WaPo’s Dan Zak explores “The boring journey of Matt Yglesias.”
Matt Yglesias can talk about supervolcanoes and about Habsburg federalism and about the semiconductor industry in Taiwan vs. China. He can talk about regulatory sensitivities around geothermal drilling. He can talk normative ethics and the Ghent system and occupational licensing and maritime commerce in Westeros, the fictional realm of “Game of Thrones.” He can talk about all these things and, perhaps more importantly, he can sound like he knows what he’s talking about.
“So even very small improvements in the welfare of chickens has an incredible sort of aggregate impact,” Yglesias said on a podcast last February, concluding a mini-monologue on poultry with this: “It’s actually very, very important if we can make chickens’ lives slightly better.”
That is a perfect Matt Yglesias quote: grandiose but granular. Draped in idealism and wisdom but anchored in data and incrementalism. Clear on its face but dotted with leaps like “incredible” and “very,” then hedges like “sort of” and “slightly.”
The affect is one of solution, of authority, of “aha!”
The effect is vaporous, curious, “huh?”
When enthusiastic or challenged in conversation, Yglesias’s speaking voice can reach a cartoonish tenor reminiscent of Jiminy Glick. His writing voice, however, remains flat.He is a “logic machine”at the keyboard,according to friends. He is a parody of artificial intelligence, according to haters.
“It’s the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly,” Yglesias says, over coffee. “I find it relaxing to work. I put things out. People yell at me. I will write again the next day.”
Yglesias, 41, has been writing online nonstopsince he was 20. In the aughts, he was an insurgent, liberal blogger who helped turn prolific posting into an industry standard. In the 2010s, he co-founded Vox to institutionalize this ethos and to bigfoot old-guard media. Now he’s struck gold on the newsletter platform Substack, where at least 13,000 people each pay Matt Yglesias an average of $80 a year for access to his Yglesiasms, and to a robust comment section about moral relativism and windowless bedrooms and child tax credits and storm-water runoff. On Twitter, Yglesias has more than half a million followers, and a habit of exasperating peoplewith his contrarian stabs at wit. But his Substack is a place where a fractiousworld is rendered logical, where self-proclaimed moderates and rationalists find refuge from so-called purists and radicals.
There’s an audience for that kind of thing, especially in Washington, especially at a time when the powerful feel rebellious for thinking centrist thoughts.
The whole feature is that sort of thing: backhanded listings of Matt’s accomplishments and thinly-disguised bemusement that anyone would be interested in what he has to say. Much less that important people are.
“I don’t always agree with Matt, but he always makes you think with his unique and sharp insights,” says Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, via email. Klain has liked and shared multiple Yglesias tweets, usually ones that praise White House actions in defiance of wailing liberals or henpecking conservatives. Yglesias, Klain adds, “offers ‘unconventional wisdom:’ He’s not afraid to break with others and put his views out there — a perspective that is hard to find in a dialogue dominated by conventional wisdom.”
For others — especially those who say Yglesias punches left— his wisdom amounts to sleight of hand.
“I think that Matt is a smart and clever thinker who spends far too much time trying to simplify the world into discrete models, either economic or philosophical, and the world is much messier and much greater digging is required,” says Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, which saw right through Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder whom Yglesias had previously touted.
“He’s basically a panhandler who’s driving outrage on Twitter, and benefits from how he engages with the performance of discourse,” says Melissa Byrne, an activist for student-loan cancellation, which Yglesias dismissed as a political liability for Democrats. (“This was dumb on my part,” he wrote in November, after the party outperformed midterm expectations.)
I’ve followed Matt’s writing for going on 20 years now and, not surprisingly, disagree with him often. But he’s never been in the outrage business. He’s often contrarian, to be sure, but he’s always struck me as someone genuinely interested in trying to understand the world and who instinctively rejects ideological straitjackets.
But enough serious people take Yglesias seriously to negate the many people who don’t. His Substack was tied for most-followed newsletter by members of the Biden transition team, according to digital strategist Rob Blackie, and Yglesias himself was No. 4 on the list of most-followed journalists. Some of Yglesias’s posts on policy — particularly one on Build Back Better negotiations in February — have reportedly circulated among White House staff.
