The Big Short
Language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not “expensive”; overpriced bonds were “rich,” which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of sub-prime mortgage bonds were not called floors — or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind — but tranches. The bottom tranche — the risky ground floor — was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium.
— Michael Lewis, from The Big Short
The backlog of books I’ve eagerly purchased but haven’t yet found time to read is so lengthy that I can always divert myself long enough for a title to come out in paperback. But I heard Ira Glass rave about The Big Short on This American Life shortly before I happened past a Borders, so I wound up splurging, allowed the book to queue jump, and guiltily read it in three sittings despite having lots of other work to do. If you liked The Giant Pool of Money, this is one to buy in hardcover.
Steve Eisman was one of my favorite characters. Early on, he concluded that Wall Street’s biggest firms were engaged in financially and morally indefensible behavior. So he did his utmost to find a way to bet against them. He spent millions of dollars on credit default swaps, a sort of insurance policy on mortgage backed securities that would pay off only if a lot of Americans suddenly found themselves unable to make the monthly payments on their home loans. He did so at a time when all the major Wall Street players were going gangbusters feeding the housing bubble and the explosion of cheap credit available to working class Americans. In my favorite parts of the book, Eisman would go into a meeting with Wall Street bigwigs who were, in effect, long on the sub-prime market. He’d try his best to determine if they were stupid, crooked, or lying to themselves, having figured out that these were the only options.
My other favorite characters were a few friends who started a small hedge fund in Berkeley, California, and independently figured out that they’d better short mortgage backed securities. They bought credit default swaps on the CDOs that Wall Street firms were using to launder toxic assets into misleadingly rated investment products. The best part of their story is when they go around trying to find someone, anyone, who can show them the error in their thinking. After all, they thought, if we’re right, the entire American financial system is based on a fraud — via stunning negligence, blinkered thinking, and outright mendacity, respected Wall Street insiders are misleading an entire country about reality, and gambling away its future on their behalf! Even after they had proved that proposition to themselves, it seemed too crazy to be true, especially when, despite all the hard evidence to the contrary, everyone else was acting like things were fine.
The bemusement of these characters reminds me of how I feel sometimes interacting with the conservative movement. Across America, the rank and file is trying its utmost, through the Tea Party and other venues, to fulfill their civic role in the nation’s political market. But the middlemen they rely on as supposedly trustworthy information brokers — the talk radio hosts and Fox News personalities and Heritage Foundation scholars and Human Events advertising editors — have found a way to enrich themselves participating in the process whether or not the common investor sees actual returns.
As they do so, they’re misleading their audiences about reality in the most egregious ways on a daily basis. When you think about it, this is morally outrageous and strategically shortsighted. But inside the larger right-of-center political world they inhabit, this reality is basically ignored, because who wants to be short the whole system? Everyone is so invested in it, especially the millionaires in the movement establishment, which never uses that name for itself. Even some firms that should no better are playing along.
I mean, I want to be short! In my Inbox, I’ve recently gotten some delicious “you were right about Mark Levin all along” emails from folks that surprised me by coming around, and I wish like hell I could’ve bought credit default swaps on his professional reputation, rather than merely being rhetorically short. But maybe that was just a lucky pick, and I’m wrong about the larger system being corrupt.
In a way, I hope so.
My fear is that the Republican Party isn’t going to emerge as the credible voice for grownup foreign policy and limited government that I want it to be until its base stops relying on thought leaders like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, whose specialty is laundering sub-prime arguments into confusing bundles meant to obfuscate their unsoundness. In this analogy, the poorly incentivized ratings agency is played by people like Jonah Goldberg, who trades on his deserved stature as way more intellectually honest than the talk radio guys, but for some reason gives Glenn Beck an overall AAA rating for a nightly program that packages a bunch of toxic assets with Hayek. (”…if Beck wasn’t a libertarian, I would find his populism terrifying.”) As “Giant Pool of Money” fans know, Moody’s rated tranches of mortgage backed securities in a similar fashion that made no more sense.
