I’ve been right about some things

Is Matt Yglesias always wrong? An investigation

The Washington Post / Contributor

When Nathan Robinson wrote a piece last December titled “Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything,” the leftist hater brigade really ate it up.

I sincerely cannot recall a single instance of a brigader saying, “You know, I really hate Matt Yglesias, but it’s not literally true that he’s always confident or that he’s always wrong — for example, even though I disagree with him on every point of factional controversy between the left and the center-left, he also has a lot of banal progressive opinions like ‘abortion should be legal’ and ‘the government should give poor people more resources.’”

I thought this spoke poorly of a leftist political culture that values conformity over accuracy in a way that makes it hard to formulate a workable governing agenda, even in places where the underlying views of the electorate are quite left-wing. On the other hand, Robinson is a huge weirdo, so I didn’t mind too much. But then Luke Savage wrote a piece last week just completely ripping Robinson off, and again people ate it up!

That genuinely annoyed me from a standpoint of craft. I was kind of a progressive firebrand myself in my youth who liked to do scabrous takedowns of writers who were more moderate than me. But I like to think I took enough pride in my work to not just be copying others like that. And then Jacob Silverman published a piece in The Nation about how the launch of The Argument is bad that passingly referred to me as “perpetually and confidently wrong.” I used to read The Nation every week in high school, my grandma was literary editor there in the sixties, and my uncle Lewis wrote film criticism for them. And to be fair, they would both think that I’m way too right-wing, but I like to think they’d have at least some respect for me as a writer and thinker.

It stings! But I think it’s important to understand why people who disagree with me are such assholes about it.