EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

feel like ezra is a more likable and otm but matt is a deeper thinker so i dunno

yglesias has been annoying the fucc out of me

strikes me as the kind of guy who would have been a member of 'the best and brightest' or whatever

yeah thats his exact flaw, i mean he supported the iraq war via absurd over thinking, still i have to admit he has influenced my thinking on such topics as urban planning and destroying the senate

i dumped yg from my read a while ago. i guess that's sort of 'mcnabb off my madden team' but there u go. mainstream dem-liberal technocrats aren't thin on the ground and he's a shitty writer imo. i still 'like' him i guess but i stopped enjoying his writing like at all.

however i do get into quasi-arguments about urban planning fairly frequently (and no not just on ilx) and i find myself mimicking yglesian points

who has better trolls?

i feel like yglesias is still sort of confused by irl

"from my reader" i mean

i must admit the truly sad number of typos were a big part of me ignoring his blog.

plus i figure the shit he talks about is so everywhere that other ppl will link to him if it's really worth it (see also: andrew sullivan)

both of these guys are nearly worthless on culture

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

haa i find the typos charming because a. its p 'internet' b. i am myself as you all know a masterful typo maker

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

shouldnt this be in ILM

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

― max, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:55 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that there is an offline culture of young dc bloggers and i know abt it is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, although i was unaware of this particular amazing roommates based nugget, would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ty 4 yr support

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

i dont really read attackerman, his shtick grates

he's done with FDL if that helps

i dunno if i've come clean about this but i have a war-nerd streak so

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 1:01 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

me too but on the other hand did u know that ezra klein became a health care reform expert to impress simon schamas daughter chloe

no i was unaware. she must be pretty fine.

i think i find the stuff he covers interesting, but i guess i dont really, i read him occasionally at wired xp re ackerman

lol max whatre u talkin abt

haha i have been under the impression that i knew a lot of gossip abt these ppl but now that i am thinking about it the thing about chloe schama is the only gossip-y nugget i know, kind of disappointed in myself

http://grab.by/8b5N

anyway when i saw ezra klein on tv i was surprised his persona seemed more journalistic glory days upstart young reporter than coddled nerdface technocratic blogger - i liked him

he has an early 80s newspaper look and feel to him

Yglesias has been wrong many times.

Klein meanwhile is a duller writer but his steady crunching of numbers is ultimately educational.

yglesiases willingness to be ambitious and wrong is imo what makes him compelling - like i understand theres danger in utopian thinking but still reimagining the world and its institutions is def one of my hobbies

who has better trolls?

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 11:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

to answer my own q, i don't really know. klein's comments are pretty boring but i have noticed yglesias' "community" to be especially vicious and repetitive. neither of them seem to really care much but i think both have made gestures to get more involved. terrible drudgery, sounds like, to me.

as far as blogger gossip goes, can anyone verify that there are, in fact, paid trolls out there? i'd hate to think it was mere dedication causing the same people to say the same things in the same place every day

theres only one blog i can think of that has good comments, really feel like 'comments off' should be the default

TNC i assume?

your bløg has good comments joe

yah tnc and lol of course goes w/o saying my blog

btw how much does this trolling gig pay, who do i contact

i know, right

i saw an interview w/yglesias where he was like all my readers really hate me i have no idea why they come to my blog

he was k funny tbh

eh i've watched a few of his bloggingheads's and he comes off like a jerk imo, interrupting, going on and on

ha yeah ive never been able to bring myself to watch a blogginghead and in general id much rather read than watch any news type thing but for some reason i saw this it was a friendly interview at a like blogg convention where they we just joking around

anyway my head says klein but my heart goes yglesias, not sure what to do, prob follow my heart

yglesias is good on urban issues - not that he says anything new, but at least he's talking to relatively wide audience. but still...super annoying on a personal level. I like klein.

Yglesias is a philosophy major in every word he writes and this is awesome about him.

ugh this is gonna be like that week i read glenn greenwald isnt it

neither of these guys is much like glenn greenwald

unless you have some sort of distaste for american journalists, then yes it'll be like that lol

these guys are on the sensible/technocratic side of the great progressive blogger divide - greenwald exists on the polemic/activist shore - which is not to say hes any more or less otm, just that hes harder to take

i do think in answer to the thread title mattys idea for getting a billion americans is more realistic tho

it is pretty funny that these guys think they influence politicians when theyre obviously downstream from them

“Governing successfully“ to these guys is really just bailing out the Titanic with a tiny bucket

you need to break the stranglehold big money has on our country in order for any of their big ideas to be possible, so why arent they writing books about breaking the stranglehold big money has on our country, its a mystery

Because they think that’s impossible.

theyre doing pretty well in our current set up, but would an ascendant anti corporate anti corruption political movement have any need for them

do the people interested in those things now have any need for them

Jamelle Bouie's latest newsletter has a nice implicit rebuke to Klein:

That the Trump administration and the MAGA movement are less interested in deliberation and governance than they are in domination and obedience should shape and structure our sense of this political moment. Calls for dialogue and discussion — for greater rates of encounter between the professional left and the professional right — make sense when there’s consensus over the character of the overall political order. If we all agree that we are part of a contest of equals — if we take the political equality of all groups and peoples for granted — then we can discuss any number of issues across ideological lines without rancor and needless division.