If I’m right about all this, it’s awful. I’d put it this way: on television and radio, none of the most popular movement conservative entertainers can get through a single week of their respective shows without egregiously misleading their audience about something. They’re also consistently debasing political argument on the right by substituting ad hominem and purity tests for reason, weakening all subsequent ideas that emerge. On the right’s equivalent of Wall Street everyone either knows this or is stunningly blinded by their ideological alliances. The customers on Main Street, doing their best to follow this market from the outside in their limited free time, aren’t in on the joke — officially they’re clients, but more often they’re treated like rubes and means to an end.
Like I said, the balance sheets I’ve delved into make this seem pretty clear. But almost everyone else is acting like this isn’t actually what’s going on, or else that it isn’t a problem. So I’m asking folks on the other side of this bet to show me the error of my ways. Why am I wrong to short these people, and to mistrust their system? Could anyone defend being long on them if there actually were a market that cleared when the true level of intellectual value was discovered? Has everyone convinced themselves that the fundamentals don’t actually matter? If not, would anyone like to join my hedge fund? We could diversify with positions against the drug war, diamond engagement rings, prison guard unions, and the intellectual value added of University of Phoenix Masters in Education degrees.
You should run for office Conor.
Could anyone defend being long on them if there actually were a market that cleared when the true level of intellectual value was discovered?
Am we trading or investing?
— THE · Sep 25, 09:59 PM · #
Am = Are.
— THE · Sep 25, 10:01 PM · #
You have included the answer to your question in your post, Conor. You lament the refusal of some conservatives to join you in pointing out, correctly, that many in the conservative media are dishonest and unserious. But you turn around and contrast that with… Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg is neither serious nor honest. And you don’t say so for the same reason those conservatives you lament don’t scold Mark Levin or Glen Beck: not because of dishonesty but because of personal, social and professional pressures.
I have no idea if you even know Goldberg, personally. But when you’ve carved out a space for yourself, as you have, as a media critic, and you continue to exist in the social spaces of Internet punditry, it becomes essential that you have certain blind spots of your own own. The personal pressure to be “reasonable” doesn’t compel you to any one position, but it does mean that there have to be some unmistakeably conservative writers whose work you champion as honest when their honesty is very much in question. It keeps you on the team.
Time has demonstrated to me that there is one central truth about Internet political commentary, and that is that the social dimension dominates everything that happens. Internet commentary is dominated by a numerically tiny number of connected elites who are socially chummy and who share remarkably similar cultural and economic background. The fact that many of them are avowedly antithetical in political makeup makes almost no difference. They write for each other, all of them; their arguments and writing are designed not to inform the general public or to develop a consensus but to maintain their in-group status. It narrows the debate considerably. I don’t doubt that Ezra Klein argues what he believes, but even if he wasn’t a bloodless establishmentarian, he’d be conditioned to be by professional and social pressure.
People complained about the Journolist, but the whole damn show is just one big Journolist.
— Freddie · Sep 25, 10:34 PM · #
Freddie,
I think you get a lot wrong here.
It mystifies me that you think I am pulling my punches when it comes to Jonah Goldberg. I have been rather consistent calling him out when I think he’s wrong. I’ve also appreciated his willingness to go on Bloggingheads to debate people with whom he disagrees. To be honest, he is a writer who I can’t quite pin down, but I am deadly serious when I say that he is quite a bit more intellectually honest than the talk radio hosts I rail against. If you think saying so confers some mysterious professional advantage I confess that I’m not sure what it is.
If the whole blogosphere is one big Journolist — and I’m not exactly sure that’s the analogy you’re looking for — how do you explain your own rise? After all, you started out as a person unknown to anyone socially, there was no professional incentive to linking your work, etc. And yet! Several of us at Culture11 wanted to publish you. You’ve been engaged and linked by Megan McArdle and Andrew Sullivan on multiple occasions. How does this fit into your theory of the political blogosphere? It cannot even account for your own experience.
