EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/07/blob-abides

This weekend will be the four-year anniversary of “the Blob” entering public discourse with respect to America’s foreign policy community. The term emerged from a New York Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s foreign policy amanuensis. According to Rhodes’s account in the story, “the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”

The term soon became omnipresent in foreign policy discussions as its definition expanded in scope. It came to mean the foreign policy “establishment” that included those working in government, think tanks, and academia. Four years later, the term, like “globalization” or “neoliberalism” or “populist” or “elite,” tends to obscure as much as it reveals.

OK, so I guess it seems to be more along the lines of "hawks", ie those who believe the US needs to project dominance for its own sake internationally.

I guess typical of Matty that he's doubling down on his take that Biden basically made the right call despite everything that's happened.

^ a member of Team Stay Forever

Nothing lasts forever.

I don’t think making it a synonym of hawks or neolibs is accurate, really - the blob is imperialism by bureaucratic inertia and tradition rather than clearly defined goals.

well of course MY always doubles down, right or wrong, but the argument that it had to be done this way (fast and chaotic) and not e.g. well organised and drawn out with ordered contingencies in place -- bcz the slow and steady way wd certainly have been stalled and derailed by the blob -- is his argument, yes; less defend biden at all costs than identify the forces arrayed against withdrawal and identify what needed to be done to defeat them

josh marshall more or less agrees: another surprising lib centrist in the "fool me once" space

Hindsight is 20/20, but I don't buy that this was the only other option besides a generations-long, semi-permanent deployment of US troops in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago I wonder what odds Biden would've given that this would be how it would play out. If he thought there was even a 5% chance it would happen this way, I think he was irresponsible to proceed as he did. If he thought it was less than that, then I guess it was a failure of intelligence.

i think they call it "the blob" because it represents a neoliberal sort of pro-interventionist "conventional wisdom" that transcends party and ideology. the traditional divisions (gop vs. dem, etc.) don't apply.

The time for a long orderly withdrawal and acceptance of defeat was 2010 at the latest.

iirc one of the examples of the Blob that Ben Rhodes used was all the Saudi money going into DC thinktanks producing all of these anti-Iran pundits and "intellectuals"

Ross Douthat has penned the most incendiary anti-blob screed I've seen yet:

Our botched withdrawal is the punctuation mark on a general catastrophe, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opinion/afghanistan-biden.html

based ross

The worst person you know just etc etc

man ross needs to chill if he wants to be invited back to aspen

Since this is kind of the blob commentary thread now

Lay off and give the Blob some mulligans. pic.twitter.com/64qSWz3Sqd

— Daniel Denvir (@DanielDenvir) September 2, 2021

just noting -- since i mentioned him upthread -- that we just got a powerful shitposter's "let's be frank: laws are made up" from josh marshall lol: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/scotus-delenda-est

(ugh i hate it when it does that)

Ezra had Robert Wright on his podcast to talk about the blob

https://i.imgur.com/sSLp1cp.png

I will basically turn in my dirtbag card at this point and say ezra is Good. I usually like his podcasts (the ones I choose to listen to)

I feel like this current act of his career allows him to be chiller and read more cool books and I definitely think he’s moved to the left

About 5 years ago Hayes wrote something for the Nation I disagreed with (in part) so I wrote him a brief & somewhat unfriendly email telling him as much. He replied with about a thousand words thoughtfully explaining himself to me when he had no obligation to do so, and he did as if he were having a conversation with one of his colleagues or someone he respected and not some random butthurt internet dude. Our politics are basically the same but I would be Team Hayes even if they weren't.

― All kinds of heinous things, Friday, December 28, 2012 12:11 AM (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is incredible btw and hates is the Only Good Cable News Guy. I loved his new yorker essay a couple weeks ago tho personally I would have edited out the trump stuff

hayes*

im still #TeamYglesias but i liked Ezra’s piece on David Shor this week, particularly how it gave a pretty thorough airing of the critical perspectives on popularism. most of the interviews with shor so far have been with people who just agree with him fully (like eric levitz, noah smith or matt yglesias) so it was nice to see some thoughtful pushback

i get a slightly manic vibe from Chris Hayes

I need to read that, I started it and then realized how long it was and I was already in the middle of a couple of other long things

in complete agreement with basically everything k3vin said here! i have some shame about enjoying ezra's podcast but he's a good interviewer and has a very curious mind

ezra is okay but annie lowrey is better

#OneOfUs #TeamEzra

ezra has a curious mouth (for gargling balls [of the ruling class])

ezra is okay but annie lowrey is better

― mookieproof, Saturday, October 9, 2021 6:24 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

There's actually an amazing moment in Ezra's interview of Jenny Odell where she recommends Annie Lowrey's book, not realizing that he's married to her.

one of the flaws in general with interviews, podcasts, and other interesting things is people can come on there are just say whatever they want and the interviewer will nod along and make nodding along noises, like ezra is no different than npr in that its soothing entertainment dressed up as something serious, i say this because very much against my will the other day someone started to tell me about ezra interviewing tyler cowen who they had never heard of, and i guess he was on there pushing some cosmopolitan thing about the joys of travel and encountering different cultures which is all fine and good, but! tyler cowen is an influential political actor one who often has libertarian affixed to his name, so i started telling this person about his shitty defense of big business and various other bad harmful politics and she was like oh that wasnt the impression i got he seems like a nice liberal, i was like well he is very good at chess