“There’s a broad sense that he’s a public intellectual, and they take his ideas like they’ll take other ideas,” says a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discussoutside influences on the administration. “He’s not super influential, but he’s a prominent normie liberal, just like Joe Biden is a normie liberal.”
Among the political newsletters on Substack’s leader board, which is stocked with Gen-X reactionaries to what Yglesias has called the “Great Awokening,” he is No. 8 in readership, between the conniptions of Glenn Greenwald and the braying of Andrew Sullivan. Yglesias’s is one of a fewSubstacks that earn north of $1 million per year in subscription revenue. Yglesias named his Substack “Slow Boring,” after a 1919 lecture by the German sociologist Max Weber titled “Politics as a Vocation,” wherein “boring” is not an adjective of dullness but a gerund of diligence.
“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards,” Weber said at the dawn of the Weimar Republic. “It takes both passion and perspective.”
That Yglesias, like Greenwald and Sullivan, had enough of a brand to sell a lot of Substack subscriptions doesn’t mean he’s Greenwald or Sullivan. Indeed, it’s weird to lump him in with them, given his vastly different worldview.
For two decades, Yglesias has been boring. A million boring posts, across many platforms, into many hard boards — into the brains of like-minded liberals, under the skin of policy experts and the extremelyonline. He has bored right through the 21st century and emerged exactly where he began: blogging for himself. Except now he’s making bank, and he seems less liberal than he once was.
What changed: Matt, or everything around him?
Maybe both? Matt was an undergraduate when he started; now he’s a middle-aged man with a wife and school-age child. Indeed, he’s older now than I was when we were both starting out as bloggers and my worldview has changed considerably over that period. It would be sad, really, if his hadn’t.
Two years into his Substack era, Yglesias bores the day away on his MacBook Air in a bare, closet-sized office at a co-working space off 14th Street NW, about 70 feet from a rowhouse where he and his blogger friends spent a portion of their 20s glued to their laptops, posting their way to notoriety amid pizza boxes andpoker games. Now he’s entered midlife, like the rest of his Xennial cohort. The hair on his crown has migrated to his eyebrows; his liberal politics have morphed into “reactionary centrism,” according to the internet.
Reactionary centrism is a contradiction in terms. The Weber quote that he chose to name his Substack after explains his worldview: politics is slow, hard work; one simply can’t wave a magic wand at problems. He’s the guy who coined the “Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics” way back in 2006:
A lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.
What’s more, this theory can’t be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will. Thus we see that problems in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t reasons to avoid new military ventures, but reasons why we must embark upon them.
Others, notably Brendan Nyhan, have applied the concept to other arenas, including the Presidency. Matt reflexively rejects easy answers most of the time. (He’s also the guy who repeatedly touted minting a trillion dollar coin as a way of sidestepping the debt ceiling fight, so he’s not immune.)
He is mindful, for example, that red-state Democratic senators Jon Tester (Mont.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) are up for reelection in 2024 — and that much depends on not alienating their coalitions with far-left slogans and hobby horses.
“The question that I, and other more moderate people, have been trying to get the progressive movement to think about is: How are you going to accomplish anything without those seats?” Yglesias says. “What is the plan to win?”
As an erstwhile Republican who doesn’t wish to yield more power to the crazies who now dominate that party, this makes sense to me. Is Manchin exasperating as hell? He is. Is there a better alternative for keeping that seat in Democratic hands? There is not.
He’s aged into his curmudgeonliness, though friends say he’s also mellowed. He and his wife, Kate Crawford, have a 7-year-old son. They are Slacking constantly, becauseCrawford also happens to be his editor and only gatekeeper. She first became aware of him in 2008, when he publicly knocked a congressional candidate she was working for — a Democrat in the South — for not supporting same-sex marriage.
