“I put things out. People yell at me. I will write again the next day.” —Matt Yglesias

“I've been accused of being a soulless monster who doesn't believe in anything.” — Matt Yglesias 

Republicans will soon control the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House and will have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. We are in the brief “lame duck” period before an alarming and unprecedented moment of right-wing rule. The American right wing envisions a radical reshaping of the social order. They have already stripped women of a core constitutional right. Now the plan is mass deportations, the destruction of consumer financial protections, and the acceleration of the climate catastrophe. 

The fact that we are in this situation cannot just be ascribed to Donald Trump’s brilliance as a salesman of false promises. It also demonstrates a catastrophic failure of the Democratic Party. The Harris campaign squandered a colossal sum of money, much of which appears to have been pocketed by strategists and consultants who gave Harris terrible advice and now refuse to admit error. 

Given this situation, how delusional do you have to be to say something like: “Democratic strategists, operatives, and consultants are on average really good at their jobs which is why Harris overperformed in the battleground states”? And yet that is the post-election opinion of Matthew Yglesias, the influential liberal pundit who has been praised for his “unique and sharp insights” by Biden’s chief of staff, and whose Substack was “tied for most-followed newsletter by members of the Biden transition team.” That Substack, Slow Boring (boring as in holes, not boring because Yglesias is boring), now makes over $1 million a year, and Yglesias is the sort of person the treasury secretary will call up for a chat. He has even spoken confidentially with the president himself. 

Yglesias provokes a lot of irritation online, some of it extreme. (“I want AI to reach the point that I can create a digital simulation of Matt Yglesias and torture it for a trillion years,” says one not-untypical hater.)  Yglesias appears to be deliberately trying to cause these kinds of reactions. (“I like to provoke,” he says.) Climate journalist Dave Vetter has concluded that, along with fellow centrist blogger Noah Smith, Yglesias’s “business model is to write horrifically ill-informed, reactionary opinion pieces about subjects they know nothing about, sit back and let the backlash and subsequent revenue pile up.” Vetter recommends simply ignoring these men, refusing to give them the attention they thrive on. 

I do think it’s a waste of time to try to refute, on an ongoing basis, every single piece of bullshit that a professional bullshitter emits online. But I also think that in order to label someone a professional bullshitter who should be ignored, it is necessary to provide robust evidence. Yglesias himself says that his critics caricature him, that their depictions of his arguments show they have not actually read them. His friends call him a “logic machine,” and the Washington Post says his work is “draped in idealism and wisdom but anchored in data and incrementalism.” Why, then, does Yglesias provoke such fierce hostility? 

I think the core frustration that many of us have is that Yglesias’s basic posture is that of the Serious Adult who lectures the left on how we are childish, unrealistic, and out of touch with The Data. In his view, centrism is sensible, mature, realistic. Adults understand that politics is not transformative or revolutionary, but the “slow boring of hard boards.” Yglesias has written about how he outgrew his youthful leftist sympathies (although they were always limited, since he supported the Iraq War, the worst crime of our century). As he grew, he realized that “hard problems are hard,” which, he implies, leftists do not. 

You can see how, before we even get to the arguments, just the attitude on display here is likely to provoke irritation, because it is condescending and smug. When Yglesias writes of the “socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe,” he is not taking seriously the possibility that this woman could be correct: that she has been persuaded by the International Court of Justice filings showing evidence that Israel is engaged in genocide and posts “obsessively” because she sees genocide as morally urgent. Instead, there is an implication that this person is somehow mentally unwell. Indeed, Yglesias’s reaction to seeing a poem about the Gaza genocide is that it shows the “increasingly porous boundaries between mental illness and leftwing politics.” Setting aside the question of whether Yglesias is persuaded by the ICJ case against Israel, this is the attitude of an asshole. I believe that people have the right, when they feel overwhelmed by the horror of seeing Palestinian children blown to bits, to resent being baselessly accused of having a mental illness because they are affected by the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people.

