There's also a class of pundit that gets their jollies from contrarianism, which frequently takes the form treating conventional wisdom as factually correct incorrect regardless of whether or not it is.
And a class of readers eager to reward 'you're wrong about' the efficacy of some liberal policy/priority.
As a note, I didn't try to list examples in the OP, but I invite people to name names in the comments.
Yes, Heebie-Geebie is a fine purveyor of artisan punditry.
The guy in the nitter thread is being silly. Among the Republicans who the author thinks will gain the upper hand half the time, how many care even a little bit whether you, me, MattY, or "the Left" has been or has not been reading David French? And of those wo do, won't it just be evidence, as if they needed any more, that DF isn't 'one of them'?
The guy has completely misunderstood where conservatism has gone and, I think, is just plain wrong about whether it can come 'back' from that place. It might be that DF can carve out a living serving a small rump ex-Republican readership with a few starry eyed libs and left contrarians thrown in. But no one should confuse that with having some sort of importance in the conservative movement.
I have somehow managed to never hear of Nitter. I thought being on Bluesky made me up to date, but no. (If anyone still wants Bluesky invites, I have a few.)
Nitter is just an anonymous Twitter gateway.
Trying to think of an example of conservatives embracing someone ostensibly from the left, but without significant influence I get Tulsi Gabbard or Gl*nn Gr**nwald, either of which seem like insulting comparisons for David French.
I am back up to two Bluesky invites. I think you get one every two weeks or something.
I would disagree with the distinction presuming that punditish/bloggish advocacy requires a large audience. There are niche writers whose work percolates through the noösphere with an initally small audience that eventually propagates it more broadly.
I guess DF does have a role to play in keeping the ex-Republican rump alive. Whether this has actual political significance remains to be seen. I don't think there's any reason at all to think he'll ever have influence with the new mainstream of Republicanism. On the other hand, if he's winning a few votes for Biden, well, that's not nothing, depending on where they are. Which is a big 'depending' -- we don't need Republican converts in NY, DC, CA unless they're bringing people in PA, WI, GA, and AZ along with them.
Mostly, though, I guess I just can't summon any respect at all for someone who labels themselves 'pro-life' and can't be bothered to support policies aimed at reducing gun violence and making health care more widely available. They don't have to be the same policies I support, all I ask is that the pundit have a good faith belief that the policies they support will produce the results.
I would disagree with the distinction presuming that punditish/bloggish advocacy requires a large audience. There are niche writers whose work percolates through the noösphere with an initally small audience that eventually propagates it more broadly.
It's a very loose distinction; I'm sure there are counter-examples. But I'd argue that many of the niche writers that you're talking about aren't generalists. For example, Strong Towns has been very influential but I wouldn't call Chuck Marohn a pundit.
Yglesias here is just reiterating his poor defense of his interaction with Hanania -- except he's doing a motte-and-bailey. You do kinda have to engage with people like French, but not Hanania.
Even if Hanania has good thoughts on YIMBYism or whatever, his overall viewpoint places him beyond the pale. It is the opponents of vegetarianism who point out that Hitler was a vegetarian.
(Personally, I find French kind of tedious and obvious, and I don't read him much. Douthat I read a little bit, just because he's so peculiar and I'm kinda entertained by his weird view of Catholic ethics.)
There's also an articulable distinction in who you read and how you use them sort of like the use/mention distinction - some people find it useful to read hard-right writers in a know-your-enemy kind of way, but it does feel different to read them in the mind-open, community-of-idea-guys mode.
I have no idea what hope Matt Yglesias has of, to take his example in the OP link screenshot of to his newsletter, fostering more YIMBYism among Republicans. There's a fundamental communication gap there.
I've considered registering Republican so I could vote in their primaries, the difference between Holcomb and Pence is enormous and Republican primaries are usually the most important state elections. (But I don't, both because I'd be embarrassed if people found out and because I'd miss out on all local elections.) I don't have any good answers about how you steer the Republicans back to nominating Romneys, but I do think it's an incredibly important problem. In a two party system you really do tend to alternate power, and one of those parties being evil crooks rather than just people who are wrong about everything is a genuinely big problem.
I have no idea what hope Matt Yglesias has of, to take his example in the OP link screenshot of to his newsletter, fostering more YIMBYism among Republicans.
He has been arguing that YIMBY's are having bipartisan success but I'm only able to read the preview. I don't know how accurate that is.