It’s particularly weird to leave that comment on a post where I assert that the very subculture where a lot of these so-called social chums of mine work is irredeemably corrupt.
There is one grain of truth to what you say — I write in part for myself and in part for the audience, but I must admit there is a part of me who writes for some of my fellow media professionals. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That is to say, the knowledge that friends of mine whose minds I respect are going to be reading — Julian Sanchez and Graeme Wood and Elizabeth Nolan Brown and everyone here at The American Scene, among many others (including, I might add, Freddie himself!) — causes me to produce better work than I otherwise would. I’d hate more than anything to write something and have Jim Fallows or Jim Manzi or John McPhee or my girlfriend or my dad or my former professor, Katie Roiphe, to say, “Wow, that’s intellectually dishonest,” or “That’s sloppy,” or “That’s poorly argued.”
This strikes me as a pretty good incentive system. I suspect part of the problem with the journalism produced inside the conservative movement is that there is a different incentive system at work. People are partly after the respect of their peers, but the particular peers they want to impress are more likely to laud ideological loyalty than quality.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 26, 12:03 AM · #
-“People complained about the Journolist, but the whole damn show is just one big Journolist.”_
It’s turtles all the way down.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 26, 03:42 AM · #
this is the only good post you’ve ever written.
— paul h. · Sep 26, 03:48 AM · #
They’re also consistently debasing political argument on the right by substituting ad hominem and purity tests for reason, weakening all subsequent ideas that emerge
Um, don’t you work for Andrew Sullivan? I realize that its not easy to criticize the person who signs your paychecks. But its hard to listen to criticisms about conservatives who are being “intellectually dishonest” when you give a pass to Sullivan. Mark Levin is an idiot, but he can’t match some of the nonsense that Sullivan has said over the years.
— Joe Carter · Sep 26, 06:30 AM · #
Excellent post. Spot on. Keep at it, Mr. Friedersdorf. Double down on the Big Short till this whole edifice of charlatans comes crashing down. There is bound to be a huge political hangover and disappointment with the Republican elites after their big victory this November, when it becomes much clearer they have no serious ideas to address the mounting problems of the country. That will be an ever better time to press the attack on the Levin-Hannity-Limbaugh type multi-millionaire fat cat demagogues.
— nb · Sep 26, 12:01 PM · #
Joe,
One of the great things about Andrew Sullivan is that, despite my having publicly disagreed with him at various times over the years, even while guest blogging for him, he never considered me an enemy, just another writer engaged in forceful arguments. As you may remember from our Culture11 days, you wrote some pretty harsh things about him, and that didn’t stop him from linking and engaging you either. I’m sure it’s true, as a general proposition, that it’s difficult to publicly disagree with your boss, but this is less true of Andrew than the vast majority of bosses. (Incidentally, Andrew doesn’t sign my paychecks, David Bradley does.)
For the record, I am not giving Andrew a pass — we all have flaws as writers and thinkers, and whatever his are, intellectual dishonesty isn’t one of them. He doesn’t write things unless he believes them, he airs dissent constantly, and he corrects factual errors. More than most bloggers, he tries to ensure that if he is dead wrong about something, his readers will be exposed to contrary points of view. (Also, he isn’t part of the conservative movement, so I don’t exactly see why he is even relevant to this post, and I sort of suspect it’s just that he drives you crazy).
Even if you have a different opinion of Andrew, I hardly see why that should make it hard for you to read my criticism of the conservative movement and its least defensible entertainers. Would the truth of what I’m saying be more or less valid if I included a long assessment of my boss’s work? If I’d written this post while at Culture11, would my argument have demanded that I include the various political arguments you and I had while sitting around the office? This makes no sense.