But if the aim of one faction is to dominate all the others — if the explicit goal is to curb the rights of its opponents and force them to submit to conditions of political inequality — then discussion is less useful than a willingness to defend liberal society in the face of tyranny and despotism.

why are arguing about Ezra Klein

its the ezra klein (vs matty) thread

im arguing about ezra klein/im arguing about matt yglesias/im arguing at the combination ezra klein and matt yglesias thread

to me, the “getting politics right” and “abandon abortion rights in middle usa” suggest he does not know the actual facts of the situation, not necessarily that he has a longing for the center as an objective. he may tho.
prev i tended to find his ability to parse actual issues to be more accurate than these. in a “you want things to be like “a,” but they are not that, they are “b.”
this stuff is a fucking awful misunderstanding of reality.
bouie has been so otmfm right thru it.

you have to have your brain not quite screwed in to say maybe we don't need a pro-choice politics in these particular states, including some that had public referendums on whether to restrict abortion and people said no

So after Ta-Nehisi Coates spelled out his thoughts on Charlie Kirk and made clear he didn’t agree with Ezra Klein’s take, Ezra Klein just had Coates on his NY Times podcast/ interview thing. Klein doesn’t appear to be really listening and hearing Coates takes and opinions to him . Klein also doubles down on ideas he is pushing ( Dems need to run pro-life candidates in red states) and doesn’t really consider Coates response.

Out of my September NY Times gift shares , sorry

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ta-nehisi-coates.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Klein doesn’t appear to be really listening and hearing Coates takes and opinions to him

They're IRL friends, which is both helpful — it doesn't ever devolve into a shouting match — and harmful, because Klein is absolutely incapable of really taking in the idea that a black man his age has an entirely different experience of America than he does, so they really are talking past each other for most of that hour. (I started out watching it on YouTube, but eventually had to read the transcript because Klein's voice annoys me and Coates' voice makes me laugh, because he sounds like an Afrocentric rapper from the 90s, so much so that I keep expecting him to start talking about Yakubian tricknology.)

Klein’s perspective is a bunch of insular media stuff no one even remembers, like people being mad at Elizabeth Warren going on Bill Mahar’s show. Yeah, sure, that’s why Trump won.

It just sounds like Ezra cannot conceive of the idea that an belief held by a majority of the population can be beyond the pale, whereas Coates knows that a majority of Americans have always held one vile view or another.

I think it's more that he's finally accepted that, so now he just wants to talk about how to get some of those people to vote for dems.

this dude is so compromised, brain applesauce from too much blogging

https://i.imgur.com/xYnzP94.jpeg

Forensic study.

you are doing a disservice to the humble but tasty dish of applesauce by comparing it to the brains of a fucking zombie like Klein. the guy is a total moron.

i would like to apologize to applesauce and the applesauce community for my unacceptable comments

unappsauceable

I think it's more that he's finally accepted that, so now he just wants to talk about how to get some of those people to vote for dems.

My impression is that he saw Trump's 2016 win as a fluke and a flaw in the system, which is why so much of his writing in the first Trump term was focused on proceduralist reforms to the system that would (among other things) prevent someone like Trump from taking power again. Whereas Trump's 2024 win has convinced him that the problem isn't the electoral college or the filibuster, it's that people truly like Trump and what he stands for. And so, yes: he sees his job as trying to figure out how to persuade those people to vote for Democrats instead.

TNC is saying "Yeah, people are racist, what else is new? You have to keep fighting the good fight, and hopefully you make a difference, even if you don't live to see it." But Klein can't see past 2028, so is preoccupied with trying to figure out the secret trick that will get a Democrat elected in North Dakota again.

I think the mistake Klein makes is thinking of the 2024 election as a stable representation of where the American people stand on issues across the board.
He doesn't seem to take into consideration that the outcome was highly contingent on externalities at the time (e.g., inflation) and that the beliefs that led people to vote for Trump were in many cases not deeply held but malleably shaped by their media environment. (For that matter, the election was also not as much of a blowout as he suggests it was.)

I don't think the lesson of 2024 is that we live in an anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-trans country and the only way to win is to accommodate those views. The lesson is that we're up against some powerful forces and we need to fight like hell to make sure our values win. But first you have to know what your values are.

Yeah I’m frustrated at all the people who act like trumps 2024 win was some Reagan/Bush ‘84 landslide. He didn’t even get the margins Obama got!

One of the big frustrations of the New York/DC commentariat is that they fall into broad-strokes thinking about the rest of the country, because most of what they know about it is data — which swings in which precincts etc. But they often misunderstand what life is like on the ground. And they are much more affected by the issue-framing of the right-wing media than they would ever acknowledge or even realize. So the idea that most people in a place like Texas or Georgia actually support broadly legal abortion just doesn't make sense to them because that's not how they think of those people.