Separately, I would speculate that the way that Matt Y and Douthat expect to benefit from being in dialogue is (1) Matt thinks that the Democratic coalition will be stronger if it is familiar with and responsive to the concerns that Douthat describes (Catholicism? Decadence?) and so he wants to encourage Democrats to read Douthat. (2) Douthat provides cover for some NYT-reading Republicans, but is also happy to have Democrats reading his work in the hopes that they will become more sympathetic to Catholics (even if they still vote Democratic).
11: He also did address the Hanania situation more directly recently, in exactly the way that I'm sure will drive you the most crazy
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1690467096013004800
13: The mail you'd get would probably be alarming.
12.1: Right. That's a separate motte-and-bailey that Yglesias also toyed with: It can be useful to read these people, he says, but that's not what the conversation is about.
12.2: I think punditry doesn't have to be defended on the grounds that anybody will be convinced by anything. The pundit's obligation is to be correct and illuminating. The rest is up to the reader.
14: I don't have access but am aware of some of what he'll be citing, and he does have a point. Broadly, Republicans are more NIMBY than Democrats, but the logic combined with a free-market framing has persuaded some red legislatures. Texas came super-close this year.
I think I come at this a bit like NickS does: I draw up a kind of ecosystem map not just of existing pundits but possible pundits; as in ecosystems, some niches may in some environments may be nearly uninhabited despite being viable.
Prevalent, heavily inhabited ecological niches:
The Nudger: the pundit who thinks of themselves as skinner-boxing public culture, who is trying to create discursive frames that train or align arguments, vocabularies, conceptual architectures; a pernicious type that is less influential than they think and is transparent when they believe themselves sly; another variant is Working the Ref who is focused exclusively on trying to skinner-box political officials and political appointees into doing as the pundit believes they ought to do (this is often more effective than trying to get the wider public to incrementally adjust their politics, but that's usually because the political officials and appointees have leaked to Working the Ref pundits what they want the pundits to convince them to do;
The Most Reasonable Man In the World: the pundit who regards introspection the way a slug regards salt (though there is a davidbrooksian variant where fake introspection serves as prophylaxis against criticism). This pundit sits at the middle of truth and common sense the way prison guards in Bentham's Panopticon sit in the central column: he (almost always a he) can see out to the cells of the unreasonable and hope that his whispers to the prisoners will rehabilitate them;
The Explainer: an actually useful, actually expert pundit who provides actual information (sometimes even reportage that could be fact-checked!) to readers and isn't necessarily trying to push any agenda; a variant form is the Holiday Inn Express Explainer who read Wikipedia, Malcolm Gladwell and a press release on an issue that they're purporting to explain and absolutely has an agenda;
The Memorably Good Writer: a genuine rarity in newspaper opinion writing. but can be found in the wider world of punditry here and there;
The Personal: pundits who speak from personal experience most of the time, sometimes thoughtfully and introspectively, sometimes in order to shut everybody else up and to issue moral commandments (as in the wider social mediasphere);
The WhaFuck: the pundit who has some really whacked out thing they're really into that produces reliably bad but kind of interesting takes--sort of the Douthat/Dreher headspace;
The Only True Scotsman: the angry pundit who is constantly complaining about their "own" side even though they aren't really on that side and are basically relentless concern trolls; are genuinely convinced that they are the only honest, thoughtful, knowledgeable and ethical person in public culture and that the rest of the world is only worth scolding for how disappointing it is.
Where does Maureen Dowd fall in the 19 typology? The WhaFuck? Or is her stuff too superficial to count as punditry?
15: That's pithy and smart joke that cuts directly to the heart of the issue -- as one would expect from Yglesias. And, as you suggest, it illustrates my point and shows that Yglesias understands, too.
It is entirely appropriate, Yglesias tells us, to legitimize someone with really out-front, crazy, repugnant racist policy prescriptions if that person also says legitimate (or at least debatable) things about policy.
And if you disagree, Yglesias tells us, one appropriate public response is mockery.
20: Dowd regards herself as a humorist. Russell Baker weeps.
Here's my take on pundits:
1. There is a functionally inexhaustible supply of people in the world with political or politics-adjacent opinions. Some of those people are actively dangerous to me and/or people I love.
2. Every human being has limited time and attention.
3. When a pundit -- that is, someone who has a megaphone of some kind -- decides who to interact with, they are shining the spotlight of THEIR time and attention on one of that inexhaustible supply of people. And they are implicitly recommending that other people devote some of their OWN precious time and attention to that person. Sometimes, depending on how influential the pundit is, they are actually creating a stampede of others' time and attention toward that person and away from other people.