This criticism is even less apt when you consider that I actually don’t have a problem with Glenn Beck refraining from criticism of Rupert Murdoch, or Conn Carrol refraining from badmouthing David Addington. In other words, you write as if I suggest that everyone meet an impossible standard. But I’m not asking conservatives to lambaste their bosses and let their significant others read their diaries. I’d be perfectly satisfied if criticism was consistently offered of only the misleading entertainers that people don’t work directly under — in fact, I downright encourage non-hacks to refrain from criticizing their direct bosses in the movement, because the last thing it needs is for the non-hacks to get fired.
Neither Freddie nor Joe has said that I am wrong in what I wrote. They’ve both just jumped into comments to accuse me of being less than completely consistent. I happen to think they’re both wrong, but that’s almost beside the point. All apologies if I am somehow falling short of the standards that I’m advocating. If that’s true, it’s a function of my imperfection, not an argument against the standard itself.
It’s just depressing that so often when a Mark Levin is called out, the response is, “Well other people say bad stuff too,” or “it’s hard to hear you criticize him if you don’t criticize this other person.”
That’s peripheral.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 26, 12:01 PM · #
I think a better metaphor for your quest, Conor, is the beat reporting, the loss of which you lament in your first American Scene post. The way the movement elites enrich themselves at the expense of the rank and file is more like the corrupt councilmen than the robber barrons of wall street who make no pretense of serving anyone but themselves.
— Kevin Lawrence · Sep 26, 08:48 PM · #
When you title a book “Liberal Fascism” in a blatant and base attempt to draw readers’ minds to equate the modern Democratic party and liberals with Nazi Germany and Hitler, you basically forfeit all claims to “intellectual honesty.”
And while Goldberg might be more intellectually honest than talk show hosts like Levin, Beck, O’Reilly, etc., that doesn’t in any way gift Goldberg the default setting you credit him with.
— jonathan · Sep 26, 09:13 PM · #
The left blogsphere’s loathing of Jonah Goldberg continues to puzzle me. One can certainly take issue with “Liberal Fascism,” but Goldberg didn’t invent the phrase. H.G. Wells’ coined the term in arguing that the UK and America should emulate Mussolini. If you actually read the book, you’d know that Goldberg never says, implies or indicates he believes that American liberals are akin to Nazis, though he effectively rebuts the common accusation that American conservatives share deep historical and ideological ties to fascism.
The thing about Goldberg is that he regularly contends with the strongest liberal arguments against conservative positions rather than jousting at strawmen (hence his deserved description as intellectually honest). I often disagree with Goldberg’s arguments, and I think Conor’s right that Goldberg could take much stronger stances against demagoguery on the right, but when people like Matt Yglesias reflexively put down Goldberg, it only makes them look weak and intellectually blinkered.
— Andrew Gilbert · Sep 27, 12:22 AM · #
<i>If you actually read the book, you’d know that Goldberg never says, implies or indicates he believes that American liberals are akin to Nazis</i>
I have read the book, twice; what he does exactly is imply and indicate that American liberals are akin to Nazis, doing it just obviously enough to get his fellow travelers riled up, while then shuffling backwards enough to provide himself cover, considering the allegation is ludicrous. He also named the book “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.” He also demonstrated his deep, deep seriousness by putting a picture of a smiley face with a Hitler mustache on the cover
You know, a big part of the reason I think my observation is correct is that people who are in the in group are so deeply, deeply sensitive to it, and refuse to ever talk about it directly or publicly.
— Freddie · Sep 27, 12:56 AM · #
“You know, a big part of the reason I think my observation is correct is that people who are in the in group are so deeply, deeply sensitive to it, and refuse to ever talk about it directly or publicly.”
What does this mean, Freddie? What is “the in group”?
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 27, 03:29 AM · #
As you may remember from our Culture11 days, you wrote some pretty harsh things about him, and that didn’t stop him from linking and engaging you either.
I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. The fact that he links to people who disagree with him is commendatory, but it hardly excuses his behavior.