What makes Yglesias even worse is that, despite the pretense of being a Serious Adult who cares about The Data rather than being led by Hysterical Girlish Emotion (note that he said “niece” and not “nephew”), he does not actually care about making sound arguments grounded in facts and data. In 2020, I showed this in my review of his book One Billion Americans, which makes the bizarre argument that America should try to increase its population to one billion. Why? Well, let him explain: 

The United States has been the number one power in the world throughout my entire lifetime and throughout the living memory of essentially everyone on the planet today. The notion that this state of affairs is desirable and ought to persist is one of the least controversial things you could say in American politics today. We should take that uncontroversial premise seriously, adopt the logical inference that to stay on top we’re going to need more people—about a billion people—and then follow that inference to where it leads…

And so the book then follows the inference where it leads. But look at what a poor argument this is: We should try to remain “the number one power in the world.” Why? Well, we don’t need to say why, because the premise is “uncontroversial” and can thus be adopted without reasons being given. For Yglesias, the very fact that something is the D.C. political consensus is enough to treat it as correct! Note that this offers absolutely nothing to anyone outside of the United States who might wonder why the U.S. is entitled to remain “the number one power in the world.” 

This is extreme intellectual laziness, and it’s characteristic of Yglesias’s writing. He treats leftists as unserious children, but he’s the one who doesn’t engage with their writings or arguments. (Instead of responding to my own arguments about One Billion Americans, he has blocked both me personally and the Current Affairs account on X/Twitter.) For another example, take the issue of Palestine. Yglesias has suggested that it’s peculiar for people to be focused on the killings in Gaza unless they are Palestinian: 

The thing about Rashida Tlaib is she's Palestinian, it makes perfect sense for her to be mad at Israel and fired-up about it ... what's sus is all the people who aren't Palestinian and seem to care 1000x more about this than any other humanitarian issue. I once met a Syriac Christian who told me with passion and detail about how his people had been wronged [by] American policy and I took it very seriously, but it would be weird if some average college student was obsessed with this.

But there are several obvious counterpoints here. First, the killings in Gaza are not actually one among a series of equally horrifying disasters. True, the violence in places like Sudan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo is appalling, and groups like the Rohingya deserve international solidarity as well as Palestinians—but Gaza is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child, and more aid workers have been killed there than in all of the world’s other conflict zones combined. The death rate in Gaza has been higher than in any other 21st century conflict. So there are reasons why this is of special urgency. But for Americans in particular, there is even more of a reason to care, which is that Israel’s actions in a very real sense are U.S. actions. Israel could not continue to fight in Gaza if the U.S. did not keep up a continuous supply of weapons, which it is doing in direct violation of U.S. law. As Leah Hunt-Hendrix pointed out in response to Yglesias, “it makes sense to care who your country kills.” It is therefore not “sus” for American college students to care about Gaza, but rather is a reflection of their understanding that we are responsible for our own government’s actions, and when our country is enabling war crimes, we have a duty to stop them. Yglesias confidently passes judgment on the protesters, implying they might be anti-Semitic (I’m not sure what else he would mean by “sus”) without even appearing to notice the clear and obvious counterargument to his position.

This combination of arrogance and ignorance is characteristic of his comments on Palestine. Yglesias has dismissed anti-Zionism as a “really weird political program” that just treats “Zionism” as meaning “not dedicated to the destruction of Israel.” Israel, he says, “is the target of a global campaign of delegitimization that casts the basic Zionist premise of a Jewish state as equivalent to apartheid South Africa.” But he doesn’t engage with the actual argument that is made by anti-Zionists, which is that the “basic Zionist premise of a Jewish state” is necessarily anti-democratic in a land with a substantial non-Jewish population. A serious analyst would explain how a state could ever be inherently Jewish without engaging in discrimination (e.g., by prohibiting the descendants of Palestinian refugees from returning to their family villages but allowing Jewish Americans with no known connection to the land to “return.”) Again, it is possible to make such arguments, but it is the intellectually lazy route to simply pretend that anti-Zionists have no case to make and are reflexively repeating slogans, which is what Yglesias claims: 

It’s clear that the pro-Palestinian thing you are supposed to say is that Israel is settler-colonialism, similar to Apartheid South Africa, and that system should be destroyed. Realistically, 99.9 percent of people aren’t going to put any more thought into it than “I want to signal solidarity with Palestinian suffering so I’m gonna repost these slogans.”

Look, I’m sorry, but if you’re a “logic machine” who cares about The Data, you can’t act like “settler-colonialism” is just a “slogan” and nobody has thought about what it means. Rashid Khalidi, whose work even Joe Biden has bothered to pick up (four years too late, as Khalidi points out, and with blood-soaked hands, as Khalidi’s son adds), has laid out a detailed case. 