4. The spotlight of time and attention DOES NOT DIFFERENTIATE between "mockery" attention and "praise" attention. It's all attention. And being zero-sum, it all takes attention away from other things/people.
5. Dangerous people are dangerous regardless of whether they also happen to have useful and/or accurate beliefs about topics such as housing or animals or sports. And whatever their accurate beliefs are there are other, non-dangerous people who hold those beliefs.
6. Amplifying dangerous people has real-world consequences for other human beings' lives and safety.
Put together, this means that when Yglesias decides that out of all of the zillions of people in the world who *could* get his limited time and attention, one of the few who *does* get it is a white supremacist, that says to me that he has contempt for the values and priorities outlined in my worldview above.
So I'm affirmed in my decision not to devote MY previous time and attention to reading him. But unfortunately I don't have control over the world of White Dudes in Media and Politics (tm) who have decided he's at least semi-important enough to follow.
21.2 depends, imo, entirely on whether the repugnant speaker's perspective is unique, or that their *his* having it is independently significant. (The latter is
the 'even the liberal New Republic' framing of yore. Which, if you're going to do it, has to be something like 'even stone-cold racist X agrees that blah blah.' If you're not going to be explicit about this aspect, you're platforming an asshole, when there are a dozen non-assholes to quote/celebrate etc.)
Dreher can correctly say that oysters are good eating, but only a nut quotes him on the point.
19.last. I think that captures what I genuinely like about Douthat. But he's such a sincere weirdo that I mostly don't classify him as a concern troll.
Newspaper punditry has become largely irrelevant as an aid to actual thinking. Who among those pundits is as smart and insightful as Timothy Burke?
(That started as a rhetorical question, but now I'm curious. If we limit the conversation to newspapers, we've got Jamelle Bouie and Paul Krugman -- and Krugman has educated me well enough that I don't really need him any more. Who else?)
In #5, pretend I put a comma after "And whatever their accurate beliefs are,"
25 I thought this was decent: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/us-conservatives-embrace-authoritarianism-anti-democracy-20230813.html
24.1: Sure. The argument is not that we cannot engage with Hanania. (That's a Yglesias motte-and-bailey.) The question is: How do we do so?
24.2: Yeah, I think that brings us back to Minivet's use/mention @12.
Jamelle Bouie said on Bluesky that he reads plenty of conservative writing without elevating white supremacists. His co-podcaster John Ganz reading Bronze Age Pervert is also useful, in a way that couldn't be mistaken for elevation.
Were there pundits before Royko? Who was the first NYT pundit, and when? Was the trajectory basically signed editorial page pieces or something else (Royko was a reporter who wrote a signed local-reality humor column that got more frequent and more serious over the years I think) ?
Royko was both explainer and Memorably Good Writer. His book about RJ Daley, Boss, is truly fantastic.
Currently the only Explainer I know of that's good is Catherine Rampell. Maybe Demsas also, I like the narrow focus she writes with. I guess basically I don't really want quick takes, prefer occasional well-done longform pieces, Ed Yong basically.
There's a guy who wrote for the Guardian occasionally who still seems good-- Black? No, Brown. Nice science book to boot.
IMO part of this discussion should be about money-- Columnists are now paid a lot more than working journalists, which is pretty broken.
Were there pundits before Royko?
Art Buchwald is a similar vintage (and even more specifically a humorist).
In terms of iconic columnists, I was a fan of Ellen Goodman growing up (I don't know that I regularly got her column but read a couple of collections).
Cosign 23, and style points for well-edited and numbered reasoning.
The thing with Yimbys and earnest argument is, better land use is inextricably linked with {on average less convenient parking}, and people are happy to blather about weightless ideas right up until they have to park half a block away from their preferred shop or a lane gets taken away from a street they see with their own personal eyes. Also a tree in eyeshot of their home is worth 5 million acres of development at the boundary of their metro area.
30-31: Goodman and Royko are two that I still have occasion to quote. Anna Quindlen did a great stint as an NYT columnist. Buchwald was silly and fun -- sort of a proto-Dave Berry oriented toward politics. Buchwald got senile and repetitive. Royko got mean. But Goodman and Quindlen left at the top of their game.
32: We in CA, at least, are being pretty upfront about that as the next step after what kind of housing is zoned for in theory. Housing people > housing cars! And we got a big parking reform over the line last year.