There are plenty of very strong popular heartland issues on the left, the Democrats are erring by not engaging with them strongly enough.

I will say, I give Ezra credit for being open about feeling lost in this moment and not knowing what his role is anymore. Hope he took something away from the conversation with TNC, even as it seemed like they were talking past one another.

i wrote two long posts to address the klein tnc thing. i like those comments i wrote, but i will spare ilx my nonsense.

it’s like this tho— klein would not get what he hopes for out of his preferred solution, it’s not possible anymore. he is a frightened fool lacking any real insight. lacking even common sense.

Klein sounds just like a centrist Dem consultant and kinda like Schumer and Jeffries

poop brained more likely

It all seems so abstract and the more interesting conversation would be a personal one, like asking Klein what life is like for his kids, where he sees them in ten years, and what struggles he has as a father. 2028 is definitely a focus, but what does our shared vision of a country, or even your local area, look like? Concentrating on micromanaging how to respond to things at the week or month level is completely counterproductive unless you have an ethos, goals, some semblance of a vision even if it’s vague.

I think that is where talk about reconstruction and the errors of the past sink in, because it takes the ability to communicate through time and Coates gets that in a way that Klein’s never quite grasped.

Honestly, a lot of the friction now is downstream of a political vision that played at leveling the playing field at a global level in its marketing but never thought to account what that would mean outside of a capitalistic international labor force distributing production globally.

Matt Stoller just posted (and then deleted) a weird response to the Coates/Klein debate where he claimed Coates sounded out of touch talking about political violence against black people since there hasn't been any since the 60s.

The only things I know about that guy are that he's insanely bad at things that are out of his lane (anti-monopoly work?), and that I occasionally confuse him with the movie critic guy because they have similar names. I mentally apologize to the movie critic every time I do that.

https://bsky.app/profile/mattnegrin.bsky.social/post/3m22rm2w55222

https://i.imgur.com/G6t7UGX.jpeg

Colin Spacetwinks‬
✧@spacetwi✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 14m
klein's politics IMO is best defined as "successful dinner party"; whatever keeps things from making the dinner party a mess. this means no conflict, no heat, just lots of smiles and hoping you can make everybody go along to get along. it doesn't matter if this approach fails other goals.

this gets to something for me with not just klein but many other centrist types in this moment

And there's a very clear line between the dinner guests and the people waiting the table

do they get foie gras too?

The problem with seeing either populism or abundance as the sole answer for Democrats is both of them assume that the public basically agrees with Democrats. In many places that’s true, and so that’s enough. But in other places it’s just not true: Across much of this country, voters don’t agree with the Democratic Party as they understand it, and more fundamentally, they believe the Democratic Party doesn’t agree with — or respect — them.

Klein in his latest NY Times piece never mentions that polling on immigration has changed when Trump’s ugly approach is visible; and Klein in noting that Sherrod Brown lost in Ohio despite running as a liberal populist does not address that the national Harris Dem campaign at that time did not run as a populist working class entity. He also doesn’t address the media aspects— people not hearing news at all or just hearing right wing Fox News and right wing podcasts takes. In asserting that Dems should just moderate in parts of the country by embracing some Republican values, he points to token guys like Jared Golden in a Maine district but he doesn’t address where this approach has failed, or why the prevailing beliefs in some regions are Republican and trying to offer something different. He glosses over Harris attempt to win via a moderate strategy and just wrongly asserts Dems had moved far left in 2024. He also never addressed how Dems were hurt by aging Biden’s inability to promote and sell Dem accomplishments

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism-elections-crick.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yE8.O-tU.eXM6Z1SC43sm&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

a middle class pundit is something to be

It drives me insane that people confidently assert the Dems “ran a far left campaign”. Obviously the ones that do have an ulterior right wing agenda, like Matty.

Embrace the abundance agenda?

lol. stop trying to make this a thing. it's not a thing

also, wouldn't it be awesome if more red states had democratic congressmen whose policies were identical to republicans?

I gave up on finishing that column once I realized how long it was going to be, but for all those words he doesn't really have a lot to say or add to the conversation. I think he's fundamentally missing a lot of what's really going on, on both the left and right. And just even the idea that Democrats should run pro-life candidates is SO DUMB! Abortion bans aren't popular even in the states that have passed them! In polls in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, even Catholic Louisiana, legal abortion is routinely supported by more than 50 percent of people, sometimes close to 60 percent.

the dem establishment is so compromised its impossible for them to tell which way is up

not left not right the smell of your own farts

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:gz255fylitjq55pcmhrmzqkc/bafkreiaoi6rdpnfk5gjjg77w4ohplntzio6k3opyrpjlrdg45ganjmr4iq@jpeg

Pretty sure the historical fascist parties used to assert they were “neither left nor right.”