“The candidate was mad that [Matt] had written something that was, frankly, correct, but also a little rude,” Crawford says. Correct but rude: “I feel like that’s Matt in a nutshell.” A Jewish Democrat running for Congress in Alabama hadto pick his battles to win and, in 2008, same-sex marriage was not the hill to die on.
“Twenty-seven-year-old Matt was very annoyed by this sort of pragmatism and hypocrisy,” Crawford says. “And I think 40-year-old Matt would be pretty sympathetic to it.”
That he’s matured in his understanding of the practicalities of politics would seem a good thing, no? Aside from more experience and being in a different place in his life, he’s gone from being a minor league blogger for activist outlets to write for The Atlantic and Slate and then co-founded Vox and is now back to writing under his own masthead but for big bucks.
“He didn’t seem to be able to be his true self at Vox,” says Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, who helped to recruit Yglesias. “It seemed obvious to me that Substack would be good for him, not only financially,” but also “for his soul.”
Rather than trying to change the media landscape, Yglesias is back to tending his own garden.His audience is relatively small (by internet standards) but highly invested (by internet standards). And in Biden’s Washington, his old friends, acquaintances and sources are now in positions of power.
“People who were unimportant when Obama was president are more important now,” Yglesias says. “A whole generation of pundits has sort of faded from the scene. And, you know, others have risen in their place.”
People grow up, in other words.A person’s principles parallax with the priorities of the Left, or of society at large. Coalitions fracture and realign. The Overton Window keeps shifting. The insurgents of yesteryear attain status, and maybe a status quo.
“Matt’s just a very contrary person, but I think he has a lot of integrity, which has been a core element of his personality since college,” says journalist Timothy B. Lee, who worked at Vox and has known Yglesias for nearly 20 years. “And so, in the 2000s, that meant being more liberal than most pundits. Now it’s the opposite. But he has the same approach.”
He’s the same guy. But he’s also become much more connected and influential.
Like Washington columnists of yore, Yglesias is in a rolling, off-the-record conversation with many major and minor players in politics: academics, executives, pollsters, strategists, Hill staffers, members of Congress, fellow panelists at conferences and fellow travelers on international junkets — people from whom Yglesias wants to learn, who want to pull him this way or that, or who want to vent what they can’t say in public but hope Matt will say for them.
“When I talk to members of Congress or people in the administration,” Yglesias says, “I feel like they’re, like, talking to their therapist about their frustrations with intra-coalitional dynamics.”
In September the treasury secretary called Yglesias to chat. Why? Janet L. Yellen’s communications staff did not respond to inquiries about why. But Yglesias then wrote a post extolling “modern supply-side economics” and concluding that, when it comes to the wobbly economy, the Biden administration seems “to be going in the right direction.”
Is this wisdom? If so, is it conventional or unconventional?
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Perhaps it’s instructive to think about two topics that bookend his public life.At age 21, Yglesias was laying out the logician’s case for the invasion of Iraq, because how could the most powerful, informed men on Earth be so stupid? In May of this year, Yglesias declared thatBankman-Fried “is for real,” because why else would wealthy people risk their money?
“Unfortunately I think, like most people, I just kind of took it at face value,” Yglesias says now, about Bankman-Fried’s endeavor. “‘Well, if his company has a $20-billion valuation, there must be something to it.’ Even if I don’t understand what a cryptocurrency exchange is.”
So, I’ve been openly scoffing at crypto for years. But Matt’s reaction here wasn’t exactly crazy.
This is Matt Yglesias coddling the powerful, his critics would say, and exposing a gullible dilettantism. And yet plenty of people view him asan early, sensible and stalwart voice for incremental progress on key issues of the 21st century, such as marijuana reform and same-sex marriage.
“He’s got a pretty pragmatic view of” criminal justice reform and “defund the police,” says Texas Southern University professor Howard Henderson, an expert on culturally responsive criminal justice research. Sometimes the “voice of reason doesn’t necessarily come from the community, or from the criminal justice activists, or the police themselves. … Sometimes you need people like Matt to actually throw out these ideas in a manner that’s approachable and debatable.”