Murray Kempton was also a superb writer
Ellen Goodman
Yes! Maybe feuilletons are worth mentioning in this context, she seemed in tune with that tradition. I liked Hoffman's selection and translation of his prewar Berlin ones, What I saw
34. More power to you and I hope you win. I don't know CA or other west coast politics well enough to say anything, maybe significantly different dynamics.
37. Started a sentence with Joseph Roth's name included, who wrote the nice columns nearly a century ago, but I see that's not what I wrote.
Speaking of Dave Barry, the other thing that seems new are televised comedian-pundits, I don't know how much mass audiences for written humor still exist?
Everyone loves that thing where you read a perfectly clear sentence literally to make it say nonsense and then respond to the nonsense without acknowledging the obvious meaning.
Oh, hey, guess what: those Montana kids were right about our constitution, and the governmental officials were wrong.
https://westernlaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/2023.08.14-Held-v.-Montana-victory-order.pdf
Idiot contrarians will say that what Montana government does won't be enough to make a difference, but the hope is that people in other places are inspired to take up the fight where they are.
When a pundit -- that is, someone who has a megaphone of some kind -- decides who to interact with, they are shining the spotlight of THEIR time and attention on one of that inexhaustible supply of people. And they are implicitly recommending that other people devote some of their OWN precious time and attention to that person.
I think that's a perfectly good reason to not read MY, Chait, or anyone else. But I do want to suggest a different frame. First, consider this disclaimer in a CT post:
Before I continue. Harrington ... is also a participant in the culture wars over transgender rights that (primarily) in the UK has split feminism quite dramatically. My regular readers know I am diametrically opposed to her views on this topic; here I explore a different issue: her views on the family.
I would think that's a reasonable way to handle, "I want to engage with a specific piece of writing, but also be mindful about how and where I'm shining the spotlight of time and attention." It's reasonable in part, because readers of Crooked Timber have some interest in discussions of political philosophy and people who are askew from mainstream political coalitions in interesting ways.
I would argue that one function of MYs blog, and a reason why people read him, is to gain information about how factional disagreements within the Democratic party (or broader political coalition) are playing out. MY participates in this both by offering his own opinions (e.g, his arguments against "defund the police") and as a point of reference that other people react to (seeing which columns get more or less disagreement than usual reveals something about intra-coalition dynamics). None of that is a reason for why MY would engage with Hanania, but it is a reason why MY would be interested in intra-coalition discussions among conservatives.
There are plenty of things in life to worry about other than coalition politics; I'm just arguing that they are an area in which pundits can be useful, and that's part of the purpose of MY's blog, for example.
Molly Ivins was a Memorably Good Writer, an Explainer (on things Texas), and more than occasionally Personal. Much missed.
Encouraging YIMBYism on the right is definitely a worthwhile and doable project that has already seen some successes. I see it personally a lot in my work; one of our most conservative local Assembly members is also one of the biggest advocates for zoning reform and increasing housing supply. That said, it is possible to engage with people on specific issues like this without implicitly endorsing them in general.
Speaking of the Assembly, I'm presenting to them in like half an hour. Wish me luck!
"That said, it is possible to engage with people on specific issues like this without implicitly endorsing them in general."
I'm skeptical, the whole point is that engaging at all is seen as "implicitly endorsing them in general."
Good luck teo.
48. Context matters. Broadcast speaking is different from talking to someone. 23.3 doesn't apply to people actually working in local politics speaking in that context.
48: It's entirely possible to hold forth on the subject of vegetarianism without bringing Hitler into the conversation at all. Conversely, it's entirely possible to talk about Hitler's vegetarianism without legitimizing him as a human being.
See Minivet in 29. I have no doubt whatsoever that Bouie discusses conservative writing -- maybe even Hanania -- without elevating white supremacists. It's not hard to do, and as best as I can reckon, Yglesias could have plausibly claimed that this was his intent -- until he got into the business of denying that this was even an issue.
What's wrong with elevating white supremacists?
It's probably too late now, but good luck, teo!
Also there should be term limits for pundits. But instead at the NYT it's a lifetime gig. No matter how terribly wrong you are, they will never fire you. You can even quit to run for Governor and prove yourself to be such a fool that you don't learn the rules for establishing residency, and they will still hire you back.
I just landed back in Texas and I have a lot of anger at my seatmates for having such an aggresively boring conversation that I struggled to block out enough to follow the big reveal scene in Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. I sat sort of bent over as though it's just really comfortable to tightly clap my hands over my ears. I hate them. The slowest, most monotonous comparison of chain restaurants in Austin vs Dallas.
