Why I try to avoid engaging with political discourse.
Or why Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias are tools.
It will become clear by the end of this sentence that this is not a flex by any means, but there was a time when I felt like I knew how to asses the op-eds and online spats from the punditocracy. This is absolutely not a valuable or even marketable skill, and knowing how to navigate a garbage chute after diving in does not make the decision to do so any more justifiable or less confounding. But goofing on influential idiots feels decently righteous, even if it involves reading articles and tweets that actively infuriate me. After a while, I’d come to realize that many columns were a therapeutic exercise for anti-social freaks to launder their psychosexual fetishes—or I was mostly wasting my time reading absolute drivel written by some smug and extravagantly out-of-touch midwit.
Our journalistic institutions pride themselves on platforming a wide range of opinions, even if that lofty ideal amounts to a glut of obviously partisan and milquetoast center-right to center-left pablum. The slate of online news functions as a tasting flight of what’s currently on offer in this burgeoning field of outrage porn and echo chamber riffraff. You do not need an especially refined palate to notice this sort of thing. The distinctive brassy tang of snarky #resistance clapbacks is obviously and instantly different than the comparatively refined notes of vanilla and pressure-treated wood in what The Atlantic generally serves up. There are blue-check nerds seething at random Twitter eggs for having dissenting opinions about their preferred prestige TV shows and there are debate me, bro culture warrior podcasters losing their shit at “woke” and hocking crypto on their commercial breaks, and this content is notably saltier and more processed than the grainier, infinitely more somber craftsmanship of establishment journos fretting about the end of democracy. When decanted properly, long-form hot takes have the look of a thoughtful article, with the unfortunate hangover effect of the brain rot both preceding and almost entirely supplanting the intoxicating part. And perhaps most distastefully, America’s Paper of Record makes the deliberate choice to employ Bret Stephens, and what he offers has the texture of oatmeal but it’s as nutritious as a dry cat turd.
It is important to note that all these different styles of news-ish content generally go down like battery acid and are extremely bad for you. Most pundits who work in mainstream media are either clinically stupid or incredibly dull. Most of their commentary is monotonous and predictable, and even if I respect the quality of writing from a publication like the New Yorker, the viewpoints they present are unbelievably narrow. They tend to report backwards from the churn of this stupid broader moment, diagnosing the droll cause and effect of reality from the trendlets of the establishment and the assumptions of Beltway consensus, then endeavor to explain why and how this means that things are more or less working as they should. Their analysis and commentary amount to an idle bias toward the class of people who are already in charge, and sort of things elites find interesting—the failson resentment of people summering in Monaco, the self-flattering ideal of meritocracy, a full-spectrum fixation on identity, and small-bore reforms like expanding the child tax credit.
The whole Enlightened Centrist schtick that a lot of these turbodorks have worked out depends upon them more or less acknowledging the toxicity of everyday life and then running it through layer after layer of faux-academic tweed until it comes out completely abstracted from empirical and observable reality. It may be that their list of the ways that the Trump administration is pushing America towards cataclysm and collapse doesn’t begin with the decades-long looting of the working class, but it is demonstrably happening. But it is easier and safer, and also something like a precondition of their respective gigs, for these undiscerning blowhards to look out through a bulletproof window and describe whatever they see as a matter of wonkish gobbledygook.
That longwinded intro brings me to some recent tweets from Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith about how “leftists” don’t genuinely care about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but are only raising this as a “wedge issue” to gain influence within the Democratic Party. On a visceral level, this is the kind of dull provocation that is standard for a canting middlebrow who confuses controversy with subversion. But I can’t fully comprehend the kind of requisite shamelessness or blithe sociopathy it would take to describe mass bloodshed as a “wedge issue,” but it seems like we’re at that stage of contrarian brain rot. The timing of their shitposts is especially sinister, considering the ghastly revelations of Israeli soldiers opening fire on Palestinian children at ersatz aid sites. This is banality of evil at its most insufferable and pretentious.
