trans people."
"2024 election where Kamala ran Yglesias's perfect campaign - his words"
Those are absolutely not his words. He praised her nomination speech. He praised certain other specific moves she made. But Kamala was (understandably, given her record) perceived by the public as further to the left than Trump was to the right, and she did very little to try to fix that perception except for the aforementioned excellent nomination speech.
The evidence is overwhelming that Trump won because he persuaded voters, not because he turned out the base. Democrats have spent the past decade and a half worrying about alienating the left more than anything else, and it has yielded terrible results in electoral terms. We need to stop worrying about alienating the left and go back to the strategy of worrying about alienating normal people.
A few points:
Wonks, economists, and lawyers from both parties have been running the country since the neoliberal order began establishing itself in the mid 70's. They've had remarkably similar priorities and disdain toward popular will so no one else has really had the reigns of power in that time.
The benefits vs the drawbacks is a matter of opinion, there are plenty of both. If you purely look at measures like GDP then of course they knocked it out of the park, but GDP isn't really the end-all-be-all. During that time US life expectancy peaked and has begun to fall, incomes for normal people have become completely detached from inflation, college has become prohibitively expensive, and all manner of trades work has left the country for overseas.
Matt was actively uncomfortable with how much he liked Kamala's campaign, he couldn't find much to criticize until it blew up so spectacularly. Clearly you also share some of the same opinions which apparently puts you at odds with the population as a whole. To many she refused to even pander to the left at all, and was even looking openly to undo the best parts of the Biden admin (Lina Khan's antitrust work was excellent and she was all set to fire her as soon as she took over). Her stance on Gaza was essentially indistinguishable from Trump's once you looked past the "humanitarian" boilerplate that Democrats like to roll out while approving child-bombings. Commitment to Israel was a core part of her campaign. I love how everyone "forgets" about foreign policy as something that the public should have some say in.
Trump did turn out his base, Kamala didn't turn out hers. Trump gained voters from 2020 (+3 million), Kamala lost Biden voters (-6 million). If she only lost the 3 million that Trump gained she would've won the popular vote at least, and depending on where those votes were located could've turned the EC.
HRC's campaign was a poorly run victory lap to collect every high $$ speaking fee she could, Kamala's was another try at that same strategy. Campaigning while female was the most progressive part of either candidate. Biden had the most progressive campaign since Obama in '08, and he got record turnout and a record vote total.
The DNC is pandering to a specific vision of the left that ruffles the fewest donor feathers. They've turned the entire political history of leftism into blue hair, land acknowledgment, and HR generalists with pronouns in their email signatures. I think you know better than to call that the sum total of leftism. With a noteworthy exceptions (Biden 2020) its given up on economic populism on national campaigns. Medicare for all has retreated to a fringe position in the party. The happiness of the various military contractors seems to outweigh that of the population at large.
If you believe in some manner of "moderate centrism" you need to give people contrast with the wildly right wing option that already exists, not another, marginally less racist right wing option. That will lead exclusively to right wing outcomes, which I think we agree is not ideal.
I find it really funny trolling through the comments on this article that there are basically two mostly incompatible viewpoints as to why democrats are able to lose to a rube like Trump:
1) The democrats run away from (trust me bro) extremely popular leftist policies at their expense. If they were all for M4A, they’d win congress.
2) Democrats have alienated huge swathes of persuadable voters by embracing/tolerating fringe cultural and economic viewpoints. If they would just signal moderate viewpoints they would appeal to moderate voters and win races.
Maybe each has an element of truth.
If he cared about winning elections he would stop doubling down on tepid centrist ideas that the electorate has repeatedly rejected.
Such as open borders and tax payer funded gender surgery on prison inmates?
What page of Kapital is that from?
Keep up that fox news level straw man of the left if you want to keep getting dog walked in elections.
>Keep up that fox news level straw man of the left
During the 2020 Democratic primary, Kamala Harris completed a "candidate values survey" in which she answered that she supported taxpayer funded gender surgery on federal prison inmates.
We fucking nominated a "fox news level straw[wo]man of the left." That's most of why we lost.
Oh wow, the 2020 presidential primary, the one famously won by someone other than Kamala Harris?
In fact Kamala Harris has never won a primary, even when she was the party's nominee. I think the fact that someone this obviously unpopular (completely separate from the quote) was shoved down the country's throat at the last second as the OnLy PoSsIbLe AlTeRnAtIvE to Trump is why she lost.
Quoting Karl Marx is a sure winner in US elections, of course
Not saying it is, but calling out "gender reassignment for prison inmates" as a core leftist position is pure misrepresentation.
As it turns out prostrating yourself to the "center" isn't is a sure winner of US Elections either.
That's lib shit. Leftists are explicitly opposed to open borders and mostly agnostic on the trans stuff.
Doing an awful job of it isn’t he? And if that’s the only thing you care about, you will fail even in that goal
I wonder why the center-right is trying so hard to prevent Mamdani from holding office then.
I think Yglesias has the unique ability to mix liberal elite arrogance with conservative for me, but not thee.
Your disassembly of this turgid, nonthinking thief of ideas is a salve on my tortured soul.
The sheer volume of Yglesias ball washers that have scuttled in like rats into the comments to lecture leftists who “don’t get Matty” just fills me with joy. Telling on themselves.
Great piece.
There is a list of things that Yglesias was “brazenly incorrect about” but more than half that list is unfalsifiable opinion…not objective fact…
The worst thing about leftists is that they are either trying to build power, or aren’t. They need to stop this right away.
Matt isn't a leftist 🙄
I love these pathetic "takedowns" by left-wing nobodies who are CLEARLY just trying to engage in a battle with a well-known blogger to raise their own profile.
Don't you have anything better to do? Who exactly are you trying to convince? What problem are you solving? Patting yourself on the back?
Pathetic.
you're here, boosting this, so it worked. kaboosh!
That’s….not how this works kid.
bigger number means he looks like more of a real person. hey, while i have you, what do you think of shawn fain for president?
Amazing how often nobody-leftists write articles like these exclusively to raise their own profile.
People like you argue that Mamdani is a "model" for the nation. Like, have you been to Oklahoma dummies?
What a joke lol.
Have you been to Oklahoma?
Unaffordable housing and childcare costs are not unique to NYC.
If you think the people of Oklahoma want higher taxes for government-run grocery stores I have a bridge to sell you.
You really have no idea how much of a bubble you are in, do you?
It would be funny if he didn't have such influence and wasn't so ghoulish
Is this the Substack version of what the kids call “clout farming?”