Spoiler: they have Central Market in Dallas, too.
I haven't even gotten far enough to know what that is.
Don't eat at Cheddar Scratch Kitchens. My mom wouldn't eat it even after weeks of hospital food. And she was right not to.
as best as I can reckon, Yglesias could have plausibly claimed that this was his intent -- until he got into the business of denying that this was even an issue.
What does getting into the business of denying mean? That is, the total body of Yglesias's work mentioning Hanania I've seen is one tweet and that reply calling him smart but unfortunately crazy, and all I've seen in terms of Yglesias's response to people getting mad about it is irritable jokes. You sound as if he's made an explicit commitment to "elevating white supremacists" somehow.
None of this is a big deal, you could never read Yglesias again and be none the worse for it, but these kinds of reactions to him seem to me to be seeing something completely different from what I'm seeing.
25.1: Douthat is so odd that I find him amusing sometimes too. The more I think about his column on the Barbie movie in which he wishes for a sequel so Ken and Barbie can get married, the funnier it gets.
But he really really should have lost his job after the 2016 debacle. He was the absolute last person in the US to realize that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination.
Thanks everyone! It went really well!
I was a voracious reader of humor columnists as a kid, and read basically every collection of such essays my local library had. I don't think there many eleven-year-old girls in south Florida who had read all twenty of Lewis Grizzard's wonderfully titled books, but I was certainly one of them.
[Also, even today I continue to be struck by the extent to which my parents had virtually no oversight of or insight to most of what I was reading back then.]
48, 49: On the subject of context, I thought my exchange with Upetgi here in the prior thread was really interesting.
I said this:
Yglesias is not wrong about everything in the Greenwaldian sense, but you can see he's trending in that direction, and I find it useful to reflect on that process.
Upetgi responded thus:
Comparing him to Greenwald is completely detached from reality.
In the moment, I thought this was unfair. My unambiguous intent here was to distinguish Yglesias from Greenwald. "Yglesias is not wrong about everything in the Greenwaldian sense ..."
Right?
But on reflection, I can see that the relevant question is: Is it appropriate to place Yglesias on the same continuum as Greenwald? Because that's what I did.
Similarly: Is it appropriate to place people like Hanania in the same context as the less obvious racists whose place in the public discourse I accept? There are subtleties and grey areas here -- that is to say, there is context.
But there is, nonetheless, a line that Hanania clearly crosses -- a line whose existence Yglesias denies.
Greenwald is a crazy person who may well be a Russian asset. Yglesias is a normie Democrat who is on the right side of essentially every major policy question, but makes tweets that a lot of people find annoying. I have no idea what you think they have in common.
Broadcast speaking is different from talking to someone.
Right, part of this is the role of pundits and the responsibilities they have specifically, which is presumably what led NickS in the direction of trying to categorize them. Other people are in different positions and have different responsibilities. To the extent that drawing attention to things that people might not have noticed is your role in society, you have a greater responsibility to think through the implications of those things.
Greenwald is a crazy person who may well be a Russian asset
I think it's one or the other, probably not both.
You sound as if he's made an explicit commitment to "elevating white supremacists" somehow.
Normally with something like this, I'd advise you to quote me. But you did! And you picked the exact relevant quote. But you omitted the antecedent for the word "this." Here's the quote, with antecedent:
I have no doubt whatsoever that Bouie discusses conservative writing -- maybe even Hanania -- without elevating white supremacists. It's not hard to do, and as best as I can reckon, Yglesias could have plausibly claimed that this was his intent -- until he got into the business of denying that this was even an issue.
So "this" refers to the issue of discussing conservative writing without elevating white supremacists. Yglesias has entirely circumvented that issue. He sort of sidles up next to it in the Douthat/French excerpt in the OP. He suggests that there are some people with objectionable views with whom one can reasonably engage with an assumption of good faith. I'm sympathetic with his view there, and agree with his placement of French and Douthat in that category. (But please don't make me defend that! Because I am certainly aware that one could reasonably take strong exception to my/Yglesias' view.)
Yglesias, on the other hand, is careful to avoid discussing the fact that there is a line that must be drawn -- because if he did that, he'd have to place Hanania on the same side of the line as French and Douthat. So even as people criticize Yglesias for being on the wrong side of that line with Hanania, Yglesias obscures the existence of a line -- and then openly mocks it.
