Firehose #136: Death of a Decent Man
Also: The legality of deporting douchebags
On Episode #495, I wandered off on a brief tangent about the recent death of the influential lefty public-policy blogger Kevin Drum, who I knew and hung out a bit with in the early days of the post-9/11 “blogosphere,” as it was unfortunately known. I tried making the point on the pod that – as evidenced even here, in our treasured Chat and Comments section! – the natural progression of any ecosystem based even a little on politics, and therefore that ecosystem’s most charismatic megafauna, is toward an ever-shrill, ever-reductionist, ever-Manichean, ever-debasing approach toward political actors, tribes, and disagreements. Ye olde organization of hatreds, stamped (as it were!) from the beginning of America’s two-party system.
The audience/peer-group pressure to pick a damn team (especially on all things presidential), and then to express yourself publicly, most every time, in such a way that casual onlookers can determine your team jersey from a thousand yards off, was constant even 27 years ago, when I first started wandering into the oncoming traffic of American politics. I am very bad with metaphors, as most of you have probably discovered, but I have long likened the process of writing/commenting about politics as standing on the narrow, wet, sandy bar between two parallel, storm-surging rivers rushing in opposite directions. At some point the easiest play is to just let your foot slide into the current you’re closest to.
Kevin didn’t do that. He had a broad team, to be sure, but more than most he rejected the dehumanizing habits of mind that tug at you relentlessly, choosing instead to have honest conversations, including about data that complicated his priors, with whoever was willing. Crucially, he also resisted that most annoying of political tics, which is to take oneself too seriously. This is why the world has “Friday cat-blogging,” and all of its descendants, including Andrew Sullivan’s View From Your Window. (At Reason, we used to do Friday Fun Links … look, man, it was the Aughts!) And to a degree that has largely been memory-holed, in no small part because of the succumbing by most of its original participants, one of the animating reasons that original blogosphere exploded in audience is that the readers had grown tired to the predictable, hatred-organization politics of the established media. Hmmm, I wonder if there are some lessons there relevant to the 2025 media landscape!
Please see remembrances of Kevin Drum from Megan McArdle, Paul Glastris, Dan Drezner, Josh Marshall, and above all, this Kancel Kulture Klassic of a tale from his former co-worker Ben Dreyfuss (veteran of Fifth Column Episodes #83, #97, #148, #214, Members Only #129, M.O. #140, #392 &M.O. #180), under the headline “Kevin Drum Was Forced Out of Mother Jones by People Who Didn't Know About a Secret Thing He Did for Them.”
* Could I go on longer about the irritating things in this New York Times obit? Indeed I could. But I won’t! Instead, here’s Moynihan last Tuesday at a Comedy Cellar 2Way event with Mark Halperin, a mandolin-slinging Noam Dworman, and Bob Kerrey:
* On to the various controversies. Comments-section Vice Frenemy Batya Ungar-Sargon (#451) went on Bill Maher’s television program Friday; here’s the Overtime section, along with Bulwark/MSNBC guy Sam Stein and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro:
* Re: Mahmoud Khalil, we referenced in #495 this Free Press essay by Jed Rubenfeld, and this one from Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427) and Robert Shibley. Other links from our universe: Robby Soave (#332), “Mahmoud Khalil Is an Easy Call”; Ilya Shapiro (#361), “Deport Mahmoud Khalil”; Ilya Somin, “The Case Against Deporting Immigrants for "Pro-Terrorist" Speech [Updated]”; David French (#191, #325, #365), “Don’t Fool Yourself Into Thinking It Will Stop With Columbia”; Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), “If Trump Blows it on Speech, the World Is Screwed”; Jacob Mchangama (#102 & #344), “Free Speech Hypocrites”; and Andrew Sullivan (#139, #200 & #449), “The Return of the McCarthyite Chill.” I’m sure there are many more; please share in the Comments!
* Let’s see, how to mention this without causing too much of a search-engine ruckus…. OK, on a recent episode, apropos of I forget what, we were talking about how the ancient TV show that Moynihan loves to hear about, The Independents, taped live about half the time (an insane decision by Fox Business Network, if we’re being honest); and that on one day there was breaking news that a beloved actor had passed, and sadly we had just spent the previous commercial break just absolutely losing our shizz over America’s libertarian girlfriend doing some hilariously unacceptable pantomime, the snot-rocketing from which we had not yet recovered, when it was time to announce the news, so … care of the indefatigable Busty Wimsatt (who could probably share the mini-clip on request), here’s the whole episode:
* Jeff Blehar’s infuriating Covid anniversary piece, which I read (and then commented about for paying subscribers) in the M.O. #251 cassingle, definitely struck some nerves, including those of Nancy Rommelmann, Jennifer Sey, and Mary Katharine Ham. I also talked about the anniversary on The Reason Roundtable:
* Was I going to include a bunch more links? Yes, I was, but Spring is around the corner, and those thornbushes are not gonna uproot themselves! So let’s zoom to Comment of the Week, from the beloved Benjy Shyovitz:
Judging by his audio, Kmele must be staying in one of Matt’s murder motels.
Walkoff music, as slurred on one of my best playlists yet, is a timely reminder about where we’d be without freedom of speech:
Thank you for putting in the work on these Matt. 🫡
That video of Batya talking about tariffs is absolutely brutal, and it is, in the greatest irony, something that is as paternalistic as the "Professional Managerial Class" and Elites that Batya rails so hard against. Raising prices on consumer goods bought by the working class (who she still talks about in Noble Savage terms like their straight out of a James Fenimore Cooper novel) unilaterally through executive action, exhibiting control over their purchasing power and, thereby, their decision making is as bad as anything the Ivy League Elites have done to randos in southern Indiana.
Unfortunately, Scott Lincicome, Bryan Caplan, and the host of economists are not great at making the case to the average person and they certainly have no broad support amount politicians because a lot of these arguments are from the left. The people talking about combating Trump's narratives on the left that I've seen are about just sweetening the handouts more than Trump has.
Also, the 1970s GDP going primarily to the middle class has a causal link to manufacturing is absolutely bananas. No evidence has been given for that at all.
I don't know what messaging needs to be done or maybe who the messenger might need to be, but this is a problem and, unfortunately, I think it's going to get worse until we see rough inflation, significant interest rate increases to deal with increased debt with the goal of shifting government revenue to tariffs from income tax, and a general attack on everyone's retirement savings.