Six out of eight of the largest mass-movement protests in US history have happened since 2017. You wouldn't know this from most media reporting, and you sure af wouldn't know this from the way either major party has reacted.
republicans saying "no, actually, we like health care" hits the ear wrong. and its the same problem dems have when they try to be gop lite with shit like "we need strong borders" and "we fund the police" and "there are legit concerns about boys playing girls sports."
In short, he's not—and never has been—the neutral commentator he makes himself out to be. I think history's judgement of him will be that that he was just a self-interested reactionary who did little useful to warn us about the horrors that are to come. If anything, he hastened them.
Telling people to "not panic" about encroaching authoritarianism wasn't just an "oopsie!" It wasn't just dangerous and irresponsible. It was complicity.
And punditry isn't just voices in the wind: Yglesias was well-read within the Biden administration. His schtick is persuasive to many. I cringe to think how much his palliative, conciliatory pseudo-analysis did to weaken my party. He's also taken money from the Abundance astro-turfers.
Especially now, I'm not sure how to see his life's project as anything but ideological—I'd even say reactionary. He helped deliver us to this moment by giving support and the cover of respectability to conservatives. He helped make things cozy for the reactionaries and subversives bedeviling us.
I contend that's actually a much more dangerous posture to assume than a naked ideologue whose self-interest is on clear display. Re-read what King said about white moderates in his letter from a Birmingham jail. That's Yglesias.
But if you've been paying attention, he really only ever breaks rightward. More specifically, he always advances the causes of his fellow white socioeconomic elites. That's the technocrat's primary suasive trick: to disguise their self-interest as neutral empiricism.
I've watched Yglesias for a couple decades now. He's always worn the mantle of a scholarly, disinterested technocrat—someone only ever guided by dispassionate, learned impulses. He cultivates the ethos of someone swayed neither by the left nor right, but by empirical truth.
I'm going to set aside you completely ignoring January 6th just now—not only the insurrection itself, but what it clearly presaged for our current historical circumstances.
It's not just that he was massively incorrect about the coming of this historical moment, it's that he constantly downplayed, minimized, and even undermined those who actually did see it coming. This is supposed to be in his wheelhouse and he got it very, very wrong. That's it.
The big one, though, is he failed to see this historical moment coming. It's not that he's occasionally wrong, he was massively wrong about this huge thing! No one can see the future, but we need to put far more trust in those who predicted the present and less in pseudo-intellectual reactionaries.
He has no qualifications besides being born to Rafael and a life of wealth, attending the segregationist Dalton school, and being nepobabied right into Harvard. He possesses no credentialed expertise or particular insight. He plays both sides like a careerist pundit, but he's a rudderless faker.
About big things or small? He's a myopic elite and a sucker for motivated reasoning that rewards his preferred affinity groups. bsky.app/profile/inep...
"I think that the United States is *not* under siege from a neo-fascist movement personified by Donald Trump… the old post-2012 consensus that the GOP would either diversify or die remains intact." —Matt Yglesias www.slowboring.com/p/fake-crisis
This is a serious question, Mr. Yglesias: Why do you get to be the pundit? It's not because you're possessed of any special training, expertise, or insight, and it sure as sugar isn't because you have a long track record of being right about anything. bsky.app/profile/inep...
"I think that the United States is *not* under siege from a neo-fascist movement personified by Donald Trump… the old post-2012 consensus that the GOP would either diversify or die remains intact." —Matt Yglesias www.slowboring.com/p/fake-crisis
I wish Dems would PLAY INTO IT: highlight the abuses, describe what Trump’s doing as specifically a war against Latinos, and demand protections for Latinos in the law and Constitution. It’s all upside - it shreds Trump’s coalition and it’s a powerful vehicle for resistance
Latino guys I talk to who are conservative coded: guys in well paying blue collar work, rosary on the rear view mirror guys, guys who hate communism and say the Dems are too extreme left etc.... they are almost all disgusted and furious about this shit.
Your faith in scholarliness is warranted in ordinary times. But the authoritarians are here and there is more than can be done. I think it's time for people in positions of prominence to consider what extraordinary things they can say to raise the alarm in this fast-devolving historical moment.