An honest defense of Yglesias by Yglesias would put Hanania in the same basically reputable class as French/Douthat -- except he knows better than to try that,* because it would be so obviously grotesque and offensive.
*I haven't read the whole substack piece, so I'm only guessing that it doesn't mention Hanania in that context.
Yglesias, on the other hand, is careful to avoid discussing the fact that there is a line that must be drawn . . . Yglesias obscures the existence of a line -- and then openly mocks it.
I don't think it's a principled stance. My reading is (a) that he'd agree that Richard Hanania's writing, taken as a whole is over the line but (b) he's being petulant about not saying so because (c) he feels like the criticisms are unfair given that, as LB notes, his interactions with Hanania were fairly minimal. Also (d) he is generally cranky about what he calls "the politics of shunning."
To the extent that drawing attention to things that people might not have noticed is your role in society, you have a greater responsibility to think through the implications of those things.
That cuts both ways however; if your role involves drawing attention to things that people may not have noticed that also implies that sometimes you'll make mistakes, and that doesn't mean you fold up and stop doing so.
The standard in 23 would argue that it's just not worth reading someone who links to the range of people that MY does (which is a fine reaction), but I read 65 differently as saying (approximately), "it's fine for Yglesias to link to people who are harmful, but he's doing a bad job of it. He's not using the appropriate caution or thoughtfulness."
I'd completely agree that he's not handling the discussion about Richard Hanania well, and that he comes across as petulant and irritable. But I don't know that it's indicative of a larger pattern of bad behavior (separate from, for example, that I often disagree with how he frames issues that affect trans people).
One of the many sad things about the demise of Twitter is that, used right, it made punditry pretty superfluous. But having watched some of today's big shot pundits grow up, it's still hard to take op-ed pages seriously (McMegan in the WaPo??!!).
70.1 gets some parts right, but I do think it's also missing one key plank of what he's saying:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1688516545419309056
What's weird to me is the combination of:
"it's fine for Yglesias to link to people who are harmful, but he's doing a bad job of it. He's not using the appropriate caution or thoughtfulness."
With the key example of his not using enough caution or thoughtfulness being a tweet where among the 280 charactes he includes "also a crazy person."
64: It's funny. I didn't really think I was comparing Yglesias to Greenwald in the initial comment. (I thought my literal words presented a contrast!) And I didn't think I was doubling down on that comparison in the second comment. But you are absolutely correct both times -- not just about my words, but about the intent behind them. (To be clear: I am being 100% unironic.)
So okay, it's time for me to own this and say it straight out: Greenwald at one time was a fine reporter, a terrific polemicist and a shrewd observer of the slide of the US into autocracy. His information won a well-deserved Pulitzer in 2014 for the Washington Post and the Guardian. He was a hell of a guy. Smart and dead right about everything. Yglesias was and remains a person of genuine substance and admirable qualities, but he never quite got up to Greenwald's level.
And yet, even before 2014, you could see that Greenwald was starting to fray. The first time I spotted it was in his (I thought) naive acceptance of Rand Paul at face value. And now he's just a nut.
I hope and believe that Yglesias isn't going to follow that route. One gets the sense that he has more self-awareness than, say, Matt Taibbi. I think Nick is reasonable in suggesting that this Hanania thing is an understandable human lapse. I mean, Yglesias was a kid when he endorsed the Iraq War. And yeah, he did opine that the 300 Bangladesh workers who were crushed in the factory collapse were the victims of reasonable policy choices - and then did a poor job of owning up to the error. I genuinely think he can be given a break for this stuff, including Hanania.
But still, his occasional blindness to the obvious has some unfortunate resonances. Maybe a more apt comparison for Yglesias is Kinsley. If Yglesias is 20 percent down the road to Greenwald, he's probably 70% en route to Kinsley -- and that is not a good place to end up, in my opinion.
I guess I just think Greenwald changed a bunch, and Yglesias hasn't really changed at all. Largely the objections to Yglesias are that liberals have changed and he hasn't gotten with the program.
I think it's more that the issues and context have changed and people are reacting to that in different ways.
72: The expression that the philosphers use* is: "That proves too much." Yglesias is offering a heuristic here that allows him to engage in a respectful fashion with pretty much anyone.
*IANAP and have no idea what they actually say.
70.3 I don't think anyone is saying that when you make a mistake you should slink off and never open your mouth again. What one should do is own up to the mistake, and then think about the various antecedent thoughts and assumptions that led to the mistake. We make mistakes for various reasons, sure, but when one realizes that a mistake has been made, it's a good time to check the settings.