He doesn’t write things unless he believes them,
I suppose if you mean that he believes what he writes when he writes it, that is true. The fact that he will likely change what he believes five minutes later, however, should factor into it. Perhaps, it isn’t dishonesty. Maybe its intellectual laziness or inconsistency or some other problem he suffers from. But the outcome is the same.
Besides, what pundits write what they don’t believe? I have my suspicions about a few of them but where is the evidence? Wouldn’t it be more fruitful to engage what they say rather than trying to discern their epistemic state at the time of their writing?
More than most bloggers, he tries to ensure that if he is dead wrong about something, his readers will be exposed to contrary points of view.
Indeed, he’ll likely present the contrary point of view—and defend it to the death—if you give him enough time. There are few positions that Sulllivan hasn’t flipped-flopped on. And not because they facts changed, but only because his emotions have.
Also, he isn’t part of the conservative movement, so I don’t exactly see why he is even relevant to this post, and I sort of suspect it’s just that he drives you crazy.
Sullivan (wrongly) claims to be a conservative and he writes for a national publication. How is that not part of the “conservative movenment?” There is no monolithic “movement” where people are issued membership cards.
Would the truth of what I’m saying be more or less valid if I included a long assessment of my boss’s work?
It’s not an issue of truth, but of irony. Imagine if Glenn Beck’s producer wrote a piece talking about all the ways that Andrew Sullivan was “consistently debasing political argument.” Everyone would laugh themselves silly.
Sullivan is even less credible than Beck (and that’s hard to do). He has squandered whatever integrity he may have once had. No one—except for his friends and employees—takes him seriously. (Could you find any prominent conservative writer who would be willing to state publicly, and without qualification, that Sullivan is a credible intellectual?)
Neither Freddie nor Joe has said that I am wrong in what I wrote.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, only that you left out the best example of what you are talking about—your boss. Like Freddie, I agree that the “social dimension dominates everything that happens.” If you were trying to get a job with NRO you’d be trashing Sullivan and defending Goldberg. That’s the way the game works.
I don’t fault you for that. I’m a firm believer in being loyal to your boss. But with such loyalty comes certain self-imposed restrictions. You can’t work for Fred Phelps and complain about other people being homophobic. Likewise, you can’t work for Andrew Sullivan and complain about pundits debasing political discourse. (Well, you can of course. But it hurts your own integrity to do so.)
It’s just depressing that so often when a Mark Levin is called out, the response is, “Well other people say bad stuff too,” or “it’s hard to hear you criticize him if you don’t criticize this other person.”
Levin is an idiot. Serious people don’t take him seriously and the clowns that listen to him wouldn’t be persuaded by anything you might say about The Great One. So why bother?
If your purpose were merely to vent about how much you don’t like Levin, then I can understand. I do the same thing, harping on Glenn Beck as often as I think I can get away with it. It doesn’t change anything but it makes me feel better. But if you want to make a substantive point about who is debasing political arguments you might want to start with the guy who concocted one of the stupidest conspiracy theories of our age.
To state the obvious, most people read these types of post for what they are—signaling. You’re trying to send a signal about what type of conservative you are and what type you don’t want to be associated with. All political pundits do this to some extent, but I think you get a bit carried away with it sometimes.
— Joe Carter · Sep 27, 05:56 AM · #
Here’s the rub, Conor. You say: “on television and radio, none of the most popular movement conservative entertainers can get through a single week of their respective shows without egregiously misleading their audience about something. They’re also consistently debasing political argument on the right by substituting ad hominem and purity tests for reason, weakening all subsequent ideas that emerge.” And then you go on to say: “But almost everyone else is acting like this isn’t actually what’s going on, or else that it isn’t a problem.”