It’s clear that these types of Professional Opinion Havers are in this position because they have a blank and fulsome worship of power and credentials. They are not necessarily paid to be “correct,” but to quickly proffer convenient takes that exonerate and flatter whatever party they’re loosely affiliated with. In this instance, it is interesting that they place the burden of the Democratic Party’s floundering appeal on “leftists” who have expressed their anger and frustration at the U.S. government’s shameful role in the unrelenting slaughtering of Palestinians; Joe Biden and the Democrats seem to be completely blameless for their hand in a six-figure death total and how that tanked their electoral appeal. And if leftists “don’t actually think they have much chance of affecting events in Palestine,” it could be because of the Democratic Party’s impotence and complicity, and the national politics of this country that they are so eager to remind us cannot be changed.
The idea that it’s a “wedge issue” to vocalize rage and disgust at the extermination of literal children is a level of callousness that will never break through the ballistic glass of their self-regard. But it is revealing of their moral compass. Well, Matthew and Noah, would you say the same about the Holocaust? And if you wouldn’t, why not? How many civilians need to die until you’re willing to call it a genocide? Or, after a certain point, does it even matter what we call it before we do something to stop or at least mitigate it?
There is a very clear and simple demand that America’s complicity in this genocide must stop, and Israel’s violence should be confronted by U.S. power rather than actively abetted. “Building factional power” in the Democratic Party, for better or worse, is the only slim but viable path to make this demand official policy. Otherwise, what is the negotiation here? Turning away from this bleak horror was essentially a main pillar of the Democratic Party platform in the 2024 election, and it’s not as if something like Medicare-for-All was offered in exchange for our votes. Either way, this is an insane bargain if you choose to see it on those terms. Even though I reluctantly pulled the lever for the Coconut Lady, if genocide is an acceptable condition to keep voting blue no matter who, then the moral red line between the two evils isn’t as clear as these partisan libs want you to believe.
The wonkish contempt for the “unrealistic” is an exhausting, nauseating stand-in for the dead consensus of left-liberalism in the mainstream media, comprised of a tiny clique of Ivy League grads plucked from the same pool as The Atlantic or New York Times writers. It’s a huge bummer, and also one sign among many of our culture’s complete flattening. Pundits like Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias are photocopies of one another, fey and nebbish cads producing work and discourse of no real import, even if they can see that everything is being shoved further under the rancid bootheels of the most rotten people this country has ever produced. But even in their veneration of process and pragmatism and traditions and institutions, they must intuitively sense how pathetic it is that things have fallen this far because they spend hours upon days straining to work backwards to explain why it’s somehow good, actually.
These types of pundits know the nation is gnawing and hacking itself to shreds in a state of blind tantrum, but they can’t acknowledge or admit it. Their understanding of the world is deterministic and a matter of affect and aesthetics, so their analysis will always be blinkered and stymied. They don’t value anything beyond their own professional status, so they’ll maunder about how something polls from the comforts of their Twitter accounts. Because of their deep incuriosity and prissy dismissal of material politics, the analysis that follows is infuriatingly mid and backhandedly poignant—and they’ll find themselves fervently typing paragraphs about That’s Not The Definition Of A Genocide or You Should Consider The Optics of That. It’s all dilettante-ish mental masturbation, a rearranging of whatever fresh developments the world hands them into a few familiar snide remarks.
The Noah Smiths and the Yglesiai of the world have been in mainstream media long enough and lazily enough that, at this point, they are just boring fixtures of a bland landscape. This kind of resignation toward the state of political news has me almost relating to the rednecks who grouse about coastal elites. Some of the “anti-intellectualism” of working-class Americans is better understood as an aversion to listening to trust fund twerps yammer about problems that their wealth and status insulate them from. When these pundits are just doing a low-effort version of amateur cultural taxonomy, it’s easy to write it off as cynical bullshit anyway. Jon Stewart once described 24/7 cable news as “prioritizing conflict over clarity,” and while there’s a lot of truth to that statement, I’d take it a step further. Political commentary as currently constructed doesn’t help you learn anything new as much as it reinforces what you already hate.
props for the pluralization of Yglesias