No one clicks links, of course, so here's what Yglesias says in the tweet linked in 72:
My view (one of my most woke opinions!) is that racism is deeply entwined with conservative politics in the United States of America so if you want to talk to conservatives about anything you're going to be dealing with some people who have some problematic views.
He's not wrong! For the most part it really is true that you can't get anything done in this country without cutting some deals with racists. That said, for productive conversation and problem-solving you don't necessarily need to engage with them as racists. Hanania's whole deal is very thinly veiled racism, so engaging with him collegially about Salvadoran gangs or whatever is enabling him in a way that talking to a more "mainstream" (still undoubtedly racist!) conservative about housing policy wouldn't be.
I'm just avoiding substack and Twitter.
79: I haven't read Hanania, and I don't really intend to, but it seems to me like thinly veiled racism isn't his whole deal, he also has a second deal which is saying conservatives shouldn't go running around saying so many obviously wrong things like that we should bomb Mexico, that vaccines are bad, or that the MSM is full of lies. Now maybe he's somehow saying that bombing Mexico is dumb out of thinly veiled racism, but I don't see how to make that connection, and at any rate whether thinly-veiled racism really is his whole deal is kind of the whole argument.
Apparently, we're going to need more "more indictments" threads.
81: He says reasonable stuff to get reasonable centrists to take him seriously so they're more susceptible to his racism.
The racism has gotten so fucking stupid, I would expect it would be actually embarrassing to your self-aware white supremacist at some point. But maybe that's not a thing that happens now because of Fox and meth? We're only ten or fifteen years out from Murray and whoever writing a whole book to argue white people are smarter at science than everyone else and now white people are bragging about the wonders of humans eating horse dewormer.
Not all white people. Some of my best friends are white people.
81: I think teo misspoke by referring to Hanania's racism as "thinly veiled." And I think this is a key point. I insist on drawing lines to separate the fascists that one debates from the Nazis that one punches. One determinant of that distinction is the effort that a racist exerts to veil his racism.
Hanania has no veil. From this year:
The belief in white racism as a major factor in American life is the force that distorts all of policymaking and culture. ... Once you remove reactions that are based on group behavior, and private preferences that are none of the government's business in a free society, the remaining "racism" in the United States against blacks is negligible, and more than balanced out by the ways in which they are advantaged.
...
If you dislike racists on Twitter focusing too much on black-on-white crime, know that they are closer to the truth than the race obsessives on the other side, and have a lot less power.
...
You can't have concerns about disparate impact in a world where crime is so overwhelmingly committed by one group.
...
We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people.
...
These people are animals, whether they're harassing people in subways or walking around in suits
Upetgi, you've made the point that you can judge whether Hanania is beyond the pale without reading his work. I will similarly say: I can place him outside the realm of reasoned discourse without reading anything else he has to say.
Hanania does not conceal his project, which teo describes in 83. His aim is to legitimize the views of the most grotesque racists. Hanania identifies a group of "Enlightened Centrists" that includes himself, Yglesias and Sailer, for example.
And Hanania is right when he says that Yglesias has done nothing in recent days to damage his standing in that group.
I think teo misspoke by referring to Hanania's racism as "thinly veiled."
Yeah, "thinly veiled" was too generous to Hanania. He's about as open a racist as you'll find short of, like, David Duke.
Like, he's actually quite different from a typical far-right nutcase who is invested in all sorts of crazy ideas on a variety of topics. He's quite rational and reasonable in furthering his project of advancing his totally insane ideas on this one topic into mainstream discourse.
"Now maybe he's somehow saying that bombing Mexico is dumb out of thinly veiled racism"
This would be a great argument to make. A sort of combination of blind support for military intervention and overt racism. "We shouldn't bomb the Mexicans, they don't deserve to be bombed. We should bomb someone who'll benefit from it, like Germany."
"These are, let me be frank here, good honest white JDAMs, dropped from inherently racially superior aircraft. The Hispanic simply will not appreciate them adequately. Pearls before swine, if you ask me."
Granted that he's unusually racist even for a Republican, it's a separate claim that all his other beliefs an opinions are just part of some elaborate scheme to trojan horse his racism. To take another example, Andrew Sullivan is extraordinarily racist for his position on the political spectrum, but he wasn't making the conservative case for gay marriage out of some complicated bank shot to legitimize his racism. He's just a racist guy who also supports marriage equality.