You are not engaged in anything resembling serious intellectual work if you simply act as if there are no arguments there. The situation is similar when Yglesias discusses the one-state solution, which would be a single democratic state across all of what is now Israel and Palestine. Yglesias says that its advocates “seem to put exactly zero effort into trying to figure out the logistical details of how this is supposed to work.” Well, I’m sorry, but I have a book open right now called One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse by Ali Abuminah, which is a lengthy discussion of how this could work. Abuminah, in a serious work that was praised even by The Economist, draws from examples like Belgium and Ireland to look at how people with multiple identities can come to govern themselves in one place and resolve conflicts. It is Yglesias, then, who has put in “zero effort,” because he has not read the literature that he confidently waves away as unserious. 

Every time he talks about Palestine, Yglesias treats his opponents as unserious, emotion-driven, and childish, all while ignoring the counterevidence to his positions. For instance, he insisted in November of last year that Israel was engaged in a “just war” in Gaza, and that critics were not being logical in their assessments of it: 

I do think, though, that a lot of critics overlook the extent to which this humanitarian disaster is an inevitable consequence of waging war in a place with the population density of Philadelphia or Chicago. It’s not like Israel is avoiding military targets in favor of shelling a city (something that does happen in wars) or deliberately targeting a civilian population center as a means of psychological warfare (something the United States has done in the past).

Yet targeting civilians as psychological warfare was precisely what Israel was doing, as was revealed shortly afterward. We know that much of the damage was not “inevitable” but came about specifically because Israel had instituted a policy that it was willing to accept vast amounts of civilian collateral damage. It was immediately obvious that a desire for vengeance after the Oct. 7 attacks was just as important in driving policy as the desire to eliminate Hamas, and that impulse for vengeance has since driven soldiers to engage in rampant destruction. To ignore this is to be a propagandist, not a serious policy thinker.

But this is the Yglesias modus operandi across many issues. On climate change, for instance, he can write whole essays claiming that fracking is good and we need fossil fuel friendly energy policies, dismissing progressives as childish, while never engaging with the scientific literature on the consequences of climate change. As Henry Burke of the Revolving Door Project observed in response, this is overlooking a huge amount of highly relevant data, and “recent attempts to model the economic impact of continued climate change have put the damage on par with constant war.” When the Biden administration argued in court that there was “no constitutional right to a stable climate system,” Yglesias said it showed Biden was a “moderate sensible person” under attack by “leftist psychos,” again without dealing with the case for why we should have a right to a stable climate system. (In fact, Yglesias thinks it’s “weird” to care about climate change, because the harms are inflicted “mostly [on] foreigners” and “mostly in the future.”) On healthcare, Yglesias insists that the Affordable Care Act successfully “bent the cost curve” and says the “U.S. health care status quo is pretty good for most people,” ignoring widespread public dissatisfaction with the system and all the evidence that it produces mass unnecessary death and illness. 

Yglesias rejects progressives’ criticism of Barack Obama, saying they believe he should have “jailed bankers with magic and made it so people who weren’t paying their mortgages stayed in their homes indefinitely.” Well, no, not with “magic,” but with legal tools that were readily available and were deliberately not used because bankers were considered too big to jail, as Jesse Eisinger shows in his book The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. (Even Yglesias himself once pointed out the pragmatic virtues of a prosecutorial approach, but that was before he wanted to tar leftists as magical thinkers.) Obama’s critics have carefully pointed out things he could have and should have done, but Yglesias says that “the main way in which [the Obama administration] fell short was that Congress did not always enact Obama’s ideas.” When The Lever’s David Sirota, a stellar independent journalist, pointed out that Yglesias was “glibly” waving away serious reported works critiquing Obama administration policy, Yglesias dismissed them as part of “an intellectual project whose aim is to tear down mainstream Democrats and smear the most popular and effective progressive politician of our time.” No engagement with their arguments, just a pure attack on motive. Likewise, he says that progressives dislike Elon Musk because he is rich, and we hate the rich, rather than because of the things Musk says and does that are objectionable. (Although I do think there are strong criticisms to be made of the mere possession of extreme wealth.) 

Then there is the fact that this “logic machine” is frequently, comically incorrect in his judgments. While some of us were trying to urgently point out that Joe Biden should clearly not be running for reelection, Yglesias was in denial. The fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, he said, was “for real” in his commitment to humanity’s well-being. (Bankman-Fried later admitted to a journalist that his ethics were “mostly a front.”) Yglesias admitted he trusted Bankman-Fried because he was rich. (“Well, if his company has a $20-billion valuation, there must be something to it.”) And the “logic machine” makes arguments that are maddeningly sloppy. (For instance, Yglesias argues that Democrats shouldn’t push gun control, in part on the grounds that alcohol kills more people than guns, and wonders why people care more about guns than alcohol, concluding it’s because progressives drink but don’t use guns. Another possible explanation for the concern about guns versus alcohol, which goes undiscussed, is that people see a difference between people engaging in behavior that primarily harms themselves and behavior that harms innocent strangers.) Exaggerated or “straw man” versions of left-wing positions are a constant in his writing. (He claims, for instance, that “the call to end the ‘school to prison pipeline’ just meant that in-school discipline should be more lax,” or that the left takes the position that “If Israel is being cavalier in its treatment of Palestinian civilians, it’s wrong to complain about the substantive ideas of anyone involved in organizing anti-Israel protests.”)