I admit, yes, it’s a problem. But I think it’s not a problem unique to our side, and you’re making it sound like it is — at least, you don’t seem to be “acting like it’s a problem” when the same vices are exhibited by people whose other beliefs are more congenial to yours. And, though I don’t agree with everything he’s said, I think Joe’s exactly right to point to Sullivan as someone whom you know well, who exhibits precisely these vices.
“Ad hominem attacks”? He calls people names and goes on endlessly about how those who disagree with him are “neurotic.”
“Purity tests”? What is the word “Christianist” if not that?
“Misleading his audience” is the most important of these, of course, but here too I would say Sullivan distorts much too much of what he presents on his blog. I believe that an honest assessment of what he’s written about Pope Benedict would show that it is deeply misleading. His blog failed to consider or even air the arguments that the evidence didn’t that the Pope knowingly protected child abusers, although it was presented forcefully by people like John Allen and Ross Douthat, whom Sullivan reads. Instead, he just repeats the “protected child rapists” charge like a mantra, and many of his readers (and I know several personally) uncritically accept it.
Sometimes, it’s true, Sullivan can be much better than that — as you point out, he will sometimes engage critics and disagree with friends, and that’s when he’s at his best. To my mind, that just makes it all the worse when he settles for cheap innuendo and name-calling instead of making serious arguments. Among other issues, it lends his hollow invective a credibility which it doesn’t deserve.
So, the problem, then, is that you, who seem to be very much the same mind as Sullivan on policy and who obviously know his work very well, are “acting like this isn’t what’s going on, or that it isn’t a problem.” Now, maybe it’s fine for you to do that. But then you shouldn’t expect anything different from the conservative movement that you criticize.
— ed · Sep 27, 06:07 PM · #
Conor,
While the market self-corrects eventually, is there any such systemic mechanism in politics, or governance, or political discourse?
Are there examples of prominent folks who have been drummed out of public life by incompetence or dishonesty or being consistently wrong? Are there examples where such charlatans have remained?
Taking a longer view, since the advent of the Enlightenment, certain ideas have stuck around way too long, while others have met their demise when shown to be wrong. Social darwinism still seems to skulk around the edges of discourse. On the other hand, central economic planning has seemingly died a just death.
As a child of the Enlightenment, I fervently hope that the intellectual market corrects. As a child of the Aughts (I’m 28), I’m not so sure.
— Muzz · Sep 27, 09:05 PM · #
“I admit, yes, it’s a problem. But I think it’s not a problem unique to our side, and you’re making it sound like it is — at least, you don’t seem to be ‘acting like it’s a problem’ when the same vices are exhibited by people whose other beliefs are more congenial to yours.”
Ed,
My point holds whether it is more or less a problem in the conservative movement than elsewhere. In my judgment, however, it is more of a problem on the right. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin — these are the most influential media voices on the right. Ask the rank and file in the conservative movement what information sources they can trust and those are the answers you’ll get.
Ask liberals the same question, and you’ll as likely here The New York Times as MSNBC. They’re as likely to read Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum as The Daily Kos. Yes, there are voices on the movement left that have vices like those I’m complaining about, but there is also a healthy culture of journalistic quality that courses through some of the most popular bloggers and institutions, and there is no pressure for those respectable institutions to toe the Keith Olbermann line.
As for Andrew, I disagree with your assessment. With Pope Benedict, I can’t speak to the overall quality of coverage on The Dish — after 14 years of Catholic school, I tend to skim over anything related to the Catholic church more often than not on the Internet generally — but there is zero chance that Andrew would be unwilling to air anything Ross Douthat writes.