89-90: I truly believe that racism is behind a big chunk of US Republican isolationism in pretty much the exact way you describe. The white man's burden, in this reading, is genuinely a burden -- one that we don't want to bear for those people. In my view, opposition to the Ukraine war is almost a side-effect (plus the Russians are more fascist and therefore whiter).
91: It's like they say: You can lead a horse to links, but you can't make him drink.
92: I said that as a joke but I can sort of see your point. It's just a more obnoxious variant of the argument that basically said "we are wasting our time, money and lives trying to turn Afghanistan (or Iraq) into a liberal democracy. Their culture isn't ready for it, strongman rule is what they are used to and it's what they like and they'll fight to preserve it".
I really DGAF about Yggles, but the gossipy side of me is dying to know what Hanania's poor grad school classmates and faculty at UCLA thought of him. Like, what's the co-author of his ISQ article thinking right now? And they have a whole race, ethnicity, and politics subfield--did he show up to talks and ask racist questions? Who was on his dissertation committee?* What did the letters of rec for his postdoc say??? The IR subfield is fairly small there, so most of them must have had to deal with him.
*I slightly know someone was an external member of Sinema's committee and have gently ribbed them about it.
::sobs:: Won't someone think of the poor faculty?!?
NickS mentions Molly Ivins, who is precisely the person I would name as a major example of the Good Writer niche. (And yes, explainer of things Texas as well; there's an Ohio-based Substack by D.J. Byrnes aka The Rooster that reminds me of her a bit in that particular respect.)
Also upthread someone mentions John Ganz' analysis of Bronze Age Pervert which I think is exactly right as a model of how you approach odious thought in the public sphere, which is not as a peer-to-peer conversation but as a historian or anthropologist might. It's a framing shift that really matters--studying a dangerous threat under a microscope rather than evaluating and then challenging someone as if they are in a shared liberal public sphere with you. You can even trace the genealogy of that person's thought with some seriousness, or bracket off interesting contradictions in it--just don't talk about it as "I agree with X" or "I really disagree with Y".
95: It's probably no one I know, but now I'm curious too.
NickS mentions Molly Ivins
That was Doug (at 43) but I absolutely agree that Molly Ivins was a legend.
95: Love this question. But I'm guessing they think he's smart and has interesting things to say, but unfortunately is also a crazy person.
The super rightwing and probably racist (at a minimum sexist) guy I went to grad school with was always well-behaved while on the clock and did some decent research, it was only out for drinks that he brought out all the crazy shit. Math isn't IR, so there's more opportunity here for him to bring the crazy to work, but still I wouldn't be surprised if he was pretty normal in his job.
95 I want deets too!
97.2 gets it exactly right
Granted that he's unusually racist even for a Republican, it's a separate claim that all his other beliefs an opinions are just part of some elaborate scheme to trojan horse his racism. To take another example, Andrew Sullivan is extraordinarily racist for his position on the political spectrum, but he wasn't making the conservative case for gay marriage out of some complicated bank shot to legitimize his racism. He's just a racist guy who also supports marriage equality.
Correct. This is an idiosyncratic fact about Hanania personally that doesn't necessarily apply to other conservatives. It's a well-known fact to people who are familiar with him, which is why they're so up in arms about centrist pundits engaging with him specifically.
This response to the entire discussion of Hanania is quite good: https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-end-of-centrism
92: I was having a row with dsquared on this point the other day - as he often tiresomely does, he was waving around the clip where George W. Bush said he didn't do nation building in order to claim that Al Gore was history's greatest monster. The thing about Bush's remark was that he specifically did want to do military interventions, he just didn't want to stick around afterwards - he was just as aggressive as anyone else, even more so, but he was more irresponsible and happy to let the pieces fall where they may after he'd finished letting the bombs fall where they may.
That's really the difference; there are very few Rs who actually want to stop bombing, but plenty who'd be delighted if they could just blitz random foreigners cost-free.
on the point about centrists, the issue here is just like all the other issues - conservative radicalization. As they've marched to the extreme, you either have to Just Ask Questions about torture or nuking Canada, or else you have to come out as, well, a competing form of conservatism trying to move into the abandoned space.
That's really the difference; there are very few Rs who actually want to stop bombing, but plenty who'd be delighted if they could just blitz random foreigners cost-free.
Correct. The way I've put this before is that a lot of these guys are correctly skeptical about "humanitarian warfare" but the part they object to is not war but humanitarianism.
Humans are assholes. They've got that figured out.