Yglesias’s provocations often appear deliberately callous and offensive. Infamously, after a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing over 1,100 people, Yglesias took the opportunity to lecture people about how it was economically optimal for developing countries to have lax safety rules. After the Uvalde massacre, Yglesias decided it was a good time to tweet the Steven Pinker-esque observation that “For all its very real problems, one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the contemporary United States of America is one of the best places to live in all of human history.” Yglesias seems to lack a moral core. For instance, when the Biden administration embraced Mohammed bin Salman after having promised to isolate him over his killing and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist, Yglesias called the pivot “a little embarrassing I guess, but also just seems like responsible leadership to do the right thing,” without a moment’s acknowledgment of how atrocious it is to help a dictatorial murderer escape consequences for his crime. 

 I do think David Vetter is right that Yglesias seems to be trying to get people to hate him, in part because it drives attention and Substack subscriptions, and in part because producing an emotional reaction can be used as further evidence that his critics are emotion-driven rather than logical. But as we have seen, logic is not in operation here. Logic requires representing your critics fairly and accurately, and not ignoring inconvenient counterarguments. “Degrowth is dumb,” Yglesias can say. Perhaps, but to reach that conclusion surely you should actually read the books in favor of the degrowth position and refute the case they make. Or if you’re going to endorse the right-wing view of human nature, you should show that you know why others say that view is irrational. 

In the wake of Harris’s catastrophic defeat, Yglesias is offering the Democratic Party advice on how to win again. Considering that Harris ran on vacuous centrism, one would think that Yglesias might be a bit humbled and take some time to read and reflect before giving new suggestions, but no. He has waved away Harris’s loss, saying that “90 percent of the explanation is the inflation-driven anti-incumbent trend that has hit essentially every rich country around the world.” (Proof? None is needed, and in fact we know the trend can be defied by a strong left-wing candidate, as happened in Mexico.) He has given Democrats a new nine-point manifesto, which includes such core principles as: downplaying climate change (it is “not a hard limit”), prioritizing “the interests of American citizens,” cracking down on “anti-social behavior,” prioritizing “the interests of [the] users” of public services rather than “their workforce,” and not “embracing views that elevate anyone’s identity groups over their individuality.” Yglesias calls these principles “common sense,” once again treating his own position as pure reason as contrasted with the irrationality of progressives. Many of the principles are too vague to be intelligible. What does it mean to treat climate change as not being a “hard limit”? What is not being limited? Emissions? Surely there’s a hard limit somewhere of what we can do to the planet. Or, for instance, what does it mean to prioritize “users” rather than the “workforce”? Does that mean that teacher tenure should be abolished? Which behaviors are “anti-social”? Does this mean Yglesias supports the discredited notion of broken windows policing? Is he concerned about the large-scale cruelty of the criminal punishment system? (Probably not, given his track record writing on policing.) What does it mean to prioritize American citizens? Does that mean that we should be willing to inflict harm on others if it benefits ourselves? These are questions that demand serious analysis. None is provided. 

Progressives, Yglesias says, are “detached from practical reality.” But here we have someone who advocates readying ourselves for a war with China, even if in doing so America hurts itself economically, who wants to embrace fossil fuels without taking climate science seriously (he thinks beating China is also more important than climate change), and whose political advice for Kamala Harris was that “she should pivot to the center” (she did, and got creamed). I think it’s very clear we should not listen to such a person, and that if America is to have a future worth living in, guys like this are going to have to be ignored. Because Yglesias, for all that I’ve dwelt on him personally, is not the only smug centrist in the world. There is an entire class of people like him, all posturing as experts, consultants, and pundits of one kind or another. And these people try to pass themselves off as merely offering data and common sense, when many of their positions ignore relevant data and conflict entirely with basic common sense. We should show the same level of respect for the opinions of Matt Yglesias and his ilk that he shows for the “socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe,” that is to say, none at all.