“I think Matt has had a huge, singular effect on the housing debate, in ways that are harder to see now because his views are so widely shared,” says Klein, a longtime friend, referring to Yglesias’s decades-long promotion of YIMBYism to confront the nation’s housing crisis. “My most significant disagreement with Matt, typically, is that I think the world is less logical than he is, and so arguments that are extremely convincing and internally very tight often don’t track the frustratingly messy ways that people and institutions work.”
Which is ironic in that Matt is criticized from the left for being too concerned with pragmatics and not enough of a true believer. But, yes, he’s a philosopher by training whereas Klein and I are political scientists. It makes sense that he would be more wedded to the power of logic.
Blowback to many of Yglesias’s opinions is “rooted in Matt being of D.C., and really understanding the place, and a lot of people who just don’t get it wishing it were different,” says Matthew Lewis, a liberal activist who’s worked in spaces that Yglesias has long written about, such as housing and climate. “Look, the Senate is a place that exists.”
And Matt Yglesias is a person who exists in this world, with all its intellectual absolutism and strategic compromise. It’s a world where progress happens through, well, a slow boring of hard boards.
“People often talk to me because they want to draw more attention to some kind of internal disagreement”on the hard boards ofpolicyand politics, Yglesias says. “And the only way for me to do that is for them to explain to me what’s going on. And, you know, sometimes it can be a process.”
He offers an example having to do with carbon sequestration, and who’s advocating what, and why, as the Earth burns up. Sometimes, to grasp a complex and spiraling world, it helps to fixate on something so specific that it will make your eyes glaze over.
“I’ve been learning lately,” he says, “about something called Class VI wells.”
What are Class VI wells? Matt Yglesias can tell you. He will sound like he knows what he’s talking about. And it’ll be one big bore.
Again, I just don’t see the problem here. He’s genuinely curious about how the world works and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to learn new things. But being a generalist means not having the same depth on any of the issues as the experts. Yet, because he’s got such a big following, his views matter more than theirs. Which is naturally galling.
The mainstream press has been ragging on him for years because he and his fellow Juice Boxers skipped ahead in line, building an online brand and becoming pundits without putting in years on the police beat first. There was a big New York Times feature (“Washington’s New Brat Pack Masters Media“) on Matt, Ezra Klein, Brian Beutler, and Dave Weigel way back in 2011.
In only a few years, these young men and others like them have become part of the journalistic establishment in Washington. Once they lived in groups in squalid homes and stayed out late, reading comic books in between posts as more seasoned reporters slogged their way through traditional publications like The Hill and Roll Call. Now the members of this “Juicebox Mafia,” as they were first called by Eli Lake of The Washington Times, in a reference to youth, have become destination reading for — and respected by — the city’s power elite. Indeed, arguably they are themselves approaching power-elite status (as well as, gasp, age 30).
“I look at those guys and call them Facebook pundits,” said Tammy Haddad, the venerable Washington hostess and cable news veteran. “They’ve risen up the media food chain. They’re acknowledged by the White House. They measure their success in a different way than the Old Guard in this city used to.
[…]
Betsy Rothstein, editor of the media Web site FishbowlDC, has relentlessly accused the Juicebox Mafia of arrogance (Mr. Klein has blocked her site from his Twitter feeds). “Their sense of themselves is so inflated,” Ms. Rothstein said. “I sometimes think they do good work, but if you’re in their pack, even if what you say makes no sense, you’re golden. I think their popularity is a myth.”
And Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University professor and historian who is working on a biography of Walter Cronkite, expressed nostalgia for an earlier, more in-the-trenches generation of correspondents who didn’t rely on Twitter posts and linking to generate content. “I’m not making a judgment,” Professor Brinkley said. “What I don’t like is that before, people would start in foreign bureaus all over the world before making their way to Washington. You would be pushing into your deep 20s and have a really deep global background. What you’ve seen is a devaluation of serious journalism in favor of reporters who are able to create a brand identity.”
I’m not sure the journalism is any less serious than it once was. But the importance of establishing a brand identity has only increased since then.