I deliberately avoid the ones with bad ppl like cowen but like the ones with amia srinivasan, adam tooze, maggie nelson ie actual original thinkers have been really good imo

your friend who has never heard of tyler cowen may not have absorbed the intricacies of the interview tbf

ah yeah the ezra klein interview was probably too intricate

that shor guy is such an obvious fraud my sophisticated computer projections 12 years out into the future that tell me that democrats should run on popular things and by that i mean target swing voters lmao, i mean god bless ezra for pushing back a little bit i guess but it was funny to see twitter described as the dem echo chamber because it is very much not! in fact the dem establishment is quite obviously being exposed to ideas that disturb them on twitter, as evidenced by attempting to blame defund the police, a position which effectively zero dem politicians have endorsed blamed for future electoral failures

the real dem establishment shines through the article in its unexamined assumptions about the primacy of above all else targeted messaging in winning elections, that the point of winning elections is to win more elections, and of course total lack of refection on the actual governing democrats do and how that might contribute to how people feel about them, i mean if this guy were just a campaign worker talking to other campaign workers fine but the dem establishment and many rank and file dem hobbyists very much have 24/7 campaign worker brain

another kind of funny tell that shor is processing washington consensus through algorithms is the total absence of the big recent novel trend in the polling, which is of course the huge generational divide! the likes of which weve not seen since before we started tracking that sort of thing

ezras momentary grappling with the intricacies of class was pretty painful too, his conclusion that if you are a white millionaire who drives a pickup truck you are the same as a poor white guy who also has a pickup truck because you both voted for trump i think is prob pretty much liberal consensus, shows how alienated our politics are from any real class analysis, which is of course super fine with powerful people across the political spectrum

i do agree that hillary would have won if she had gotten strongly behind even just one popular policy, like if instead of saying that economists favor raising the minimum wage to $12 she had run around the country saying fuck it you all deserve $15 an hour, and not just because its a popular galvanizing policy but because it wouldve shown that she was capable of standing for anything at all, but of course she was not

also interesting that the consensus around obamas big win has become that he was simply incredibly talented, the fact that he ran on HOPE and CHANGE is maybe too painful to reflect upon

wait I feel like i agree with all the stuff you just said but also am not sure how it pertains to ezra klein

hes one of them man, lol occurs to me hes kind of the david brooks of centrists

yglesias is bill kristol

ahhh lmao ilx undefeated

https://i.imgur.com/6ngjErV.png

hes one of them man, lol occurs to me hes kind of the david brooks of centrists

― lag∞n, Saturday, October 9, 2021 9:59 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I guess I thought that David Brooks was the David Brooks of centrists.

I think Klein is temperamentally similar to someone like Brooks or an NPR commentator or whatever. He seems to place a virtue on seeming reasonable and open-minded, and he occasionally invites someone on the podcast with whom he disagrees politically but believes is making their arguments in good faith (like Ross Douthat or, indeed, Tyler Cowen, whose libertarianism was pointedly brought up and critiqued by Klein on the podcast, so I don't know how much your friend was actually paying attention).

Politically, however, he feels to me more simpatico with Jamelle Bouie or Brian Beutler or the folks writing for The New Republic these days. He's fundamentally earnest, so he's not going to take on the sarcastic edge of someone like Alex Pareene, but with that earnestness comes a streak of righteous anger and moral clarity about certain issues, like expanding the social-welfare state and strengthening democracy.

At the end of the day, he's someone who is paid handsomely to pontificate for the New York Times, so I get that he may come across as a foppish establishment type. But that's not really the impression I get from engaging with his work, at least over the past few years.

imo klein is pretty clearly to the right of the new republic staff which isnt to say there isnt some overlap in views, i think also hes fundamentally a technocrat, but we live in interesting times where even technocrats maybe be moved to moral indignation, i wont hold my breath for yglesias (sociopathy)

also brooks is most certainly a conservative, but hes a conservative for centrists, which is to say his job is to apologize for republican horrors

also brooks is most certainly a conservative, but hes a conservative for centrists, which is to say his job is to apologize for republican horrors

otm

Klein is most certainly a technocrat first, and even when he argues in good faith he can't help sounding like a pundit for whom the risk of enacting social policies benefiting the people who don't read him scares him more than explaining over tweets or podcast how these policies would look.

wish we could have a safe space wonk thread where we could talk abt pollsters and bloggers without fear of bullying from lag∞n :P

1. i have no problem with polling or blogging, in fact i like both

2. lack of bullying is one of the things that has allowed technocracy to flourish, something is deeply wrong with a society where mathew yglesias has such elevated self esteem

3. if you started a technocrat thread i would probably never find it

i for one only read these revives if lag00n is involved in them

xp- milo and julio would find it tho

since i did start this thread i feel i have a duty to patrol it