More broadly, my claim isn’t that Andrew, or myself, or any number of other writers I respect consistently avoid ad hominem in everything we write, or somehow amass a perfect record of engaging in discourse, never earning so much as a yellow flag. My point is that every player gets an occasional yellow flag, whereas Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and others openly engage in ultimate fighting moves on the soccer field. Sometimes I get annoyed with some tick or other of Andrew, Freddie (as you see in these comments), Yglesias, Heather MacDonald, and the list goes on. I’m sure they and others get annoyed with some of my ticks sometimes too. On the whole, though, we’re all making a consistent effort to be fair to our interlocutors and avoid misleading our readers.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 27, 09:17 PM · #
Joe,
You’re bothered by the fact that Andrew Sullivan has reversed his opinion on various matters. That’s fine. It’s a common enough critique of his work. I certainly acknowledge he’s changed his mind on, for example, the Iraq War, among other major issues. I don’t think that fact bolsters your argument or cuts against mine. If you want less of him thinking through issues in real time and reversing himself with regularity I’d skip The Daily Dish and stick to his books and long essays.
You write: “Sullivan (wrongly) claims to be a conservative and he writes for a national publication. How is that not part of the ‘conservative movenment?’ There is no monolithic ‘movement’ where people are issued membership cards.”
Weirdly, you’re simultaneously claiming that Sullivan isn’t a conservative AND that he is part of the conservative movement. I’m happy to let the reader decide whether he is or isn’t.
“It’s not an issue of truth, but of irony.”
We’ve always had divergent senses of irony, Joe. But insofar as I’m aware, it’s perfectly acceptable to make true arguments — indeed, it is incumbent on us to do so — even if doing so seems ironic!
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, only that you left out the best example of what you are talking about—your boss.”
If you think I’m right about many of the most prominent voices in the conservative movement debasing discourse and serially misleading their audience, I’m happy to declare victory, and agree to disagree about Andrew.
“…if you want to make a substantive point about who is debasing political arguments you might want to start with the guy who concocted one of the stupidest conspiracy theories of our age.”
As it happens, I wrote a post publicly disagreeing with Andrew’s posts on Trig. As I said, one of the best things about working for him is his tolerance for forceful disagreement, or so my experience suggests.
“To state the obvious, most people read these types of post for what they are—signaling. You’re trying to send a signal about what type of conservative you are and what type you don’t want to be associated with.”
So you agree with me on substance. But at the same time, rather than focusing on the rot in one of America’s biggest ideological movements, and among some of its most entertainers — rot that is misleading rank and file conservatives about reality everyday — you’ve chosen to spend your time complaining that I am not criticizing my boss, and speculating that the thing I’m saying that you think is true is merely offered to signal. And in the very same comment, you write, “Wouldn’t it be more fruitful to engage what they say rather than trying to discern their epistemic state at the time of their writing?”
Yes, it would.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 27, 09:41 PM · #
I disagree with both Ed and Conor on Andrew Sullivan.
IMO, Andrew is painfully honest, very very bright, and is incapable of writing a poor English sentence. But I can’t think of anybody near his intellectual caliber who has worse judgment. This is a bit ironic. Andrew is a conservative, albeit of the Oakeshott persuasion. Oakeshott/Burke conservatism reveres judgment as the prime political virtue.
— Joe S. · Sep 27, 10:42 PM · #
Mr. Friedersdorf,
I think you wrote an excellent post but when you are attempting to argue that Jonah Goldberg is intellectually honest, you seriously damage your credibility. What’s more, your defense of his intellectual honesty is premised on his willingness to engage an opponent in debate. While that might make him a good sport, I have a hard time seeing how doing so makes a man who seriously attempted to argue that fascism is a liberal ideology at all intellectually honest.
His argument that Nazism and fascism are left wing ideologies seems to be entirely rooted in nursing a right wing grievance – namely that left wing ideologues deride conservatism as akin to fascism or Nazism. This might often be an unfair charge itself, to be sure, but lashing out in response, essentially saying “Nuh-uh! UR teh fascistz!” in language not much more sophisticated in that, complete with laughable arguments about public smoking bans being championed by “libs” and – tah dah! – Nazis, is not the mark of someone who isn’t the least bit intellectually honest.
My apologies for run-on sentence to end things, but, my God.
— mygoodness · Sep 28, 05:52 PM · #